Mystic Pizza

Standing in my underwear in my kitchen, eating three day old cold pizza out of the box, a singular thought occurs to me. A year ago today I was in India.

And I live in a time warp.

How can it be that an entire year has passed? And more oddly, how can it be that almost an entire month has passed since Tim and I went to Shreveport for Carly's graduation?

Graduation weekend was one of the best weekends I've had all year. It was so great to be back in Shreveport, in fact, that in the car on the way in from Plano, I cried tears of joy. I'm not kidding. I thought about being in a car, on the way to see my friends, having a whole weekend of Shreveport ahead of me and I started crying because I was so happy.

And the weekend was no let down. It was more than amazing to see everyone. Kacie was in rare form (I think she was the outward expression of the giddiness I felt), everyone was in a supreme mood, the food tasted better, the weather was more tolerable, even the nap I took in the hotel was far superior to any other nap I've taken this year. Just walking into the stupid Target in Shreveport felt like walking into the Louvre or some glorious temple of commerce and capitalism. Let's not even mention the drive-thru daiquiris.

So why didn't I write about it in my blog?

And why haven't I written about Memorial Day Weekend? It's not like there's nothing to report. In fact, Tim and I took a pretty impressive vacation.

We rented a car and drove to Cape Henlopen in Delaware, where we camped for one night and then spent the following day getting patchy and ridiculous sunburns on the beach. (It was too cold to swim--the kind of internal-organ-clenching cold where you'd actually rather haul yourself all the way to the bathhouse to pee than get in the ocean and do it.)

When we were breaking down camp, a tiny spider swung down out of the rain flap almost dropping onto Tim (who was sitting in the tent, with his feet outside on the ground) and I said "Hey silly spider, don't go on Tim" which is when Tim and I both saw the OTHER spider that was ALREADY on Tim and we lost our minds a little bit. She was not only the size of a nickel, she was carrying a couple hundred baby spiders, which exploded EVERYWHERE when poor Tim slapped her off his leg and I dropped the rain flap on his head and we both started screaming.

Ah, the stuff that comedy and nightmares are made of.

After the tragic spider event and the procuring of quality sunburns, we came home for a night and then took our rented car to Gettysburg. I like the idea of Gettysburg. Not that it's the site of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War--that's terrible. But that the entire town and all of the woods surrounding it are inside of a giant national park. Everything is clean and green and pristine and covered with hiking trails and historical markers. My kind of place.

The only really disappointing part was the gift shop with its Battle of Gettysburg mugs and shotglasses and the weird pink baseball hat with hearts all over it. What sort of statement is THAT supposed to make? "I like, totally loooooove the place where almost 50,000 Americans slaughtered each other in three days Ya'll!"

Puzzling to say the least.

And here I am, weeks later and I haven't posted pictures or talked about it at all. At this pace, all my "news" gets stale and all my funny and exciting stories start to sound like that boring 20-minute story your co-worker wants to tell you about this one guy they knew in high school and the time they... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Still, for the past year, it's been driving me nuts how many intentions I have. I intend to finish Trina's baby present (as of one month ago). I intend to paint my toenails (as of three months ago). I intend to send out this stack of greeting cards I bought (as of two months ago). I intend to order groceries (a week), put my laundry away (two weeks), finish reading Dune (a month), upload my photos, call my friend Eben, put away my jewelry, go to the zoo... write on my blog.

None of it happens and I think I've finally figured out why. There are two reasons.

The first is that my "real" life only happens between 5:30 p.m. on Fridays and about 1:00 a.m. on Mondays. Any other time is my non-life when I have work and I have to wear terrible business casual clothes in public and decide what kind of monotonous sandwich/soup/salad I'm going to pay too much for at lunch. So when a month passes for everyone else who, I flatter myself in imagining they're waiting for me to post on my blog, only about a weeks worth of "real" days have passed for me.

In real life, it's not unreasonable to go a week without writing on one's blog. Unless one lives in a time warp.

The second reason--and I've known this since the minute I started dating him--when I'm around Tim I'm just a generally less-productive person. Most of my artistic impulses come from, and have always come from, the fact that I'm an only child and I like to entertain myself productively. Now I have someone to entertain me.

Not to mention that a great deal of art comes from wondering "WHAT DID I DO WRONG?" and "WHY DOESN'T ANYONE LOVE ME?" Which are not things that people in healthy relationships often have time to feel. (NB: I'm not saying that single people necessarily feel that way, I'm just saying that those who do are more likely to write bad poetry and create ugly art in proportion with the amount of free time they have--myself included.)

Once again, I intend to do all sorts of creative and fulfilling projects but I end up just sitting on the couch with Tim, watching Jeopardy! or playing scrabulous on Facebook even though we have a real Scrabble board not five feet away.

On weekends, it's worse, because his time warp and my time warp collide creating a sort of cosmic time-gap where it takes us 24 hours to make one 2-hour trip to the bookstore and a whole load of clean towels can disappear into a black hole where it won't re-emerge for sometimes up to four weeks.

What the solution is to any of this, I don't know. But if you don't believe that it's as dramatic as all that, take note: the only reason I'm writing on my blog now (over a month after my last meaningful post) is because Tim is at a softball game and because I had a major revelation while eating cold, hard pizza in my underpants.

These kinds of things don't happen every day.