It’s 8/8/08 and I know this is supposed to be a great luck day and maybe it will be, but personally I can’t wait until 9/9/09 as 9 is my favorite number. In elementary school I was sent for further counseling for loving the number 9 so much.

You can read about it in the book. it makes me laugh as I know there was nothing sinister or sick about my love for 9–it has the “n” sound which is still my favorite. I think they were trying desperately to find bad neurosis in me as I did have problems and they couldn’t accept that my inability to learn many things despite my IQ and my clumsiness etc DIDN’T have to have a neurotic basis, OK psychotic, as they couldn’t find a physical base.

I’m exhausted. So much has happened since the beginning of July. I’m proud of my LIP article. It was a coming out of sorts as I sent it to every living relative. My relatives were always great to me–well my one year older boy cousin and I had a sibling rivalry–according to our Aunt A–but when we grew up we liked each other. We really like each other. Not that we’re close

My friends are my family and my sister and her family of course and my b-i-l’s family–this is getting even more exhausting.

But my family of friends are taking over my move which is happening exactly when I thought it would. (Note to self: rethink The Secret,no don’t–it was a combination of market forces, pressure on the realtors to deliver, and much else.)

I will celebrate when it’s all over. I’m overwhelmed by everything and overwhelmed by gratitude to my friends and that includes blogging friends–Alphabet Girl Who Is A Woman Now you occupy a special place in my heart–for keeping the faith and much more.

OK. I’m a bad blogger. Last Friday night my blog disappeared and while I got it back I still haven’t reinstalled the links and much else. Too much is happening in my life. Most bloggers do respect that. I find it amazing the bloggers that will de-link you immediately, not even caring about karma and really showing that they couldn’t care less about blogging as a community.

I stopped caring about links over a year and my lack of them shows that. The blogroll will be back up shortly. I apologize about that.

I plan on enjoying the next two weeks as I have to go back to New York on 8/25 to finish getting ready to move. Lucia has taken over responsibility for getting the built in wall unit down, rebuilding the wall, and painting the living room.

My sister thinks I should move to a college town, me being a great mind in need of constant stimulation and all that but I’m beginning to build myself a nice life here. I’m confused. I think I can start a book club or writing group through the library, and a writing group on the Internet.

I was going to write a post or hopefully article on what I would have done differently when I bought my apartment. Then I realized two things. Eleven years ago the info on the Internet today wasn’t around, and I didn’t buy my apartment as an investment but as a place to love and live in. Guess what? I’m going to buy my patio house as a place to love and live in also.

Me thinks I’m beginning one of those great periods of life that used to happen to me every other year for three to five years—then once a decade if I was lucky. I can’t decide if the time when Courting was hotter than hot was a great period of life or was an interesting anomaly. I don’t exactly tell people when I meet them for the first time that I have a blog and once it was taught in at least two universities and I’m a side note in blogging history.

I don’t explain why I don’t drive. Since I have been moving during the oil crisis I have been using that to my advantage and saying that I’m experimenting with living in a town with zilch public transportation without a car or valid license. Myrtle Beach actually has Greyhound buses that go everywhere, and there’s a new bus company that goes many places much cheaper and is very luxe.

I didn’t reinvent myself through my blog. I was honest but it did help me see that a person can reinvent herself, shake up her life, and become the person she was in her 20’s and 30’s before life became so complicated but without the baggage and torrid self examination

When women talk about the 40’s and early 50’s being a wondrous time, and how being over 30 brought peace and contentment I wonder about them. Did they just stop living? Were they really that together and I was missing a lot? Did they have elderly parents who were becoming more dependent and thought that was a picnic?

Life doesn’t have to be as hard as it was for me. Now that more people have aging parents, it’s not a verboten subject. My best friends found ourselves moving away from each other during our 40’s for many reasons. We have found our way back to each other, and this is a subject I might explore in my blog because if there was a mistake to be made I made it. Fortunately they love me anyway.

Stumble it!

I still have a blogroll. It just doesn’t show It will later today. I don’t know whether I’m going to put my blog on hiatus until I’m more settled or not. I wanted my blog to glide along effortlessly until I was ready to return to real blogging. However….

I want to scream. All week it’s been too hot to go to the beach during the day. Not that I go all that much anyway and I live less than thee blocks from it. There are always errands; always things keeping me from it. But I go in the evening and walk miles. Last night I looked at the beautiful light falling over the ocean. Duh. Lightening–and not heat lightening.

Today I had to do something for the lawyer. Not my lawyer. The buyer’s lawyer. This might be a buyer’s market but I resented that. It was something stupid–I had to pay something that really wasn’t expensive. But the damn principle. I guess I hate it when people nickel and dime me as I’m so the opposite.

