If You Belonged Here

Alice Grew Up. Again.

For as long as I can remember I've been imagining how grand life could be if only I had the balls to move outside central Ohio, away from the only home I've known for all of my 26 years.

I'd be a carefree little Midwestern bird with cute boots and an even cuter attitude. I'd spend years as a student sipping lattes and contemplating the secret of life. I'd drink too much beer, sleep with too many men and study too hard for my exams. All the while racking up student loans I wouldn't be able to pay off until I was years and years into my glam career.

I'd be consciously building what would turn out to be my life long favorite photo album containing a montage of my care free days. Photos of me wearing outfits that would make the me-in-my-30's cringe. Photos of me with my arms around friends who's names I wouldn't be able to remember and possibly never knew in the first place. Photos where there was never a lack of cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Photos of me playing air guitar and singing into the bristle end of a hairbrush at house parties and attending sporting games of a college I was only barely accepted to attend.

Oh how I would have cherished that photo album.

I'm sure that you can see where this is going. In fact you probably would have seen where this was going years ago and I could have used you then.

Folks, I could have used you then.

I stayed, people.

I stayed right here in Ohio and that's not all. I stayed in a relationship with a man that should have only been the first on my list of the too many men I'd slept with. I stayed away from the classes I should have been attending. I stayed in a job I should have left. I stayed, in general, away from myself, away from the me I wanted to become but knew I wasn't.

And then I  got pregnant, got married, had the baby (it's a boy) and got divorced.

Which landed me in an apartment in a trendy downtown neighborhood with a baby, a Chihuahua, a job that I loved and more dates than I could handle. I hadn't moved away to a new city but I had, I thought, figured out the aforementioned secret of life. And I had done so without racking up any student loans or sipping any lattes with my classmates.

The secret, of course, was staying forever single.

Oh, how I vowed to stay single. And single I stayed. For almost a year. 

That almost-year was a great year, too. I lived alone (without other adults anyhow) for the first time in my life. I controlled my check book, the grocery list, the remote control, the stereo, the how and when of all the household chores. And most importantly my datebook. I did what I wanted, when I wanted, with who I wanted and it was the most liberating feeling ever.

If this single life wasn't the secret to life, well then, I just couldn't imagine what was.

Except on the Saturday nights when the kid is with his Dad and you have no plans and no desire to sit at home and read whatever you've just picked up from the library. Except when your kid is teething and all you can think is where the hell is someone else to help me with the parenting??? Except when you realize that while cohabitation at times really blows, it is kind of nice having someone around to do the laundry once in a while, not to mention to be there when you're sick or injured. Because not being felt sorry for is just depressing.

Not that I realized these things and set out to find a mate. I was nowhere near that level of awareness. Nor was I willingly going to let go of my recently declared forever single status. I just walked into my favorite bar and was introduced to my now fiance and the rest as they say --and I sincerely hope--is all history. 

It's funny now how all of the seemingly short-sighted decisions I've managed to make--in a fairly brief bout of adulthood--seem to fade out of the Mistake category and into the Live And Learn category. How instead of discussing the secret of life over lattes I've accidentally discovered it through simply living--and please don't confuse that with living simply.

I know now that family is the key.

Your partner, your kids, your life long friends, your brothers and sisters, your parents - whatever form your family comes in - they are the secret to a happy life. I know now that single is nothing short of knock-down-drag-out fun but that I'm much better suited to being part of a family.

The best part of not being single anymore is that my new fiance, through a series of not so unfortunate events, had to move to Colorado recently.

So.

After years of daydreaming of a new city, I, with a toddler and a Chihuahua in tow am packing my nail polish collection, my favorite pillows, the snow skis that haven't been touched since 1999 and moving to Colorado.

I'm finally getting my wish and, despite my inability to live life without a care in the world, I do have quite an adorable pair of boots and for the second time in my young life, the possibilities seem endless...

Bookgirl is Begging the Question 5

I have this framed print in my apartment. It's the very first thing you see when when you walk in the door:

I like to think that I mostly use my power for good. But let's be serious, here: is a life without any mischief worth living?

