Paper Slaps

I’m pleased with the postcards–a couple more Quint Buchholzs with books, one with a cat on a stack, the other with a boy asleep under one.  Who knows when I’ll send them.  I have nothing to send them in but Impossible (Nancy Werlin), but I got that for my girls, and one of my rules for the game state that it has to be a book I’ve read.  I’m waiting on Scottish Poems.  A part of me really wants to believe I’m just doing this for fun–I am, but fun, for me, is in the challenge, and I don’t mind making my own challenges.  I have some theories, and the challenge is in testing them.  I want to see how much trouble I can almost get into for the sake of self-expression.  This paragraph is a test of those theories.

The last time I said I could “play it canny” was just before I crossed a big, fat line.  How sure can I ever be that I won’t do it again?  I don’t know how I can escalate from unaddressed, unsigned postcards, but I’m afraid I’ll figure it out.  Apparently, I’m neither content with the unrequited aspect of this love nor mindful of the pathetic quality of dialogue with her I usually provoke.  Spring can’t come too soon to give me something better, more positive to do.  Eh, but it’s still a few more weeks away, and it will get cold again before it warms for real, and I have time, postcards and love on my hands.  As I can no longer (thanks to Blaise Pascal) trust reason to keep me out of trouble, I can only hope for more rewarding distractions from trouble, because it’s trouble I want, and I can only talk myself into it, not out of it.  The less talking to myself the better.

God, how could I be missing Julie?  I feel almost ashamed of it.  How could I want her back?  How much of that hell could I go through again?  I don’t want her back at Twin Hickory.  I couldn’t go through any of that again, but hope always thinks things could work better the second time around.  It seems unfair that I am not rewarded for falling in love for the first time after fifty years, for not giving up on the possibility.  But nothing’s done right the first time, is it?  I understand what I’ve been going through, but it doesn’t seem to mean much at the end of the day, when I still have to write like this, with my smile cracked and my humor beaten flat, left with this wistful pain.  I write better feeling this way and feel better for having written.  It’s martyresque.

Anonymous postcards sent unaddressed.  What am I doing?  Does it matter?  Just let me do it.  It’s what I have to get me to spring.  Let me believe she reads them, and that when she does she thinks about them, doesn’t dismiss them as an annoying reminder.  If not my words, maybe the pictures on the front will be appreciated.  “Maybe” is all I have, because the postcards are a weak provocation unlikely to elicit a response–in fact, the game was all but designed to render all provocation inferential.  If what I really want is to stir something up, I won’t likely be satisfied–and so I’m back to worrying about escalation.

I would plead for spring’s hasty arrival, but what will that really change?  Julie and spring are just different brands of the same desperation.  Which has the more attractive package?  I don’t need it or want it, but I can’t help buying it.  Spring will probably just find me buying more postcards and having more books sent to Twin Hickory from Glen Allen.  I write, and spring isn’t likely to deter that activity.  Like anything else I write, the postcard game is a project, and though it’s destination is as yet undefined, I’ll see that it gets there.  That, also, is like everything else I write.  Everything I write is a provocation, too, a boot in the ass, a wake-up call, a rent in the drone of life:  Listen to me!  Listen to yourself!  If you think you have nothing to say, nothing better to do, then why would you read this?  You have given up and would as soon do what you do every day without deviation, without challenge.  Take it, keep it, go away.  To proclaim myself a provocateur is to say I’m no mere troublemaker.  I feel, and I want you to feel.  Spring and all its promises provokes a renewal of hope and its potential unrealized from last year.  I plead for a provocative new season to kick my ass, to expand my possibilities, to smother my excuses–not to distract me.

Whatever I’m doing with the blogs and the postcards I have to do, to whatever ends they take me–Oblivion, Nirvana, or Trouble. I don’t see an alternative.  It has been, and will continue to be a hellish sort of fun, a continual challenge, a wired-in, nervy awareness that might never be satisfied or restful.  That’s me, that’s the journey.  Wish you were here.

Climbing the Pitch

Even at the risk of taking all the fun out of it, I can’t help wondering what flirting is all about.  I likened it to sex, but is it in reality a sort of pre-foreplay?  It’s a toe in someone else’s water, isn’t it?  Or is it an invitation to a club into which only a coded rapport gains one entry?  And what is membership?  See, I wonder just how serious flirting can be.  Certainly, it can be more serious for one person than the other; that is, it can mean two entirely different things to each of the participants; and if there is a disparity wide enough, someone’s feelings could get hurt.  But, no, a flirt is a flirt, right?  You can’t get a flirt on alone.  (In that way, it’s definitely not like sex.)  Even the unacknowledged flirt is valuable insomuch as it eliminates a relationship candidate.  I suppose that’s what I’m doing when I flirt:  gauging compatibility.  Is that what it was for that flirter I told you about?  No, that was pure tease, a test of the ol’ feminine wiles.  If I’d been a serious candidate for romance to her, she would not have mentioned a husband.  So I got notched; at least she must have considered me attractive–unless she’d set her sights low when she picked on me.  (That can’t be true!)  I don’t flirt with every woman who approaches me at the circ desk, though I try with most of them; but that’s only because most women are attractive to me in some way.  I allowed the flirter her fun despite the tease because I had fun, too.  I had not invested much, and isn’t that the beauty of flirting?  There is never much invested, but the payoff is always in the black, ranging from flattery to romance.  And no one gets hurt.  Flirting is a kind of speed-dating:  No rapport?  Next!  A flirt can’t go too far but always far enough–far enough to know the sparks just aren’t there; far enough to have a good time; far enough to hit it off.

