A Series of February's

Nostalgia. Greg pointed out something that stuck with me in his list of 25 Things and I thought about it and came to the conclusion that while looking back on your past can very well taint your present (taint. ha. ok,ok.), it can give some much needed perspective.

Below is a series of February's in San Francisco. Sometimes, looking back helps.

February 2004

Boys Who Live Alone Never Have TP

Josh C. called at midnight asking if everything was okay. He was concerned I left so early in the morning. It's always the logical thing to do. I was wide awake and he didn't have any toilet paper for a poor girl who drank him out of house and home (Corona out of a can is a whole new experience for me). The hangover headache was approaching. And he was dead to the world because he hadn't slept in 2 days. While I would have loved to have done some naked wrestling to abate the hangover, Josh was sleeping and Josh needed sleep more than sex anyway.

Laying in bed that morning, looking around his place, the girl in me took over my brain. As crappy as I was feeling I SO WANTED TO CLEAN HIS APARTMENT. That, my friends, is not kosher. I think I'm smart enough to know that guys don't like girls touching their stuff unannounced. So I picked up my share of the mess, carted my empty beer cans to the kitchen. I looked around to try and find a trash receptacle for my empty ice cream bar wrapper (apparently I housed a Hagen Daaz at some point in the evening) and could not find one.

I don't think the boy owns a trashcan.

None of this is a dealbreaker, just an observation.

Coming home at 10AM to my own clutter that had accumulated in a week, I decided I had to feel better cleaning up my own messes and leaving others to do with their own what they will.

Post Script: Josh gave me my first Valentine's Day present in a couple of years. It's a leather cuff. He's got the same one, except his is black and mine...well, of course it would be pink.

I just think that's entirely too funny. Ahh, to be the girl of a tall, Jewish, skater boy.

February 2005

Options

I want the option to upgrade my life, if I so choose, to the Platinum Series.

I'm currently mainlining the Silver with stable job, roof over head and beer gut protrusion.

Silver has treated me pretty well, considering I am not living in a hobo encampment under the freeway nor eating ramen from a Dunkin Donuts travel mug.

Old letter from former best friend in grade school who was taken away to Ohio before we could hit puberty together has put certain things in perspective for me.

In 1999 she had pointed out all the many things I had accomplished that I had said I was going to do in 1985.

-Escape from New Jersey.
-Go to school in New England.
-Get a degree in Writing. (And I'm pretty happy I could say I was a 'Writing Major' and not an 'English Major'. Not that there's anything wrong with 'English Major' its just in my mind's eye, and my artsy fartsy school's eye, the two are different.)

And I'm sad I don't know Steph anymore and have lost her somewhere because I want to tell her I made it to San Francisco.

A place we both talked about escaping to. Her, due to her obsession with Janis Joplin. Me, because...I like pretty things.

She was smarter than any other 13 year old I had known and smarter than most adults too. After losing her to Ohio, she suffered depression as only poets do and ran away several times, to Alaska and eventually to San Francisco in a drug induced short stay only to find herself broke, tired and unable to finish anything she started.

Last I heard, she was slowly but surely recovering and struggling to finish school in Alaska.

I've always wanted to be a tortured poet. Somehow it always equated with having a soul.

This, I discovered, is not true.

Great pains bear great works of art, but so do great joys and great moments of quiet, and great snatches of conversations and great people.

I'm coasting the Silver and I like it.

I'm lucky. My life is an adventure and I haven't had to struggle as much as I think I do for the things I want.

February 2006

Mad Mission
The Mug

G. has a yellow coffee mug that reads "I'm Smarter Then You".

And he has never, in a million lifetimes, a million reincarnations of our relationship, let me drink out of it.

February 2007

My plastic heart will love this year or I will be melting it and turning it to Legos.

PDX this weekend. 29 with a chance of snow. I'm 30 with a chance of diabetes.

But somehow I know I'll make it, Lego heart and all.