Christmas morning

I woke up early. Not like when I was little and got up at the crack of dawn and had to wait (per parental rules) until 7 a.m. to wake everyone for present-opening. I didn't mean to wake up early, but someone texted me, and my phone chimed, and I did.

The temperature on the thermostat in my bedroom was 60; I shivered as I rolled out of my warm covers. I came into the kitchen, poured a bowl of cereal, looked out the window. The sky is perfectly clear. A plane is streaking one thin white line across it, from right to left in a straight, horizontal projection from my vantage point. Above it, the sky is blue; below, a warm yellow-orange emanates from behind the dark roof of a neighbor's house. When I stand up, I can see the east bay hills, blue in the backlighting of the rising sun. The crisp wavering edge of their ridge reminds me of real mountains seen from a great distance, like in the Southwest. This is not what I think of when I picture Christmas morning.

I picture dry brown leaves spread all over a still-green lawn; we haven't felt like raking over the holidays. I picture the lawn because I can't see much of the sky from our front windows (where I sit impatiently by the tree, rearranging gifts by recipient and sometimes shaking them), Atlanta having such a long growing season that trees rise high behind all the houses, their branches filling the view. Mostly I picture the living room, with its plush white carpet that I sit on, leaning my back against the piano seat and watching the tree as though it is doing something. I have already plugged in the lights; it was the first task of the morning. When Mom gets up, she will think starting the coffee comes first. Dad will make sure all signs of the Santa for whom I left cookies are gone, and both will stay in the kitchen while I read the letter Santa left me in thanks. I will not realize this letter is in Mom's handwriting for years. I will love it for years.

When my brother finally gets up and everyone comes together by the tree, we will open all the gifts in an orderly fashion, me directing a present to each person in sequence, then issuing another round, until I sit amidst a sea of wrapping paper and bows and four tidy piles of treasures. A cat or two might look on quietly. Eventually, the dog will be allowed in the room, and she will make a royal mess of any remaining paper.

Later, the best part of the day will come. Once the sun goes down, I will turn out all the lamps in the living room and plug back in the tree. It will cast red, green, and blue fir-branch shadows onto the pale lavendar walls. It will sparkle with color. I will sit on the sofa, legs curled under me, and watch quietly for what seems to Mom a very long time for doing nothing. When I have taken it in long enough, I will sit beside the tree and play Christmas songs on the piano. I read the music with only the colorful light of the tree to illuminate it, and no one is in the room with me but I'm sure they are listening (and perhaps wishing I would get a new repertoire). To little me, this was the best part of Christmas. The making of music, the admiration of beauty, the joyful lights in the dark.

Test run: sharing some photos. (These are from Balboa Park in San Diego.)

This is a test to see whether I can put photos in my posts.

Public Service Announcement

Recently some friends and I were talking about dating. I don't remember what led into it, but I announced that I tend to go for younger guys these days. I am sure that I also declared that men over 30 or 32 have too much baggage. I know, I know. This is an unfair generalization. I do always keep my mind open; but experience has me thinking that way. So you can imagine my horror when one of the guys in the conversation, who is solidly in his mid-20s and thus in a place of knowing, responded to my comments with something along the lines of, "But the problem is that guys in their 20s don't like kids, and women over 30 are ready to have 'em." Two very loud responses immediately competed to be heard in my head. The first, I will admit, was, Shit. Is it that obvious?! Because truth be told, I would love to have babies. But the other response was the stronger—Shit. Do men really think this way? Because if so, all us single 30-somethings are screwed!!

I thought a lot about this after my last breakup, when I was told (by someone my same age) that I was more mature than he was, that I was farther along in life than he was; that he could see this going to marriage and that that terrified him because he wasn't ready. What I found incredibly odd about that was that he seemed to imply that I was. I had never said anything along those lines. Maybe, in my own being, I am in a place from which I could steadily and happily take the next steps in life. I know I will be a kickass mom, and I think I will be great in a lifelong relationship; maybe I emit something that says that. But just because I, on my own, am prepared for those things doesn't mean I'm expecting to get to them anytime soon.