What happens after hitting it off?  This is where expectations can diverge.  Who’s seeing romance and who’s seeing a little diversion?  If it seems as if I’m looking at this a bit too deeply, to the extent, indeed, of sucking the fun from flirting, well, part of that is me trying to find a reason to not enjoy myself at it and part just plain curiosity.  I can’t much control either entity.  Serious or fun, flirting is still a game, but a fascinating one.  I want to know how and why people play at it.  After all, if I want to play this game I had better be able to hold my own.  This is a league I do not want to be booted out of.  Maybe I want more than my partner in repartee, but flirting is not the stage at which such things are revealed.  So, then, flirting is less pre-foreplay than pre-first-date, right?  That wasn’t how my flirter saw it, but maybe that’s how Ms. C saw it a few days later.  She had a different style altogether–subtler, with the body language all in her eyes and head, and no pointed innuendo.  In fact, there was nothing so much in what she said that defined her attitude as flirtatious as there was in the quality of the rapport between us.  I’m not even sure where the flirtation began.  Maybe it was in my own raised eyebrows when she approached, for she was gorgeous–see-green eyes set in caramel skin and dark hair piled hurriedly on her head–carelessly beautiful.  I was in her power, struggling to hold my composure and her interest.  Certainly, she knew that.  Though she didn’t mention a husband (and my eyes were unable to stray from hers in search of a ring), perhaps she was, still, playing the same game as Ms. H, the previous flirter, insomuch as she was enjoying her power over me.  Ah, so be it.  My flirtation skills are not yet such that I can hold and wield much power in these exchanges.  I wonder:  Is it the balance of this power that seals a mutual attraction?  If I were to hold my own better, not yield control so easily, would I be more desirable?  Huh.  I guess I’ll just have to improve my game to find out.  Ms. H. has a book on hold.  I can only hope that she holds off getting it till Wednesday or Thursday evening, and that I’m on the desk when she does.

I have allayed my initial fear.  Not only have I not analyzed the fun clean out of flirting, I have actually found new levels of appreciation for it.  Desperation has become eagerness:  Put me in coach!  I’m ready to play!  It’s a game worth playing, and worth studying to get better at.  I don’t know what “winning” at it means, and I don’t want to know just yet, but maybe by the time I’ve learned to swing the balance of power closer to center I’ll understand what prizes are awaiting me.  Do I then try to pull that balance toward me?  Ah, so much to learn.

To Take Desperation Down There and Drop It In a Bum’s Cup

It was more than two weeks before I finally played the CD I’d bought at Plan-9 when I was last in Carytown.  I didn’t want to be reminded of the failure and disappointment and the limbo of transition I was lost in.  It’s called Write About Love, by Belle and Sebastian.  It only took me a day, though, to respond to the sticker on the wrapper:  “Write 300 words about love in any form.”  It was a contest solicitation, but the thought of a “song and a visit from Stuart Murdoch” was not my inspiration.  Being asked to write about love was enough. It was the kind of inspiration that got me started on A Bright, Ironic Hell after at least two years of not writing about anything.  This what I wrote:

Love is all I write about, because I don’t know what it is, and I want it so badly.  I think I have been in love.  I’m not sure.  It was a new feeling, and it was a good feeling, and it was torture.  It might as well have been love.  She didn’t love me, though she liked me once–just not enough.  Now, she doesn’t like me and won’t even let me talk to her.  So I write about her.  She doesn’t like that, either.  It doesn’t matter what I write–whether I’m angry that she rejected me or worshipping her qualities–she doesn’t like it, and has asked me to stop–a few times–and I have stopped, because I would do anything for her.  But I have always started again, because, I guess, there was always that one thing I couldn’t do for her as long as she inspired me.  And, though, if she told the truth and said she hated me, I would find inspiration still in the fascination for her that won’t die.

Was I in love with her?  Am I still?  Is it even love if it is rejected?  Is it just a seed without soil?  Her name is Julie, and she’s beautiful except when she looks at me, when her eyes darken and her face hardens, and I could cry because she feels that way about me.  I only wanted to love her.  That was my crime, and that face is my punishment, though hell is not being able to stop seeing it before me–and having to write about it.

Still, it was two weeks later, just after I’d published the previous post that I listened to the album, and now it cozily inhabits my head.  Friday had arrived and all the chatter I’d felt so excluded from had left with the half of the crew that didn’t work that weekend.  I am always more comfortable with the smaller crew, and the size of the group has much to do with that–the smaller the better for me–but the people in that group are individuals I’m comfortable with, people I can talk to and listen to.  That they’re all women plays no small part, either.  I feel the rooster in the hen house in some ways, but the brother among sisters, mostly.  Mike and Maddox have in turn shared this weekend with me, and I felt them to be interlopers.  Jennifer traded a weeekend with Bethany recently, and it simply seemed there was a hole in Bethany’s place.

This crew–Megan, Becky, Bethany, Angie, Sujatha, and Judy–gets a much more relaxed Dion than they’ve probably ever known.  Though I harbor bitterness still over the not-so-distant past, I feel no reason to air it at work; without its source and target, it has no (or little) context there:  She’s gone, I’m out of the box.  I can breathe deeply and not dread an emotional menace around every corner.  On my best days–and they are coming more consecutively all the time–I feel like a dancer–loose-limbed, swivelling from the hips and shoulders; turning on a toe; reaching from the waist standing on one leg, back and other leg parallel to the floor, eyes straight ahead–nearly every move a “step.”  I feel closer to real.  Amongst this group, I feel much more accepted; and individual but still connected to the group.  I’d like to think that I ask for less and give a little more now that the person I used to ask so much from with such futility is gone.  Before she left what I wanted out of this crew (and everyone else) was some acknowledgement that they understood me, that I wasn’t alone.  My paranoia needed to know that not everyone was on her side.  Then the peace lily came, and she left.

The desperation stayed, of course; it’s mine, a part of me for the time being.  I can diminish its role as motivator, but it has to tag along to work with me.  It wants me out on the circ desk, to see and talk to people (by which I mean women).  I’m anxious to get out there, too, but when I do, I leave desperation in the workroom.  On most days, with a full crew in force, any of us is lucky to get more than an hour out there in a day.  Monday and Tuesday, day shifts for me, are busts:  Any women I see on those days are most likely to be either young mothers or retirees.  Give me my hours in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday, when the working women come in.  Fridays and Saturdays, with the half-crew, I might get on the desk three times, and as busy as those days are, my opportunities for contact can reach tantalizing proportions.  I have no “line,” just a smile, a greeting, and lots of eye contact.  If her eyebrows go up, the pitch of my voice goes down and its edges melt away.  That’s my invitation to a flirt, but sometimes the invite comes from the other side of the counter.  I never turn those down, though not leading the dance can momentarily tangle my feet before the flattery rights me.  With Megan as witness at the terminal next to me, one woman virtually turned a fine payment into a come-on, leaning across the counter to within inches of my face to joke huskily about being “bad” just before casually dropping the husband bomb.  I felt teased but didn’t let on, didn’t even pull awayto regain my personal space from what could’ve been a kiss if we’d both puckered up, we were so close.  If this had been a game, I’d have conceded her the victory but not without letting her know with a one-sided smile of a wink that I was merely extending her a gentlemanly courtesy and that next time I’d be a bit more competitive now that I had her measured.  I asked Megan what she though of this woman dropping the husband bomb in the middle of a flirt.  What was the point?  Megan theorized that the woman wanted to prove to herself that she still “had it.”  If that were true, then she went away satisfied.  I felt the same way:  It had been nearly as good as good sex–a mutual challenge willingly met to pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

I’m not sure what I’ve been getting at here, except, maybe, that I don’t have to just write about love, that I can talk about it, too, at work, where there is no longer someone with whom I’m in love and who resented and feared it.  What I have now (for the most part, and the rest doesn’t matter) is a peace lily and people who understand that I am a passionate man and am not ashamed of it; can confide with it and joke about; and is who he is not because of one person, but despite her.  Every day is less of her and more of me, and much more fun–and I’m getting paid for it.  What’s the rush to Carytown?

