some random thoughts at bedtime

P and I went to see Monsieur Verdoux at the Alamo tonight. It's a later Chaplin film; very good, very ahead of its time in some ways. Martha Raye plays one of his many wives (one of the ones he doesn't murder, though he does try!), and she was my favorite character in the movie, though he was quite good as well, as always.

At one point in the evening, P turned to me and said, "Did you really do a shot in the dark and say you were a woman?" I had no idea what she was talking about. The last time I remembered doing a shot, it wasn't in the dark, and I didn't remember saying anything so clever. She repeated the question a couple of times, then said, "In your blog!" I forget that she's one of my regular readers!

My right eye is bothering me tonight. I went over to M&J's today and cleared a bunch of brush from a patch where the shipping containers will soon go -- the shipping containers which will be S's and my new home before (apparently) too long. On Sunday, J and I marked the ground with orange paint where they will likely sit. But then today, while I was out there working, J called M and told her to look something up on Craigslist. Some men had big plans for a container house (using eight 20-foot "high cubes" -- which means 9.5-feet tall -- we've been talking about two containers) but had abandoned the project and are selling the containers for a quarter of what they normally cost. M said, "We want all of them!" So who knows what our home is gonna end up looking like, but it just keeps getting better and better. They're gonna be up off of the ground on "piers" (concrete columns) four or more feet high; I'm thinking of putting a chicken coop under one of them!

I'm going to Paris in March. M is now thinking of going as well -- which is great. She has friends in Paris and London, and is thinking about going to both of those places and overlapping her stay with the time I'm there. We were looking on Google Earth today at the bed & breakfast I'm staying in. She said she was trying to find her friend's house on Google Earth after having heard from her recently. She had lost touch with this friend and found her by doing an Image search on Google.

I had a friend named D in high school whom I've looked for on People Searches and other kinds of general online searches over the years, and could never find him. But then I tried an Image search the other day and there he was, a picture of him at his place of work. He's still in Bigtown, which was surprising (and a little sad), but he seems well adjusted. I emailed the company -- the Sales Department came up on the email contact; I wrote a simple email saying I was trying to get in touch with him. He wrote me back that night! We've written a couple of times back and forth now. I felt all giddy and in a good mood today. (P said I was "spicy" tonight, and I think that had something to do with it.)

I won't say I had a crush on D in high school. I was really always kind of surprised that he wanted to be my friend back then since I didn't really have many friends. He worked at the Community Center as a Night Watchman and I used to go visit him there late at night. He volunteered us to work on set for a school play and we spent all night painting and building. That's a good memory. But the thing I remember most about D, the thing that has stuck with me over the years, was once when we were driving around, he said, "If you want to tell me your gay, I would be okay with that."

Over the years, I wondered what he meant by that, if it meant he was gay as well, or if he wanted to betray me and justify the rumor about me around school. But more often than not, I just figured it was his attempt to let me know that he accepted me for whatever I was, which was something I didn't often feel in high school. When he asked, I said, "No, I'm not." I didn't come to terms with my sexuality until I was 24, and even then I was never so sure about that choice. I mean, I know I'm attracted to men, but labeling myself as gay was (and still is) a little unnerving (which likely has a lot to do with my very religious upbringing).

Over the years, straight men have been attracted to me. Of course, for the most part it never boils down to them wanting to be physical with me (though there was that one time a couple of summers ago, but anyway...). I believe now that these are "crushes" that straight men have on me, whatever that means. I looked back on my relationship with D and have been thinking over the past couple of days that he was the first straight man to have a "crush" on me. In his email he said I lead such an interesting life and that's why he always liked hanging around with me. I never thought of my life as being interesting when I was in high school; I know that it has been pretty interesting and unusual since then, but I just hated my life back then. P says she thinks it's probably my outlook on life that he liked. Perhaps. I do often consider the fact that my life has always been so very different than other family members' lives; I'm always curious about how I turned out the way I did. Not the gay part -- there are a number of homosexual stories in my family -- but the fact that I'm so much less connected to my upbringing than even my sisters are. I feel like I escaped in some ways. I was happy when my father died; I felt then (and I still feel) that it allowed me to survive.

Still I have my depression sometimes, so I don't know what that's about. Maybe that's the fallout from going against my upbringing.

