Okay Look I'm Busy

pack square and biltmore building
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

This has been an eventful week and actually, it's been pretty much all good except for that part where I got laid off. The last few days of that were rough. Still, that part isn't even bad at the moment because let me tell you, it is hard to feel bad about not having a job when the weather is all beautiful and warm and the birds are singing and flowers are blooming. On days like this, somehow - go figure! - the thought "Gee, I wish I was in a windowless basement office right now working on spreadsheets" just doesn't enter one's head. Or it doesn't enter mine, anyway, but then I claim exemption from the Protestant work ethic since I was sort of raised Catholic inasmuch as I was raised anything. We get guilt instead of a work ethic. It works just as well - guilt, like duct tape, is good for all kinds of repair jobs! - but I seem to have misplaced mine somewhere along the way and I'm not looking for it very hard.

Yes, okay, of course there is another reason for my sudden attention to bird songs and blue skies and also for the little cloud of circling animated tweety flying things that keep circling around my head and the way everyone in my path keeps breaking into one of those choreographed song and dance routines a la any number of overproduced 1950s and 60s musicals. The reason is this: I have changed my Facebook status.

I had never changed my Facebook status before and it was extremely exciting, which may go to show you that either my perceptions are on the altered side or my life is really damn boring. Anyway, I am finding this twenty first century Facebook status thing completely fascinating. Back in the day when you started dating somebody you thought, perhaps, of an eventual ivy covered cottage or maybe one of those commercials where two impossibly beautiful people in jeans go somewhere impossibly cool or a music video or, possibly, if your father and his were dedicated arch rivals in 15th century Venice, a romantic death by poison, but now you start contemplating the changing of the Facebook status. It is the equivalent of people in the middle ages having their first child or jumping over a Beltane fire or having the banns read or plucking three feathers from the sacred swan of some misty loch - if you read the kind of endless fantasy novels I do, you get to pick from a wide assortment of dubious traditions! - and yet it is accomplished with the click of a button and an email that asks you if you are, in fact, going to do this. Then you hover around Facebook all day to see what your friends have to say and all in all it's almost exactly, but not quite, the same as it was in 9th grade or so when you went out for a slice of pizza with a real, live, genuine Boy. Or, okay, not pizza but a joint behind the gym, whatever, but the eventual reunion with the friends after the Going Steady part was established is the same. Facebook has turned us all into perpetual adolescents, which I must say is totally okay with me.

So who am I dating? Well. He's my age. He's remarkably calm, stable and just about as sane as I am despite the affliction of being a poet. I could say more but in the interest of everyone's blood sugar level, I won't. Yeah, you're welcome, I know, it's the sickening googly eyed stage. Basically, he talks nerdy to me and this is a good thing all around.

In other good news, my taxes, which I have been dreading to the point of waiting to start them until 4 in the afternoon on April 15, turned out great after all. I do get to keep my son as a dependent for one more year - which is only fair, if you consider the astronomical numbers of chicken fingers he puts away - and all in all, my personal financial crisis has been temporarily relieved. Do you believe this? No, neither do I, but right now I'm all about taking in the gift horses and not even glancing at their mouths.

All this good news is making me nervous as hell but at the same time I can almost see just going right along with the flow, here. This reprieve from cursing the gods and struggling through the darkness has its points. Who knew?! I don't really know how to act but I tell you, I think I am willing to learn.