Victories Everywhere

This is very hard.  I have to take my victories very small, or I could not remain motivated.  Friday an abundance of confidence allowed me to believe that my search for love could end that day.  Yet at the end of the day, the light retreating, I sat outside The Eatery in Carytown wondering what I had accomplished.  “Nothing” was my initial assessment, but as I wouldn’t go home feeling that way, and I could think of no other reason to hang around other than the hope of the love of my life falling into my lap within the next few minutes, I decided to make a closer inspection of my interactions during the day:  There was Stuffy”s (pass), Richmond Book Shop (fail), main branch of the Richmond library (pass), Library of Virginia (mmm…pass), Carytown shops (fail).  I guess I did alright on the pass/fail scale, but that still wasn’t good enough to get me on my bike headed west.  I tried a third assessment that started with throwing out the fails and moving to a deeper measure of the passes.  How good was the eye contact?  How often did I stop myself from speaking? and how many times did I not? With how many strangers did I initiate conversation?  This is where I began to feel better.  At Stuffy’s the eye contact was good and the banter loose and easy, but at the book shop I began to turn inward as I assessed the likelihood of meeting anyone there as unlikely the moment I walked in and the woman behind the counter didn’t look up; and I felt a pang of failure for not speaking to her.  The disappointment of not finding myself in the treasure cave I’d anticipated depressed me a bit further.  I was relieved to be out of there, to escape my darkening mood and the leaden stuffiness nowhere near relieved by the meager phalanx of fans.  Before I unlocked the bike I nearly called James but felt I might miss out on meeting someone if I spent the rest of the day with him–taking friends for granted for the sake of friends I haven’t yet made.  Hm.

It wasn’t the last time that day that I stood on a busy street pondering my next move–in fact, it could have been the theme of the day.  I spent a lot of time looking in all directions for the right direction.  The last time, frozen in place on Cary Street, I looked down between my feet.  From a crack in the sidewalk protruded a silver cut-out heart.  I stared at it for several moments before stooping to pick it up.  I had a heart already, a pocket charm I’d bought a few weeks before, just before I’d found a heart-shaped rubber band in a book on a shelf at work that I now wear there around my name tag every day.  Then there’s the one on the claddagh, too.  Direction was home, with my new heart.

At the library I take my victories even smaller because they are harder won.  The nag of hypocrisy sours much of my action and digs me into a cynical hole from which I have to climb back into my game by the time I have to face the public, because the positive opportunities there can help me heal the negative ones in the back room.  However, the gains I make out front, in public and on the floor seem yet to have made an impact on the back room, but I try to ignore that situation altogether anymore, as there seems nothing else to do about it without a cooperation that will not be forthcoming.  No victory there, but an unsatisfactory truce.  No ground to be gained, I’ll go where I’m not trespassing.  There is no enticement or motivation to cross a minefield–what reward could overcome the setback?  I won’t get hope started in that direction.  The ultimate little victory I can go home with at the end of a day is, sometimes, simply not to have gone that way.  That can be quite an accomplishment, really.

Not Crash-Test, Anyway

Shelving, I caught myself looking in Dating for Dummies.  I say caught myself for I felt so stupid reading it that I even embarrassed myself.  I might say, also, that it was a near thing to getting sucked into it, but what I randomly opened the book up to was a section on exchanging phone numbers, and even that seems a stage far advanced from my position.  Dating–I have very little experience in it and none since the eighties, when I got married, even since the divorce eight years ago.  But books only offer tricks–pharm-rep samples pawned off by the doctor to a patient with an undiagnosed disease:  They don’t know me or my problems.  It’s not as if I even believe in dating as a means to my end, believing as I do that what I need will somehow find me in the natural course of my living my life, but who am I to say that that’s not an avenue to take on that course?

I may have renounced online dating, but I picked up a Style Weekly this week to look at the personals.  They didn’t have any.  I’m guessing they’re online now.  Before my Box 049 project, I’d answered a few ads.  I targeted the quirky ones, and because I’m a persuasive writer I often attracted response–even got a few dates–though no second ones.  “Girl with glasses,” had to see my place and paw through the magazines fanned on my coffee table–stopping at the Playboy and saying, “I guess that’s alright”–before we went out.  We saw a movie (at the Westhampton) that I’d already seen.  It seemed to bore her.  On the way back, she told me that her ex-boyfriend had had sex with a prostitute and that she had since had sex with him.  I suppose that was her way of precluding my sexual advances, but she needn’t have flattered herself that I’d ever been attracted to her.

I met a Christian girl for a drink at a hotel bar, where she like to go on Friday nights to meet friends and dance.  She agreed to the date even after a phone chat in which, responding to “What do you thnk of the Bible?” i said I thought it was “good science fiction.”  In the bar outside the dance floor we had a pleasant conversation–even made each other laugh–but decided as pleasantly that it just wasn’t happening between us.  She was eager to get to the dance floor and friends, and I let her go, only a little regretful, but pleased at least that we’d understood each other.

Then there was the woman, who after dinner and a long walk and talk around my neighborhood (then the Museum District), I never saw again, her therapist having advised her against it.  The next date I took to Joe’s.  She wouldn’t order any food, but picked at my plate.  When she returned from a bathroom visit and slid into the booth across the table, she fluffed her skirt, and I smelled pussy.  We looked at each other, her at me with a hint, me at her with a confused query.  What was I supposed to do? slip off a shoe and slide a foot in her crotch?  Maybe so; that I didn’t do anything but eat and try to have a conversation was my failure of a test, I suppose, but of a test I wasn’t interested in taking, anyway.

