November.

I haven't written anything any more beautiful or inspiring than a grocery list in days. I did start one of those obnoxious Gratitude journals though. The ones where you write a one sentence something at the end of every day, saying what you're grateful for.

It lasted for two days, and then was abandoned like a one night stand you accidentally got pregnant.

Right now I guess I am grateful that it's November.

I love November. Nights are chilly and soup recipes are abundant. Lainie's birthday comes up, and it's time to start planning for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. The food and the lazy casual feeling of the day. Just lounging around, eating snacks and appetizers, waiting for a meal of epic proportions to be ready, and then eating that, and then sleeping. And I think you can always tell who really loves you, and considers themself your family, by who stops by on Thanksgiving. The ones who don't need an invitation, who don't over think it, they just drop by for appetizers and bring wine, or they come for dinner because they know you made plenty of food for everyone, or they come over around dessert to fill you in on all the drama with their family that holidays always seem to bring, and you laugh together over pie and the last couple glasses of wine, while everyone else in the house naps on couches, floors and wherever they could find a place to lay down.

November is like my new year. I clean out my closet, I throw things away. When we want to have a little fire in the backyard, the scraps of last year's tragedies make perfect kindling.

It's time to clean up, clean out, and look forward.

I am grateful for November.

...

And just because you didn't ask, some more things I might be grateful for right now....

My new dining room table and the fun things the kids and I have already found to do at it.

Good music I've never heard before.

Halloween visitors.

Hot showers.

3rd quarter profit sharing.

My car, for staying alive this long.

Netflix.

Pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin coffee.

Pumpkin scented candles.

Lainie, for giving me a birthday to celebrate this month.

Bill, for still being there.

Jack, for making me laugh.



I Want a Love

I want a love that doesn't need to be questioned, or analyzed, or discussed.

A love that simply is, and always will be.

One that needs no justification or convincing.

I want a love that is reciprocated easily.

One that looks for every reason to be near each other.

I want a love that is given, without doubt or question or fear of what anyone will think of you for it.

I want a love that grows wild in the sunlight.

I want a love that is allowed to extend into all areas of your life, and one that can, in time, bring our two lives together, eventually blurring the line between what is yours and what is mine.

I want a love that makes you proud to call me yours, that makes you want to show me off, tell everyone you know, and make sure I'm there for the big moments in your life.

I want a love that means we're best friends, a love that means we're soulmates, a love that means the past is the past and it's today, tomorrow and forever that matters.

I want a love that I can pour all of myself into.

I want a love that wants me to get close.

I want a love that forgives, a love that endures and a love that is ours.

Always, and forever. 

The Friday Diary: Too Legit to Quit

So. It's Friday.

This post is going to be entirely anticlimactic.

Just like this week was.

I did nothing special.

I took zero pictures.

I hurt my neck on Sunday and stayed in bed for two days.

Finally by Wednesday I was all better, but I was just not in the mood to cook and photograph and leave the house except to work and get food.

So I didn't.

I cleaned out my closet...I watched the 4th season of Grey's over again...I hung out with the kids...I laid on a heating pad and sometimes an ice pack, and I slept.

There you have it.

But I am glad it's Friday, and I am ready for the weekend.

I'm ready to put on my pajamas and order some Chinese food and hopefully find a good movie on Netflix, and lay on the couch eating egg rolls and Starbursts and being happy not to be in pain anymore.

It might be lame, for the weekend before Halloween, but it sounds perfect to me.

Now, just because I can't leave you with nothing, I will give you a shortened, condensed, and probably more legit version of the Friday Diary {aka just the letters portion}.

Letters:

Dear Kitchen, Why do you insist on dirty-ing yourself just after you've been cleaned? Why are you SO hard for me to keep up with, and why do I feel so depressed and defeated when you are cluttered and messy AGAIN? You must have some weird effect on my emotional equilibrium.

Dear 2012, You're almost over. Holy crap.

Dear Emotions, Get. It. Together. You were out of control this week. Not ok.

Dear Mad Hatter, Brilliant. Sweet. Surprising. Addicting. Home. Another 5 words for you, from me.

Dear Fall, You make me want to travel. You make me want to take late night drives with the windows down. You make me want Pumpkin Spiced coffee on a rainy day in Sedona. Why can't I quit you.

Happy Friday.

I Want This, I Want You

Sometimes when I spend the night at your house, I wander downstairs while you're shaving and fixing your hair, and I stand in your kitchen in my panties and your t-shirt, and I just look around.

Your things on the counters, your books on the shelves across the living room, your pans hanging from the ceiling.

The little, every day signs of you.

I think about cooking dinner with you in this kitchen when you get home from work, talking about our days and saying normal things like "Can you strain this for me?" or "Would you grab the butter from the fridge, babe?"

I want this. I want you.

Back upstairs I sit on your bed and watch you get ready in the bathroom.

It smells like your deodorant, your shampoo, your soap and your laundry.

I think about brushing our teeth together in the morning before work, at night before bed.

Slipping in and out of our pajamas, the choreographed dance of getting ready to wake up or go to sleep.

I want this. I want you.

When we sleep together, I wake up very early in the morning.

Sometimes the sun is barely straining peaches through the binds, sometimes it's still dark.

But I can tell it's morning because very early morning feels different from very late night.

It sound different, and if you pay attention you can feel the shift.

I lay beside you and listen to you breathe. I look at your face, sleep sodden and peaceful, your hair sticking up at the sides. I imagine falling asleep beside you every night. Whispering in the dark. Messing up the sheets.

I want this. I want you.

