if you're going to break down somewhere...

....it might as well be a small grocery/gas station somewhere in mississippi with a sign on the door that reads: 'we don't sell minnows here.'

poor ansley, en route to jazz fest in NOLA. she's fine, waiting on triple a, lamenting the fact her camera battery just died, thus there will be no photos of said minnow sign.

that really is a shame.

it must be love.

[sigh]

so i've been struggling lately with little angus bean, struggling because, for several weeks, i've hated him. absolutely and completely despised the poor little bits. he's adorable, he's smart, he's affectionate, he reminds me of the boy who, after all, found the bean for me. and helped promote his nickname. bean is bean because of him. so every time i look at the poor dog, i seethe. this is not good for a healthy relationship. at all.

over the weekend, the pups and i drove out to melina's for a visit. i confessed my dirty little secret: i hate the dog. i can't bear to look at him. he's evil. 'well,' m. said, 'my sister is coming to visit next week. when she leaves, she can take bean back with her.' sister sam volunteers at a fabulous, totally cool animal shelter back in the tundra. the shelter was porter's first home. they work hard to find animals homes. they take animals in from high-kill shelters. they play, they frolick. it's not a bad place to be if you're a dog or a cat who needs love and a home.

perfect, you might be saying. 'wow, lynda must be so incredibly relieved. an option! a good option so she doesn't have to look at that poor dog every day!'

err...not really. once i was presented with an option, a viable option, i was horrified that somewhere in the back of my mind i'd ever considered really getting rid of the bean. he's my baby. he's a good dog. he was abandoned once (in a ditch, as a teeny puppy, collar on, sealed bag of dog food). take him to a shelter and abandon him again? i couldn't do it. it's not his fault. 

so. the game of patience began again. we're going on more walks. we're playing more fetch. we're scratching bellies. we're annoying zoe and mitzy. 

naomi and i even got uber ridiculous. 'imagine women who are raped during wartime and become pregnant,' she said. 'think of people who go through terrible divorces and have to raise their children alone, children who look like him!' in our ridiculousness (yes, we know, it was ridiculous) it became even more clear. bean is a dog. he's adorable. i took on the responsibility. and when he looks at me, he isn't saying 'you jezebel! you already-wrecked-home-homewrecker! harlot!'

at least i don't think he is.

today's word rocks.

this is totally why i love the english. seriously. why say something like 'gwyneth wore really tall shoes' or 'gywenth totally rocked the stilettos' when you can say something like this? 

"She arrived at the screening in vertiginous stilettos and short skirt, virtually guaranteeing coverage for the premiere in all the major newspapers the next day."

so, yes, today's word: vertiginous, adjective

1. whirling; spinning;rotary: vertiginous currents of air.

2. affected with vertigo; dizzy.

3. liable or threatening to cause vertigo: a vertiginous climb.

it was bound to happen.

it happened today. finally. for the past week-and-a-half i've managed to avoid seeing the boy at work. it's a fairly large workspace, so really, it isn't that difficult. we actually had to kind of go out of our way to see each other back in the good old days. we've managed to somehow - telepathically? - to avoid running into each other in the parking lot. no run ins in the elevator or the stairways. no...anything, really.

until today. i popped out of the stairwell and there he was, leaning down into someone's cube, intent on the computer screen. i hurried past, fairly certain he didn't notice me. it was hard to not reach out and touch his arm, offer a smile, say hello - i mean, i'm just not a mean person. but i didn't do any of those things. i hurried past, turned the first corner and that was that.

well, i wish that was that. of course it's more than that, but it's a start, right?

it's just so weird to suddenly have nothing to do with someone who for so long had everything to do with me.

'it didn't have to be this way,' betsy reminds me.
'he had six months, six months, to talk to you,' ansley reminds me.
'the person you thought he was would not have handled things this way,' i remind myself.

i'm sure i'll believe all of us one day soon.

it just sucks in the meantime. i mean, i loved him. it's too bad you can't just turn that off. why couldn't that hex have been a 'can't-fall-in-love-hex' instead of a 'can't-get-it-to-work-out-hex'? honestly. this is much worse.

witchcraft.

i have a theory about this unlucky streak i've been suffering through for lo' these many years. you should probably know that i do believe in tarot cards and witches and ghosts and the like. i've seen a ghost, at the end of my bed in my cute little apartment on the intercoastal waterway in south carolina. so it's important to know that i do not discount these things.

my theory goes back a decade, if you can believe it. and it starts with the norwegian bachelor farmer.

the norwegian bachelor farmer (from here on out to be known as NBF)and i have been friends for a very long time, almost as long as lastenia and i have been friends. he is most certainly norwegian, and though he is no longer a bachelor, his parents do have a strawberry farm in norway. NBF and I became fast friends in college. we never dated, not even once, though it's true we did once, after way too many drinks, attempt to get busy. i say attempt because it ended in fits of laughter without much having been accomplished. it's a sure sign of our friendship that we met up the next day, as planned, for dinner at aunt jane's with never a second thought about what had (and hadn't) happened the night before.

