Me Elsewhere

Totally wiped out from it being Monday and all.  I have the all Golden Girls channel on, and am thinking of playing some solitaire or something equally mind-numbing, but figured I would point out that I posted again on Gals About Town.  Last week, I wrote about having tea in Benicia, and yesterday I posted about a delicious meal at Dead Fish.  Of course, there are other posts by other people there as well that I encourage you to read.

Matchmaker Matchmaker

Now that I have cable, I seem to find myself watching it at odd times.  This weekend, Bravo was doing a marathon of their Millionaire Matchmaker show.  I watched a bit of the show when I was down visiting my friends in LA last year.  My friend Jen really likes a lot of reality programming, I think because with her busy life, it's hard to keep track of serialized shows and reality programming spells a lot out for you.  You could watch one episode and "get it" right away and start following the program.

Anyway, it was very interesting to me, being single, to watch something like this.  I've seen episodes that take place in New York and LA.  I can't imagine being single in either of those places.  I think I always think of having a "singles scene" something like the movie Singles, where everyone is hanging out in coffee shops, singing in bands, living in sketchy apartments.  This does not describe what I saw on these shows.  I know the focus is on "millionaires" so they have to include all these lifestyle places, with the name-dropping, expensive clothing, etc., and that part of the show really isn't interesting to me.

What is interesting to me is the psychology of it all.  The woman who is the matchmaker, Patti, is sort of like a neurotic love guru.  I don't know how much she is like her portrayal on the show in real life, so this is not an attempt to talk about her as a person, but the character that she portrays.  And that character is tough.  She's tough on people, calls them on their bullshit pretty much continuously.  Not just talking about swearing at people or whatever, but there are men and women that come to her and say that they want to find a love partner in their life, and then their actions indicate the diametric opposite of that.  For instance, this guy who says he wants someone whom he can be intimate with, but then only looks for women who are 15-20 years younger and overpowers them by talking about places he's traveled, but not about himself.  Patti advised him to make himself vulnerable, to open up to a woman on the date he goes on.  Like any kind of therapy, a lot of these clients are very resistant to change, and often the show ends with them not being successful in their dating endeavors or really seeming to have experienced much personal growth.

Patti talks a lot about these "non-negotiables," that is, five things that you won't compromise on.  Characteristics you are looking for (or their opposite, trying to avoid) that come from your past experience and what hasn't worked out for you.  A lot of the clients come in saying they want "the full package" or "love and romance" and then when she asks them specifically what they really want, they can't nail it down.  I started taking that to heart of thinking about dating, so without further ado, my five non-negotiables.

1. He has to have a job and be able to support himself financially.
2. He needs to be emotionally open, able to express his emotions, able to talk about them, and also listen to me when I talk about mine.
3. He needs to be open to trying new things, exotic foods, travel, new experiences.
4. He has to have a sense of humor.
5. If not a feminist, he at least has to not be sexist.

What are your non-negotiables?  I think mine come from a variety of experience, negative and positive, but I've never dated someone who fits all of these criteria.  Not yet, anyway.

Journaling and Blogging

My therapist wanted me to read this book about journaling to deal with some of my ongoing issues.  I have skimmed the book, haven't really been journaling.  I feel like this is a good idea, to start writing stuff down, but I feel like a lot of crap is just stuck in my head.  A lot of the time, I think about my thoughts, think about things I could write down and post, but I don't really do it.  I am sure some of that is life, the things we think of doing aren't always the things we end up doing.  I feel sometimes the gap between how where I would like to be with my life and where my life actually is, and I feel this gap widening. 

I've been thinking a lot about jumping in the waters of dating again.  When I first broke up with C, I thought I'd start right away, then I thought I needed a few months, and well, it's been about a year.  And some portion of the year, I was getting over being with him, missing some of the things that our relationship had.  I thought, and decided on the whole, that the things our relationship had did not make up for what our relationship lacked.  Communication.  Commiseration.  And that feeling of moving towards a commitment, or at least, some stability and feeling like we were on the same path.  Nada.

I think being single has been good for me.  There have been times when I was single, and I spent a lot of energy on making my outside look good.  You know, diet and exercise, lose some weight, get in shape, throw myself into gym routines.  But lately, I've done the opposite, and instead of working on my exterior, I have been working on my interior, my inner feelings.  I don't think I'm one of those people who always gets involved in the same kind of relationship, but I do feel like a lot of deep-seated negative beliefs have kept me from being in the kind of relationship that I deserve, with someone who treats me with respect and takes my feelings into consideration.  Oh and isn't emotionally unavailable and doesn't remind me of my dad or his mother. 

Anyway, I saw this quote a few weeks ago and it kind of speaks to where I am now:
“You know, it’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness… There is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss; if you think about it you don’t do it.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea 

So maybe I need to think about dating a little bit less and act a little bit more.

Wine, Noise, and Future Plans

Kailyn, who has become both my social director and now the documentor of my life, has posted about what we did yesterday.  I am gathering a good collection of wine glasses this summer.  I managed to avoid fried vegetables this time, which I consider a minor victory.

My new neighbors haven't moved in, unless they are very, very quiet.  My landlady said that they paid to move in on the first.  Are they rich?  Or doing some sort of scam?  I think I probably read too many thrillers and watch too much TV, because I keep thinking up really interesting ideas, and it's probably a very simple and boring explanation.  I keep expecting a big and loud move-in day, and it hasn't happened yet.  The only loud days we have had are the residual fireworks.  It was weird talking to someone at my local grocery store the day after the holiday, and he was talking about how much fun he had shooting off all kinds of fireworks, and I was thinking about how horrible fireworks are for my cats, how they were so traumatized the night of the fourth.  It was over ninety degrees, but I left the windows closed because the noise was really traumatizing the cats.

So it is official, and DMA and I have our plane tickets for our trip to Italy in October.  I don't know how much blogging I'll be doing from there.  But I should find a way to get my phone online and maybe posting pictures and who knows what else.  And you know, there is still a lot of summer to get through too.  I hear rumor of heading to Benecia, and then going to the state fair, and that's just what is occurring in July.

Happy (And Hot) Fourth of July

I just put up a post over at Gals About Town that I think is kind of cute, though not profound or anything.

It is a three-day weekend, and super hot where I live.  I didn't really have anything going on yesterday other than a vague plan of cleaning my house, and it never really cooled down enough where I felt like doing the heavy lifting of the vacuum cleaner, but I did manage a few things.  Our weather here has been crazy, because last Tuesday it was pouring rain, and yesterday it topped out at 90 degrees.  It's almost surreal.  I tried to bet someone at work before last Tuesday that it wouldn't rain, and she thankfully didn't take the bet, because I would have lost.

Oh, and to add to my last post, my next door neighbor told me about being out of work for four weeks, so that explains the unwashed smell and seeing him sitting around in boxers far too often.  I have to say, thinking of a guy out of work for a few weeks, reminds me of my ex R who was out of work pretty much continuously while we were dating.  The new downstairs neighbors have yet to move in, which is nice from a noise perspective, and maybe they'll do it during the day when I'm at work.  And with the heat, it is kind of sad, but I'm looking forward to being at work because there is a/c all the time.

Thankfully there have been a lot of fireworks around here the last few nights, and Kiki seems completely non-plussed by the noise.  Teddy will put his ears back and look curious, but he's not getting angry or fearful either.  I keep seeing people posting on Facebook about their pets freaking out, and I'm glad mine aren't doing that.  Though they will be happier when it's less hot around here.  They lie flat around the non-carpeted surfaces most of the day.