Sometimes my heart catches in my throat, and I fight back tears, because I love you in such a terrible way.
I love you in a way that living the most ordinary life would be extraordinary, as long as I was living it with you. Of course I want heart pounding adventure too (who doesn't?) but doesn't it mean something to want to love someone even in between adventures? To want to love someone when they're feverish, or tired. When life is just life and it's not particularly interesting at the moment, it would mean more still because it was ours.
I love you in such a way that I would be happy just to have both our things together on a window sill and a language only we understand.
I love you in such a way that I want to make spaghetti with you, brush my teeth with you, pet you before bedtime and hear you talk dreamily about the house you lived in when you were six. 

I want to know your favorite song, and who your first kiss was, and where you got the scar on your chin.

I want to collect all the seemingly unimportant details about you. I want to be there to adore you over morning coffee and eggs, admire you as you take out the trash, wake up in the middle of the night and kiss you because I love you in a way that just can't wait until morning.

I want this. 

I want you.

Being Alone

This park is near my office.

On days when I am responsible enough to remember to bring my lunch, I grab a book and my food and come here. I sit under this tree and eat, and read and watch the ducks waddle around.

They don't mind me and I don't mind them.

I people watch, making up stories about the people I see.

The couple meeting for lunch, the two old ladies walking around together, the women with their children, and the ones who, like me, are there alone.

It's a simple thing, but it makes me so happy. I come back to work in such a better mood. It's finally nice outside in the middle of the day, and sitting under a tree between two big beautiful fountains with a book and a sadwich is pretty perfect.

Not long ago, this is something that would have made me a little sad to do by myself.

Now, I don't think I would invite anyone to come along. At least not most days.

It's quiet and it's cool and I'm starting to like being alone. At least more than I used to.

I think for a long time I depended on other people for my own happiness quite a bit. I wanted people around me, I needed people to talk to, I wanted someone to spend the majority of my time with who wasn't a toddler.

But I'm learning to make myself happy on my own.

Not that I don't need anyone, that's ridiculous.

Everybody needs somebody sometimes and anyone who says they don't is a damn liar.

It's more that I'm alone more these days because I choose to be, not because there was no one to hang out with. And if there's something that will make me happy, I usually just go and do it, or think it or say it myself, rather than waiting and hoping someone else will come with me, or say what I need to hear.

So far, I'm pretty happy.

I still need to be held sometimes.

I still need to be told that everything will be OK sometimes.

But I'm trying to learn to make everything OK on my own, and make myself happy regardless of who's coming or going in my life at the time.

I've learned too many important people can be far too temporary.

Feelings change, needs change, people leave.

I'll always be here with myself though, so I'm learning to be OK with that during the times when that's all there is.

Just me.

Truth.

Did you ever play truth or dare as a kid?

At sleep overs, all your friends sitting in a circle, an empty soda bottle in the center, the building anxiety over who it would land on next, trying to decide ahead of time - just in case it landed on you - if you'd pick truth or dare.

When we were little, we all picked dare.

It was exciting, being dared to do something crazy. Run outside with no pants on and scream "I LOVE BUTTER!" at the top of your lungs. Put an ice cube in your bra and keep it there for 30 seconds. Call the boy you have a crush on and ask him something weird, or worse: tell him you like him.

Hearts pounding, hands sweating, hoping our friends would be kind and not make us do anything truly awful {which they never were}, we always picked dare.

I mean, what great truths did we have to reveal when we were 10 anyway?

I wet the bed once?

I steal cookies?

Sometimes I wonder if 5th grade is all it was cracked up to be?

No.

We had nothing.

As I got older, the game was still played, but usually between me and a girlfriend who was staying over, laying in bed in the dark talking until we fell asleep. And we always picked truth,

Maybe we played to pass the time.

Maybe we played because it was a good veil under which we could ask personal questions without being nosy.

Maybe we played because we had questions we secretly wanted to be asked. Truths we secretly wanted to share, but didn't know how.

So we opened the door. The rules were, after all, that they could ask anything and you had to answer honestly.

It's like what psychiatrists always say about having a journal: you're writing it because you want someone to read it. You want it to be found, read through and known about. You want to share yourself, you just don't know how to come out and do it.

Playing truth or dare did it for us.

Want to hear my truth?

Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing, here. I worry about how I'm raising the kids, if I'm doing a good enough job, what I'll be dealing with when they're 18. What issues they'll have that I know will be my fault. I don't know if I'm enough.

Sometimes I'm equal parts scared of, excited about and apathetic toward the future. It's very confusing.

Sometimes I wish mistakes were more easily forgotten. I wish that at some point people stopped seeing your poor choices when they looked at you. Like every day when we woke up, we forgot all the sins of the day before, and we only remembered what was good, what was real, what was intentional.

I fucking hate mopping.

I un-friended someone on Facebook the other day for posting too many political statuses and pictures of Obama. Judge me, I don't care. I don't feel bad about it at all. 

When I was little, I used to break the candy bars that are in those metal racks in the check out line. I wouldn't break the wrapper, so nobody would know until they bought it and opened it and saw their candy bar was fatally decapitated. I don't know why I did it. I'd just stand there and squeeze them until they snapped in half, then I'd move on to another one, seeing how many I could break before we were done checking out and paying for our groceries.

I still feel bad for all the people who got broken candy bars.

Anyway, your turn. Truth or Dare?

Video Blog Pt. 2

Alright alright alright, everybody.

The second {and last} installment of the video Q and A is up. 

Bill helped me film this one, because talking to the camera alone in my bedroom last time was just too weird, so thanks Bill.

Apologies in advance for how much I giggle and the weird way that I keep clearing my throat. I never realized I do that so much.

Enjoy.