10 Things I Think I Think

Man, are some of these posts dense or what? Long-winded. Starchy. Reading them is like trying to chase a pound of spaghetti with a loaf of garlic bread and a potato. Maybe I should start using subheadings like I do with my legal briefs. Anyhoo, I’d like to add a little levity and brevity to the situation, so I’m bringing back something I used to do on my old blog: ’10 Things I Think I Think,’ which I stole from sportswriter Peter King. 10TITIT will be a little shot of grappa from time to time, a palate cleanser between these heavy, constipatory meals of mine.

Off we go….

1. No one tells you before you have a kid how much they’ll dictate your life afterwards. Not just the time and care involved in raising them, but everything else too.  Where you live. How often you can travel. How long you can stay anywhere.  Your realistic geographic dating range (if you’re lucky enough to be single in your 50s like me!).  How much free time you have to do the things you enjoy.  The kind of house or apartment you’re going to be able to buy and where. Being a parent really fucks with one’s life logistics and freedom of movement. It’s mostly worth it, but still.

2. M. and I have made it a habit to watch America’s Got Talent reruns before she goes to bed. She loves it, especially the young performers, and I’m trying to plant seeds in her mind of what she’s capable of achieving in life if she wants to. Before going to the judges, Terry Crews will sometimes ask the performers who it is that inspires them as an artist, so one time I asked M. who inspires her. She said ‘Olivia Rodrigo and you, Daddy.’ I almost cried.

3. There are two sides to every divorce story. Two. Not one. You’ve probably only heard one of them.

4. I haven’t been this disinterested in politics in a long time. I don’t know if it’s fatigue after 4+ years of Trump Wars, which are now starting up again, or that it all feels like a boring rerun I’ve watched 1000 times, or that I’ve come to believe that people in this country are so hopeless, uninformed, and easily misled by demagogues that they deserve whatever they get.  I really don’t give a shit about any of it right now. Or maybe it’s because I’m getting the fuck out of here in 12-15 years.

5. Caught a few episodes of Love is Blind on Netflix recently. I like this concept for a reality show, but it’s absurd for people to think they can fall in love based on a voice and personality alone, and a person’s looks don’t matter at all. If only it were that easy!  Physical attractiveness is a subjective thing, and the show is intentionally withholding this critical information until these couples finally see each other after connecting blindly for days. It’s definitely an interesting experiment, and I can’t wait to see how these car wrecks love connections play out!

6. You really find out who your friends are (and aren’t) when you’re in one of life’s troughs and some of them forget you exist. I read this quote from Camus’ The Fall not long after I graduated college, and with rare exception, I’ve found little reason to quibble with it since:

“Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends.”

7. You can’t always get what you want.  This is a good thing.  There was a time when I really really really didn’t want to get divorced.  But the universe always has a better plan for us, regardless of what we want in any given moment. I’ve learned a lot about life and myself over the past year, so repeated kicks to one’s balls can be a gift once you’re done numbing them with a pack of frozen peas.

8. There’s an old saying: The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Fucking someone else–anyone else–ASAP pulls the green curtain away from the all-powerful Wizard of Oz–i.e., whatever uniqueness, beauty, and permanence you thought existed in your prior relationship–and literally overnight, reduces the entire experience to something plain and ordinary. “Look, Dorothy, it’s just an old guy moving levers and yelling into a voice modulator!  It was all an illusion!” Remember your surprise when you saw the real Wizard for the first time as a kid? Or when the Wicked Witch melted because of….. water? Yeah, it’s totally like that.

9. My last post was probably too revealing about myself.  There’s always a balance I try to strike between TMI and writing in the raw and authentic way I prefer to write, but some of what I post can leave me feeling naked and overexposed. I recently made a choice to live my life in a more vulnerable and authentic way, to be less self-conscious and more open to other people, especially strangers (give or take weird-looking dudes in vans who offer me candy). For better or worse, what I write about here, what I choose to reveal about myself, is a part of that. I even linked to this site on Twitter, which is something I never thought I’d do. Not all of it’s pretty, and things get a bit Russian nesting doll-y when I start chasing thought rabbits, but fuck it. So far, living my life in this new way has been empowering. It makes me feel lighter, stronger, and more synchronized with the world, even if it’s a painful process sometimes. It feels right to me. We’ll see where it leads.

10. Nothing makes me happier than when someone underestimates me, tries to define me, or condescends to tell me the limits of what I’m capable of. I consider it a challenge, motherfucker.