but our friendship is a good one. in our undergrad days we liked parties and drink and dance. in our grad school days, we read the paper together on sunday mornings, and he is still the only person in the world who won't make fun of my coffee brewing skills. he is friends with my family, and he often, before moving back to norway, visited with them, and became, for all intents and purposes, a part of our family.

we're all a bit surprised that the NBF actually got married, settled down, recently had a beautiful baby boy with the only girl who could ever put up with him, the lovely Ivy. if you had known NBF in the day, you'd know he was a cad. he loved girls - every shape, every size, every ethnicity. you name it, he had it. as a best friend, i watched a great many conquests come and go, some happily and some not-so-happily.

so, yes, it's NBF that I blame for my current streak of bad luck (and by current, I mean this ill-fated in love bad luck streak that's been going on for 10 years now). around the time i was wrapping up my MFA and graduating, NBF was dating a girl from west africa named anita. he brought her to my graduation party. she refused to partake in the festivities and instead sat in a chair in aunt jane's living room and flipped through catalogs. any attempt at conversation - and we MFAers are a friendly lot, as is my family - was shot down with a wicked dark look before she turned her attention again to the magazines in front of her. i don't think she had a very good time. it turned out she and bjorn were in the process of breaking up, but they were still living together. and sleeping together. of course they were.

so when, a week later, bjorn helped packed up my apartment and loaded up a u-haul and drove said u-haul a thousand miles away on my behalf, anita was not happy -- despite the in-progress-break-up.

it's then, you see, that i'm convinced anita put a hex on me, bleeding me dry of any sort of happiness when it comes to love. because isn't it true that we always blame the other girl – even if the other girl turns out to not really be the other girl?

shortly after moving me to that little coastal South Carolina town post-graduate school, NBF and i sast on the tiny deck of my tiny apartment overlooking the intercoastal waterway. we were having drinks and trying to ignore the mosquitoes.

'i don't think anita is thrilled you're here,' i said.

'no,' NBF agreed, 'i really don't think she is, but i don't really care.'

'but she knows we aren't dating, right?'

'huh,' he said. 'well, i don't specifically think i ever told her we weren't dating, but it seems so obvious we aren't.'

'really?' i asked. 'helping a girl you're obviously close to – and her family – pack up her life and then drive her four states away and then staying with the girl for awhile makes it obvious you have no romantic entanglements with her how?'

'hmm,' said NBF. 'i didn't think of it that way. i mean, it's clear she isn't fond of you…'

'understatement.'

'but i wouldn't worry," NBF said. "what can she do to you? nothing's going on with us.'

'right.' i paused. 'well, she could put a hex on me,' i said quite seriously. hadn't he mentioned at some point that anita was into witchcraft? or hexes? or some such thing? i think so. i do.

'actually,' he said, as serious. 'that's kind of true. i wouldn't be surprised. i wouldn't put it past her. i mean, she wouldn't hex me because she loves me.'

so how does a girl de-hex herself of a hex that really shouldn't have been put on her in the first place?

a new beginning. of sorts.

today i am home from work. sick. a springtime cold, if you will. it sucks. my throat feels as though it's coated in shards of glass. my cough, which is frequent and has made my chest sore, sounds like someone is beating a baby seal to death with a club. cliche, yes, but sadly true. even the dogs are shunning me. 

it's karma, of course. last week my parents had the distinct displeasure of being in town while i was effectively breaking up with a boyfriend i didn't even really have. that sounds more pathetic that it actually was. we were heading toward being a couple, until he told his wife, pulled away, got divorced, started dating someone who was not me. and not forgetting to tell me, while giving me the 'i want to be friends' speech, that because of me he's paying his ex-wife alimony. seriously, could i have felt worse? could he just have branded me Jezebel or Harlot and let it go? instead i had to play with his new, adorable puppies and cry.

needless to say, i was not a pleasant last week when my parents were in town. i was downright unpleasant. to make it up, i took a much valued vacation day on monday. i spent it with my parents, doing endless yard work. raking leaves (there are so many leaves here in memphis; no one told me the leaves would be overwhelming). spending a fortune on annuals and perennials. planting flowers. grilling. by the time they packed up to leave on tuesday morning, i think i'd redeemed myself. maybe. 

or maybe not, hence the awful springtime cold. it's warm enough out today that the fans are on in the house, which don't honestly help the cough or the sniffles or the throat, but it's leave the fans on or stifle to death. 

ansley swears karma, juju, whatever you call it, comes back with a vengeance. i believe it, i really do, but why am i the one with the horrible springtime cold and the empty bed?

oh, right. i'm the Jezebel. apparently. 

so here is what we've learned as of late, in no particular order.

1. it matters not if the divorce is in progress if the parties involved are still living in the same house.

2. it matters not that you sometimes give a leap of faith and believe what people tell you and have hope everything will work out, because sometimes it just doesn't.

3. your one true love - in my case, of course, elvis costello - will always come back to you (again, in my case, it was tuesday night at the new daisy theater with hundreds of our closest friends).

4. springtime colds are the worst - right after summertime colds, of course.

5. as much as i say i hate bean, i actually love him a lot - especially when he curls up on the end of the couch and isn't bothered at all by my wracking coughs.

6. one day soon i'll remember how to tell a story.

7. april showers indeed bring may flowers.