“Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person” ~ Ethel Mumford

I love gossip.  Not necessarily malicious gossip or rumor gossip or bad news gossip or really any sort of specific type of gossip.  I just love it all.

I don’t use gossip as a way to talk about my friends behind their back or spread rumors or ruin reputations.  I like to gossip about the facts.  Well…unless it’s celebrity gossip and I’ve read it in Us Weekly and I consider it fact even if it isn’t proven…

I like to be in the know.  I like to know things.  I like to be the holder of all information about everything.  I have a great paranoia about being out of the loop or in the dark.  I want to know who’s pregnant, who’s engaged, who got a promotion, who’s on the brink of firing, who’s got a boyfriend — everything.

When I talk to friends, I can’t stop myself from being overly nosy and pushing for details that I have no business knowing.

Yet it seems that my love for gossip and knowledge of everything keeps me from knowing anything in-depth about anyone.  I push so hard for the juicy details, that I usually wind up missing the big picture and the real story.

Lately, my goal has been to steer clear of the gossip and ask for the story.  It may be a subtle difference, but knowing the whole story is really knowing, whereas gossip only gave the illusion of knowing.  And I’ve discovered that I understand more about my friends, and I understand more about how I can be a better friend to them.

Gossip is fun, but knowing the whole story is better.

“And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd/Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud/And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to” ~ Anna Nalick

Most days I worry about how having a blog is going to come back and bite me in the ass.

Am I the only one who worries about what will happen if I become famous one day and all these words written in the heat of the moment come back to haunt me?

But even though I worry about how people will perceive, misconstrue, or understand my words, I can’t stop myself.  On this blog and even moreso on my other blogs, I simply have to put these words out in the universe.

Some posts are snapshots into my psyche, some are mundane and simply fill space, some are forced, and some tumble out of my fingers before I even have time to register what I’ve just written.  I feel compelled to write them all.

Since I was in 4th grade I’ve kept a diary.  And now as an adult, I keep a blog.  My thoughts are just as private, but I’m less embarrassed by them now and there’s comfort in the collective.  But I know that I set myself up to be taken out of context, as well as taken at my word when I write about something I’m feeling at the moment.  I have a hot temper and part of my rage management is getting those feeling out on my blog.  Writing about how I’m feeling so that I can stop festering over those feelings.

I try not to involve others in my blogs.  I don’t name names, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure privacy.  So all I’m doing is standing naked before you all, telling you that these are my words, these are my thoughts, but these are not all me.  So do with them what you will, but understand that I am so much more than just these peepholes into my soul.

This is why Facebook is evil

Yeah, I know, veering from the quote theme again.  But sometimes I have thoughts to work out that have nothing to do with quotes.  And it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.  You don’t know me!

Okay…now that I’ve gotten that out of my system…

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook.  I’m sure we all do.  But I feel like I spend more time thinking about it than most.  Of course I do.  God forbid I spend a substantial amount of time ruminating on the ills of the world.  No, better I expend that energy thinking about how Facebook affects my life.  Well, that, and whether or not the right girl won America’s Next Top Model.  Priorities, people.

I was ALL ABOUT facebook when I first signed up.  I could spend hour reading people’s profiles, building my own, hunting down old friends and lost loves.  I’ve always been nosy by nature and facebook suddenly made that socially acceptable.  It was WONDERFUL!  But then, like every other time one has too much of a good thing, it started to make me sick.  I OD’d and there was no way to rid myself of all the FB info I’d ingested.

Suddenly, not only was I comparing my life to the lives of my actual friends (you know, the people I call to make plans with, spend every weekend drunk with, go on trips with — the people whose lives I actually know) but every person I’ve gone to grade school, middle school, high school, and college with.  The fact that I went to a high school where everyone was prettier, wealthier, and smarter than me did not help things.

Since that first log-in on FB, I’ve felt like a tragic underachiever.  I got married later, got a house later, and now I’m starting on kids later than everyone.  Former co-workers and classmates give numerous updates about the various sources of bliss in their lives (generally an amazingly romantic husband) while I bumble about in my average life.

The thing is, I’m really happy.  No seriously.  I am.  I’m so, so happy with my life.  I’m so happy with my husband and my home and my dog and my friends and really, when I think about it, my career.  I’m so happy that I don’t need to talk about it on FB.  Maybe because my happiness isn’t something to brag about.  It’s such a normal, happy, existence that to an outsider, it might appear downright boring.