I know nothing about dating, or a little less than I know about any other social convention.  I righteously declare that I don’t play those games, but it’s a defiant ignorance of the rules that keeps me off the playing fields.  In staking my claim to individuality, I have virtually renounced my humanity.  Forget about connecting to women–I hardly connect to anyone but you, a faceless mute.  It’s not what I want, but that’s where “my own terms” have gotten me.  I spent all day in the apartment before finally getting out to spend two hours in front of a movie screen (Mic-Macs).  I didn’t go down to Carytown from there, but sat on a bench near the theater and considered my relative humanity, fading nearly into a quiessence I felt I didn’t deserve.  (Don’t ask me why.  I can’t tell you yet.)  In my consideration I didn’t include the positive eye contact and frank, friendly greetings I gave to two very attractive, albeit attached, women at the theater.  That I’d forgotten instead of congratulated myself is a sign that it’s becoming more natural.  I didn’t know either woman was attached until the first one, in line before me, bought two tickets and entered the theater with a gentleman.  The second, a compact, sinewy blonde a few years my junior, practically snatched the eyes from my head as she crossed my path at the intersection of the row and aisle after the movie.  “Hi!” i said, then saw her gentleman friend a step behind and, with no time to register my disappointment, I greeted him, too, but with hardly the same enthusiasm.  He clasped her bicep as they descended the stairs, and I wondered how much each of them appreciated my attraction to her. 

I have to believe that the eye contact and greeting will one day mean more than that to a woman, that we’ll find each other in the simple word and long look.  I have to believe that, because dating is so unnatural to me that it’s a lie to my entire character.  What little I know about it might be enough.  I’m no dummy, anyway.

The Norse God of Escape

I have not been back to Carytown since my street-corner recitation.  I’ve hardly been out at all.  I’ve allowed myself many excuses for it.  Being without a car in the suburbs, I often play myself the distance card:  How far am I willing to go?  Less than three miles east takes me to the western border of Richmond and nine more miles puts me out the other side.  That is the range to which I’m conditioned.  North and south, my conditioning is the eighteen-mile trip to work and back.  By Friday evening, my best chance to find a social life, I’ve put ninety miles on my legs, which need some kind of rest (and a good massage, which I don’t get) before the next work week.  I can’t always motivate myself to get back on the bike, especially if (as has often been the case already this summer) I have just plowed through humid, triple-digit heat to get home.  My imagination, or lack of it, contributes to my inertia by claiming, after looking at the movie listings, that there’s nowhere to go, anyway.  Neither have I been encouraged by my efforts when I have managed to get out and about.  No matter where I go, I seem to be the only person there, or if not, am not welcome.  Sub shop, coffee shop–I can sit in there for an hour and no one else will have come in.  And forget about hanging out in a restaurant alone:  One person in a booth?  Move to the the bar or clear out.  The last movie I took in at the Westhampton (Please Give) was a late-afternoon show, so I ate dinner afterwards next door at Phillip’s.  I’d never been served so quickly, but when the check was slipped onto the table without a proffer of dessert or another beer, I knew that I was not experiencing efficiency but expediency.  I had been prepared to stay awhile with another beer, dessert, coffee, and maybe something harder while I wrote, but while it was all conveyed very politely, the message received was, “Get out so we can serve a bigger party and make more money from that booth.”  Not encouraging, but I can either play the oppressed minority or find my way to where I’m welcome, can have a good time, and meet people.  I don’t know where that is, but haven’t I always said I like a challenge?  But that box I’m in contains my imagination, as well.  The answers are all outside the way I’ve been thinking, but my ideas have all rebounded from the walls all the way back to online dating, which I gave up when I finally admitted to myself, two years ago, that I wanted Julie.  (I swore I wouldn’t mention her!)  It’s not the way to go, but every time I chop it down it sprouts up somewhere else.  I never got anything more than conversation–some of it stimulating–from the online scene–certainly not a date.  I am not going back that.

Desperation is a mighty inhibitor of my imagination, distilling all social considerations down to the possibility of “success” (whatever that is).  Of course, by that standard, no venue is worthy of my effort to visit it or my presence there.  But what do I know of possibilities?  Who do I know is going to be at any of these places?  And desperation shows.  Being “after” more than the movie, meal or shopping, is a pretense that won’t hide, is an emanation that repels even on a psychic level.  Often, I can’t look at a woman on the street without conveying desperation.  At work, knowing this, I have tried to dowse the emanation, with the result of hardly feeling anything, even attraction, toward the women I see there.  I’ve all but forgotten how to play my eye game.

I’ve lain all my hopes and confidence upon the altar of Transfer.  I put all my meager faith in it and have effectively suspended “artificial” efforts at finding peace and love.  It’s as good a god as any, I guess; until I get away from Julie I won’t be over her, and until I’m over her I can’t find what I need, or even pursue it.  That is the ultimate excuse, and having accepted that, I have no excuse at all to not just go out and have a good time–one movie, one beer, one coffee, one art gallery, one impulsive purchase at a time.

I’ve Run Out of Metaphors for “Never”

Still, it’s all about Julie, and that spoils everything.  No matter how good I feel about my appearance or how confident I am of my game plan and ability to execute it, her hands are around my throat.  I say, “If only I could find someone else, I could be rid of Julie,” but most days it feels like the other way ’round.  Being in the library with her is a fight for emotional survival.

