Look, Look, I Can Be Useful Too!

So, my time of living someone else's life is coming to an end (signaled by the fact that I'm likely going to leave work early - as in 5 p.m. - to go home and finish another project I've avoided for a week). However, during that time of having only a single job, I enjoyed myself thoroughly and while I did not get much fannish done, I did see a slew of fans:

-I attended two concerts, one of them with rosetti
-Had dinner with iamsab on Tuesday
-Drove north to see the lovely _minxy_ and walked by the beach and ate local seafood and had a generally terrific day.

I also attended a Zinfandel tasting, drank martinis on Friday night, and made questionable judgment calls about the wisdom of placing a personal ad on Craigslist. Friday night martinis have been known to cloud judgment. One shouldn't have to learn this quite as often as some of us do. I am not as dumb as Eliot Spitzer, but then, even martinis don't skew your judgment quite that badly.

(Side note: things I have learned from the adventures in free advertising. Personal ads on Craigslist are just like selling a coffee table, but with tits. Pictures are exchanged, promises are made, crazy is weeded out, eyes are made to bleed, and at the end you come down to a few options, all of them questionable, many of them with TMI and termites. I am astounded at the variety of people willing to send you - unasked for, btw - pictures of themselves nearly naked. I should not be astounded. I am... sometimes far too startled for my own good. One guy asked if I were just doing this to gain fodder for an expose, in a nice way. Perhaps I should be.

Other things learned. I am just not this girl. So, so not this girl. It makes me vastly uncomfortable to advertise myself like a coffee table. It makes me sad in ways I don't want to be sad. It makes me sad for men who want to promise the world to someone they don't know. Makes me suspicious of them as well, which I should be. It makes me feel like I haven't kept up with the times, still unwilling to embrace MySpace, and makes me feel like I'm just better off left behind if this is how it goes now. It makes me question, as happens frequently, why it is that men feel like their penis is a selling point. Literally. It makes me feel like I have to respond to all of them, and if I don't, I feel like an asshole. Spent a lot of time feeling like an asshole.

Conclusion. I am not a coffee table. And I'm gonna be spending a lot of time alone, and that's okay, too.Alone as a choice is a reasonable conclusion.)

None of this was helped by reading The Executioner's Song this weekend and getting completely freaked out by the society that created that tragedy. Nor by coming home on Saturday night to find that M. had misplaced his truck due to an excess of tequila. I worry about him more and more, even as he's jovially going through life at a steady drunk. But he doesn't ask me for help, hasn't raged in ages, and so I just...keep looking for an out.

It sounds like my weekend made me sad. It didn't. Mostly, I had a stellar weekend. I saw friends, I drank good wine, I indulged in near disastrous home repair - installed a new handle on my toilet, and a new shower head with a telephone hose, learning the important lesson of "If the showerhead is $13, odds are, it's not actually metal, and didn't destroy the plumbing in either!!! I went to writer's group and I ran errands, and I enjoyed, thoroughly, this foray into someone else's life.