For starters, I'd have to find someone I want to marry, which is no small feat! (Though the last guy was thinking that way, I actually wasn't.) And being 30 means I was born in the 1970s, not the 1950s; a lot of things have to take place before I give birth. Let's do the math to illuminate the point: By the time I find a guy I like, start dating him, get into a relationship with him, and decide I want to marry him, it's likely that two or three years have passed since we met. Maybe another year passes before we actually get married. Once we do, I can't imagine having kids for at least a year or two (and that would be longer if age weren't a factor in pregnancy). Which means it's at least five years from the starting point before I even want to pop any out! At which point, you'll take note, the men in their mid-20s are 30+ and perhaps more ready to have babies. (Meaning my younger-man fetish still has a chance!)

If I hadn't been so flabbergasted by the out-of-the-blue breakup, I might have asked that last boyfriend why on earth he thought I was looking to marry him. We never talked on that level, and we weren't even at a place of saying I love you. But he had told me enough about his previous relationships for me to guess that he had seen a pattern in the way women think, and he was applying what he had known to be the case in other situations to the one with me. And here's where we get to my PSA. All you charming single men, no matter your age, please remember: we don't all operate the same way. There may be women who have reached 30 unmarried and are upset by it; but the ones I know who are single at this age are still single because they can handle it. They may get frustrated with it sometimes, but they can handle it. Most of them have all kinds of interesting things going on in their lives, making them perhaps even more independent (and intriguing) than you can imagine. So please, don't fall into any of those generalizations I lightly started this post out with. Keep your mind open. I can promise you: we're worth it. (Like wine, we get richer with age.)

Where the wild things are

Last night I had an interesting discussion with a friend who was disconcerted by my recent post about Into the Wild. He was distressed that I said I could live without people. I'll point out that I said I could do so for a time. I certainly am not looking to become a hermit! I do enjoy entire weekends to myself sometimes, and I can imagine spending at least a couple of months alone. (A friend of mine did this a few years ago—driving to Alaska and back for a summer—and he did just fine with it.) But I would have all kinds of requirements for my lengthy-time-alone to make it enjoyable; for starters, I'd have to be in a beautiful natural setting. And I'd have to have some books around, and a computer or notebook so I could do some writing, and ideally I'd have some film and my camera (because I like to create visual poetry too). And let's just be clear on one other front: I'd need to have four walls and a door with me in my wilderness. I'm not proposing living in any magic bus like Chris did. I like to take a shower every day. I like to cook my food on a full-fledged stove, after I've taken it out of the fridge and chopped it up with a real knife (i.e. not a machete). I don't have anything against camping, but it's not something I'm looking to do with my life. Plus, have you ever spent a night alone outside? It can be terrifying!

Which brings me back to my last thought about that film. I was struck throughout the movie by the lack of fear Chris showed about being in the wilderness. I wondered if he really didn't have any (I've never been a cavalier young guy, after all, so what do I know?), or if Penn, perhaps being more of a city person, didn't think to include it. If you've never been in the woods at night (or watched Lost), you might not think of it. But I've spent a night alone away from anything, and I sure did not enjoy it once the sun went down.

This was in Maine. The month was March; dark fell by 6 pm. Thankfully I had a flashlight and a book (if my memory is accurate, it was Camus' The Stranger, in French). I squirmed deep into my sleeping bag, propped the book open and the light against it, and tried to ignore the rustling sounds in the woods around me. Within an hour, my eyes hurt from reading with so little light, so I closed the book and attempted sleep.

As my eyes shut, my ears opened.

I lay as still as I could and tried to block out the sounds. I thought if I envisioned everything around me, it would calm me down, so I re-built the landscape. A tree stood about four feet from me. Others were scattered around it at similar distances. The hill began to slope to my left maybe 30 feet from me, and before me, the land stretched 50 or 100 yards before dropping off into water. I tried not to think about what lay behind me, for it was only woods, dense and dark.