Do I wish I had more money? Yeah.  Do I wish I could take a decent [sober] picture?  Certainly.  Do I wish my house was bigger? Yes…except then I’d want a cleaning lady because I can barely keep our 2,000 sq. ft. livable and clean.

The thing with FB is that it’s not showing reality, and I always forget that when I’m looking at adorable baby pictures, over-the-top weddings, and fancy dinner parties.  I don’t know what’s really going on with most of the people I’m friends with on FB.  And if I don’t know the whole story, then what’s the use of comparing?  I know my whole story, and I know that I am happy every single day.  I suppose I’ll always wish for something more and better than what I have, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love my life as it is.  And my life gets better every year.  FB may not tell that story to my “friends”, but I don’t need it to.  All that matters is I know it.

Right?

“He’ll always need your love/And so he’ll get your love./A man who needs your love/Can be wonderful.”

I was watching The King and I the other night and this song, Something Wonderful, gets in my head like no other.  I sang along with it, I hummed it in the shower, and wandered around singing it as I cleaned up after myself later that night.  I love this song.  I think it’s absolutely beautiful and is one of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.  It’s an epic, sweeping song, but it isn’t too long.

Right around my 136th singing of the song that evening, I began really thinking about what I was singing.  The song suddenly started sounding so needy to me.  And it really got me seeing the King of Siam in a new light.  My Yul Brynner — needy?

Okay, perhaps I was taking it all too literally.

But really, the lyrics did get me thinking about my feelings on neediness.

It got me thinking about my high school boyfriend — the boy I truly thought I was going to marry.  That boy was wonderful.  Honestly, I have nothing bad to say about him.  He was a good person and he treated me like a queen.  But while our relationship may have looked right, it was all wrong.  We were completely co-dependent.  He needed me and I needed him and that is exactly how we wanted it.  We needed no one else but each other.

Looking back, that relationship sends a shiver down my spine.

Today, that kind of neediness absolutely makes me bristle.  I HATE neediness.  Don’t get me wrong — I love to be valued and appreciated and desired.  But I hate being NEEDED.  The very thought of neediness makes my skin crawl and any time someone in my life becomes a little too needy — a little too clingy — I immediately take major steps back to distance myself.

I don’t know exactly where this disdain of neediness came from, but I can only assume it came from my experience with that high school boyfriend.  As much as I enjoyed that relationship until the last couple months, being with that guy was like being in Wonderland.  I fell down the rabbit hole and got completely lost.  And that’s what neediness represents to me.  I pull away these days because I want to steer clear of that rabbit hole.

The husband does not need me.  He was complete before I came along.  But he wants me.  Oh sure, there’s certain things he needs from me, but he doesn’t need me.  It’s hard to explain the distinction, but there is one, I assure you.

I’ve spent most of my life loving that bald-headed beauty, Yul Brynner*.  After analyzing this song, though, I don’t think I’m going to be able to see him in quite the same light.  Bald might be sexy to me, but neediness certainly isn’t.

*Yes, I’m aware that Yul Brynner is only playing a character, but that character defined him — he kept his head shaved because of that character, so I tend to view them as one in the same.  I mean, he played the King of Siam over 1300 times on stage, and played him right up until his death. So you can’t blame me for blurring the line between real life and a story.

“Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.” ~Fran Lebowitz

When I was younger, I had complete confidence in my intelligence and my ability to hold an intelligent conversation.  For many years, I related more to adults than I did to kids my own age.  I loved having discussions about things I just learned in school and then learning even more about them within the discussion.  There were topics that I simply couldn’t get enough of when I was young.  I’m sure if the internet was readily available in my household I would have spent my evenings scouring Wikipedia.

As I grew older, I grew less curious, but was still completely confident in my ability to hold an intelligent conversation and discuss many topics on an intellectual level.

I don’t know what happened to me as an adult.  I don’t know where my confidence went (or perhaps, more accurately, where my intelligence went).  My grandpa once said to me something to the effect of, “You’ll never be the prettiest, smartest, or funniest girl in the room.”  And he wasn’t saying it to be mean.  I could be hard on myself and he was saying it to me to let me off the hook.  To let me know I didn’t have to be the ‘-est’ anything.  But I’m still sad that something I was once so confident in has left me.

So now, here I am as an adult, spending much of my time discussing celebrity gossip or my favorite memories, which are inevitably soaked in an alcohol haze.  I spend more time trying to figure out the science of mixing various alcoholic beverages without getting a hangover than I do trying to learn new information.

