Still Learning

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At least with every heartbreak, heart ache, disappointment - of friends or lovers - and painstaking hike down a new path, those who pay attention and learn from the pain gain something fruitful as they move forward. It has taken me many years and bruises of the heart to realize each time it hurts, it is a chance to become a better person. And I believe that I have. 

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“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” ― C.S. Lewis

The Importance of Ice Cream Cake

This weekend was a whirlwind ending up in an ice cream cake we bought for no reason whatsoever: Except for that we passed a Baskin Robbins on the way back from the auto parts store and we wanted to, which seemed to be reason enough to buy a princess-themed ice cream cake. It was the only one in mint-chocolate chip.

And then we sat down and ate it - sans bowls, nearly sans spoons - while watching "Gladiator" and wondering where we went so right in our lives. To mark off our accomplishments for the day, we changed my taillight and I went through my friend's donation bags, which lead to this car maintenance outfit:

Meanwhile, I check Facebook and read a post from my sister about how much she loves her babies. I love them too - but lets juxtapose these posts, shall we?

She is only two years older than me and my Sunday is spent eating brunch, then ice cream cake, then Chinese food with my friends that woke up slightly hungover at my house that morning after a mutual friend's 29th birthday party - and one very singularly victorious beer pong game - (Evidently, it's the boy partners that drag me down.) with the day's largest accomplishments consisting of second hand clothes and new tail lights.

And this only after I went out Friday in a bare midriff top, danced my ass off and had a great time without two cares in the world - from what I recall, because apparently my memory stopped dead in the tracks of a vodka Red Bull. I blame the Red Bull. Seriously. And the forgetting may be a shame, considering after my friend's bridal shower the next afternoon, I went to a local arts festival - her mother gave us margarita filled bubba kegs - with some of the other attendees, during which time I got a text:

Obviously I didn't recall this person. And unsurprisingly, the fair egos of Georgetown's trotting men don't seem to take kindly to being forgotten - or rather, never remembered. In the future, perchance I'll just continue the conversation first and ask questions later. However, if anyone has any chance to date me, their egos must be much less fragile than this. Especially when they meet me when I'm dressed like this:

On the left is my friend. We went for the tipsy ab contest. He texted earlier that day while I was debating if I was going to have a date that night with Ben and Jerry to tell me we're going out; his brother was in town. So that happened. And I magically woke up in time for my friend's bridal shower, sans alarm. So after the shower and after the arts festival, I had to head home for the birthday shindig. And I awoke on Sunday morning, The Greek having texted me the night before with an :p emoticon, I texted him back questioning the lack of drunk voicemails this weekend; as last weekend he had left one at 2am that I came upon on Tuesday and so generously deleted, per request, without first listening. Lucky chap. And decided, thereafter, that flowers are pretty and any man makes the lexical choice to (sincerely) call me "beautiful", is one worthy of my heart. Not that the compliment wasn't nice, I was quite flattered "damn you're pretty" is always nice to hear - especially at 11am after 6 hours of sleep and looking like less than ravishing. But there's something about that word "beautiful". (Who doesn't want to be more stunning than a flower?)

So who's The Greek? He's just a guy I met a few weeks back after a seriously impressive day of day drinking and bar crawling. Remember my hiatus? This was part of that. 

The first week of June is always the VA Vintage Wine festival. For the 3rd year, at 10am we hopped on a charter bus, headed down there, drink for 8 hours and then ride back up. While there, I met up with my aunt who lives locally. Rather uneventful aside from getting in an argument with asshole on the blanket next to us because they refused to give their passed out friend water and she was unresponsive and my aunt, as a trauma nurse, has a civic duty to help - (then the girl woke up pissed off passerbys were mistakenly? concerned as she was "napping"...hoooooooooookay) - which led to one of the middle-aged men taking off his shirt and trying to fight the dickhead twenty something who wouldn't wake up the girl friend and then started throwing garbage our way 20 minutes later. This was normal for us, but the middle agers seemed to really get a kick out of the whole thing. 