I could see everything in my immediate vacinity. Except the thing making so much noise. I knew it was something hungry, something going after my food. I had strung the bag as high as I could, but a bear could reach it, I knew. I listened to it knocking the branches around, and I felt a paralyzing fear in my body. I don't think I could have moved if the bear had tried to sit on me (or worse).

But somehow, it all stopped. Whether I fell asleep or the creature left, I'm not sure, but in the morning, I awoke all in one piece. My food was gone—the twine had been gnawed through, the bagels and nuts swallowed, except for a few tidbits that spotted the ground. Yet there was no sign of a large animal. The leaves all lay in place; the thundering attacker I had pictured was most likely a raccoon with sharp teeth and quick hands. I laughed at myself, thinking how incredibly sound amplifies in the dark. I laughed at myself, but I still looked in every direction, up trees and over the hillside, before starting the walk back home.

Into the Wild: a movie review and then some

Friday night I saw the film Into the Wild, based on the Jon Krakauer biography of Christopher McCandless and adapted for the screen by Sean Penn, who also directed it. I’d had a wearing week, for all kinds of reasons, and I badly needed to escape into that blessed world of the movie theater, where the big screen and loud speakers envelop you in other realities. And though the film ended sadly, I left elated, having found it to be elegant and accurate and enlightening in multiple ways. Some of my companions disagreed heartily, finding the main character selfish or unbelievable. But I found him extremely true to life in certain ways, and I think Penn did an impressive job of creating a film that fills your senses with Chris’s situation rather than just flashing images of it before your face.

An early scene reveals an aerial view of a snowfield; a pickup truck trundles down the side of the frame, emitting that crunching sound I associate with boots on frozen snow. Eventually the truck stops, and a boy gets out; as he trudges over the snow and toward a wooded beyond, the camera broadens our view a bit, revealing the jagged tops of distant mountains and only a sliver of sky above them. This type of tight-in cinematography immediately, if quietly, sets a tone for the film—a tone of enormity and enclosure all at once. The wild is massive and beautiful. And looming.

As Chris crosses his first river, a soundtrack begins; a familiar voice wavers into a song that is heartfelt, emotional, pained in a way that I associate with American Indian singing; it is not the jamming nor the acoustic rock for which Eddie Vedder is best known. Throughout the film, periodic bursts of Vedder’s singing quietly build toward a scene in which he almost wails a song as Chris peers over a vast landscape below him. Like the composition of each visual image, the timbre of each song works subtly to tell us that the character is not just adventuring, but questing.

The premise of the story is that 23-year-old Chris has been dreaming of getting to Alaska; he wants to survive there on his own, out in the elements. Leaving West Virginia, he begins to head westward, traveling for a total of two years without any money (he’s cutely given the bulk of it to charity and then burned the rest after getting drenched inside his car in a flash flood and deciding, perhaps, that it’s a sign he can survive anything). This feat alone is impressive, though he does supplement his barren savings by working odd jobs, underscoring that a world without money is a utopia, not a real place. Still, Chris wanders for two years by the end of the film, and during that time, we learn that his passion for getting “lost in the wild” has multiple layers.

First, the obvious: he wants new experiences. He wants to challenge himself. Where better to do so than out in the elements? It’s tried and true; many have turned to nature when looking for themselves. It offers challenges, and it offers solitude. It offers a peaceful quiet interrupted only by bird song or wind song, the rustling of leaves, the crackling of branches—by no voices other than one’s own. I understand turning to nature; I have always done it. I understand leaving society; I could do that. None of you will believe me because I seem so social, so people-oriented. But I can live without cities, even without human contact for a time; yet I could never give up the ocean, the mountains, the quiet places tucked in under tree branches, the quick-footed lizards of forests, the first flowers of spring. I could go on and on. I have shelves of books that do so. I have spent hours and days quietly seated by a seaside or on pine straw in the cool dark of some woods. These are private times—sometimes shared with others, but mostly enjoyed on my own. So I loved watching Chris yearn for these places; I knew what goodness he’d find.

