I am a firm believer that every once in a while, the world tries to tell me something even if I don't want to listen. Lately I have needed some serious mood revivalling.  I have been thinking about a lot of things.

Last week as I was driving home, I some how got to wondering why I have not finished the long awaited new entry to E.M. and a few other entries I just didn’t conclude.  I have the regular excuses of time and lack of emotional energy to get further in the chapter but if truth be told (which is really why we are all here) I have been avoiding the E.M. series.  It’s not because thinking about him is hard. I knew this would have a two edge sword effect when I started this.  I know how this tale ends. I was there for the wonders of the highs and I felt the pain of every low.  That’s not what stops me from opening the file and typing out my misspelled prose. It’s the finality of the project. It’s knowing that the process is what gives you the extraordinary rush and then you get to the goal and… the project it is done. Recently I read a article on ADHD. It was listing some of the issues spouses of ADHD suffers have to deal with, and one was how a ADHD person gets no joy out of an accomplishment.  No I do find peace out of reaching a goal, but I find much more happiness in the process.  Although I have excepted the real life out come of E.M. and myself, the idea of finishing my tale almost feels like losing and excepting the outcome of another part of myself.

My current lesson in life continued during lunch on Saturday.  I was reading the letter from the publisher for this month’s issue of ‘skirt!’.  It really hit upon my reoccurring feeling of giving up on living my dream.  I had failed at a few dreams in my time, and some of my dreams didn’t go as planned.  I had stopped dreaming since dreams didn’t come true anyway. Dreams though are what give you hope, and when the dreams dimmed, so did the possibility of hope. Fatalistic reality over took the brightness and the shinny things that distract you from the bleakness.

By Sunday I was still thinking about having to relinquish you dreams.  I wondered into church ready to canter.  Cantering is almost like having a job while everyone else can sit in the pews and do what it is they do to find what it is they are looking to find.  As part of the job, I need to be technically there. I can not really lose myself in the spirit of the service since I am helping to create the service.  I sang a version of the psalm 51 I have done almost every Lenten season. In most cases the verse the majority of people seem to focus on is 10 – ‘Create in me a clean heart oh God’. I have read the psalm on many occasions and have developed an interruption of what the psalm tells me. I have to have an emotional understanding of what it is I am singing so I can transmit an ideal into the melody to help the congregation. As I sat down for the homily, Fr. ‘I am a converted Presbyterian’ started by saying we would be taking about dying; specifically dying dreams. He then took the psalm I had heard at least a thousand times in my life and ripped every belief and understanding related to the words I had been taught or formed on it’s biblical book end. The short version is that sometimes we hold onto the dream after it has died intead of morning its lose and then moving on to acceptance of what we have instead. This prevents us from seeing the other joys the new reality has given to us. If we wish to have a clean heart then we need to first accept verse 8  -‘Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice’. 

So I mulled that over through out the day. I went to bed and dreamed about broken hopes and unfilled wants.  My alarm went off to NPR as it always does and I started listen to this piece on teaching soft skills in the poor to help them get better jobs. It is a faith based program. The preacher was telling his students that if they wanted to become better citizens they needed to become “right in (their) attitudes in order for God to create clean hearts in (them)”.  Smacked in the soul by Psalm 51 again, I contemplated staying in bed a little longer.  With the time change, it is now dark when I get up… the room is gloomy and the birds are just a little too happy for a Monday.  Yet I figure the world is trying to tell me to just get over it already… so I got up, feed the cats, got ready and went in to work early, and took what Monday had to offer me.

I really want to tell you my day went great, but life is funny that way.  I got a new project due in 5 weeks and my deadline for two others was moved up.  I have 3 projects to finish by April 17, another by April 28 and a third by May 2… So now I am looking for the joy in my newest broken bones.

A prevalent self-configured mystery in my unending quest of analyzing my life (in order to improve how I live it; at least that’s what I tell myself when I ask…) has been why men don’t ‘pay attention’ to me. They just haven’t.  It affected my self-esteem in the past and influenced some of my choices in how I handled myself and situations.  I want to explain/examine some of my thoughts on this issue for ground work on some future entries and serials. This is a concept I only discuss (vaguely) with close friends yet I am hoping in this faceless and nameless medium I can explore this further.

I know the first thing the majority of males look for in a member of the opposite sex is appearance.  Before all of my friendly male readers go shooting off comments on my generality of the male race, note I said majority; not all. I’m using realistic and scientifically based reasoning (even the Discovery Channel supports this opinion, so I can’t be all wrong). If you are not in the majority (I pin most of you on the non-majority side of the fence after getting to see how you talk about you families), when you’re done with this entry, maybe you can give me some insight in to the ‘generalized’ males.  

