Moodswing

I love my new house, I love my new neighborhood, and my first day here was a purely happy one.

I had to say that before I start parsing the woes that have befallen me.

I'm feeling lonely and sexless. The last week I was at work, I logged on to the online dating site I used to use to delete my listing. But of course I had to check out the current crop of guys on the site, and I found that T the Underaged had posted a profile. And that twisted me up more than it should have. Last spring we had one of the most fun dates I've had in years, sparks were a'flying, nakedness ensued, and then he disappeared. I thought I had done pretty well, thought I had even passed a karmic test of some kind, by letting it go without too much of a fuss. But this sparked a new round of mooning about what happened and wondering what I did wrong.

But the thing is whatever I do wrong, it comes down to just being who I am. So it's not useful to brood about it. A better way to look at it, and equally true, is that it just wasn't a good match or that he's the one with the problem.

Still, whatever may or may not be wrong with me, I am feeling lonely. I got the new Shannon McNally record, which is pretty good. But I was reading about her and her record release party in the paper, and the story mentioned her husband W who worked at the Louisiana Music Factory. The same W who I had a crushlet on a few years ago, and made a pass at, and who tactfully let me know he was married. God, she's beautiful, too, way out of my league.

In the middle of all this, while I was at my old apartment waiting for the movers who were hours late, I got a package of books I'd ordered weeks ago. One of the books was Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, who also happened to be one of my teachers at Bennington.

RW and I were just discussing this when I was in Maine. He went to Columbia, paid for it with a big student loan, and acquired Jonathan Franzen and Michael Cunningham as mentors. My mentors were lesser literary lights like Lucy and Bob Shacochis and Sven Birkerts--and I don't mean to put them down, they were great and it was a thrill to have teachers who published actual books, even if they weren't at the top of the bestseller lists.

Lucy actually was at the top of the bestseller lists for awhile when she published her memoir Autobiography of a Face. As a child, she'd had a rare and lethal cancer that ate up her jaw. She beat the odds by surviving it, but her face was never right. She looked odd, she had almost no teeth and she couldn't closer her mouth.

But she was a great writer and enormously popular and well-loved. But she never felt loved, and always thought it was because of how she looked. The irony is that she had at least two boyfriends who really loved her. I met one, and he was quite attractive. He might have married her, but she broke up with him. Patchett writes that she'd had so much time alone to build up an unattainable ideal of love. Real love in the real world didn't quite measure up. She never quite understood that it's like that for all of us. She thought it was because of how she looked.

There's a lot here to turn over in my head. Maybe this will be the kernel of my next essay.

One thing that Patchett mentions is that Lucy was thinking about going to medical school before she died (of a heroin overdose). She wanted to keep her writing as art, separate it from commerce.

Now that I've moved and quit my job, the fact that I'm starting law school in a few weeks has finally started to seem real, and I've begun to feel a bit anxious about it.

But my immediate anxiety is that I'm waiting on an overdue check and I've only gotten mail one day this week. I'm supposed to take Miss S out to Ralph's on the Park tonight for her birthday, but if the check doesn't show up in the next few hours, tha'ts gonna be a problem.

There's much more to write, but this will have to do for now.

I'm here in my house. I love it. The blues will pass.