But Chris also heads out to the wilds to get away from something. It’s not just the nature freak in me that enjoyed the movie; it’s also the kid inside, one who, like Chris, had parents who fought, who made life at home unpleasant sometimes. I know what drives one out of the house and into the wilderness; what drives even the most sociable to need a break from humanity. I think the film depicts flight from family fights with an accuracy that maybe only those who’ve been there can appreciate. Some may see his behavior as self-serving, but I see it as self-preservation. As knowing when you’ve got to do your own thing, make your own way, find out who you are entirely outside your upbringing and bring that self to life.

As part of that discovery, many of us come to the joyous realization that we can love whomever we want. We can make friends out of strangers, family out of a conversation gone right. To my delight, Chris wanders the country adopting parents. Whether they replace his true mother and father we will never know; but they certainly fill in some holes in his heart. They mean so much to him that the film takes a turn I would deem an authorial failure were it not based on what Chris truly wrote. While dying of starvation, he enters one last note in the margin between paragraphs in a favorite book. “Happines only real when shared.” My euphoria with the film broke in that moment; I wanted to shake Chris and remind him what he'd been learning, at least as I see it, which is that the minute you are able to smile and need no one else to know about it, to feel ecstacy or tranquility and enjoy it entirely by yourself—that's when you have found contentment. I wanted to shake him, but I reminded myself that he was dying, and that people are human, and humans are needy, and that craving the companionship of others is a beautiful thing as well, even if for myself it is imperative to know that my happiness does not depend on them. (I view the ability to share my joys with others as the greatest bonus of living; not a necessity but an invaluable, incredible plus.)

The end of the film is hard to watch; it’s tragic that in real life, a man died trying to follow his passion for life. But it is a reminder that how you live matters immensely. It is tragic that anyone dies so young; but I feel happier for the late Christopher McCandless than I do for many people who are still living, because I can see how much he got out of his life, and to me, that's what counts. I think I loved this movie most of all because of a message it underscores, which is one I hold dear. Don't just be part of the world around you; experience it. Don’t just live a little; live a lot.

(note to self)

let it go--the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise--let it go it
was sworn to
            go

let them go--the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers--you must let them go they
were born
         to go

let all go--the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things--let all go
dear
   so comes love

               -- e.e. cummings

(Many of you know I have an 1100-page book of e.e. cummings poetry that I read like it's the Bible, it includes so much wisdom creatively put. In the midst of an exhausting week, at the end of an exhausting year, I've been turning to it often lately, lacking the time to put things in my own words and so relying on his incredible choice of them.)

Today I felt a pang of missing winter.

Beautiful

is the
unmea
ning
of(sil

ently)fal

ling(e
ver
yw
here)s

Now

-- e.e. cummings

Small-town San Francisco

Yesterday one of my best friends was in Palo Alto for the day, so I drove down there to have brunch with him and hang out. Per his usual routine, he was late, but having not lived in the same city as him for more than two years now, I had forgotten this tendency and arrived a little early (per my usual). The restaurant we were meeting at was near the center of town but a bit off the general path, so the only place I could wander into to pass the time was Whole Foods. Having forgotten to buy cereal when shopping the day before, I found the proximity of a grocery story opportune and popped in to make that quick purchase.

As I stepped through the parting doors on my way out, I did one of those head-turn-followed-by-full-body-realignments—mimicking the path of a guy passing me as he entered the store. Sunglasses blocked my view of his eyes, but I found his face familiar. Unwilling to ever let a potential reunion pass me by, I met his (still-shaded) stare as he turned to investigate my own, and then I queried him by name. Removing the sunglasses, he smiled, and I reminded him of my name, not knowing if someone who knew me as a child would recognize me now, as an adult.