I know I am not attractive in the traditional sense of the word.  This ‘belief’ is not because my father never told me, or I was mistreated as a child.  As I have mentioned a few times, my life growing up was average, almost text book in its normalness (although we never had a matching sweater shot…). I have a lot of great assets people would kill for (or pay a lot of money to get).  My hair is naturally wavy. It was naturally healthy and radiant with multi colored stands of red and gold interlaced in mousey brown hair.  In the sun it looked like an expensive natural looking dye job.  My skin is very fair and with little blemishing. The oiliness had insured that I had very few wrinkles until the drugs left some deep muscle ones around my eyes and mouth. (My dermatologist tells me only surgery will remove the lines and I’m too young for that; I’ll wait for my skin to catch up with the grooves.)  My eye lashes are so long, they leave little lines on my glasses if I put them on before the mascara dries. My figure is not scientifically ideal.  My hips are bigger then most.  I admit to having a proportional looking body, but only because I learned to stand with my shoulders back to sing better, thus my chest looks bigger then it is. My hip to waist ratio is not the biologically pleasing 7 a male instinctively craves. I also knew that to whoever loved me my looks would not matter. I have always believed it is what we carry inside that is a true measure of what we are and how we are judged as being beautiful. I figure by the time ‘beauty fades and we are all on an equal playing field, I lot of guys will discover if they got a total package. 

Having drawn people since I was 9, I know my features are not proportional. If you draw people as you see them, you learn a lot about what is and what is not beautiful. My realism pencil work got me the scholarships to pay for a private art college if I minored in Illustration. Thus 12 courses of drawing (including  6 in life drawing) has allowed me to look at features in an analytical way (have to be ‘detached’ to draw male nudes for 5 hours with out giggling or breaking out in a cold sweet… sigh) As a portraitist I explain my look as intriguing. I like to draw intriguing looking faces.  I know they have their own beauty, and I am quite comfortable in admitting I have my own liveliness, it’s just not the type that would be commented on (as either drop dead gorgeous, or hide in a closet).  If we passed each other in a crowded airport, you probably wouldn’t notice me. My look is not rememberable.

I was not asked out until my junior year in college.  I had gone out on group dates, and my friend who didn’t have a boyfriend either would call our latest crushes our boyfriends to mess with our parents.  I had asked out what few guys I dated in high school and the first two years of college myself.  We go out a few times and that was it.  The first guy I dated dropped me off by 9:30 (I was 17 and without a curfew…). He called me back - a week later - to tell me he thought we should endit. My track record in college was no better. 

I asked one of my close male friends why guys didn’t want to date me.  He was very frank, “you scare the hell out of them”. I was shocked over this. I wasn’t even 5’-0” at the time and lucky if I weighted 100 pounds.  I asked for an explanation.  “<Lilac>, you’re too observant. It is like you look right into a person and understand them sometimes better then they understand themselves.  That scares them.”  As I was weighing that statement, I was wondering if the guy who made that comment had figured out if he was gay yet, or if he was too afraid to tell me (I had to wait a few years before he confided in me).

I’m not sure how to describe this; but on many levels he’s right. I tend to attempt to figure people out: not intentionally, my mind just starts assessing and adding together all the bits and pieces I hear, witness, perceive and know about a person. That sounds exceedingly judgmental and even stereotypicalistic; but it truly is not.  I know how it feels to be ruled and found lacking. I have a propensity to give people the benefit of the doubt and my respect; they could only lose it by concrete actions. My friends call it my ‘<lilac>dar’.  They would invite me to coffee with there current boyfriend or girlfriend and ask for my impressions.  Knowing that what I say has consequences tempers what I relate back to them.  I also know I have been proven wrong,. Most of my friends thankfully make good choices in dates and mates. The irony to my over observing is I can tell friends when people are noticing them.  I have a ‘model worthy’ friend who is oblivious to here surroundings or the effect she has on the males she leaves in her wake.  The only reason she met her mate is I pointed out her husband to her (who was a drooling jarhead trailing us from bar to bar at the time) after he had sent over a drink and tried to ask her to dance (twice). 

When I had my first serious relationship, it was a navy guy who lived two and a half hours away.  He asked me out in the middle of a party (I was running the 4 liqueur stations) after I recited the history of the U.S.S. Hornet (unsolicited) as I pasted him and his fellow officers while they where drunkenly trying to figure out her date of commission. (I worked as a guide for a navel museum at the time.) He figured anyone who could fire off an answer might be worth getting to know. I met him for lunch the next day (I was a poor student, and needed to be feed…) After exchanging phone numbers, we ‘dated’ for two years: long distance; through 6 deployments; the Gulf War; 2 summer breaks; 5 sets of architorture studios; my thesis; and his moving to a different yard 4 hours away.

