5/4/2011 - everything kind of wrote itself. . .

What follows is today's post, written in one sitting with barely any revisions.  I mention this because I wanted an opportunity to explain its faint aimlessness while also drawing a modest amount of attention to the irony that I really didn't know what to say today, yet found that once I starting writing, everything kind of wrote itself.

For better or worse.  You be the judge; I can take it.

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Today is the first day in a long time, at least a few weeks, where I sat down and had no idea what I wanted to write about here.  Not that things are going badly in life--quite the opposite, actually--but I resolved at the beginning of this blog not to just rattle off things that I'm thankful for, like my health or my job or milk for my cereal.

I am, of course, certainly grateful for all of those things, and more, as I recognize that the alternatives are dire (with the possible exception of the milk item, even though it may feel like the end of the world to be let down first thing in the morning when all I want is a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats): a friend recently broke his knee; others are struggling with employment.  Another recently came home after a vacation to find that the doggy hotel/hospital erroneously doubled his dog's insulin medication, ultimately killing his beloved pet.  Can you imagine?  And of course, now that I own a dog, every other dog becomes a representation of mine.  When I heard the news, I could only think how grateful I was that Grr is alive, safe and troubled only by his desire to live in a sleepy suburb, a rural farm, a quiet cul-de-sac, anywhere but here in the City.

But see, that's just it; I don't have much more to say about Grr other than that, nor about any of those everyday morsels of gratitude other than 'I am glad I am healthy,' or 'Thank God I have a job.'  And as happy as I was to see Sam yesterday morning after a few days apart, I have tried really hard (and largely succeeding, I'd say) to avoid turning this blog into the Sam and Austin Show, where essentially I just gush about how much I love my boyfriend.  Nobody wants to read that; people hate you for that.

Such is the danger of writing for an audience, or, largely in my case, writing for an intended, imaginary audience: you start to cater the writing to the people who read it.  But the truth is that I am happy with Sam.  I am very much in love with him, so why should I shy away from saying just that?  An acquaintance chatted me up earlier today on Gmail, and what started out as a friendly 'hello' quickly turned into a session of couples' counseling (is that apostrophe in the right place?).  Peter repeatedly finds himself in the same arguments with his partner: partner is not affectionate enough; Peter himself doesn't put out enough; they both recognize that they are not happy, but neither has it in themselves to figure out a solution to the complex problems they share.  Throw in self-esteem issues, feelings of jealousy in an open-relationship, and a growing animosity toward the inequities that exist between them, and I quickly found myself in over my non-M.F.T.-trained head.

Besides, what can they do?  They have been together for over seven or eight years, live together in a house they recently bought together, share friends and acquaintances; in all ways--emotional, physical, legal--their lives are intricately tangled.  A separation, ironically, would require a huge amount of commitment, a quantity of which I doubt either had.  I felt bad about it, worse, actually, since I listened to what Peter had to say and interpreted it all as a cautionary tale, a story of how not to be if you want to have even the most remote chance at a realistic, but still fairytale-like, ending.

Toward the end of the conversation, he asked me how things were going with Sam.  What could I say, after spending 30 minutes talking about his imperfect relationship, other than, "Oh, we're fine," even though I repeatedly thought, as we chatted, how lucky I was to be in my imperfect-but-perfectly-fulfilling one?