He was born the same week as my brother, and our mothers have been friends ever since. His family moved away when we were young, and in the years between childhood and now, I’ve seen him once that I can remember—we could place where but not quite when, but it was between five and eight years ago. Why I recognized his cheek bones or jaw structure or whatever it was below the sunglasses that assured me, even in such an unfamiliar location, that I was seeing a face I knew—why I recognized him is not clear to me, but the fact of the matter is that I see people I know everywhere in the Bay Area, with great regularity, and it is making the world begin to feel wildly small.

When I moved to San Francisco, I thought I knew two people in the area—and, vaguely, a third. But the first week I lived here, I randomly encountered four people I had gone to college with. I saw two at restaurants, one at a bar, and one on the street. Within a month of my arrival, I had met another at a boutique, a few at the Castro Halloween party, and one more at the grocery store. I seemingly could not turn around without bumping into someone from a past life. For six years after graduating, I had lived one to four miles from my the center of my college world; in that time, when many of my friends also still lived in the area, I bumped into only one of them. Here, 3,000 miles from either of the cities I’ve ever called home, it immediately felt like a place where I would recognize one in every ten people who walked down the street.

It happened with strangers too. One night, I stood in a long line outside the Castro theater, waiting to see the opening show of the SF Indie Film Festival. A few days later, at a trivia night at Mad Dog in the Fog, I sat at a table next to a woman whose face I could not stop studying because I knew I recognized her. Finally, she leaned across the space between us to confirm the same feeling, and that’s when I remembered: she had been in line just ahead of me at the movie. We chuckled over the peculiarity of crossing paths twice in one week; but I didn’t chuckle when, just another day or so after that, I stood in line at a free film at the Embarcadero, and the guy behind me started chatting—only to pause as we clearly began sharing the sensation of already knowing this stranger. It took us much longer to place it, but finally we realized we had both gotten the free passes at none other than Mad Dog in the Fog; he’d been sitting at the same table as my other newly re-encountered stranger. Reasonable, then, that we’d both be at the movie; but reasonable that I knew his face so well after so brief a viewing?

Topping off all these experiences is that I once waited for the bathroom at a restaurant in the Haight beside a guy whom I saw the next night as well—at a bar in Oakland. I was thoroughly astonished by that one, given the distance between venues, as was he. The gaggle of female friends with him tried very hard to get me to believe in fate—but the truth of the matter is that I don’t, and so all this crossing of paths really gets me thinking because it is, to put it frankly, a bit eerie. But as I recounted yesterday’s reunion to a friend, she commented that there was nothing odd about it—not for someone as observant as I am. I hadn’t realized until she said that that not everyone looks at the people around them, studies them, takes mental photos of them; but I do. I people-watch constantly, apparently even when I am not aware of doing so. Maybe this explains everything I’ve just described. But I think there’s another factor at play, which is that this city—this internationally known and widely adored city—is really just a small town dressed up in a fancy glitter.

Pride (in the name of love)

I'm not using that phrase the way U2 coined it, but it's the best way I can find to peg something I've been discussing with friends lately. The question is: just what is it that holds us back, at times, from letting a person we might be interested in know about that?

Even for the most liberal, independent women, sometimes traditional ideas come into play, getting us daydreaming of not ever having to be the one to make the first move. Some of us are light-hearted about that feeling: it would just be more fun if the guys would do the asking. For others, underneath, we think we deserve it—we expect to be courted. I tend to be in the former camp, but as a romantic at heart, I do understand the latter sentiment more than those who know me might expect.