Some days, I’m just sure I’m not going to make it.  I become that caged animal again, knowing I have to get out of there–permananently–yet despairing of the possibility.  On Monday and Thursday, the two full work days with Julie, I’m looking for her even before I get to work.  As I pedal across the Nuckols overpass, cars criss-crossing in front of and behind me entering and exiting the expressway, I’m gazing ahead to the next exit, where Julie would be getting off.  I always hope to see her on those days–not just see her but pass in front of her at the stop sign and look her in the eye and kiss the air between us.  It has never happened, though twice we have been stopped beside one another at the next light.  She refused to look my way–not even straight ahead–but checked her rearview and shotgun mirrors while I stared at her.  If I don’t see her on the road I hope to at least beat her to work and get changed and ready to work before she arrives.  Monday I’m always scheduled to start the day deleting outdated holds, the ones patrons didn’t pick up in time.  Julie could be anywhere else–circ desk, window, picking holds–but I hope for her to be backup.  There are two terminals at the backup station, one always manned, the other spare.  I use the spare one to delete holds.  I want Julie to be backup that same hour so she can be trapped beside me.  I won’t talk to her, and I’ll only look at her when I’m sure her back is turned.  The torment is exquisite, and I only hope that Julie is at least uncomfortable.  After all, I don’t want ignoring her to make me invisible; I just want it to be annoying.  It’s easy for her to not talk to me, but I don’t want it to be too easy for her.  I suppose all I am or can be to Julie is an annoyance, and I can be that for as long as I want to be.  I know her boundaries.   I can be that fly bouncing against the other side of the window screen, just this side of her doing anything about it.  When I think of it that way I wonder why I even consider her a hindrance to my pursuit of love.  Ask my heart why it bruises my ribs in her presence or my face why it flushes crimson.  In the infancy of my crush, I had a giddy outlet for that energy, running everywhere in the library I needed to go, vaulting desks, dancing and spinning around obstacles–including Julie several times.  But the excitement has turned to dread and the energy now lies coiled, poised for flight or fight.

It’s not always my desire to avoid Julie.  If we are both shelving, I like to be near her, and see her working from where I’m working.  I don’t hide; in fact, I often will her to glance over at me as I stare at her.  It sometimes works, and when it does I take the eye contact as a victory and work on.  The only time I don’t want to be in the same room with her is when there’s a chance she’ll speak to someone.  I can handle seeing her, but anymore just hearing her voice raises my blood pressure.  In the workroom I try to drown her out with music through my headphones if I’m trapped at a desk, but if I’m sorting a cart, I might get up and walk away–way away, like out the back door, for some deep breaths of fresh air.  If I’m where I can’t do either of those, such as at the window or backup, I sometimes mutter, “Shutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutup…” until she does.  Though sometimes her initial syllable comes out at a very high pitch, it’s not her voice that annoys me so much as that she’s not speaking to me. 

We do the avoid-dance as if we choreographed it in collaboration–as if we were an old married couple tired of each other, except that we are embarrassed instead of indifferent upon encounter.  When the music stops and we misstep into a confrontation the eyes meet briefly (that chin-up, defiant glare that used to freeze my blood having been replaced with Bambi fear) –just long enough for recogniti0n–then we take an exaggerated path  around each other. 

If by the end of the day I have dodged apoplexy, I scramble back into the bike togs and try to hit the road ahead of her.  That way, she’ll have to pass me (if I get a big enough headstart).

Tuesday and Wednesday, when Julie and I work oposite shifts, overlapping only half the day, it’s possible to have no contact at all with her, as long as one of us isn’t relieving the other at a service point (desk, backup, window), and even then we both know the steps to that dance, though I sometimes ignore the music just to make her look at me and say, “I’m here, Dion”–another little victory.  At the end of those four hours I am angry (and puzzled as to why), abhoring the resultant vacuum before a baptism of relief floods the void.  I never believe it’s going to happen, but within fifteen minutes I’ve been born again.  Before that point in the day I cannot be expected to bother with conversing with anyone, and if I had any humor at all it was cynical and cruel.  With Julie gone I am very nearly the opposite person–happy, talkative, goofy, my voice clear and expansive.  It’s a good time to flirt.  The weekends, now that she’s switched, are virtually holidays.

But these two lives are one life too many, each in the shadow of the other, each mocking the other.  Neither can be sincerely lived (and certainly only one deserves to be).  I insist on claiming back my self from the emotional tyranny I imposed with the obsession over Julie, but I also insist on continuing to oppress both of us as punishment.  I can’t be rid of Julie until I let her go, but as I told her about being in love with her, “It’ll be over when it’s over”; there’s nothing I intend to do about it–or, rather, nothing my pride will alow me to do.  Rationale gets no say.  Perfect sense is still not wisdom.  So nothing will change about the life I don’t want, because if I don’t change it it won’t change.  Julie will never make the least move toward change, any more than she would initiate a conversation or greet me in the morning–any more than I am willing to do it myself.  I play at pushing aside that ugly life, displacing it with the more attractive one, but I can only carry it, like a hump on my back, like that constant knot in my shoulder, and drape it with vanity as I play-act my way across the more scenic stage.  But acting, however good, is still just acting.  I know what I’m up to–both the good and the bad–but just as rationale will not effect wisdom, neither will laying moral judgment upon myself effect action toward healing.  The changes needed will make themselves.  Talk is cheap, and pretty words don’t mean much.  I’ll move on, Julie will move on, the tension will fade.  I’m almost sure now that that will have to happen before I can have a meaningful relationship with another woman.  Until then, emotional survival at work will remain a challenge, but, with patience and confident foresight , should be more endurable.  Another lofty game plan, maybe, but at least one not consciously executable.  It might all just amount to muddling through, but was I doing any better strategizing?  I’m at least able to recoginize futility.  Sure, it’s still about Julie, but one day it won’t be, just won’t be–no grief or relief on its departure, because its departure won’t be noticed.  One day.

More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

She wore a short denim skirt and white panties.  The skirt I noticed when she walked through the library security gates, the panties when she knelt to find her hold on the shelf–a bright triangle between shiny tanned knees.  She stood empty-handed.  I followed her legs to her face, reaching it as she turned to me at the circ desk.  I locked onto her eyes, smiled, and silently invited her to come talk to me.  Her smile accepted.  Her hold was not where she had looked for it because it was waiting at the window for her to driveup for it.  I recognized her name when I scanned her card and knew that she picked up all her holds there, though I’d never actually seen her at the window.  I got it for her.  The title was something like When Food Is Love.  As our engagement was mutual, at parting I gave her the test:  How long would she maintain eye contact as she left?  She dropped her eyes to her book and slid it off the counter to her other hand, and as she turned to the entrance her near eye swivelled to me and smiled.  If the same light hit my eyes, I suppose I returned the same.  I’m sure I felt the same.  I watched her out the security gates then turned back to her name, still on the monitor before me, and clicked on it.  Fifty-four years old!  You’re kidding me!  I was pegging her for five years my junior not three years my senior.  She suddenly became even more attractive.

