I love this book. It has helped me with a lot of things "around the house" and I've renewed it twice, returned it, then checked it out again, that's how much I love it...I just wanted to share a few pages from it. The pages came out oddly because every time I tried to photograph one the book flopped off my computer and onto the floor so that I tried holding the book down with one elbow while taking a picture. Okay, that's more than you need to know...anyway, this book is truly helpful!! :)

silly things you write in very weak moments...

I think about you often, even though I like someone else, someone in real life I must stop liking. The idea of you, I must admit, came rather late into my life. When other girls were planning their future weddings, with as-yet-to-meet-boys, I was wondering why I wanted to BE a boy, why I felt the need to protect instead of be protected. I never once thought of what my wedding would be like…because I knew I’d never have one. Women like me didn’t have that option.

But the idea of you persisted…in my dreams, in my thoughts, in my heart. Every solid fact proved again and again that love and I were not meant for each other. Lonely hearts are stubborn, though, and very much delusional…and I feel (however wrong I may be) that you’re out there (somewhere) no matter how many years or miles away.

I’m sure I AM wrong (that I’ll get over my someone in real life and someday met YOU and you’ll actually, maybe, possibly, love me back) but it gets me through bad days and I dream about it (actual dreaming at night) and so I sometimes let myself believe (however wispy that believing is.)

I imagine what you’re like, more often than I should. You are kind and smart and sweet, very loving and loyal and faithful. You’re stronger than I am, yet still feminine.  You wouldn’t mind that I’m not wildly experienced or that I am old-fashioned when it comes to romance and love. You would adore me and I adore you and hopefully we’d grow old together

Does that sound silly? Of course it does! Maybe it even sounds creepy. But, for me, that makes it not one bit less true. Even if I never find you, I will always hold on to the idea of you…just a little bit of false hope to hold on to on during those long nights when the world feels like such a lonely place.

Please, dear you, please if you’re out there, able and willing to care and love with all of your heart, please come into my life sooner rather later. I’m not very pretty nor wildly fascinating, but I have a huge heart and a desire to be everything to the woman I may be lucky enough to find one day.

Most sincerely,

me

 

There's no point in going anywhere near my bookcase if I'm planning to clean. I just found Expensive People (highly recommended if you read Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and, not sure this is the right word, liked* it) on my shelf and completely forgot I had it...and now I'm reading it, dust rag now forgotten. Darn you, books! :)


*Gillian Flynn's books are well-written and captivating, but her characters, much like Joyce Carol Oates', kind of make your skin crawl.


1968

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





I have had this dream many times over the years, though it's not always the same and not troubling like my other recurring dreams. I go to the bookstore to get lesfic titles and the clerk hands me Harlequin romances instead.

It's one of my less mysterious dreams. There's no hidden judgment in the clerk's eyes, there's no "You should be straight, not gay. Read these books until you turn." It's not that at all. It's more of a misunderstanding, plus the fact that most bookstores don't even have a lesbian fiction section.

It's also more like memory and how I used to read Harlequins like there was no tomorrow and how I often projected myself, as the reader, into the male character. Sometimes, if I were lucky, I even found Harlequins that were written from the male point of view, so that the feelings the main character had, romantic and otherwise, were for women rather than men.

Even in the classics, where romantic feeling factors in, I see myself in the male characters, not the female.

"Well," he said blushing, "personally, I'd like to love the same woman all my life."--from A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

But the dreams can also can be different, and heartbreaking, like last night's, where I found a lesfic plot within a Harlequin while I was waiting at the airport and twirling a paperback rack around.

In the dream, I could see the cover, though I couldn't actually read the words. I rarely can read in my dreams. Still, as soon as I picked up the book its entire contents jumped into my brain and heart.

One thing was for sure...the book was a morality tale, not a positive love story...kind of like pulp fiction from the 50s and 60s, where the main characters could only be together (temporarily) if, in the end, they were severely punished or one of them "went back" to men and the other was clearly seen as "not right in the head."

I turned to a stranger near me and begged for an understanding of why people in love couldn't be together without people making a fuss. The stranger, surprisingly, comforted me and said some things would never be understood.

After that, I woke up sad, feeling bad for the two women in the fake book, who seemed as real as the sheets I clutched, who couldn't be together just because of who they happened to be.

from the front of Desperate Asylum by Fletcher Flora

"I think emotions affect your body as much as X-rays and vitamins and car crashes. And whatever it is I'm feeling right now, well, God know what parts of my body are being demolished. And I deserve it. Because I'm not a good person--because I'm a bad person who also happens to be lost."

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland is one of his best! I'm finding it so very relatable, but I still have a ways to go with it...meanwhile here's a review from Publisher's Weekly:

 

Starred Review. Two misfits find common ground and a unique, surreal friendship via unspoken words in Coupland's latest (after JPod), a fine return to form. In the two years since his wife's (nonfatal) cancer was diagnosed, Roger Thorpe has devolved into a dejected, hard-drinking, divorced father and the oldest employee by a fair margin at Staples. A frustrated novelist to boot, Roger considers himself lost, continually haunted by dreams of missed opportunities and a long ago car accident that claimed four friends. His younger, disgruntled goth co-worker, Bethany Twain, one day discovers Roger's diary—filled with mock re-imaginings of her thoughts and feelings—in the break room. She lays down a supreme challenge for them both to write diary entries to each other, but neither is allowed to acknowledge the other around the store. Through exchanged hopes and dreams, customer stories, world views and cautionary revelations (time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties), the pair become intimately acquainted before things unravel for both. Running parallel to the epistolary narrative are chapters from Roger's novel, Glove Pond, which begins having much in common with the larger narrative it's enclosed in. Coupland shines, the story is humorous, frenetic, focused and curiously affecting. (Oct.)
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