On the one hand, I've done my share of initiating—for years, I was undaunted in this regard, mostly because I couldn't help but say everything on my mind at some point. (This blog has its name for a reason.) My first experience with sharing strong feelings with a guy whose intentions I wasn't sure of was fairly comical—if painful in the aftermath. It was freshman year; he'd become my best guy friend. He was a lover of wordplay and spent hours getting in my face with good humor, conjuring up nicknames for me, hugging trees whenever he saw me coming after one fateful email that I sent out to describe quite the weekend in the woods and that he felt the need to dub "Walden II." He was a jokester and a sweetheart mixed into one, and I had trouble reading that and reading my own feelings about it; but I knew that at times our friendship verged on a different kind of playfulness. One night, wandering out of a party together and sitting atop a wall dangling our legs, I got up my nerve and said to him, sucking in a breath for strength, "Sometimes I like you." His cheeks went red and he huffed, "And what? The rest of the time you hate me?" And now I was turning purple, and fumbling with the words—"No, I meant, you know, sometimes I like you." (Such a stupid word, like, when used that way—but what other word is there?) The rest of the story isn't much worth repeating; his response is illustrative of the way things would soon be going, which is to say, quite directly down the tubes.

I took a long break from telling it all after that, but a couple of years later, I fell for my latest best guy friend, and when I let him in on my interest the first time (the first time! you say, wishing I would not be pushed to drive myself toward repeating the past), he gave me a legitimate timing-related negative response followed by a 200% increase in the intensity with which we hung out. Within a year, we had a friendship that everyone around us thought was slowly developing toward one of those movie-esque loves that come along only rarely in the real world. But this one was not to be either. When he finally told me he loved me it was in closing, after we finished discussing that he was elated to be single and feeling no wish for a girlfriend—and I commented that I dreamed of couplehood only because of him. He let me down easy, telling me he cared about me, was attracted to me, wanted everything we already had but wasn't ready for anything more. He closed with "I love you," ever so softly as we hung up the phone, and I curled into the cold flannel of my attic bedroom and wept.

It was a tough year after that. A tough couple of years. My feelings for him only grew; his for me deepened and solidified until I was like a sister to him—a crucial, beloved facet of his world but like a sister. As I struggled to get over him, I went on some of the funniest bad dates known to womankind, and I used to recount them for entertainment, even writing some of them up under the title "Manhunt." True to my nature, I was at once nursing a miserable sorrow inside me and forcing myself outward, onward. I went out with anyone someone suggested I meet; I even considered asking out random nice guys I encountered, like my pharmacist (thankfully, I pondered that one just long enough to not get my nerve up until his return from a few-week vacation—at the end of which he wore a shiny gold band.) Determined to get myself over my friend (which proved tricky since he remained one of my closest for years), I even decided to act on a lustful crush I had developed on an unlikely candidate: the guy who fixed the heating and air system at work. Not my usual hunting ground, for sure, but this guy was HOT, he was charming, and according to every woman in the office, he was into me. (I sat by the thermostat, and this gave him a chance to get to know me.) One day, when he'd spent a remarkable 30 minutes sitting on my desk chatting after making a minor repair, I excused myself from the room, accepted a double dog dare from a group of my female co-workers down the hall, and returned holding a post-it note. It read Give me a call if you want to get a beer sometime and included my phone number. Facing him, wanting him, wanting even more than that to move the hell on, I smiled, held up the yellow sticky note, and wordlessly placed it in his pocket. His front jeans pocket, mind you—a detail that had about every woman peering around the door frame falling on the floor, as it meant I stuck my hand into his front pocket—yes, the one right by his goods—to slip my note in. Needless to say, he called me that night to make a date. Needless to say again, the one date was the only date, as he had even more recently entered rejection recovery than I, and we were a friendly but emotionally distracted pair all night.

The point of these recountings is to make that point I started with, which is that I'm not shy about my intentions; I will never be afraid to let someone know that I care. I value that too much. And I've gotten one thick skin out of my experiences, even with some damage done to it in the last year or two. (My first year in San Francisco, I got spoiled with guys showing interest left and right. That year ended with a one-two punch that knocked me off the dating circuit for some time and softened my skin up a bit—but just a bit.) When you've been rejected from "I'm in love with you," you realize how small a deal it is to get turned down from anything less. You stop worrying about what you do; you just put it out there and see where you get.