I feel like screaming. The walk made me sweat but didn’t do jack shit for my mood. I walked back with groceries, and groceries, a mile and a half at least and 90 degrees feels like 110 don’t go well together.

I hope to care about something other than this someday. But I thought I was through with renovating that apartment. I have to take the wall unit down–it’s built in–redo the wall and paint the living room. Well no, I’m not going to do it personally. I have a best friend who used to be a girl contractor. Though she volunteered and offered her daughter and all our friends I feel weird. Very weird.

I have to face up to demons, my own personal ones, I have been avoiding for a few years. I have to pack, arrange for the move, and do everything in one month. For so many months life dragged on but i was tied to my computer and cell. Glad I didn’t get a Blackberry or Apple Phone–would have died in the great cell in the sea incident.

I was so tired of waiting and now I don’t know how to describe how I feel other than crazed.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

There is nothing you cannot achieve if you want it enough, and if you keep telling yourself that fact you will be surprised at how quickly your dreams start coming true. Just make sure that what you think you want is what you truly desire. Don’t lie to yourself.

Usually I do feel like this. Today however my apartment is taking too long to go into contract and everything feels out of my control. I will probably feel differently tomorrow or maybe even this afternoon, but I so need to feel control over my life.

Being in control has always been the most important thing to me. I have been trying to learn to live without so much control, and thought that I was succeeding. But waiting slowly for each step with my apartment and then feeling guilty and as if I can’t write about it because at least I can sell my apartment. Why should I feel so guilty about something I have worked so hard for? The contract should have happened already and each hour that it doesn’t makes me think I will have nothing to feel guilty about.

It’s not as if selling my apartment is my end goal, though at times it feels it. I want to sell my writing. I know we’re supposed to be coy about that and if we get a book contract say that was the last thing on our minds, until the first comments come telling us how we didn’t work hard enough or some such thing, and then we’re supposed to say “What do you mean? I had a plan. I read every damn writer. I mimicked their styles. I studied proposals. I did this….”

I’m an insatiable reader. However I’m truly incapable of the master plan. The only way I can get a book contract is by writing a book. I have been.

My blog will be four years old this month. I will probably put in a lot of picture posts once I stop getting an error message when I try to. My article explained my problems. They’re not excuses but it’s hard to have my problems and feel that I’m not excusing myself from things that are so easy for most people.

I hate feeling the way I do. Vulnerable. Sad. Scared. Lately I have been imagining what my life would have been like if I didn’t have NLD and I have to deal with that loss also. The loss of self that could have been, and really should have been. I do feel robbed as I’m so close to “normal” and can truly visualize my more “perfect” self. I try not to do this but I have a feeling that it’s part of the process of reclaiming me.

And I do like me very much. I’m a great friend, sister, relative. I’m fun. It takes very little to get me laughing. I want to be laughing a lot more and hopefully will be shortly. I know I will be as I will be in New York for most of September, friends will be here later in the month, family will be here when I come back.

And hopefully I will get to buy a house. My bff Lucia said that’s when I’m going to turn into a true Puerto Rican as she’ll come down (she was a girl contractor) her sister C will be here, C’s husband W who was one of the original VP’s for Home Depot and a supporting cast–everybody has to inspect everything.

I was going to write a post about how my three best friends and I decided to share our homes when we get older. We will have two Manhattan apartments, a house in North Myrtle, a house on a Long Island Sound town and a house in Sag Harbor.

This way we can remain in control and not be dependent upon the one child among the four of us, or hopefully anybody else. And we will be laughing. A lot.

Stumble it!

It was just another 90 degree in the shade Friday night and I was planning my day tomorrow when something made me look at my sitemeter. It stopped working at 4:54 PM. But there was more. My whole blog disappeared.

I don’t want to go into the whole story of how I was begging my old design and host company for months to change my custom WP as I wanted to be able to make changes myself.

My head feels as if it were split open and not stitched back together so I’m just going to thank Jess of Delicious Design Studios for saving my blog, and I do mean saving the entire blog.

I was able to successfully back up my blog for the first time. Once again I had been blaming myself for a problem I didn’t cause. It feels so great to have control. Thanks Jess

There will be minor differences in the template that will or won’t be noticeable. Or maybe major ones!

I wasn’t going to say anything as I know how hard it is for so many people to sell their homes, but my apartment–well it’s good, it’s very good and by November, I should be the proud seller of my apartment.

In New York we “go into contract” and the coop board has to approve the buyers. It’s a long drawn thing made longer by banks doing whatever they’re doing these days.

