Desire. Ask. Believe. Receive.

Blah. I'm tired, I can't break this diet plateau, I'm drinking too much, I have no motivation, the same makeup application that last week made me look tousled and sexy today makes me looked like a burnt-out 20-something junkie college student. I just want some damn excitement and energy. I fell asleep meditating on it last night, I guess I was expecting to wake up more hopeful. Maybe it's just too soon. Maybe I just need to keep praying and meditating on finding my goal/path to meaning for longer than one night. Ya think?

My attention span is just so relatively short though and I'm such a slave to my cycle that I'll give up because I'll hit that week-long span or so where all I care about is sex with as many people as possible and I'll get knocked straight back to go, without collecting my $200. I'm just so tired of this same pattern, over and over and over. I read all the right books, you know? I do so many of the right things and yet here I am, writing the same entry I wrote 6 months ago and a year ago and five years ago and at this point even 10 and 15 years ago. 15 fucking years I've been doing the same things, having the same thoughts, and dealing with my issues in exactly the same way. At this point I'm feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day--why bother making any changes, obviously nothing is ever going to change. Though I guess he perseveres and takes the high road and attempts to make it as good as he can and eventually he does break through it, but I'm just so tired. Today I want to steel Punxatawny Phil and drive off a cliff.

That's clearly the only reason I was so caught up in the physical and the mundane all week long. Putting on eyeliner, control top hosiery, making eyes at the guys at work...This week it's totally like "get up, get dressed, whatever, and could you please step away from my desk while you're at it? It makes me crazy how quickly I jump from one astral focus to the next though, it makes it feel impossible to actually know myself. Maybe I should just be ok with that. I mean, who said I had to be either "slutty party girl" or "silent spiritulist?" Maybe I can just be ok with flipping back and forth for awhile...

I guess that's all I have to say right now.

I'm tired. Ooooh, here it comes again...I feel dissatisfied with my life. (this is soooo cyclical). I have my period and feel at once exhausted with life and the prospect of making anything of mine. I'm tired of being hit on at work, I'm tired of my going nowhere friends; I want to travel and write and learn and change and feel passionate about what I do for a living. Mostly I want to be a good mom to Suzie though and I can't do any of that if I'm off in some Ashram in India for months at a time. I need to somehow reconcile my need to run with the fact that I've been gifted with this amazing daughter and I need to do all I can for her.

One cool thing that I've essentially forgotten for the past decade is that an an Antioch alumnus (alumni? I think the singular is nus...) I can audit any class offered (that's got a space open) for free. Not for credit of course but I couldn't care any less about credit. I thought maybe I'd start in the winter but I don't really want to be commuting to Seattle once a week once the weather hits. Come spring though I think that could be a viable option.

In the meantime though I'm thinking that my goal is to figure out how to be happy with what I have. I need to stop running and constantly looking for more and instead find the more in what I already have. How deep is that?

kinda bored now. I'm going to go read for an hour until I can go home.

Today's lesson--what do these two natural phenomena have in common. Actually, it's not my intent to delve into this riddle at all this morning. I'm simply going to discuss both of the. Or, rather, what I mean to say more accurately is, neither of them.

Where could I possibly be going with this early-morning, dream-inspired entry opener. Simple. Shifts. I'm talking about shifts. Or shifting, as it were. Paradigm? Geological? The always correct answer for the fashion-impaired? No, nothing so grandiose as any of that. I'm just talking about little old me and my current trend towards (finally) growing up and changing how I view the world and my place in it--a little.

So, long time readers of this blog (hellllo...Is there anybody out there? --read this with just the slightest tremble of trepidation as I stand, nearly alone, in the dark cavern that has become my blog.) will/might/ could quite possibly remember that way back in the misty pre-history of before I found myself pregnant with Suzie I had the tiniest little crush on a bass player from town. Maybe crush isn't the right word. Passing interest? No...Unrequited love? Not exactly...Obsession? Yes! That the word! I had a relentless, ridiculous, hopeless, staggering, and ultimately humilitating obsession with a guy who, for all intents and purposes, treated me pretty badly. Nothing abusive really; to be honest, I don't think he was interested enough to be abusive. Mostly it was just me, letting myself be taken advantage of and for granted because I was trying so desperately to win his affection; to win, period.

It ended, quite naturally, about six months later than it should have, when I was nearing the 6 month point in my pregnancy and my priorities had shifted, very appropriately, to where they needed to be focused, taking care of myself, and my baby, and my growing family--and not a bit too early in the uninterested guy's opinion, I'm sure.