I'm not convinced.

So here's this week's question:

If you ruled the world, how would you use your power?

As someone who spends more time than I'd like to admit fantasizing about world domination, I've given this one some thought.

We'd lose weight first from the spots we really want to lose it from. As the weight comes off, my legs get skinnier and skinnier, and my belly comes off at a much slower rate. Which means I look more and more like a lollipop each week.

Not okay.

The members of the opposite sex who are really nice and sweet and treat you like gold would also be the ones with whom you have really explosive sex. If any of you have this in your personal lives, I don't want to hear it. If you don't know where I'm coming from, pretend. It's the kind thing to do.

Bathing suits would always make you look thinner than you actually are. Always.

There would be a universal database with a person's relationship history. So as soon as you met someone you liked, you could look him or her up and find out things like "Cheats" or "Will turn into a bunny boiler after the third date."

I think it would make things much easier.

But at the same time, I'm torn, because that means someone would also be able to find my awesome history of things like "Will be as mean to you as she needs to be to get you to back off if you get too close" and "Will call your voice mail to break up with you while you're still on the way home from her place." Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm still actively working off the bad relationship karma I earned myself with that one back in college.

American-style football would be an Olympic sport. Just so that I could see a game between the US and some country with generally much smaller people, like Mexico or China. Because can't you just picture Ray Lewis taking down the entire backfield at once? How many ambulances would they have to keep on hand for that?

Okay, so I acknowledge that most of our readers are of the girly-girl variety, and you read that whole last paragraph as "blah blah blah blah blah." But trust me: hilarious.

Two words: universal clapper. You know those things you see on late-night tv, where you attach a sensor to something and then when you hit the button on your remote, it beeps? Well, I want a universal one of those. Where you can just say "Find book." Or keys. Or glasses. Or bra--for those of us who take it off the moment we put our stuff down, and therefore sometimes have to look for it in places like the front hallway or the kitchen.

I don't want to have to choose which things will have the sensor. Because I lose EVERYTHING.

I want the clapper to just know.

Polly Takes a Turn

Is it my turn yet, people?

I swear to Hank I've been waiting for it to be my turn for maybe a month. I keep looking at the calendar, wondering when it will be my turn. And it never is.

Until today.

And now that it's my turn I realize I don't have a whole lot to say. Coincidentally, that's the precise reason I decided to implement the turn taking and transform this blog into a collective of writers. Which I think is working out beautifully, if I do say so myself.

This is what I'm going to talk about: high school. But only because someone once told me they love all the veiled references to high school that I put in the posts. And because, well, even though it's old news, somehow it's strangely apropos.

Because that's the last time I really felt part of a group.

I remember high school, people: the fun parts and the not-so-fun parts. I remember it in excruciating detail. I thought I'd be over it by now. I really did.

I'm not.

I'm years past graduation. I mean, I was graduated with the class of 1993 for Hank's sake. I really was. In spite of that recurring dream I have where it turns out I failed PE and have to go back to high school. I freaking hate that dream.

But it's just a dream. Because I really did get my diploma. Diosa and Bookgirl were witnesses. You can ask them.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Anyway, my kid is running around buck naked and dripping wet. The shower is still running. I am the only adult on the premises. Clearly this is my responsibility.

And yet I'm still typing.

Sheesh.

Did I mention that I'm tequila impaired. Well, I prefer to think of it as improved. I'm tequila improved. But I might not have mentioned it and I think it's worth mentioning. Because being impaired is a handy excuse for not making sense, and I'm not sure I have much intention of making sense right now.

As a matter of fact, in the event that I do make sense, I assure you it will be entirely an accident.

Whatever.

Back to high school. Figuratively, thank Hank. Not literally, like that terrible recurring shame dream. Because that would suck.

But figuratively: back to high school. Because I'm pretty sure in some ways, I never left. Just like, in some ways, I was never really there in the first place.

That last was meant to be all existential and moody. The tequila may have impaired that. I apologize if that's the case.