So on the way back we shared a couple bottles of wine and then I time-traveled in my head to being showered and ready to go out all over again for mutual friends' shared birthday bar crawl. In essence: I bar crawled to sober up. Ha! So fast-forward a couple of hours, after I walked across the Key Bridge, rode a concrete elephant and sat at the bar garnering a free cider than moving towards the dance floor: I'm standing there watching my GBF dance with a frenemy, a man came up to talk to me. He asked for my digits and, per usual, I complied. He said his phone was dead and my response was: Then memorize it. I'm not even kidding, he did - and how to spell my name correctly. Before he left, he even came up to me to double check his memory and when he texted the next day all I could wonder was why he didn't grab a napkin and a pen from the bar. A few minutes pass returned,  checked my number/his memory again, then left; Just then a Marine came up to talk to me about that girl I was watching and the state of her self-esteem problems and daddy issues, to which I responded: I know her (haha - but I'm not a fan). We started to chat - his friend came to chat - and my girlfriend N started dancing with their other friend. Fast forward again: We close down the bar and - after 15 hours of drinking - cabbed back, wherein I insisted we go eat. And then girlfriend C left her phone in the cab. 

Having previously made friends with the driver - myself at a pleasant point of tipsy - he was a fan of us. So she borrowed my phone to call hers. While using my phone and standing in the lobby, I'm facing her while standing next a table. In the middle of trying to get her attention I hear someone to my right say to his friend "She's pretty. Tell her she's pretty." After repeating this a number of times, I turn and say "thank you" and go on trying to get my friend's attention. This is The Greek. 

After this I walked up to my girlfriend C, the cab pulls up and she gets her phone back leaving me to tip him as she refused to give him more money for doing a nice thing. Returning back into the diner, The Greek stops me. We sit there, leaving the Marines we had met at our original table with my girlfriend N - who I later would learn talked smack the whole time about The Greek and his friends. They called them frat boys and preps and picked on their polos - of which some of the talk I caught having left that table later, returning to the Marines because my friend was being completely definite about everything as The Greek told her "you are the angriest person I've ever met" "why are you so angry" - at which point 1. his friend left because she was too much for him and 2. I decided The Greek could have my phone number. Then I wrote my number on a napkin and went back to the Marine table. Then one of the Marines got locked outside and was knocking on the window to tell us to let him in, to which we responded it's not locked because it's a 24 hour diner, to which - while still knocking on the window, we were then asked to leave because they are, in fact, not a 24 hour diner. 

And then we went back to my GBF's place - the one we went to wine fest with that didn't quite rally as well (instead of the sober up tactic I seemed to us, he drank 2 forties to earn points for our crawl "team" - kudos) - and found him passed out on his front door. I'm sorry, my friend, but that is a visual I will cherish for the rest of my life. That and the princess themed ice cream cake because: "whose birthday is it?" "no ones. i just wanted ice cream cake." Just because.

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[Edit: Gchat Snippet: 

me: B, am i suppose to want a family right now?

because eating ice cream cake and chinese food and watching movies with my friends yesterday seemed like a much better idea than taking care of kids.

 B:  hahaha dude. I've been feeling the same exact way lately.]

Psychic and the Book

I've taken a hiatus. It was an accident. It’s summer. And I started to write a book. About our 20s and every up and down and no-one-tells-you-what-the-fuck-is-going-on you are not alone totally relatable tale...and I give you no more details because, honestly, I think it's a good idea. And so do older generations. And something I learned throughout my 20s - they know what the fuck they're talking about. And despite having lost my phone yet again last week - and getting it back...again - my faith in humanity is probably not as high as it should be. Last year was a rough one, so I'll probably blame that for the next 5.5 months.

But when I thought about it for a minute, this idea of writing a book (and wondering who would read it) - I remembered something the psychic said back in October while visiting NYC. Among the many details of the reading, she told me to write. That was the first time in the 30 minutes of sitting in that room I wasn't completely enthralled with the things she was saying. I mean, as soon as I walked into her little basement room in the middle of Chelsea, it vibrated...and then, after placing a crystal over my hand, she began to "read" it and immediately spout out exactly the top I had just been discussing with my friend prior to going: Huh. Palm reading? 10 dollars? Want to?

I had just been telling him about my anti-cover letter. And how I didn't want to limit myself career-wise. When I sat down she began with something similar: Explaining that I had my "hands in lots of cookie jars, but it's not a bad thing; I just like to do a lot of different things not not limit myself". Comforting, I thought. I still stayed silent and she went on.

