Niki

My friend Niki (aka Nicols Fox, see link at bottom of page) is just about the coolest person I know.

I met her in grad school. She's roughly my mother's age and has been a role model and in some ways an alternative mother figure for me. She lives by herself in a cottage on the quiet side of Mount Desert Island in Maine. Some of my earliest on this blog were about a visit to her home in July of 2005, just a month and a half before The Thing.

She's a role model because she transformed herself in the second half of her life, and she makes being an old maid look damn appealing. When she was in her 40s she was the wife of a Republican politician in Virginia and the mother of two. Since then she has divorced, survived breast cancer, moved to Maine, finished an MFA, started a writing career and published four books, changed her lifestyle to reflect her semi-neo-luddite philosophy, and generally followed her own vision.

But I always wondered about whether she would stay up there in semi-isolation till the end. I worried about her a bit. Now I have learned that she put her house up for sale and is considering a move back to Virginia, because of a multitude of health problems.

She was so gung-ho into living on Mt. Desert. Just as I was about living in New Orleans, I suppose. We both had the feeling that we had found our place. But life is a series of storms and upsets, with interludes of semi-contentment if you're lucky. Now we are both in search of a new home and the next interlude. I'm going north and she's going south. It would be cool if we both ended up in VA. But I'm sad. I don't want her to be anything but healthy and in her element. I wish I could buy her house, too, as a way to hold on to that moment now gone.

I have a job interview at a state court in Norfolk on the day before my dreaded b'day. One of my fellow interns from this summer is interviewing in the slot after me, so we can get together and have a drink afterward. But the job is the opposite of the job in New York. It doesn't offer any of the things I want except a means to get established in VA.

I got back together with Mr. M about a month ago, but now I have second thoughts. Or I need to think about the relationship in a different way. I absolutely want him in my life. He is my closest confidante, but as a boyfriend he is hopeless. He does love me, despite what I wrote in an earlier post. But he chronically cannot get his shit together. On any given day I go to class, then to my externship, then run errands, then read for next day's classes, then work on my paper, then walk the dog, while he "managed" to get some laundry done and went to the drugstore. He still hasn't "managed" to do anything about work or school or making any plans to do anything. It drives me up a tree. I don't want to nag and for the most part I don't. At least he knows he's got some issues with this and he's in therapy to work on it. But still, I find myself losing respect for him. And I realize if we were just friends it wouldn't bother me very much. I sometimes get momentarily annoyed by my friends' flaws and foibles, but for the most part I don't notice them very much. But in a boyfriend I find this unacceptable. Instead of getting annoyed, though, I think I need to get detached. If he doesn't affirmatively do something, our romance will die a natural death because I am not going to move to Minneapolis. Hopefully the friendship will survive. And if he does actually do something, it will be a wonderful surprise.

Being romantically alone doesn't seem so bad as long as I have good friends and a social life. Right now I'm in a cycle where I'm madly horny for about two days each month, during which my dreams are just sex, sex, sex, and I have to masturbate in the middle of the night just so I can dream about something else--kind of like when you keep dreaming about peeing until you get up and go to the bathroom. But the rest of the month I don't think about sex at all, except maybe to think how annoying is that random, compulsive hormonal stupidity.

In other news, a murder in my neighborhood at 11 a.m. today, and a carjacking late thursday night/ friday morning.