But the thing about high school is that it happens at a particularly terrible hormonally charged point in life, a time when most everyone is both so judgmental and so afraid of being judged that the whole thing ends up being a communal hazing experience. Everyone is the person being hazed and everyone participates in the hazing. And some fair better than others.

I faired okay.

I had really great friends. I still have them. I hope to have them until I die. And I think I will.

And yet there are still people I wish I had never met. There are still memories that make me cringe. And, quite frankly, there are a couple of people I'd like to backhand just for the joy of it. But only if they are tied to a chair and can't possibly chase me down and return the favor.

There was this one girl, she was so mean. Absolutely the quintessential mean girl. She would suddenly decide she loathed a girl and then spread the most awful rumors about her. Something involving anal sex and saran wrap in lieu of condom springs to mind. And then, just as suddenly, she would decide she liked the girl she'd previously hated and want to be all BFF with her and for some reason the girl would total be friends back.

What, I ask, besides hazing accounts for such a turn of events?

Only it turned my stomach and I still can't stand even the thought of that traitorous wench. She's dead to me. Only she still walks around in my head sometimes. So maybe she's zombie to me.

Sometimes I wish I was handy with a machete.

Anyway, there were other things. Like boys. We all kissed the same boys. With a surprisingly communal laissez-faire attitude. Like a cookie swap. As in: you have to try this one! seriously! amazing! And then the boy would be kissed as recommended and the girl doing the kissing would report back to the group.

Side out! Rotate!

Just like volleyball, only, at the risk of bragging, I kind of knew what I was doing. I cannot say the same for volleyball.

We had these monumental, historic, crazy crushes that achieved a level of obsession that clearly must have been more about us than the boys in question. I mean, I've perused my yearbooks since I left high school and there's not one boy in them that would actually stop the world to melt with you. Or even one I'd particularly die to melt with. There's just not.

Only we didn't know that then. We were insanely wrong about those boys. With the notable exception of Diosa--who married Blackstone--and from all accounts is still melting.

I think back to how early we had to be up for school. I can't for the life of me figure out who came up with a 7:05 start time. That's just wrong. And bad planning.

I mean if they had started school at closer to ten or so, I would have--I'm sure we all would have--slept in and then had to attend classes until my parents got home from work. I would have spent more time being supervised. I would have spent less time being sleep deprived. Because let's face it, with as hormonal charged as I was, it's not like I could really afford sleep deprivation.

My judgment was plenty impaired already. And back in high school I needed not even a modicum of help from my old friend tequila to make poor decisions. I could make poor decisions on my own in the dark. Okay, maybe not alone. But then again, my poor decision making wasn't limited to the dark, either.

What I'm saying is that I did not have to be lead astray. I knew the way to astray. No map required. I had astray on autopilot.

Ah. I remember astray fondly. Like a foreign country I was once a foreign exchange student in, a country that almost felt like home, but was ultimately too exhausting and exotic to spend my life in.

I can only be thankful that I took pictures because I doubt I'll ever see astray again for as long as I live.

Even back then, astray wore me out. I remember fondly those mornings when I would kiss my mother goodbye, trudge out into the snow, walk around the block and come in through the backdoor in my room, where I would hide out until she left for work.

Note to self: having a door to the exterior in a teenager's room is a terrible idea. I don't care how idiosyncratic and quaint New England-y a house is: board up the door.

Of course, had there not been a door, I would have simply gone in through the window. That's what my brother did.

Anyway, I remember fondly those mornings I would sneak back into my own bedroom--instead of out of it--kick off my shoes and climb back into bed to get a few more minutes of precious sleep. So that I would be well rested enough to sneak out of my room later in the evening perhaps. Or maybe just for the sake of the sleep.

Sometimes--more often than not, maybe--I would still attend my extracurricular activities even though I'd missed school that day. After all, I lived closer to the school than the student parking lot and could hear the bell ring from my house. Which is why we so often ended up at my house after school. Or during.

I can remember a fire drill or two--maybe three--where Bookgirl, Diosa, and I just walked off campus rather than wait to be let back inside the building. 

Even then, we made our own rules.