tallnlucky: blog

Commencement

I don't profess to know what the statistical probability of a stunning male model-turned-brilliant software engineer falling for a slightly socially awkward, jaded single Mom is, but I imagine it's not that high. 

I know that in good times, I possess a small, fleeting shrapnel of intelligence and I know, despite my tendencies to look kind of alarmingly gigantic and manly in photos, that I don't break mirrors.  I am aware that once in a while I can be funny and I am responsible with money and I probably won't spend time in prison for violent crime in the near future, but still, I grapple with the fact that such an awesome man feels compelled to look at me the way he does: in that sweet, baffling, perfect way.

When my shiny new boyfriend and I are out in public, people stare, even more earnestly when he speaks and it's alarmingly apparent that his brain is just as big as his biceps, just as stunning as his face.  I'm left rubbing my own visage, looking for errant cookie crumbs or an embedded piece of spinach, wondering what the hell I did to deserve this.

***
A few of you have emailed me and left comments asking me where Corey and I met and I at first thought I'd spin a yarn about kismet in the carrot aisle because that's what he subsists on and also: the truth is more humiliating.

You've all heard of Plenty of Fish, right, that godawful internet dating website known for trolling men in self-portrait bathing suit shots and random, dirty hookups?  That site has been the source of much of my blog fodder in the last two years: through it I've met an angry South American man who stole my Jeep, an earnest single Dad who bought me a Volvo, a fat hairy dude who undoubtedly trolls this site compiling nuggets to use against me later, and an earnest young stripper lover who I'll always have a soft spot for.  These are just the ones you know about: there were others, there were worse.  The site is atrociously embarrassing as a participant, but doubtlessly, it provides good stories for a sporadic single Mom blogger.

***
I hid my profile on the site several months ago: too many 57 year old weirdos in shredded tank tops were messaging me, and I cringed each time I didn't reply.  It was easier to pick and choose on my terms, hidden to men except those I messaged first,  even if my chances weren't great:  single Moms in their mid thirties don't float to the top of the Dating Desirability pile. It sucks, but it's true.

I chanced upon Corey's profile: besides being breathtakingly handsome, he was on the high end of my OMIEFF I'm a cougar age range, and he was a web 2.0 geek. 

I messaged him a short note about shared geekery and didn't really expect the reply that came within d day:

"You sound like someone I'd like to know.  Why don't you friend me on Facebook and we'll go from there."

I friended him and texted my friend Kgrrrl right away.  Holy shit, he was hot.  Holy crap, there were a lot of girls on his wall writing things like "Miss you lover" and "Why didn't you call me back, baby, did you forget about me?"

Red alarms started reverberating and I clicked through to his profile pictures and one of them made my heart plummet: a self portrait, complete with ripped abs, in a mankini.  In the dim light of his own bathroom.

I went over to Kgrrrl's house and we creeped through his Facebook pictures and stared some more.

"I don't think you can go out with him," she said," A self portrait?  In the bathroom?"

"I know," I groaned.  But, we kept flipping.

"He's fucking hot."

"Yeah."

"Maybe go out with him, just to see.  Maybe he'll fall in love with you because you won't fall at his feet like all those other girls."

"Ha!" I laughed."Yeah."

In the back of my mind, I was already thinking: effing wicked blog fodder, no matter what happens.

***

I met him at a Starbucks for a walk on the beach in the West End.  Alaina had encouraged me, she was staying with me that weekend and though I could tell she was dubious she was also all "Eh. What's the worst that can happen? Go."

He was wearing a white button down and long green shorts, leaning over his knees at an outside patio table, and he took off his sunglasses as I approached.  His eyes were yellow green and his face bronzed from the sun and when I met his gaze, his stare shot right behind my eyeball, and I gasped. 

There was no usual moment of stranger awkwardness as we started toward the sea wall.  He was ridiculously funny and surprisingly self deprecating and I was shocked: I lectured him about the mankini photo and he laughed and made a disparaging comment about himself and I felt myself becoming increasingly intrigued with every step.

I remember thinking that his head scraped the air at the exact same height as mine, and I felt a strange, humming electrical undercurrent between us: something tangible and strange, a lucid, sexually charged comfort that I can't quite properly explain.

  Within minutes I was telling him about the most profound, impactful and personal moments of the last three years of my life.  Despite what you read here, this is unheard of for me in real life, where I'm much more private.  But I couldn't stop talking.  As we rounded the corner of the seawall, where the waves crashed against the shore, he took a deep breath and started telling me his story.  And my heart plummeted,and I realized: shit.  This will be impossible.

And yet I looked at him, into his eyes, and I saw something that mirrored my soul.  And so I kept listening.

Drowning

He's asleep, but my body is vibrating with a melange of awe, hope, terror and gratitude, and I try to force feed this image of him into my mind.  The waves are crashing on to the black rock outside our small cabin, and I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, focus on that.

His eyelids are twitching a bit with sleep, his leg is propped over the small of my back where a heat is emanating and rising up through the light quilt.  My heart lurches and tugs and images from the last 24 hours pervade my brain like a firecracker movie reel: a plunge into cold water, naked, a spectacularly unexpectedly great dinner in a small town outside our destination, our hands, intertwined constantly, a constant euphoria, like a flowing adrenaline shot aimed consistently right into the brain.

His eyelids flutter a bit and I touch the tip of my finger to the back of his arm and inhale as he murmers sleepily, "Baby, you're up?"