But I've noticed lately that that's now how I'm operating. Friends have noticed too. So what's holding me back? Here's the other hand in the balance: the thing is that no matter how strong your will can be, how steady your sense of self, sometimes your pride steps in, and if one thing has taught me to get a grip on my chattiness, that's it. I find pride a much tougher thing to combat than a little rejection or not getting what I want.

I'm thirty years old. By now, I've experienced a lot. I am passionately engaged with my life and the people in it. I know what I want, and it's got to be as good as what I've already got; as far as dating, I find that I only want someone who sees that he has some kind of interest in me and goes after it. Pride has stepped into my mindset, and it tells me to leave alone anyone who doesn't do that. I know that sounds like a double-standard—to expect him to do all the risk-taking even when I know full well I could do it myself. I'm not saying I'll do nothing. I'll drop hints and flirtations; in some cases, I may even break down and ask some of these hims out. When it comes down to it, I will always let people know just how great I think they are. But I can’t help but want, at least for a while, to leave room for someone else to beat me to it. Because that thing called pride tells me that I, too, deserve the joy of experiencing that.

Review: Rufus Wainright / Release the Stars

Recently Omar lent me Rufus Wainright's album Release the Stars, which I've listened to with the best of my ability to give something I don't think I like right off the bat a chance. (Omar, please don't throw any tomatoes at me.) While there are moments in it when I do enjoy the music, overall I find Wainright's voice and musical style to be dischordant. I think that results from the combination of his nasal voice, love of wavering it from here to there, and use of music that seems at times orchestral and at others like the soundtrack to a musical. (Note that I'm not a huge fan of musicals other than Grease.) He also has a depressing tone to his voice, and his attempts to hop between moody and peppy music mystify me. There are artists out there who can suddenly sing pop songs without any objection from me -- Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer" and REM's "At My Most Beautiful" being two of my favorite examples -- but it doesn't work for me when Rufus tries it. Needless to say, his music is not my cup of tea.

A crush in my back pocket

A year or two ago, I met a guy with whom I was immediately taken; we seemed to have a clear chemistry—not that physical chemistry that can be so much fun but rather something in our personalities that drew us, in a room full of people, to want it to be each other we were talking to. As it turned out, he had a girlfriend, but as we developed a friendship, I couldn't help letting that connection grow into the basis of a crush that I actually enjoyed having. I hadn't had one in years, and I was tickled by how much I liked this one. A friend scolded me, saying a crush on an unavailable guy was a bad idea; but it was just a crush, I said, and a crush is not real interest. Crushes are innocent; you don't expect them to go somewhere. Then what's the point, she asked? And I had to think about that one. But I think it's this: I like having occasional crushes because they are recognition of something that I cherish: that I have met someone who fits the bill. Whether I can be with him or not, that my kind of guy exists. Some people get frustrated by crushes, but I see them as special reminders that, in fact, all kinds of people can make me a little light on my feet.

A friend asked me earlier about my various dating interests of late. I covered the bases, ending with one that I don't usually mention. He is someone I see infrequently. Yet he is one of those people I want to be around when he's in the room. I even get stupidly nervous around him because there is just something he emits that draws me in. And I kind of like the infrequency with which I get to feel like a fourteen-year-old girl because of him, because there is, as my wise friend Ellen then commented, something wonderful about having a crush in your back pocket. I have to admit, the brilliance of that phrase made me consider whether there's more to my fondness for crushes than just their reminding me of what appealing people are out there. I think it's also that, when you nurse a crush over time, forgetting it and then re-conjuring it up, you get the repeated (if intermittent) excitement of wondering whether maybe this one will be the exception to the rule. Crushes are innocent; you don't expect them to go somewhere. But occasionally, maybe they do.