Such an encounter as that is now my goal for my hour on the circ desk.  Accepting that that won’t always happen doesn’t tempt me to lower my standards but to practice as intensely as possible.  And that I don’t practice on every woman but the ones I find most attractive shaves my opportunities to the bone.  (I’m a picky guy.)  But I’ve stumbled onto something–speed dating at its quickest and least embarrassing.  Simply, it’s first-eye-contact.  In that moment is the most significant moment of the relationship–in fact, the moment that decides the possibility of that relationship even happening.  And if that moment tells me it’s not happening, where’s the rejection?  Brilliant!  It starts with self-accepting the initial attraction and then conveying it.  I saw this woman (whose name I will withhold for compromising her vanity) before she knelt in front of the holds shelf, but she did not look my way until she didn’t find her book.  I was already attracted to her; now I had to let her know by looking in her eyes.  That she returned my smile with her own did not necessarily mean she was attracted to me–I could have just been a friendly face willing to help her–but it did mean she was willing to accept my friendliness.  That’s all I can ask, isn’t it?  It’s easy to discreetly test the waters from that point, as we are now open to each other, relative to being strangers.  After the initial positive connection I do not fear tripping over my tongue or saying something inane or innappropriate and have little trouble maintaining eye contact; plus, I will do anything she asks and offer to do yet more.  But how can I be sure I’ll see her again?  I can’t be sure I’ll be on the desk the next time she comes in, or on the window when she picks up there.  That’s why I have to intensify my practice.

Matt invited me over for lunch Memorial Day.  Being a bachelor (or just being me), I accepted the free meal.  “Oh,” he added, “Chris invited us over for a cookout later.  Do you think you’d wanna come?”  “Yes!  To tell you the truth, I would hope to see Jackie there.”  I told him about seeing her at the yoga studio.  (He doesn’t read my blog.)  “I really could use the classes,” I told him, “but I haven’t done anything about it because it still feels like a pretense to see Jackie.”  Well, guess what?  It must have been.  My hopes were already in the way when we got to the cookout, so my tongue was tightly knotted.  When someone asked, “Jackie?  Where’s Brian?  Is he working?”  i knew my game was over, but I was as relieved as I was disappointed–and I no longer felt the nine-mile trip to the yoga studio was worth my Wednesday morning.  At least I hadn’t committed myself to the hope and inflated it beyond proportion.  I could easily have done that in the months since I’d seen her, but unlike the months it took me to ask Julie out, I wasn’t reminded of my hopes by seeing her every workday.  If I’d been paying attention when we first saw each other at the cookout, I’d have already seen in Jackie’s eyes that our interests were not correlative.  My day wasn’t ruined; it’s knee wasn’t so much as skinned; it didn’t so much as cut itself shaving.  There was no lament or woeful wail, but a shrug and “Oh, well.”

I play on.  I keep looking, keep looking into eyes, looking for…what?  A connection, then a deeper connection.  It’s there, somewhere, in someone’s eyes.  It’s not a game–I shouldn’t call it that–and it isn’t play or sport.  I might know what I’m after, but getting it doesn’t get me the broken tape and the top step on the tri-level dais.  No medal will be hung around my neck, but a millstone might be lifted from it.  This is serious work and might amount to a life’s-work in the end, but…but the thought is too complex for me to express adequately, and, despite my normal analytical bent, I get the feeling that I should accept it being so, that even an understanding, much less an explanation of what I’m doing is not only unnecessary but detrimental:  Codifying what I do is what makes this a sport, a game for its own sake.  I want to see beautiful women; I wnat to meet them and talk to them.  I want to fall in love; I want to love myself.  That I feel good doing what I’m doing only means I believe I’m doing the right thing.  Whatever comes of that must be what I deserve, and the only way to accept what I deserve is to know I’m doing right:  There’s my circle.  I have to trust it not to be a snake eating itself.

I Can Almost Believe Myself This Time

Though I try to believe that love will just find me, I think it needs some help.  It won’t come  bursting through my door, so I have to go out and meet it.  Not find it, just…run into it.  Maybe it won’t be in the movie theater, but I might find its wallet on the sidewalk out front.  Maybe I’ll bump shopping carts with it or laugh at an embarrassing event it had hoped no one saw.  However it comes, I expect it to come unexpectedly.  This attitude relieves the desperation of the endeavour, if not the urgency, because it’s a role that suits me.  I believe in serendipity, but like luck, it needs a catalyst sometimes.  So, I’m getting out of my bubble to do things I like.  I may no longer be getting my money’s worth out of Netlflix (I kept Stranger Than Paradise two weeks), but spending two-thirds of my monthly fee on one movie in public is more cost-effective for my purposes–eventually.  I think. 

But of course I spend half my waking life at work, so I have to seriously consider the library as a site of prime opportunity, and for direct, captive contact the circulation desk is the place to be, where the patron will first encounter library staff.  Each week there’s a chance of not getting an hour out there one day.  On that day I feel caged and wonder what opportunities I’m missing and hope that I can at least get out into the stacks with a cart of books to shelve, maybe get a chance to help an attractive woman find something.

On the circ desk, the patron has to come to me, but I can attract them.  Two people are assigned to the desk, and if I’m really intent on getting on my game, I’ll try to get the terminal nearest the entrance in order to make the first contact with the patron and try to steer them my way with a smile and greeting.  If it’s a woman I find myself attracted to, I consider her mine and will be disappointed if I don’t get at least a smile in return.  If she steers to the desk I lock onto her eyes.  This is especially important when she approaches head-on from the stacks (as opposed to the entrance, whose path is parallel to the desk) and is deciding which clerk to visit; first eye contact almost always wins.  Having won her my way, I look for the glint, the bright band of connection, the bridge from soul to soul.  Quite often it’s there, and when it is I am that much closer to being at ease and myself.  I can throw away the professional scripts and be Dion instead of Mr. Library.  Discreetly, I look for the ring and try not to let finding it close me off.  After all, contact is the thing, and I’ll take all the practice I can get.  (The last time I was on the desk with Julie, after the failed conversation, I enjoyed a banter with a woman my age as I checked out her books.  We had a very easy time making each other laugh.  There was never a thought of romance in my head–I knew she was married–the conversation just flowed, and afterwards I realized how important that kind of rapport is and how Julie and I never had any of that, how strained, even in the best of times, our converse had been, and how our humors had rarely met.  If only I’d recognized then the signs of incompatibility….)  I maintain the eye contact as best I can (that doesn’t come naturally to me, either) especially at the parting, as significant a moment as the greeting.  The duration of eye contact at that moment is very telling:  The longer it lasts, the brighter and stronger that band of connection becomes.  But as strong as the connection might be made, it may never get a chance to be made stronger.  With maybe one hour on the desk a day, and rarely the same hour, reconnection is, at best haphazard.  In fact, I can’t think of a good connection made twice with the same woman.

