Strong Enough

The other day as I was getting ready for the New Kids on the Block concert, [totally worth the 20 year wait] I was crimping my hair in all my 80's glory when the power went out in half of my house from a storm.  I went down to my dark, powerless basement and flipped the switches in the breaker box to no avail.  I was going to be late for the concert and figured nothing could be done at the time, so I left.  Make that, tried to leave.  Dummy me, I wasn't thinking that my garage door needed power to open.  It was a picture worthy of Candid Camera - me in four inch heels and a hot pink dress dismantling a garage door opener. I returned home five hours later (after a glorious regression to my eight year old self) to an empty house with no power and a flooded basement. 

No exaggeration, I've come home to worse.  I pulled out my fridge and ran an extension cord to it from an outlet that worked, looked up the numbers for the electric company and my general contractor, and went to bed.  Woke up, called them both and had everything fixed by 9 AM.  Thank God it was the transformer and not something wrong with my house.

Getting my garage door back on track was a little more difficult.  I googled how to do it and it said it was a two person job.  The instructions didn't seem all that complex so I went out and tackled it.  More minutes later than I would like to admit, with the aid of a folding chair, I had a working garage door again.

I am awesome.  Take that, storm!  Make me sleep with no A/C for a night?  Child's play.  No power to my sump pump so my basement floods?  That's nothing.  Garage door needs dismantled and put back on track?  Fuck you, I did it in stilettos.

Cue "Rocky" theme song.

Fast forward to this past Friday night.  I had dinner with my best girlfriend from high school, C, and her wonderful husband.  We cooked a phenomenal meal, laughed, drank wine...and I listened to why they feel I am single and what I need to do to change this.  [We went through three bottles.]

This topic seems to be coming up a lot recently.  This fourth of July, after several margaritas, my brother and one of his best friends and I were sitting around the fire pit and the two of them started discussing why I was alone and what kind of a man I needed.  At the time, I thought my witnessing this conversation was some sort of tequila-induced hallucination.  [After all, we later snuck onto the golf course and hit gasoline covered, flaming golf balls.  Go America!] But just last week, my two sweethearts of roommates (my mortgage isn't going to pay itself) told me that they were talking about how they couldn't figure out why I didn't have a boyfriend.

Each time these conversations have occurred I have felt like perhaps I am having an out of body experience, or I have somehow acquired a superpower of invisibility.  Nope.  Apparently it has become fair game for my friends and family to publicly conjecture why I am single.  OK, maybe conjecture isn't the right word.  My brother and his friend, one of my closest friends of 12 years, and two women who live with me probably have at least a decent grasp on who I am...

Among other things, the recurring theme from all three:   I fix my own garage door.

I have two initial reactions to this.

1. I should not be listening to other people.  They are inside the box thinking, Stepford wife loving, sticks in the mud.  I am spontaneous and adventurous and free-spirited and sometimes slightly stupid.  They're afraid I'm going to do something and end up dead.  I'm afraid I'm not going to do something and end up dead.  When I mess things up the most is when I allow other peoples' fears to creep in to my world and influence my actions and decisions.
2. Are you fucking kidding me?  I'm alone because I don't seem to "need" a man?  Just because I'm perfectly capable of standing on my own two feet doesn't mean that I don't want to share my life with someone.  It doesn't mean that I am a badass all the time either.

There was an ad I cut out years ago about running that said, "I run to take out the garbage in my mind."  Apparently I need to up my mileage.

I've been reading a ton lately, thinking a lot [so what else is new?] and writing like a crazy person.  Reading?  Economics and correlations between perfectionism and procrastination.  Thinking?  Sex, love, relationships, career, new city?, risk-taking, travel, and what I truly want out of all of those.  Writing?  Fairy tales and how they don't relate to real relationships, and how I don't want to live in a romantic comedy.  Can there be two "alphas" in a relationship?  Also, wedding season - endless material.  All of these things combined have resulted in an absolute explosion of wordiness.

Brevity is not my forte.  While I try to pare down and focus my thoughts, here is all I can seem to come up with right now:

I'm fucked and not in the way that I want to be.