Under no liberal definition of dating would you call this typical.  We talked when he was home almost every night, but I would go up to 3 mouths not hearing from him if he was shipped out. I saved all the letters he sent me, well over a hundred, but I ‘saw’ the guy only seven times the entire 26 months we where seeing each other. He was either gone, or I was on break over 1200 miles away, or I didn’t know he was coming home. I got flowers sent to me overnight (and with a note in his hand writing) when he was in the gulf the day after I was attacked in my car. He sent me presents from Morocco at Christmas in 1991. We talked about what we wanted out of our relationship. It worked at the time for both of us.  He had a loyal girlfriend waiting on him who he could send letters to keep his sanity, and I had a boyfriend who didn’t interfere with my goal of getting my degree or lowering my GPA.

There were signs all was not as it should be. I was raised a good little Catholic girl, but he was a converted Catholic zealot who wouldn’t even think about breaking ‘the rules’ of mother Rome. He wanted to ‘wait’ until we at least engaged. I also had this feeling he was holding something back from me. I knew he could not discuss some of his military duties, but I never really knew what it was he did. All that changed after I graduated.  I headed back to cheesehead land looking to get some more degrees so I could become an academic.  Navy officer had a Phd in criminology and his commission was ending.  He had talked about the FBI; and maybe going back to school himself.  On day he called to tell me he was recruited by the CIA.  Apparently his navy job was counter-intelligence.  I can’t talk about it, but the bottom-line - if I stayed with him, I would have to forfeit my goals, my dreams, my plans, and maybe even my family.  I refused to surrender my rights to my life when he loved the United States more then he loved anything else.  I didn’t want compete with a mistress as daunting as the security of the world. Last I heard (1995ish) he was in a former Soviet State. 

I dated a few people after that, although I had to ask them out.  In 1994 this restaurant manager asked me. ( my second offer…oh) I ate there about twice a week during my lunch hour from my job as a floor manager  at a department store for jewelry. We had a four dates and all was going… ok.  I had gotten a mother/daughter talk a few months back on how I was being too picky in my dating. (If they don’t ask, how can I even have someone to be picky over…?) So I ignored the little ‘<lilac>dar’ going off and attempted to just go along with this for awhile.  He would send a flower to my job the day of our date. (I did not tell him where I lived so he had to send them to the store.) By date five, I was invited over to meat the parents (who were a little strange, but amenable).  After dinner he got out this scrap book about ‘us’.  (We have dated 17 days, and you have a scrap book!!!! Sorry mom, but this is way out of the realm of being picky!)  He even had possible lists of good days to get engaged, days to get married; even a page for ‘baby’ names.  I drove home that night looking in the mirror the whole way (taking back roads and farm equipment lanes, making sure no headlights where following me and that I knew the family who’s land I was trespassing on in case he found me; 20ish miles to get to his parents house, over 50 miles to get back.). The next day he stopped in on my day off to take me to lunch (flower in hand).  I very carefully explained to him I was not ready to get married, and we really had nothing in common, (I’m only slight strange, but you’re a full fledge psycho-puppy pal on the level with Norman Bates…) He was calm and we reached a ‘mutual agreement’ to see other people and to let this continue naturally. I didn’t want him stalking me or jumping out from store racks.

Then the flowers started.  Everyday. Even days I was not at work.  Huge arrangements of roses and exotic flowers.  They came non-stop, with notes asking how I was, and if I missed him. We alerted security in our store and the mall. We where planning to have a meeting with the local police detail when I got the flowers that ended my niceness.  Flower delivery 16 (or maybe 17); the note stated, “I saw you with that jerk down at the club you take home with you, you bitch.  I can give you so much more.”  With an undercover security guy in tow, I walked (ok it was a brisk march in heals across the road… I was really angry…) to the restaurant and went into his office, threw the flowers, still in the water and vase, on his desk (destroying the papers and computer readouts in too neat of stacks), and stated, “its over.”  I turned and marched back. That night when my brother stopped in to get his girlfriend a birthday present, I told him about the guy harassing me, and how he had seen me taking his drunken self home the weekend before.  Apparently the guy had also hit on the brother’s girlfriend too.  Baby Bro, the next day (as told by one of the hostesses who worked nights at the store) went into the place, and picked the guy up by the jacket about 3 inches off the floor and told the guy to leave his girlfriend and his sister alone. Never saw the guy again.

I just don’t ‘attract’ guys (who are not nuts …).