I have been single for what seems like an eternity. Despite a smattering of dates here and there, I’ve hit a drought. And not just a seasonal drought, it’s more of like a sub-Saharan multigenerational kind of drought.
I don’t know how this happened, it didn’t start as a drought. It started as a break. A break from all the stormy weather you encounter at the demise of a relationship. I was going to take some time to reconfigure what it meant to be Giyen. But then break turned into dry spell and then into a full on drought in just a blink of an eye. I am just now encountering the notion of dating again. And am now one of those people who says, “Where do you meet guys? The good kind?”
At this point, I have been in relationships most of my adult life with some massive dating before and in between. I keep telling myself that I am going to start seriously putting myself out there but I never seriously do. Perhaps I am suffering the ill effects of too many RomComs. Or maybe it’s just harder to meet someone when you’ve become a woman of a certain age. So many guys that are in their mid-30s are ready to start procreating and I am not there. I will never get there. I don’t plan on having any more kids. As a single mom this means I am looking for a “daddy type” who doesn’t want kids. Where the hell do you find that (aside from someone who could be the age of my daddy as well)? Plus, Seattle is not known as the easiest place to meet people – a.k.a. the Seattle Freeze. People go to coffee shops and open their laptops and put their headphones on – instead of going to coffee shops to talk to people. This is nuts.
All I know is that watching Jon, Bryan, Hal and Mark, husbands of Dooce, Mighty Girl,Girls Gone Child and Cool Mom totally made me miss having a partner. But not for all the reasons that you would imagine. It’s just that I have a really odd sense of humor and I laugh all of the time. Sometimes to myself. I think it would be good to always have someone standing next to me so I don’t look crazy laughing to myself. That’s where a husband fits in. I think that it will cut down number of instances where people think I am nuts. Maybe by 50%.
Well it’s official people. I’ve been trying to hold it in but I think it’s safe to announce that I will be working on my first contract blogger project – a panelist on Momversation.com. I have just signed the paperwork and am getting ready to pdf it back today. Momversation is a recently launched “video show and forum community for women” that features some big names in the blogosphere like Dooce, Finslippy, Parent Hack, Mighty Girl and Work It Mom. I have been following their individual blogs for a long time and they are rockstars in the industry. This makes me transcend the “groupie” title into becoming an official “hanger-on.”
I would totally be lying if I said I wasn’t over the moon about this. The Korean in me wants to say how excited I am really fast and then never mention it again because that would be almost as distasteful as actually mentioning that something awesome happened in the first place. Now that I think about it, the Korean in me says I shouldn’t even be blogging at all … I am a bad Korean.
The only thing that is equal to the excitement that I am feeling right now is the fact that I am completely terrified. I think that I have taken more photos of myself this past week than in the past 7 years in my Shrinking Giyen project. Now I am going to start videotaping myself. Seriously, this is crazy. I am so uncomfortable looking at myself that I actually had to switch the sidebar widget to my main Flickr feed because I don’t really like looking at myself and things seem all the better when my self-portraits are mixed in with other photos (as to somehow disguise the fact that I am taking pictures of myself). It’s neurotic, I know. You can still keep tabs on my daily self-portraits here.
Okay, I am gonna breathe a bit and let myself lean into the fact that I am happy for the first time in a long time. QB made some crack about me “not going Hollywood on him” then advised me to go read Margaret Cho’s “I’m The One That I Want” – which I actually finished over the weekend. I really didn’t know much about Margaret Cho until I read the book. But after reading it I can definitely say that much of it is familiar to me and my life. There are a lot of commonalities about self-esteem issues and personal hardships in there. At the very end, Cho sums up how I am feeling about life right now:
“I believe that when you take those first steps in loving yourself, the universe conspires with your soul to keep that love affair going.”
A few years ago I the cynic in me might have thought that this was metaphysical crap. Now, I’m drinking the koolaid.
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, BlueHost, Freshbooks and OpenSky may take you a purchase page of a company where I am a member of an affiliate program. As a result, I will often get a small percentage of the revenue or a commission off of something you have purchased. I am not otherwise paid to link to these sites, nor do I link to any products that I don't actually use or covet in real life. On the rare occasion I accept payment to review a product, it will be duly noted in its associated post.
