6/1/2011 - about nothing. . .

It's hard to write about nothing.

The front desk boy at the gym who remembers my name regularly asks me if I have any big plans for the weekend, or if I had done anything exciting over the weekend past.  Though at the time, while living through those weekends, I was thrilled with it all, going into any detail about the dog park, sleeping in, my latest iPad app obsession (Vegas Towers, and not just because it has the word 'Vegas' in it) would seem to just give a long version of the very simple answer: "No, my life is very boring."

Sam and I had dinner with Jason and his sister in honor of Steve's birthday on Monday, and I not only found myself constantly talking about Grr, but Sam too!  Have we become those "parents" who think they are raising a "Christ-pet," and that everyone is waiting with bated breath to hear more?  Do we have nothing else going on in our lives?

When I sat down at lunch today to begin this post, I ran through how Sam and I spent our previous evening for fodder.  Nothing.  I had biked home shortly after five, opened the door expecting to catch a lunging pup in my arms, but the house was quiet.  No pup, no Sam.  I walked to the kitchen and found ingredients for spaghetti stacked on the countertop and a pot of water on the stove, threatening to boil.  I opened the freezer, grabbed the frozen ground turkey, and popped it in the microwave.  It was all very smooth, as if mapped by a choreographer.

But there was a time a little while back, when Sam was a question mark to me altogether, when we were still stumbling around in the infant stages of our relationship, when we weren't in one at all.  I spent countless hours at the gym with Chad, over coffee with Steve, dinners with Karen, trying to decipher this enigma, read his mind and extrapolate tomes of information from a simple glance, a smile or a scowl.  Had I started this blog then, I would never run out of things to say, about Sam, about love, about dating and insecurities, about hope and discontent.

I can see now how Carrie devoted about seven percent of her on-screen time writing her "Sex and the City" column and the rest shopping for shoes, brunching with the girls, living the extravagant life of a writer--her column practically writes itself!  (Though I do have my doubts that her lifestyle could be supported on a newspaper columnist's salary, however successful she may have been.)  Without turbulent relationships, she would have nothing.  For that matter, there would be no pop music, no rom-coms; arts and entertainment would be a completely different landscape without the oft-comedic struggles of dating.

Contentment, on the other hand, is a different story, one that doesn't always write itself.  Turns out Sam isn't so much an enigma as he is just male, and our life together is fun to live, but less so to tell.  How many posts can I put up of living together, cooking together, raising a pup together, before I alienate what little readership I have? 

When Sam and Grr returned from their walk, I heard a frantic shuffling of paws and an equally frantic dog round the corner and leap at me with a winding tail, ready for take-off.  Sam followed and, with no other form of greeting, said, "He's having some tummy troubles.  It was like two handfuls of pretty explosive stuff."

This is what I'm thankful for.  After struggling through the better part of an hour with various scraps and sentences, opening paragraphs that ultimately went nowhere, outlines that even I got bored with writing, I remembered this little quote from yesterday and ran with it.  The post didn't write itself, and I doubt a TV show could be made out of it, but still--eat your heart out, Carrie Bradshaw.