Just Give Me What I Want

Another one on the list of myriad reasons I love New York. It gives you what you need. Sometimes when you're having a shitty day you need to get on a bus and just hate everyone around you while they jostle you and yell at you and stand dumbly in your way. But sometimes you need something a little lighter.

I had a week. Mostly just the same as any other week but Thanksgiving looming with the rest of the holiday season pressing unstoppably behind it, my job work has been piling up and I was brutalized in a conversation with a friend. It started out with her saying she's a "Rules Girl" and ended up wandering into the territory of my past adulterous behavior. (Bizarre aside, part of her reasoning for following the Rules is that it's got more magic and it's more exciting but check out the official link it's Dating Without Drama. Hmmm.) This friend is younger, pretty religious etc. She was curious and I set myself up for a fall by trying to explain how I feel, no excuses, just explaining. I had plenty of times over the course of 2 days worth of e-mail when I could have exited before the damage was done. I felt it was more important to be heard.

Let's just say I wasn't heard.

So, after the second day I was slogging home on the bus in the rain crushed between a ton of people who felt roughly the same. I ended up hanging slightly over a double seat with an oversized mom near me and a young toddler and her play stroller wedged in next to the window.

I looked at her and she looked at me. So I made a face and she hid.

So, of course I pressed it and made another face.

She made a face back.

So I copied her. Which freaking broke her world open. An adult was copying her? And adult was paying attention to what she was doing and following her example? The hell? You could actually see her little brain screaming "The Hell?"

So I kept it up until it was time for me to get off the bus and she leaned way forward to look after me. Her mom never even noticed.

That was exactly what I needed. I smiled all the way home and I've been thinking about her all week.

I also read a new blog from the randomizer, Amieable, and she posted this reading she did in a wedding recently:

“Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow toward each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.”

That's all I was trying to get my friend to see. Just (identify this quote) "Fire bad, tree pretty" you know?