So here we are, fast forward two+ years to the present. I've got a gorgeously temperamental toddler and have been so busy giving her nearly everything I've got and dealing with all these libido-suppressing breastfeeding hormones to boot that I've hardly given a second thought to any extra-marital (or marital, for that matter) activities. But all of a sudden something's changed; in the past month I've felt so energized--you know, like really fucking horny energized, almost constantly. I've been emailing quite a lot with an old boyfriend from high school; a guy at work that I've had a mutual attraction thing with for a good four years has really been upping his game (or lackthereof unfortunately); and now, to top it all off, I was visiting the home of the aforementioned unhealthy obsession (not visiting HIM per se, but his landlord, the crazy woman who originally inspired me to begin this blog) and he was clearly, in his own lackluster way, hitting on me.

Something has clearly changed. I don't know if it's my current cocktail of hormones, the pheremones I'm secreting, or just that I've finally lost every last bit (and then some) of the baby weight I've been carrying around but people, and by "people" I mean "men" seem really to have started paying attention to me again. It's an odd feeling, after feeling kind of "momish" and invisible for almost two years. So when this former obsession so romantically emailed me the proposition that we could "you know, get together again, sometime, maybe, if you wanna." a BIG BIG BIG part of me (like, probably close to 120%) thought something along the lines of "you bet your ass I wanna."

In the meantime though, I've been absorbing (as I mentioned in yesterday's much more succinct post) a really great book. The Goddess Rules, by a 20 or 30-something (I'm leaning towards 30-something) British novelist. As I mentioned to Andrew yesterday, I go through phases where I absolutely adore this Bridget-Jones genre of fiction. There's always just something heroic about the normal, usually slightly overweight, often a little mousy title character that gives me hope. In this particular novel, our heroine, Kate, begins a friendship with a fictionalized but thinly veiled 60-something Brigitte Bardot who, despite her advancing age, has clearly still got it. As is the standard course of action in most novels of this ilk the main character will generally be spurred on by some catalyst that encourages her to drop a few pounds (stone, more accurately as she will often, conversely, gain or inherit a more than a couple actual British pounds), get a few highlights, buy some new underwear, and most importantly, dump the cad she's been wasting her time with and who can't give her a proper orgasm anyway, and hook it up with the subtly gorgeous, kind man she's never really noticed but who's (usually) been in love with her for years and years and can rock her world like it's never, ever been rocked. The Goddess Rules was no less formulaic but I guess it just happened along at exactly the right time.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!? SHE'S FINALLY GOING TO GET TO HER FUCKING POINT!

And here it is. I've come to a point, an honest to god, point in my life where I'm no longer interested in having/willing to have sex with any man (woman, person, whatever) that isn't completely adoring of me. No more settling, no more wondering, and no more--god forbid--seducing people into it (or me, as it were) who aren't completely, overwhelmingly, and totally hungry to feel that energy with ME. That's what this former obsession's email reminded me of. Towards the end of our "relationship" everytime we had sex there was this kind of underlying current that he didn't really want to even be there; I'd talked him into it and he was too weak to stop it. How unsexy is that on soooo many levels? And while he was definitely at that top of that pile, it hasn't been entirely different with some of my other past conquests. Not only did the former partner not adore me, I'm not entirely sure he really even liked me; and judging by a recent blog entry of his, I'm not sure that's changed.

Doesn't that sound terrible? And even when it's not that ugly, I'm still not interested in hooking up with someone only to wonder if he'll still be interested, if he'll call me again, blah blah blah. It's all so tired. If that leaves only my husband for the time being, I'm absolutely great with that--he loves me, he can't get enough of me, and he can't keep his thoughts and his hands off me. It's settling to allow for anything else.

I think there's more, unbelievably, that I could write about this but I've already spent far too long on it and really need to get back to the family.

Actually, yesterday turned out pretty well. My boss' bosses, and my boss as well, were out of the office by about 11 a.m. so after a long lunch with John, I was able to sit at my desk and read for a good four hours. Sweet! I used to feel so frustrated when the bosses would leave early but I was still tied to the time clock and thus effectively hobbled and unable to leave work myself. Eventually though it occurred to me that I had just been given a significant chunk of hours to get paid for doing my very favorite (ok, maybe second very favorite) thing in the world, reading; and well, I could hardly complain. So as I've got very little work on my desk today I'm hoping for the bosses to clear out of here by about 1 at the latest. That would rock. My boss is currently at breakfast with a hottie sales rep so while I don't have the freedom to actually break out my reading material, I do have a few minutes to update this long-neglected blog.

And that's about all I've got for now. Maybe I'll do a real update later.

p.s. Andrew--I sent you a reply this morning, did you get it? I'm about finished with Comcast.

Oh come on, now that's not true! That 1/2 hour is my lunch break where I'll be able to sit quietly and read my gorgeous new slice of gossipy chicklit that I picked up at the library yesterday! If only I could read at my desk for the remainding 8 hours. As it happens, I'll probably have an hour of actual work float across my desk at different points during the day, and then I'll read the NY and Seattle Times and a bunch of blogs for a while before asking my co-workers if I can use their desks to check my myspace (for some nefarious reason only my computer is blocked to myspace.) So that's my day. If anyone has any eye-opening solutions please give a call.