Saturday Night Festival of the Bullet Point

• My latest obsession is The West Wing. I'm not even watching them in order, I just grab a random 4 off the Weekly shelf at the video shop, and watch them one after another. I am watching these shows instead of living life - instead of laundry, groceries, cooking, instead of calling anyone, reading books, going out and doing things. I lie on the floor on a mattress and watch these shows and feel deep feelings, I am moved by them and experience grand emotions, but if I'm just lying on the floor alone in my house doing that, then really I am just lying on the floor alone in my house. These emotions do not contribute anything of value to the world. Life is action. Watching tv is neither action nor life.
• I am still sick, it's been nearly 3 weeks, and before that I felt pretty bad anyway, remember, it was just before I joined the new gym? It's all due to complications from asthma. Today I started the more intense medicine. And tomorrow I should get out in the sun and move around a little bit. I'm sure I will be fine, but I was just remembering how when Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven she and most of her neighbors had been experiencing a bad flu epidemic, for several weeks. It makes you feel a bit like Sylvia Plath, having a cold.
• I had a dinner party last night (which went very well! new record number of people I cooked for), and one guest bought a bunch of tulips, saying she has had a real tulip thing recently and loves watching them. They didn't look like much yesterday, just flat green leaves with little green buds of the same colour. But today. I have been home all day and have been watching the buds turn from green to orange before my eyes. It is remarkable. I can't wait to see what they do next. I understand her tulip thing, and am very grateful.
• *(If you're wondering how I had a successful dinner party but am as sick as Sylvia Plath, I've just been taking drugs and soldiering on. Most of my sickness is feeling bad from asthma getting worse, and that's not the kind of thing you postpone stuff for, you just pretend you feel fine until they go home.)
• I am waiting, waiting, waiting. I don't know what I want.
• There's something up in the stars with Virgo and Saturn, I'm not sure exactly what (see Astrobarry for details) and it's supposed to make you kind of anal and care a lot about details and having everything in its place. And I can kind of feel the pull of that feeling, the last few days. I wanted to get all the dishes washed and put away. I de-cluttered the house for the party. I want to make lists and schedules.
• All my friends were on the radio last night. One of them had a two-hour spot from midnight as a kind of audition for a regular spot, and he rang the rest of us up to interview us. The main theme of the interviews was just things we're passionate about. I think it has potential, this theme for a radio show. It was interesting to hear what my friends had to say, in that context. It was also just really cool to have so many people I know be suddenly in the media, even though perhaps with a smallish audience.
• Have been having reconciliation dreams, as I think I mentioned before, and my theory was that I would have them any time I slept longer than eight hours, but last night there was a variation - a dream about the Lying Liar. In the dream we were just friends, but he was definitely much more open and companionable than he actually is in life - I might have been blending him with my old friend from PhD days. Anyway, it's progress, and certainly less unsettling than the ones about my ex, but I wish I could be having dreams about some appropriate man that I might actually hook up with in the future.
• Not that there is any such man on the scene at the moment.
• Speaking of which, I have heard three times in the last week, from men, that it is a fact that women can have sex any time they want, all they have to do is go get picked up in a bar. The first time I heard this I was about 27 years old (at a job interview, but that's a separate story), and I was outraged. It sounds like a completely anti-feminist thing to say, I suppose because it implies that every woman alone in a bar is asking for it. But it's also patently not true! Women have absolutely no control at all over when they have sex. They have to wait until a guy initiates something, until a guy asks them. It has always seemed to me that in fact just the opposite is true, that guys can have sex any time they want, because all they have to do is go up to someone and ask them. So, it must be the case that it's just hard to have sex for everyone, and each side thinks the other is making all the decisions but it's not true. But it has left me wondering how it would work. Could I actually go to a bar by myself and get picked up? I've always thought that it was impossible, no guy looking for someone in a bar is looking for someone like me (fat, old, plain looking, intellectual, geeky career, etc.)(psst this is the point where you break in and cry out, "But you're not old! You're not fat! You're not plain looking!"). That if I got any attention at all it would be in a Diane Brimble kind of way. And also in a Diane Brimble way, it's so risky - I have a clean bill of health STD wise, what would be worth risking that, for a lifetime of herpes sores and etc. worse things? And how can you tell if he's an axe murderer? How you tell is you go out on a few dates before you have sex, of course, but that kind of defeats the purpose of going out to the bar, and then you're on the side of, "You women, you tease and make us jump through hoops and get all hung up about commitment and love and buying you things, but all we and really all you want is just a root." I don't want to be that woman, who makes a guy take her out for three expensive dinners and talk about commitment before agreeing to do what they both knew it was all about in the first place. Manipulative, that is. Anyway, the whole thing has made me really wonder how the whole thing works. What happens in bars? How would anyone meet me, or start a conversation and see where it led? No idea. Well, some idea. But I'm not curious enough to go try it out, I don't think. No sordid GHB death for me, I don't think so.
• But above musings have been making me think, maybe I do need to get out there, in a more general way. And not sit in my house watching West Wing so much.
• It's just two years now. The anniversary was this past Thursday, which I hoped to celebrate with my rock and roll friend who was in town for one night, but he had a bad case of the cold that I gave him when I went up to Brisbane, so we had a quiet one. It does feel good to be on the other side of it. And it has been a good six months since I've had any real contact with the guy. Probably a good sign that I have no idea the date of the last time I saw him. I think it was the pizza dinner, when it was nice but I spoiled it by calling his new ho-bag "Ho-bag". But maybe that wasn't even the last time. It's nice to have no idea. It's not an anniversary I'll be marking.
• I want to spend tomorrow doing lovely, fun things. I hope I don't get caught up (like today, sort of) and it gets to be 3:30 and I'm still in my pyjamas so by the time I could get showered and into the city all the shops would be closed anyway. I need to fill the well, a bit. Having a cold makes you depressed. Having my time so very closely micro-scheduled as it has been for the last few weeks, maybe even months, makes me crazy. I want to do some fun, beautiful thing that makes me lose all track of time.
• A new romance would do that. Talking all night on the phone, lying in bed for several days running. A honeymoon period where you so delighted with each other that you lose yourself in bliss and the world goes away. Yeah, that sounds kind of fun. I could do with one of those.
• Anyway, I'm waiting.
• But the tulips are nearly all orange now. Who knows what they will do next?