me: should i put an emoticon in this text?
natalie: no.
me: why not?
natalie: because he's not an actor.
me: oh.
(silence)
but he put an emoticon in one of his texts.
natalie: oh, should be fine then.
i'm finally coming round to emoticons, but don't get me started on emojicons....
...
in quotes
You won't do it at the right time. You'll be late. You'll be early. You'll get re-routed. You'll get delayed. You'll change your mind. You'll change your heart. It's not going to turn out the way you thought it would. It will be better. | Kate Moller
my manhattan
in my manhattan
dating mojo. or something like that.
in finding love
i have this pair of earrings. not terribly exciting. little diamond studs. but i love them. they're practical--all purpose things that for the most part i can sleep in without them poking me in the neck.
when i dated a guy a few years ago, one of them came loose while we were making out (like teenagers) in the middle of his living room. i quickly took it out, put it on a counter, and forgot all about it--other more pressing matters were at hand.
and for the rest of our relationship i'd ask him to remember to bring the earring and he'd say that of course i'd be over again and i could get it then and on and on until we broke-up.
and you know? i'd be damned if i didn't get that earring back.
(remember? i posted about it here. it was awful).
for a long time i knew exactly which stud it was that he had held onto for so long. somehow it seemed important.
in the next few months i found an almost identical pair at a fraction of the cost and quickly snapped them up.
and time moved on and i lost track of which earring he had had and then i lost one from the original pair and one from the backup pair and was left with two studs that didn't quite match, but still, i loved them.
they got me through a lot.
and then this fall, i lost one of them in the crevice of another man's couch. and the same day, lost the other somewhere on his bedroom floor. and it became this thing--this joke between us.
those earrings are still lost somewhere. and somehow i'm okay with that because it was never really about the earrings it was about the guy, and the guy from the fall, well, i was okay with him having my secrets and my earrings. i knew he'd protect both.
but just a few weeks ago, when i found the same pair in anthropolgie on sale, i snapped them up, because not only are they still great earrings, a girl's gotta get her mojo back.
and more earrings means more stories.
i'm still working on my own "letter for our daughters"
two days ago i posted this. about this. i'm working on my own letter right now. and this is what i got so far:
... there's no such thing as perfect. it doesn't exist.
you don't owe a man love simply because he loves you. you don't choose who you love. you will fall in love for better or for worse mostly against your will. what you do with that love--that will be the choice, yes. but don't attempt to give love to a man simply because you think you should.
should. a mostly terrible, unhelpful word. get rid of it. throw it out. eradicate it from your vocabulary. and build a vocabulary. be better read than the person next to you. intelligence is not a liability. don't apologize for what you know or how you know it.
you're going to have some bad first kisses in your life. and then, when you least expect it there will come one that undoes you in a long, gentle whoosh. head to toe. it doesn't mean you'll marry this man or even see him again. it means it was one. hell. of a kiss.
real power doesn't ever diminish another person. your success doesn't mean another person's failure.
there's going to come a day when you're skiing and the conditions are less than ideal and there's more ice on the slope than you know what to do with and so you give up a little control and your turns will be smaller and you'll be moving faster than ever before and you'll find that actually, oh, this is where control lives. take this metaphor with you into the world--take this lesson. but be brave enough to give up in the first place.
figure out what you love and never apologize for it.
loving yourself and investing in that love does not make you self-centered or an egoist or too proud. it makes you about as smart as you can ever hope to get in this life. that love becomes the well-spring of faith and empathy and imagination and boundless courage...
thing is, i want to know what you all would write. in fact the blog exists primarily because of reader submissions, so why not write your own? i sure as hell would love to read it.