And maybe that’s inevitable.  Maybe as we grow older, we actually do realize that what my grandpa said is generally true.  I think the difference is, a lot of people keep trying to better themselves, whereas I seem to have simply shrugged my shoulders and taken to the bottle.  I don’t know if I should feel bad about this, or realize that no matter what, I’m happy and I’ve made a lot of friends in bars.  Far more than I ever did in school.  Learning is distracting, but wine brings people together.  And hell, I’ve had some REALLY good ideas over a good bottle of wine.  It’s the hangover that prevents me from acting on those ideas…

It’s not about perfection

Recently, a friend of mine has made a major life decision to leave her husband.  There had been problems for a while, and she said she knew it was never going to work out, but it wasn’t until she met someone else that she decided to take the major step of divorce.

Listening to her tell me about her marriage, and then tell me about the new man in her life, I couldn’t help but compare my marriage to the things she was talking about.  She said that she found her soulmate, her perfect match, her reflection, in this new man.  That this new man was everything her [soon-to-be-ex-] husband wasn’t.  That she married someone who she had little in common with, when obviously she should be with someone who was exactly like her.

Obviously listening to all that got me thinking about my relationship with the husband.

I must admit, I started panicking a little bit.  The husband and I are not a perfect fit.  We have different interests and we bicker over stupid things and we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we have different political beliefs and were raised differently and even perhaps have different values.

But then I always think of that Seinfeld episode where Jerry is dating Janeane  Garafolo, and how he eventually gets sick of her because they’re exactly alike and who wants to date themselves?  I’m a huge pain-the-ass.  I’d never want to date myself.  I can only handle one of me.  So why would I want to date someone who is just like me, who shares all the same interests?  How would I grow if I had no one to challenge me.

I then began thinking about all the other relationships around me that I have long admired.  My parents are so different in so many ways, and have been [mostly] happily married for 28 years.  Both sets of my grandparents were total opposites — my mom’s parents were married until death, my dad’s parents are still married after 50+ years.  Each of those marriages are something I would be blessed to have.

I widened the circle of influence and thought about more marriages I look up to and realized that everyone had the same story.

For me, it’s not about finding your perfect match.  It isn’t about being with the person who loves the same things you do and thinks the same thoughts.  It’s finding the person who you respect, and who respects you.  It’s creating a mutual and powerful love despite all the quirks and hiccups and appreciating the merging interests, but valuing the individuality and independence as well.

I wish my friend nothing but happiness for her future.  But I know that her definition of true love could never be mine.

“I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.” ~Jane Austen

One of the most frustrating arguments the husband and I constantly have is about my opinion of perfectly nice people.

Nice is probably one of the worst things I can say about someone, mostly because it means that ‘nice’ is the only generic descriptor I can come up with.  To be nice is to offend — it is bland, it is unremarkable, it is simply agreeable.

But I would prefer, when I dislike someone who’s merely nice, that they not be nice at all.  Because invariably, the husband will accuse me of treating a perfectly nice person meanly.  In his opinion, unless someone has wronged you, there is no reason to dislike them — even if they’re boring, forgettable, and merely agreeable.

The husband is right, but that doesn’t change the fact that I tend to dislike those types of people all the same.  So I guess I wish that the dull and unmemorable of the world would have the decency to quit being agreeable so that the husband and I could quit fighting over my disdain of someone whose only redeeming quality is “nice”.

“My friends from high school/married their high school boyfriends./Moved into houses/in the same zip code where their parents lived./But I, I could never follow.” ~ Dixie Chicks

Yes, I’m quoting a Dixie Chicks song. Because A) I love them and B) trust me, the quote is relevant to my life.

I struggle with my past so much.  I struggle with how my experience at the private, all-girls, Catholic high school felt like  spending 4 years as a fish out of water, and yet how my high school has defined me and molded me into the person I am today.  I felt so different from all the members of the “St. Paul Cult” I was surrounded by, and yet I can’t deny that I’m a member-by-proxy myself.

I didn’t grow up in the St. Paul Catholic school system like so many of my peers, but I was born in St. Paul, I consider myself a St. Paulite, and both sides of my family were raised in the St. Paul Catholic school system.  But I still feel so different.

I look at my life, and it doesn’t look so different from the girls I went to high school with.  I was married in my mid-20’s, I have a good, stable job, I own a home, have a dog, etc.  But somehow my life is different.  I am so far from the girl I was in high school.  I am so far from the zip code I was born and raised in.  I have grown, I have changed, I have moved on.