Still, I psych my self up for the opportunities.  My vanity, formerly attended to strictly for Julie’s audience, had, until recently, fallen somewhat lax, but on most days now I bother to shave and wash my hair.  I’ve discovered my physical persona as a rugged, outdoorsy guy, and I like him, with his perpetual tan, his sleeves rolled up and his hair in a ponytail.  If my physique falls a little short of my ideal–Michaelangelo’s David–I can at least say that I’m comfortable with it–in fact, a bit smug about having chiseled it from my chosen lifestyle without that narcissistic artificiality of “working out.”  I like wearing what shows it off and showing what the clothes are supposed to be covering–a boy’s ringer tee tight around the biceps, a tad short at the waist above the low-riding jeans, flashing skin between the belt and shirt reaching to the high shelves, squatting to show off a rim of colorful underwear.  I embrace the exhibitionist in me as I try to embrace all those other mes I used to deny as flaws to be expunged from my character.  “Me first” is not, in my case, selfishness in the derogatory sense; it’s the place to start.  It should be easier to complete myself that way than to seek someone to do the job for me. 

Is what I’m completing the vessel to hold love?  Instead of bumping into love or finding its wallet, will it just flow into me?  Or am I sewing a cap and begging for love to be dropped into it like loose change?  I suppose my attitude will decide, and right now my attitude says “vessel.”  If it ever points to “cap,” I hope it does so with an impish grin and a wink and doesn’t thrust out the supplicating headgear before finishing a goofy soft-shoe.

Nowhere Near “Postal,” Anyway

Work without Julie is a relief.  That, like many another thing I’ve said, is not true.  There was a time when it was true.  There was also a time when I was unhappy without her there.  This is neither of those times, though it strongly resembles both.  Her not being at work relieves me of watching out for her in order to avoid her or openly show my disdain for her.  It deprives me of that, too.  It relieves me of very little stress.  See, if she’s not where I am she’s relieved of me, free to live without me.  Free to be happy.  Free of my dramatic disdain.  I could say I don’t want that for her, because I feel that way, but I don’t believe it,  and I don’t want to hate myself yet more by talking myself into believing it.  I’m just lonely, jealous, and brittlely insecure, and Julie is a target for my projections.  What I can’t take responsibility for I blame her for.  There’s my awareness.  Where’s my corrective action?

The solution is beyond my intellect–not smarter than it, but transcendent of it, impossible to consider.  What’s to do when thinking won’t do?  We come back to faith, a frightening place, a place without control.  A humble place.  A place without Me.  A lifetime of looking for myself, and this is what it comes to.  I thought I was through with irony.  This soul’s not big enough for both faith and pride, and it’s easier to keep what I’ve always had than to replace it with what seems an ambiguous entity that will claim control of my ego.  Pride has not altogether blinded me, or I would not be questioning its worth, but sight is the price I would have to pay for faith.  With what, then, would I look in the mirror?  How would I avoid Julie?

I still have my little game of flirtation with the patrons, but the big game I play at the library is with Julie, and I lost it at the tip-off–even playing by my own rules–simply by getting her to play with me.  Winning now means losing my ego.  I tell myself this is all an experiment, a test of limits and reactions, but it’s really no more than poking with a stick.  I don’t honestly want her to hate me.  I’m even beginning to doubt that I’ve fallen out of love with her.  Was saying I was no longer in love with her just another of those hopeful deferences I made to Julie? or was the lie the declaration of love?  (Wow, Irony, you don’t mess around!)  If Julie changed her mind about me, do you really think I’d say, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel it anymore”?  The supposition says enough.

I’ll play my game.  I’ll avoid Julie as I avoid doing so many “right” things:  with awareness of the actions and their consequences, the guilt of knowing and not-doing, and the pride of doing the wrong things well.  Awareness doesn’t change anything but my level of self-loathing.  Do I have a limit I must reach before I change?  For how long can I work with Julie before I reach that limit?  Will awareness keep up?

Food, Shelter, Love

At work I see plenty of physically attractive women, but I’m not ready to fall in love with any of them.  Physical attraction in only that.  Love is more.  To be physically attracted is to have sized up a potential sex partner, a biological imperative justifying a recreational pursuit.  Where is love?  Of course I want sex, but it isn’t the first thing I want.  It might not even be the second or third, depending on the scope of love.  Is it realistic to want love above all else? to eschew the baser needs in favor of a need that has never been satisfied?  Why not?  Let the baser needs take care of themselves.  What, then, has happened to letting love come to me?  Well, I’d leave well-enough alone if it were well enough left.  But regardless of my inability to bring love to me, my overwhelming need for it crowds out the faith that it is on its way.  So I distract myself with the shapes of women, and I don’t kid myself that it’s anything else.  I know better than to look for love in a vulgar aesthetic.  Though sex, for me, has never been a simple vulgarity or casual one-off, I have never fallen in love with an object of sex, and when I have fallen in love (if I actually ever have), physical attraction was not the reason.  If I have ever fallen in love, it was with Julie, and in all of the time I mooned over her I never considered sex with her (though, eventually, that would have been nice).  If I had not otherwise been attracted to her, there might have been no attraction at all.

So, here we have new expressions for both the inutility of vanity towards the “acquisition” of love and the futility of seeking or even preparing oneself for love.  If physical attraction cannot recognize love–and as a biological (animal) mechanism it must be singularly ignorant of any spiritual imperative–then what role of the least significance can vanity have in the attraction of anything but sex?  If that is all vanity can do, then its role is to distract one from seeking love.  But I don’t want to be distracted–from anytything.  These shapes are all nice to look at and to imagine having fun with, but as much fun as they might be, they aren’t enough.  Feeling that way, I can’t enjoy the game.  Yet there is nothing else but distraction when there’s nothing else I can do.  Nothing else is more important to me than this thing I can’t do anything about.  But as I have neither the patience to not-wait for love or the faith in not-waiting that would facilitate the patience, what’s left but to play the game? to appreciate the shapes?  Perhaps that’s all that keeps obsession at bay.