The following week - the week before Halloween - I chatted with my mother and a few others, sharing what the psychic had said. Next time I’m taking a tape recorder, but here’s what I gathered from my saved chats:

On Intuition:
she also said that my 3rd eye was very open.
and, without me saying anything, that i need to trust my intuition.
that was one of the first things she said: to trust my intuition because it's very good.
she said that my 3rd eye is open for myself, as well as picking up on the energy of those around me. she said that i have a very strong aura and then prefaced next statement with: don't take this the wrong way or as a bad thing “but it attracts weak people to you".

On Love:
which then lead her into my next love...she said he'll be weak, but he won't always be that way.
and that that's how we connect or meet: that he's coming from being broken in his previous relationship.
coming out of a relationship, he'll be in a bad place and i'll help him and it will develop. (sounds not great. haha. but typical.) i guess i help him. he gets himself back; he's not always weak.
and we'll have a deep love that isn't happy on the outside and unhappy on the inside: it's real, not superficial. she said he is no where near me; she said i'll meet him in 2013; that we would be friends first; that we would have two children. (but she didn't say anything about marriage. idk if that was intentional or not.) she added that my second pregnancy would come with a complication; the baby would be fine, but during the pregnancy I would feel something was wrong and to trust myself and not everyone else telling me it was normal. She also said that that we'll push and pull one another; that we challenge one another, but in a good way.

On Writing:
although i don't think she used the word "challenge" [for the love], but she did use the word "challenge" when referring to writing. she made a specific point about writing: she told me i need to challange my writing. that i can write - and it's not a taught thing - but that i need to do more with it. and i can make money off of it.
i didn't really understand. She continued and said i have a lot of creative energy but need to explore it more and make more time of it. She was extremely clear on this point - despite my total bewilderment: Challenge your writing; it can make you money. (And I think she mentioned "the next six months".)


She also said I'll move some time next year (this was one of the first things she said and I didn't say anything to her before we started) and i'll stay there for about 3 years - which, at the time I was heavily considering, if not decided upon. So when I left, I was stunned by how accurate the reading was. How many nails she hit on the head. We were both so impressed with the reading, that we went to another $10 psychic later that night near Times Square. That one was short, but accurate: she did said I'd lost someone close to me, I was planning travel and that I've been going thru a long period of struggle but in the months ahead she sees things getting better and better. Oh. And money. She said i'll come into money.

I had lost someone, yes. I had just gone through a long period of intense struggle, yes. And from those months had just learned - or rather the universe had smacked me upside the head - to trust my intuition because it had be right about the PE all along. I did end up coming into money, but in a strange way where really I didn’t but it was a valid vision and the better months that followed where right. I had a wonderful few months with that guy I met at a Halloween party, who I had started talking to because he was in a weak place and I drunkenly ended up helping out of a broken relationship. And while I laughed at her saying I was planning travel and told her I wasn’t. She said I would. Four months later I had purchased my roundtrip tickets to New Zealand - because my heart was broken by said guy.

Impressive, no?

But then there was still this lingering mentions of writing. She was so insistent on the writing piece. I was inquisitive because I don’t write - aside from this blog. I don’t write for my job, really. I don’t make any money writing. “Maybe I’ll do freelance copy editing for websites,” I said with inquisitive inflection. She didn’t know, she just told me to challenge my writing. To feed it and I could make money off of it. She was unrelenting despite my skepticism. And months later, after I had confused the “challenge” to be referring to the “love” I would find, I went back to look at the chats to see what the psychic had mentioned about writing. The “challenge” was for writing, not my great love (though implied we would force one another to grow, but that it would be a good thing). And I laugh because what if, just what if I write this book and someone cares? What if I really can make money off of writing?

I’m going for it. The psychics have been too accurate thus far (though I really can’t see myself allowing me to be dragged through another person’s failed relationship and falling for them). And there has to be a reason for all these stories, for my desire for them. I guess we’ll find out.

So, then, now it's real: I’m writing a book. It may seem self-important. It may seem far-fetched. But I really believe in it. And my forgotten reading confirmed that maybe, just maybe, I can do this. And it will be good. I guess sometimes we need a stranger (to believe in us in order) to believe in ourselves.