Am I in the Zone Yet?

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I think I'm in a zone.
Not THE zone.
Not that place where athletes break records.
Not that place where artists create masterpieces.
Just a zone of my own creation. That place of inpenetrable apathy toward the things that once upset me. 

I normally don't do apathy. But once in a while it serves as the emotional version of affirmative action. A means to finding my way back to the center. To that place of caring without obsessing.

In the zone, I care less that I don't have a date on Friday night, (or Thursday night, or Wednesday night, or next week or last week). In the zone, this situation is referred to as an opportunity to stop waxing.

In the zone, I eat less bread and ice cream. Out of the zone, eating them together was an eventuality.

I don't know how long my OK mood will last. My moods are nothing, if not precarious.

 For now I am enjoying it. Enjoying just being. Just doing. Just going about my life.

I have no illusions that my knight in shining in armor is around the corner. More likely he is held up repairing a chink and his armor won't be out of the shop for a while.

But nonetheless, I'll hold onto the hope that when he does arrive, it will have been worth the wait.

Nicotine, Alcohol and Testosterone

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There's a clever expression in Hebrew. When you see a woman smoking and drinking you say to her... "if you're not careful, you'll start going out with men..."

I love it... the implication that nicotine, alcohol and testosterone are equally addicting and detrimental and that one naturally leads to the next.

I would compare this whole internet dating scene to smoking. And I say that with fondness for both cigarettes and men, as an  ex-chain smoker and a serial dater.

For the most part, all the internet sites have the same men, just like all the kiosks have the same cigarettes.  But wait! Another shop just opened up and they have different brands. And the packaging!!!  SOOOO much better than my regular brand. 
One, two, three cigarettes. New packaging. Same old taste.  By the time we (i.e. I) are on our 4th and 5th cigarette we gag and get nauseated. Yet we keep coming back for more.

In time, we may have stopped smoking, but addiction to internet dating sites has replaced the habit, with its own set of gestures and insatiable urges.  

Rather than reach for cigarettes we wake up in the morning and reach for the laptop.  We have to have a look at the sites with our first cup of coffee.

And we take a break at work and sneak a look. And we look again when we get home, and again when relaxing in the evening.

The routine is always the same. Open up the same sites, look at the same faces, reject the same idiots, be rejected by the same men of our dreams. Face the same sensory onslaught until it becomes more than we can handle. How many rejections? How many disappointments? 

We swear we will not do this for a while; just like the myriad times we stopped smoking.


But even if internet sites won't give us cancer, it doesn't mean it isn't too much. There's too much input. Too much expectation. Too many options. Too much quantity over quality. We become no better than our children whom we kept away from the video games. We may even be worse as passiveness overtakes us. We sit with all sites open, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for our lives to change.

Yet, at least from internet dating sites, there is a glimmer of hope, an off chance that something may come of it at the end.  So if I have to have a "bad" habit, let it be this one.

At least it doesn't smell up the house.

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"... Catch me a catch"

Too bad professional matchmakers have lost their cachet.  Sifting through the creeps on internet dating sites has exhausted me.

I have found myself thinking about that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding in which men of various demeanors were invited for dinner as potential dates for Toula. With the first camera shot we got the punchline, we knew right away that these men were not for her. Now, imagine one of those men hidden behind a Times New Roman declaration that he "loves life, travelling, pampering, and is looking for a woman who is beautiful on the inside." It takes so much longer to get to the punchline, and if we get to the end of the joke unscathed, we should count ourselves lucky. 


Without our professional matchmaker, who protects us from the disappointments that are part and parcel of finding our one and only? With a matchmaker, we could still choose from pictures (albeit a pile of and not a window full of); we would tell her who we like and she would tell him. In the off chance that he would reject our overtures, considerately she would tell us that as it turns out he is out of the country and not available for a relationship. Or she would tell us that as it turns out, he is a scoundrel and a beast and best stayed away from and she is immediately tearing up his pictures.

In a perfect world, our matchmaker might save us myriad monosyllabic phone conversations. She would protect us from the men that have unilaterally changed the rules of polite conversation. She would save us from the tiresome justifications of why we, who are closing in on a decade of divorce, are not interested in a newly "separated" man who lives in his wife's guest room but "emotionally" lives alone... 

But, in lieu of Yente, I will continue to sift through the creeps on my own. Because I know that somewhere among the rubble there awaits a nugget of gold.

"...Nevermore."

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On Sunday morning, as I left the house for work, a massive raven dive-bombed the back of my head.

I can't think of any metaphors for the meaning of that experience in my life. I can't justify it or learn from it. I can't extrapolate anything from it or laugh about it. The municipal vets did not find any fallen baby ravens, nor did they find the raven itself. It was pure meanness.  So much for EVER overcoming my lifelong distaste-slash-fear of birds except cooked in a pot and served with Kneidlach.

The one and only bright side to this story is that my week could only get better.

Yet how do I get around needing to pick up the phone to tell someone something really special - like that I've been attacked by a bird - and having no one to call that would TRULY make me feel better. Oohs and ahhs from my kids and colleagues, just don't add up to a  hug and a foot massage from a partner in life. So still nursing the bruise on the back of my head and a dent in my skull, I continue my routine, on my own, and do the best I can.

And maybe the next time I have a National Geographic moment, I'll have someone to tell.

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