It’s almost too good and while I know how hard I worked to make this a reality I will believe it after the closing is over. I know the song I’m going to put in my blog. Began singing it to myself. Thought I wrote an incredible song–with music. Then realized Stevie Wonder did many a moon ago.

There are too many one bedrooms on the market Mine is smaller. I bought it in 97 and priced it much lower than the Uppper West Side apartments mentioned in this article. If the sale doesn’t go through I will be miserable, and as I said I can’t be too excited until the closing

I rejected totally insulting bids from people who couldn’t pass the coop board. I found myself not only being insulted for myself but for the building. The people who I hope to go into contract with and then close are perfect coop residents and not dependent on Wall Street at all.

If this falls through I will take my apartment off the market, live in it and try when the market rebounds. It would be the end of a dream, but I have to believe that everything will go as planned.

Signed:
Somebody who used to have a good grasp of the English language but lost it tonight; I feel as if it should be August Fools Day

Stumble it!

Thanks Bone for the words.

I apologize for the triteness of the dialogue. This is a writing exercise and I have too much on my mind and other things happening. I really don’t want to write about my apartment sale until the middle of October–November, however–it’s never ending and there are more things I have to do that are kind of funny.

I loved and felt privileged by the award Cooper gave me. I hope to give it out next week

A couple of years ago this was a nice townhouse complex. Now she wouldn’t even go into the greasy pool filled with foreigners who yelled in strange Asian languages, and all variations of Spanish, she thought as she banged the wall with her broom. Damn kid. Screamed constantly as the kid’s parents talked over her in Chinese or Viet Namese, and didn’t care if neighbors got any sleep or not.

People moved out in the middle of the night. There were foreclosure signs everywhere. Marilee grew tired of banging on the wall. Cigarettes. Damn she was out again. She took a butt from the large silver plated tray that fell. She wasn’t going to pick it up.

Once she had girls to do things like that for her. When she had moved to the townhouse it had been a temporary measure for a girl used to living in 10,000- 5,000 square feet houses with full staffs.

She had moved to Vegas at the end of the Rat Pack era. You could tell a gentleman gangster from the scum wannabes of today. Oh she had been aware that many girls her age became hippies but she laughed at them. They didn’t know about glamour, about gentlemen paying a lady’s bills, about things necessary for a girl’s survival.

Marilee had never made it as an entertainer. Occasionally she would be in a chorus line but it didn’t matter. Marilee and her girlfriends measured success by the size of the rock, the size of the house, the cut of their man’s suit, the silk in the shirt and tie, the Italian loafers and the size of their feet. Still a girl couldn’t gamble with her future.

Marilee became a craps then 21 dealer. Later she became a floor supervisor. Then her rotor cuffs went and she got sciatica; the secret ailments of the Vegas dealer. The money for the seventeen operations ate through her savings. The men who once couldn’t leave her alone couldn’t be found. Still she had the town house and some money in a bank account. One day she would get back. She was keeping the money in the account for facial renewal purposes.

The doorbell opened.
Oh, it’s you. Could you get me a cleaning woman?

The tall girl with the thick brunette hair and smile that could have powered Vegas frowned.
Mother you owe two months mortgage. I’m not going to front you any more money.
Lesley I gave you money for law school. You wouldn’t have the life you have if it weren’t for me. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t have life without me.

Marilee wheezed. The cigarettes were beginning to catch up with her. She sat on a chair and put up her swollen legs. Who the hell did Lesley think she was? When she was a girl she had everything Marilee never had. Lesley was smiling. Marilee remembered all the time she had spent arranging people to take Lesley to the orthodontist. All the money gone to Lesley’s mouth. She looked as if she whitened her teeth to the max. Marilee would have approved if she could stand anything about her daughter.

Lesley sat in a chair across from her mother:
I’ll get straight to the point mother. The other day when you were dead to the world in an alcoholic haze I tried cleaning this mess. You’re not at the top of your game mother anymore. Not even close. I found Johnny’s will. He left everything to me. You spent my inheritance and that fabled law school tuition. You paid for one semester. I had to work my way through school but at least I was a good dancer. Yes, mother people wanted to see me dance. I was a headliner, no thanks to you. I know you told people not to hire me. They laughed at you. You were washed up by the time you were my age and never knew it.

You omitted to tell me that I was Johny’s heir. I found the letter he wrote me. He wanted to know me. You wouldn’t let him. You told me he wanted nothing to do with me. You were scared I might like him more than you. You deprived me of knowing my father and I never can forgive you. How you managed to hide everything for so long, god I’ll never know. You knew he had a dangerous job and could be killed at any time. You’re the ultimate bitch mother.

