Heart Break

“This has been fun,” she says as she surveys the damage to her living room, and psyche. “Next time I need a reality check, I will be sure to go to a from blogger to author seminar where the panelists all seemed to have publicity in The New York Times, loved the interaction or people commenting on their blogs while they didn’t comment back.”

She looks around the living room at the pile of catalogues. For every one catalogue she throws out she gets seven more. One day she almost threw out a $3,000 check as it was embedded in a catalogue that was strictly about socks and even she wasn’t going to read about all the compression hosiery available.
Though yes, it’s probably better than the one she received on penile ejaculation.

“Did I really have to waste two hours, and walking time, at a seminar that was really about fairy tales coming true?” She says this aloud to her imaginary dog Toto who seems to be really eating catalogues.

She feels rather less than. Despite somewhat having a rep for shameless self-promotion, she is really rather shy and has only successfully networked when she felt within her comfort zone.

She can’t tell if she has done everything wrong, from writing too many posts that were self-revealing, to not writing enough posts that explored her fun side, or if she is just badly in need of a blogging break.

She will probably not take one. She understands that is difficult for people to understand that she is both brazen and shy. She understands that people assume her to be very connected because she lives in a magical Island.

Only the Island is made out of rocks and they do cut at times. For sometime she has been feeling that she doesn’t live up to people’s expectations. Oh yes, she understands that the only expectations she has to live up to are her own.

This has been a unique period in her life. One that has given her much satisfaction, and has also forced her to confront something that she was in denial about for a decade. She has sought help and found it surprisingly or not from bloggers who can’t give concrete help but a wonderful type of empathy. She is happy about that.

She can’t imagine being a blogger and not commenting on other blogs. The people on the panel said how much they loved the interaction but it all seemed to be one way, comments on their blog. That’s not blogging that’s writing a column with published letters.

She wishes that it was September not December. She had to buy Chanukah presents and couldn’t find proper gift boxes for the gift cards teenagers adore. That angered her as the Upper West Side is home to many Jews. Being Jewish isn’t just a religion but a heritage as most Jews weren’t citizens of the country that their families come from. She is glad that most Jewish girls now want to be Bat Mitzvahed, that they are proud to be Jewish.

She hates it that people assume that if you’re Jewish, you’re an automatic supporter of Israel, a country that has made many mistakes. Yet it is a needed country and not for the reasons the radical right want to exist. After World War Two concentration camp survivors were further treated as scum by being put into displaced persons camp. The USA didn’t want them. Few countries did. She can’t help but wonder if countries such as America had been more generous with their immigration quotas would this whole Mid East mess exist? It is one of the many reasons she firmly believes that “illegal” immigrants should be permitted here.
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Did she really have to waste last night at a seminar where she learned it’s all about fairy tales but baring that networking and contacts will do. Isn’t that something that everybody knows?

She also celebrates Christmas because all her friends do. She thinks people should celebrate all holidays. In the blogosphere many people go out of their way to be inclusive and that makes her happy. Though being from New York she only experienced anti-Semitism once in Boston, of all places, when she worked at something that was really an anti-busing front during college, and in the blogosphere because many members of the radical right confused it for something that was their personal property. That’s passed, but she has learned to be vigilant

She buys presents for all the kids. Does a 21 year old college senior who is the top sales person at a very luxe hand bag store count as a kid? She knows Katie half thinks of herself as a kid, and wishes that she didn’t have any responsibilities, and half loves it because her grown up life is just beginning and is exciting, and will grow more exciting now that she broke up with the fiancee from hell who she still pines over. Katie of course doesn’t see it that way.

But as with most things in life most of us have to experience romantic heartbreak. Maybe that’s what life is really about, heartbreak of one kind or another. No, it can’t be. Then why live? People in Darfur must be happy if they just survive the day. She silently curses another 21 year old who is more mature and has made her too aware of the genocide in Darfur. This isn’t really the time of year to be thinking of genocide though she just might push it on people at the first ever family holiday reunion for the New York/New Jersey relatives.

Shit, she really has to get back in touch with her lighter side. She really has to offer her help for this reunion. She really has to win lotto. Oh right, she would have to play it to win and somehow never does. If there was only an assured lotto for people who receive the most amount of stupid catalogues.

One of the members of the blogging panel said “the ones who want to contribute and don’t want to get paid, they get blogging.” That would be an accurate and good statement had he not made a small industry out of blogging. One that pays him. The more she thinks about his statement the more she realizes how egotistical and self-serving he was.

She is cynical. She is jaded. She isn’t up for commenting so she can’t post. It’s neither fair nor right. Blogging is in someways the best thing that ever happened to her. People reacted to her blog. But now she wonders if personal bloggers shouldn’t come with an expiration date.

She learned at the seminar that some people might or might not be overexposed. “Why buy the cow…?” This one is tricky as it looks like she has said everything about her life, but really has left out many major events. An entire marriage for one thing. The long version of her life with Zachary, oh she has left many things about that out. The wide variety of men she was with post-Zachary, and come to think of it. pre-Zachary.

Though sometimes she really does feel like the punchline to a blogging joke. She can’t help but delve into her feelings as blogging as made her so aware of her problems, and that’s really not a bad thing

She needs to get her mojo back. She needs to feel great about herself. She knows that nobody is entitled to anything but death and taxes, but people should be entitled to feel that they are the greatest thing since Weight Watchers made cookie and cream bars.

Yes damn it, this is self-serving and whiny, but not as self serving as the man who believes that he should be paid, since he has a book contract, and is paid for his blog, but people who write for it shouldn’t.

She curses all her obligation for the month, and then decides that’s she’s lonely. How contradictory and stupid is that? She’s lonely for something more. Something great. Something personally fun. She wants to relive the past 30 years knowing what she knows now. No she doesn’t. Just parts of them, and only in the past decade.

She has recently come to some personal revelations and knows how much she has cheated herself out of because she didn’t feel worthy.