When I was a sophomore in college, my best friend and I went to a New Year’s Eve party that some boys we went to high school with (at our brother school) were having.  It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.  These boys were having the same fights they’d been having since they were 16.  Nothing had changed.  They were hanging out with the same people, dating within the same group of girls, and living in the same neighborhoods.  I knew definitively at that moment that I never wanted my life to be like that and that I wanted to keep my past in my past.

Looking through people’s facebook pictures, so many of the girls I went to high school with married their high school boyfriends, hang out with their high school friends, live in their parents zip code.  And I scoff at them, grateful that their life isn’t my life.

But really, is my life so different?  Sure, I’m a girl who left her past and refused to be defined by high school friendships and relationships, but have I really turned out so different?

Maybe, just maybe, when I ran kicking and screaming from my past, I left a lot of loose ends hanging and so I haven’t really moved on.  Maybe it’s all those girls from high school who are still friends with each other and married to their high school boyfriends who were really able to move on.  They’re the ones who are comfortable with themselves and with where they came from.  They don’t fight the things that define them.

I don’t know, it’s something I don’t have the answer to, but it’s certainly something I think of a lot — especially when I hear the Dixie Chicks.

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” – Thomas Jefferson

Confession time: I am terrible with current events. TERRIBLE! I honestly can’t remember the last time I opened up a paper and read it. And I’m relatively certain that whenever that time was, I bypassed the headlines and went straight to the Entertainment and Variety section in search of Dear Abby and my horoscope.

Part of this aversion to current events is laziness – why bother with the newspaper when there’s an Us Weekly lying unread?  Why watch the evening news when I can watch my favorite Friends rerun?

And even though it frustrates the husband to no end that I am so clueless about the world around me, I can’t deny that I’m likely a happier person for it.  I realize that sounds terrible, and that I should be more actively engaged in the world around me and create change to make things better.  After all, if I was tuned in perhaps I would be motivated to take action and make changes in this sad world we live in.

But the reality is, no matter how many sad stories I read or watch, I can’t imagine myself motivated by them.  I can only imagine myself depressed by them.

And so, I avoid current events.  I get my CNN update email, I read blogs that cover a handful of current events, but for the most part, I stick with my lighthearted Entertainment and Variety, and I am convinced I am happier for it.

So when the world is about to end, could someone shoot me a text and let me know?

The Little Things We Carry

I know, I know, I’m not following protocol and blogging a quote. I’m breaking my own rules. The rules I can barely adhere to anyway so I don’t even know why I bother with them in the first place. But whatever, I’m a renegade like that.

I’ve been thinking lately about the funny little habits we learn from people that we carry through life. I guess I was thinking specifically about the random details I remember and keep with me from bygone relationships.

I had one boyfriend who always made a wish at 11:11. For years I would watch for 11:11 and make wishes. Now, I don’t wait for it, but I can’t stop myself from wishing at those times I do notice it.

I also had a boyfriend who used to hit the roof of the car every time he ran a yellow light, and another one who hit the roof every time he saw a car with one headlight. Yet another hit the roof of the car while passing graveyards. All these things were rituals I once engaged in, but now they’re the little things that cross my mind only from time to time.

I had one boyfriend who compulsively cleaned whenever we finished up with a meal at his house and it drove me CRAZY.  Before we could settle into watch a movie we had rented, he had to pack up the leftovers, wash all the dishes, and wipe down the counters.  For a girl with no patience, that was tantamount to torture.  Don’t get me wrong — very little of that behavior rubbed off on me — but every so often I’ll find myself obsessively cleaning the kitchen after a meal as the husband impatiently waits for me to return to the living room to finish the movie and I think of that boyfriend.

One boyfriend never “split poles”.  We had a tendency to hold hands while we walked (this was before my days of PDA aversion) and even in a tight spot, he wouldn’t let us walk on opposite sides of a telephone pole, parking meter, street sign, etc.  He said that you didn’t split poles with someone you cared about.  For years after I broke up with him, I continued to make a concerted effort not to split poles.  I’ve since stopped, but every so often I’ll catch myself trailing behind the husband on a sidewalk, slipping into the old habit to keep from splitting poles.

I’ve spent so much time thinking about all the things I’ve learned emotionally from relationships, and I never stopped to think about the funny little habits I’ve picked up (and oftentimes left behind) because of each relationship.  We expect people in our romantic lives to change us profoundly — our emotions, our futures, our hearts.  But after all the relationships and all the roller-coasters, it’s not the emotional growth I seem to recall and reflect on the most — it’s the littlest ways each of those boys infiltrated my life that seems to have made the most lasting impact.