Your bank account–it’s in trust for me. I had your name taken off. This house is in my name. I’m your landlord mother. I paid off the mortgage, and I might just evict you.

Oh, Lesley, stop being so melodramatic and get me a cigarette.

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If Karl Rove goes to jail, my heart will burst. The arrogant prick thought he was better than any of us. He thought he was above the law and spent five years secretly investigating the former Alabama governor

This would be a law way overdue. Keeping pot illegal is to nobody’s interests. It’s a very selectively enacted law and just serves to give poorer people and/or Black people records.

Stumble it!

I have long believed that while this country has countless problems it needs healing more than anything else and Obama is the perfect person to do that

The Bush admin has spent almost the past eight years fracturing us, beginning with a crime of the century, the stealing of the 2,000 election. It doesn’t matter whether you think he had the numbers–the recount was a model of political sickness.

Here’s just one more thing, the Bush admin has been guilty of–hiring Justice Department attorneys

If anybody wrote “a good young liberal, pro civil union, atheist attorney,” heads would be rolling. And who is anti-marriage? Gay marriage isn’t on my personal top 20 issues, but I do understand the want for a union to be recognized, benefits to be shared etc.

Someday we will look back at this time as a very sad and sick time in our country’s history. Oh we do now. Let’s reclaim America–and who cares what the color of Obama’s skin is? If he bled green I would have problems but he bleeds red so…

Stumble it!

McCain’s playing dirty. Obama would have loved to meet with the troops. Money can’t buy that type of PR, and any American would love to meet injured troops. Anti war doesn’t mean anti troop But as he took himself off the ballot in Michigan because it was against the rules, he didn’t meet with the troops.

I love Southerners. They bang at my door, almost invite themselves in, tell me their life stories and then tell me how gracious I am. Once is strange; but twice in three days is a pattern. There are townhouses in the complex for sale, and the lock box doesn’t have the keys. There are a lot of people home but I’m the only one who feels compelled to answer a door knock.

I’m not going to talk about my New York apartment until after the closing which should happen sometime in the decade so I won’t jinx anything and because I do feel so blessed to have an apartment that I can actually make a profit from.

After I close I hope to buy a patio house. They’re adorable houses with very little land and decks off many rooms and sometimes an inner courtyard, but not in the Mexican or South Western way.

I lived in a house in Oaxaca off the Pan American Highway that looked like nothing until you went into the courtyard. It was filled with sculptures, comfortable chairs, tables, plants and birds.

No these houses aren’t on that scale but I love them. Lucia’s used to going from the house to the beach to Wal Mart. I introduced her to the different hoods. She could never stand looking at the patio. We walked from the patio to an enchanted world filled with beautiful houses, community pools, and truly nice people.

I took her to Cherry Grove and she fell in love. I live in Crescent Beach/Ocean Drive. I spent months looking for Ocean Drive until I realized it’s a hood that personifies shag dancing. I have no idea what Ingram Beach is as I have only seen it on maps.

Sadly or not I learned that Lucia is a bed slut. When we were young we would share beds at times and she would hog the covers. Sometimes we would come to one or the other’s homes after a wild night with prey uh men and I have no idea if she hogged the covers or not. We don’t have that type of friendship. Once she and her sister C were staying at my studio on East 63rd Street. C lived in Atlanta and they didn’t have sex stations on cable yet. Lucia and I shared my bed, C took the couch.

She stayed up in awe watching the channels (have to editorialize and say I found them totally boring, but I guess if you’ve never seen people undressed on TV…) I would wake up every hour or so as Lucia would hog the covers or kick me;C was still talking. I think we had a six hour conversation that I didn’t remember at all. Apparently I’m very good at talking in my sleep or almost in it. That began C and my friendship–and now I’m her tenant.

This is a beach house so it has many beds and adorable roll up Urban Outfitter’s Chinese mattresses and other things like that. I offered Lucia every bed in the house including mine or rather C’s. Lucia was here for five nights and slept in four different beds or bedrolls. Always said she was a slut. And did tell her that if I had any same sex inclinations she would be the one.

I don’t remember what Lucia and I laughed about. Neither does she. We have an ability to look at each other and laugh.

When I first met her I was dating a guy at work who had a thing for the guy Lucia was dating. Lucia and I weren’t friends yet and were totally clueless as to their sexual adventuring, I guess is the phrase. It was the 70’s and people did things like that. Especially guys.

I remember one day Vinny had us follow them to the subway. I found that very strange. They were arguing and I finally realized what Vinny wanted as he almost jumped over the tracks to Ed’s side.