Home Field Disadvantage

My game has all but dried up.  If I were paranoid I’d say it was Julie’s return and the stress of avoiding her that was throwing me off,  but I would be ignoring the precipitous drop in circulation and attendance at the library since then.  Or I could blame that on her, too.  I could try to hold Tammy accountable for not giving me more time on the desk, but I’d have to forget the three hours out there Saturday.  There’s bee no return of the lyart, dark-eyed woman I’d helped with the copier, no return of the lady checking out Italo Calvino and Vonnegut to whom I recommended Donald Barthelme–or I just haven’t been out there when they were.  There’s no consistency to a daily schedule.  I can’t count on being on the desk at four-o’clock next Tuesday on the strength of being there on the previous Tuesday.  Who’s come in hoping to see me only to see Megan and Bethany out there on the front line?  But there I go, getting paranoid (if arrogantly so).  I’d say it was as chancy to meet women at the library as anywhere if I were anywhere as much besides home.  (And what do you think my chances are there?)  Relative to time spent there, opportunities should abound at the grocery store, but I’m out of my element, my scripted environment.  Being away from Julie does not further tip the scales in my favor.  I may be more relaxed at the grocery store, but I’m just there.  It’s all up to confidence at that point.  If I’m having a bad-hair day, forget it.  I almost try not to be noticed.  I’m noticed, anyway.  A patron, Ms. Hall, said, “Your hair is astounding!”  I was not having a good-hair day–the humidity had exploded it, and my fingers trying to get through it should have been machetes–but I chose to take it as a compliment.  Still, at the store that evening I was in invisible mode.  It didn’t work.  I couldn’t help noticing I was noticed.   I could even tell who was trying not to be noticed noticing.  When I realized it was my hair getting the attention, I thought, “Well, I guess all I have to do is bring my hair with me wherever I go.”  Easily enough done.  If I don’t have to care how crazy my hair is to get attention, that’s one less thing in the way of my being true to my self.  This doesn’t have to be a game at all.  Isn’t that all I want?

Turn Blue

Outside the practically scripted structure of the library, the rules of my game of attraction change.  There is no search of interest in widening eyes or a head-dip.  There is only one rule, really, and that is to look good, and that’s all about the hair.  Shaving happens when I feel like it, clothes cover me, and I’m in good shape.  Hair is my vanity, and I’ll pay for the extra hot water it takes to wash and condition it now that it’s grown out, and for the detangler and oil.  If I feel I look good I feel good, and I’m the opposite of self-conscious.  I don’t swagger; I just feel good.  If there’s interest, I don’t notice.

Now that Julie’s back, outside the library is where I’d rather be.  With a weekend between us, it was easy writing that first paragraph .  Now I consider shaving the evening before the new week begins, and her face floats up before mine as the reason to shave.  So I won’t.  It didn’t stop me from washing my hair, though.  My rebellion in that arena is not having it cut.  I know no one at work likes it.  The next time someone says my hair looks good will be when I cut it short.  They can hold their collective breath.  I’ve spent enough time trying to impress the unimpressable.  It’s time I impressed myself–and anyone else who can appreciate me as I am.

Cancel My Engagements

If I were to say that my life was hollow and lonely I’d be only half right–that is, in a proportion of each adding up to about half. I get home from work, and here I am, on the sofa. I could watch tv or read, listen to music, get on the computer, write–the same things I could do every day. I don’t want to do any of them. I run through the list like channels on the clicker. Nothing engages. I don’t even want to sit here writing this, but it’s the only thing that expresses how I feel. The other things just cover it up. Nothing much means much with no one to share it with. There’s only so much I can share with the kids that they would understand, and why would I tell them I’m lonely? Thirteen is an awkward enough age without feeling that your love isn’t enough to keep your father happy. The girls are nearly the entire portion of my life that is not hollow and lonely–that’s all they need to know. (Funny, by the time they are old enough to understand, perhaps they won’t care.) So I write and pretend I’m talking to someone who’s listening and is neither judging nor pitying me. I won’t talk to myself. I’ve heard it all before, and I’m not sympathetic or forthcoming with good advice. I don’t want a therapist, a professional listener and sympathizer with advice from books that’s been doled out to countless others before me. I want someone to be with.

Since Julie came back to work it seems my opportunities to connect with female patrons has shrivelled up, but the stress of working with Julie has simply hardened my mood and put me off my little game. Tap me with a hammer and listen to the echo. Shake me and you might hear the faint rattling of my marble of a conscience. Or is that Jiminy Cricket’s dessicated carcass? I’ve been judged and pitied at work for falling in love with Julie, so I come home to seek understanding, and all I have is pen and paper. I’d better stop writing or they’ll start pitying me, too. Now, do I watch a movie or have a drink?

Confounded Interest

Julie returns to work today, and I’m reminded of how ill-prepared I am to love, how pride is so thickly in the way of accepting what others have to give. I will go on, open to that spark of interest from women I don’t know and might not see again, all the while entirely closed to the woman whose interest I most want and will never have. I’d as soon she never came back, but the sweater hangs on the back of the chair at her empty desk like a jeer at all those lofty words her absence afforded me. Pride seems now to make a lie of all of them. This that I seek I seek selfishly, as something I demand as a natural right that has been unnaturally denied me. How much I talk of receiving love–what can I say about giving love that doesn’t embarass me with its naked ignorance? This “interest” I look for is not the innocuous fun I claim it to be. I’m looking for someone willing to love me. What thought is there of what I could give back? So a woman to whom I can’t speak, upon whom I can’t look returns to work. How well now can I expect to play my little game with the women I don’t know while I’m ashamed of the game I play with Julie?

Faith Once More?

If love is to come to me, there is nothing I can do consciously to facilitate it.  There is no scheme or strategy that will draw it to me.  I have to accept these “mysterious ways” love works in.  Faith–that’s all it takes, right?  But what have I ever really had faith in?  Even in the glaring spotlight of the collective ironic failure of all of my strategems, what have I learned?  I have steeled myself against faith, my only faith being in the certainty of failure.  Certainly, this should have engendered at least a throwing-up of hands, a fatalistic determination of resignation.  I could have at least backed into this faith.  Instead, I let my ego determine that I was a victim, that I was not dealing with a universal force but with a force that waited solely on my actions and intentions in order to thwart them.  Even now, though, having said that, I have difficulty believing that this force targets everyone.  The evidence isn’t strong enough.  If I were to believe that this was a circumstantial force, that it was activated by certain factors, then I would be jumping onto that hamster-wheel of strategy chasing that magic combination of actions and behaviours that would bring love to my door.  But I might just as well pray for it.