S is still in Indiana. He comes home by Amtrak on the 24th. I think he's looking forward to being home. I'm certainly looking forward to him being back. He has been helping his dad do some repairs or some kind of physical labor around the house the last couple of days. He emailed to tell me that he had a panic about our new home, about what will be expected of him as far as "building" goes. I tried to calm him; I think I did. I told him that nothing is really expected of him, certainly nothing he doesn't feel comfortable doing. Perhaps he can cook for us workers, he loves doing that.

But really, with these containers, they're pretty much negating the need for much building at all. I'm interested and excited about doing this stuff that I never have done before -- or that I had to do with my father as a youth and therefore despised. I'm all scratched up tonight and have something in my eye and I feel exhilarated by what I accomplished.

Part of that exhilaration, I fear, comes from the feeling of insecurity about my novel that I've been having lately. I'm on the verge of giving up on it. I don't know if I'm smart enough to get this incredible story that's in my head onto paper in a way that I feel will be right. I'm very hard on myself. I asked S to help me. I need him to read what I've got -- the first 15 chapters -- and to encourage me and/or point out where I've gone wrong. I fear I've over-edited some of it, that perhaps the writing group wasn't so good for me. I mean, I got some good suggestions from the people in the group, but also some not very good suggestions. And I think maybe I didn't always know when to trust myself and ignore some of the advice. S said to just relax and he'll read it when he gets home. That's probably good advice; my instinct is to just pitch it all (not literally) and start over. But that seems like a daunting task (and silly thing to do to boot).

C in Florida asked me to send her another copy of S's documentary about our life on the road so she could share it with a friend she recently met in yoga. She's a Bikram teacher; I'm not sure if he's a teacher or just a student. It came up because he's been in a polyamorous relationship. She called today to tell me that her friend reported that he knows R (S's and my third partner), who obviously appears in the movie. The news made me a little nauseous. I have felt the need since my last flirtation with R (earlier this year), which didn't go so well, to stop paying any attention to him. I took him off of my Myspace friends list because every time I saw his picture I went to his page and got a kind of sick feeling. (I noticed that shortly after I took him off of my friends list, he did the same -- or maybe that's a Myspace thing, I don't know.)

But I guess I'll forever be connected to R. I didn't understand where he was coming from when I saw him; it was a weird visit, to say the least. And then just today I got an email from him (a group email) about a blog he and his boyfriend are doing around their sustainable life together. When I saw him, he and K were on the outs, and I thought they were done for good, and that I had a chance (telling myself that that was really what I wanted). And now they're back together, and fortunately I didn't move to Florida to "be with him," and I'm about to move into an amazing, very sustainable situation with S, with whom I have a much more healthy relationship. It's still very difficult to explain my relationship with S -- or with R -- but things are as they should be, I do believe. And the fact that I'll be living so close to M&J (not to mention their little P), it's just a dream come true.

I was over there last night watching Teeth with M (another good movie; my second time seeing it) while J went to pick up little P from camp for the night, and when I left it was raining lightly. I looked out over the humid grounds and listened to the peaceful sounds of the birds and atmosphere, and then came home to my apartment and sat on the porch awhile. I don't mind the interstate two blocks away, I never have (besides, there are so many fans blowing in this house, who can hear it?!), but I had this sense that I'd just returned from the country, and that was a very nice feeling indeed. It isn't far out of town or anything -- 5.0 miles exactly from the capitol, according to Google Maps -- but it feels like another world, and it's gonna be my world, our world. Wow.

And to cap it off, Timmy just sneaked into the apartment with something in his mouth. He often brings in katydids or grasshoppers, which annoys me. I usually take them from them and toss them back into the yard (which annoys him). He went to the middle room and did his little playing with it and chewing at it thing. I turned on the light and he was playing with what looked like a sprig of cilantro! He dropped it and it moved a little, so I thought maybe there was a bug under it or attached to it in some way, but it was just the fans blowing through the house. In Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin says, "Dear, do I smell meat cooking?" His crippled wife says, "Yes, dear, so-and-so is coming over for dinner." Their little boy says, "Why don't we ever eat meat, daddy?" Chaplin says, "Because, my boy, we are vegetarians." Ah.