I was dating other guys. It was the one time in my life I could keep more than one guy at a time–I want to say straight but that doesn’t seem right.

Vinny was strange. We went to a party in a loft on the Bowery in his white Caddy–very embarrassing to begin with–but he kept running to the windows to see if it was still there or if the snow had covered it. I can’t believe I dated him for two New Years Eve’s which was a very big deal then.

Lucia and I became friends the following fall, after having never spoken to each other for a year. I don’t think there’s a person in the world who would have guessed we would have become each others true life partners in every sense but one and yes that is a big one.

To all the people who thought Lucia and my friendship was a flash in the pan, and we were very well known at our job which kept half the unemployed actors, artists and writers in New York in work, I say “I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. Even if she is a bed slut.” It was weird but people delighted in talking about us.

This is number two in an occasional series on sluts.

And Cooper–who is anything but a slut and gave me a great award–I will be giving them out on Wednesday.

Can I still call myself a woman and a blogger if I didn’t go to blogher? It reads so institutionalized and “we who go are more committed and better bloggers than you who didn’t take the time.” My life’s been more than a bit unsettled and I wasn’t going to make reservations or commit to something I didn’t know if I could go to. San Francisco’s not exactly around the corner.
I read there was a panel for baby boomers. At one time I was the “highest ranked” baby boom blogger. It didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy; didn’t give me anything but a lot of unpaid work. I’m not into talking about menopause. I don’t have kids or grandkids. My career trajectory has taken me down unique roads
I haven’t been giving my all to blogging these past eighteen months or so and part of that is because I love my blogging friends but have no desire to reach out anymore. I’m tired. I’m disillusioned. Once I thought blogging held so much promise. Now I see every MSM magazine or paper have bloggers–paid bloggers. It lost that feeling of “I’m doing something well that not every person can do.” That was a great feeling and made up for the lack of pay. When Writer’s Digest for a quick example has newish bloggers who tell bloggers who have been blogging for years what they like in a blog, it’s time to be even more rad.
I’m not a prod placement blogger, a tech blogger. I write about politics but I would never consider myself a political blogger.
I’m a personal blogger who is a hopeless optimist and still believes that I can make something more out of my blogging.
I don’t know; I just find the mainstreaming of blogging to be sad. At this point in my life I have to ask not what I can do for the larger blogging community but what I can do for me. Somehow I think going to blogher would have helped cement certain things, but my life’s unsettled and more than anything last weekend was the one weekend all year I want to be all about me. One spent not trying to sell myself or my blog but in comfort with an old friend laughing over nothing

Stumble it!

Thanks Bone for the words.

It is difficult to get back to blogging. I would like to put in pictures while I work on a book and enjoy summer. Summer has always been and will always be a season of magic. No matter how long I am out of school–and I got my grad degree twelve years ago; twenty years after my undergrad degree, class will always be out in July, August and I love the perfection of September so…June isn’t bad also.

Summer is a state of mind. Summer belongs to me, me, me. Summer is a time for beach music; light things. If I take a class and sometimes I do it’s a fun one. Dream interpretation; pop culture for the classless; stuff like that.

It rained and rained on Friday and Saturday, but that didn’t stop us from exploring every beach between North Myrtle and Pawleys Island (I’m redoing my blog to make it photo friendly, and blogging from Flickr didn’t work.)

Monday was hot, very hot, but we weren’t going to avoid going to Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington NC. It was so breathtaking I forgot I had my camera. The waves were supposed to be seven feet from a storm but it was so calm we could swim. The sand did stick to my body. I felt like a kid in love with the ocean who could do everything and not care about anything. The view isn’t quite describable. A huge dune and a beach that was not the widest I have ever seen but the most beautifully shaped. Unbelievably it was almost deserted.

I’m a beach slut but as most sluts I have my preferences. I’m an Atlantic person. I know people think the Pacific Isles are the best but they leave me cold. Oh, Jones Beach will always be my dream beach though the ones I found this weekend might be a close second. And the beach near my house is great just not in high summer.

I was born near the Atlantic and I hope to die near it. Not for a long long time. Estelle Getty died yesterday. She didn’t have her “break through” role until she was 60. I knew that but forgot. Now she’s my new idol.

About Michael Savage’s comments on autism. It has always been my fear that when I write about NLD people will think I’m excusing myself and others from being neat and much more. Never. I’m harder on myself than anybody could possibly be. I will be on anti-anxiety medication the rest of my life, and don’t enjoy that. But as I suffer from such bad anxiety and panic attacks it can’t be avoided.

We have many best buds–they tend to intermingle and only one bff. I know how rare a friendship like ours is and might even write about the weekend is in depth.

Stumble it!