"Just for a second, go back to sleep," I whisper and touch the soft hair at the back of his neck.  His eyelids close.

It's only been 5 weeks.  I think of this, through the black of the room and the steadiness of his breathing.  5 weeks is not enough time to fall in love.  People can change in the span of a few months, this is a high risk situation.  I'm out on a ledge, I don't know if I have enough time to come back in, my heart is dangling by a ripped red tendril and a small, insistent part of my brain keeps screaming: Why open yourself up? What are you doing here? But the spiritual part keeps me here, knows that this kind of thing happens once in a lifetime and force-erected barriers only serve to destroy it.

He opens his eyes again and leans into me and I close my own eyes and suddenly butterflies are swirling in rapid succession in my stomach and I am overtaken with something that can only be described as bliss. 

The messed up thing in all of this, the thing that's been perplexing me most, is that when he looks at me, I can see that he is feeling exactly what I do.  And this is the difference, the thing that I've never felt before: he is taking the same risk.  He is as vulnerable as I am. We're here together, and the awesomeness outweighs the terror.

I'm falling.  I've fallen. It's too late.

About to plunge.

I took this shot on Long Beach in Tofino, right before we embarked on a 10K run together.  Those of you who are my contacts on Facebook and Flickr will have gleaned from his photos that Corey takes physical fitness extremely seriously, and he's been a great influence on me: he subsists on fruit, vegetables, and lean protein and it's inspired me to do the same.  Running alongside the man who has captured my soul, along a pristine, glittering beach in Tofino rates among my top 10 life experiences, ever.

I am not naive enough to exclaim that this is perfect, this is it, this is the kind of connection I've been dreaming about, that it will all, obviously, end happily after ever,  There are barriers, big ones, obstacles that I'll undoubtedly write about in due time.  But for now, I am insanely grateful for the knowledge that perfect synchronization with another human being can occur randomly, awesomely, perfectly. 

No matter what happens, I'll forever be grateful for what I'm experiencing right now.

I've just seen a face

The soft waves of the inlet sluice quietly over the dock below the cliff and the late afternoon sun pulses on our already tawny limbs: the result of a surprisingly warm spring for the Pacific Northwest.  My Mom is still beautiful; cornflower blue eyes bright against the thick blonde locks of hair that curl around her face.  She is 62.  This strikes me more and more every day.

My son stomps in a blue plastic pool as a heron lands gracefully on a barnacle-crusted post on the water, and my Mom takes a deep breath.

"So, are you serious about this guy?"  She looks at me and I look at her and then I stare at Nolan, who is blissfully prying himself free of wet bathing suit.

I take a deep breath, and start to say we're just friends, Mom, he's just a really nice guy, but then I stop.

 It started somewhere around 1992, when I was about 16, when I decided to keep everything inside me, away from my parents.  They'd read my diaries then, toppled my bedroom drawers, and ransacked my closets: in search of  the debaucherous and deviant behavior they were certain I was hiding from them.

 They didn't find drugs or booze but they did find diarized admittances of the fact that I had sex with my older boyfriend and hid it: I was unceremoniously asked to  pack my bags and leave the house.  Since then, I've locked everything up from them; told them nothing.  Perhaps that's why I feel so compelled to put it all elsewhere, put it here.

"I really like him, Mom," I say and I wait for her lecture about the fact that I have a young son, about how I shouldn't be selfish and needy with my own desires when so much rests on what he needs.  I haven't told her that I've been dating at all in the last 2 years, never mentioned that I might be lonely and missing a partner.

"I like him too,"she says instead and I straighten and look at her quizzically.

"I watched, the way he is with you," she murmurs quietly, and she's looking straight through me,"He watches out for you and helps with Nolan and he treats you with such kindness. He seems to treasure you."

Inexplicably, I gulp back tears. Strangely, she looks emotional too.

"All your boyfriends,"she continues,"Over the years.  Not one of them have ever made a motion to help you: it's like they knew you could do it all yourself and took full advantage of the fact that you just would, if they didn't.  I watched Corey - take Nolan's hand and help him on the dock when you were upstairs, when he thought no one was looking.  And he took the bags out of your hand, helped Nolan into the Jeep..."

"He's good to me,"I say.

"I am so glad to finally get to see that."

I look at the heron on the dock and will back a startling flood of emotions. 

"He's the polar opposite of R,"I say.

"You couldn't possibly create a more polar opposite," she smiles, and I smile, and I start to think about so many things I should have told her, so many things I left unsaid.

***

Weekend snapshot:

Just a few hours ago, after a weekend filled with friends and adrenaline and the rush of new hope, Nolan and I took the plunge off the dock at the cabin.  He's a water boy, and I love it. 

Sheer, green, ice cold water and the unabashed joy of a little boy.  Awesome.

The BlogHer Vancouver meetup was held on Saturday, at a fantastic little local coffee shop.  I stayed for a bit and went to meet Corey afterward, and two blocks away from his house I came to a dead stop at a green light: hundreds of naked bicyclists snaked around my car, cheering and armoured with body paint.  I grabbed my camera and started snapping but I seemed to be the only one noticing.  Police followed at a grimly dutiful distance, lips pursed.  This is Vancouver.  Anything goes.  I effing love it.

On the tin boat this morning with a bounty of crab: the half face of the man who I want to say: has potential, is sweet, has an allure, contains potential.  But the reality is: he's got my heart.  I don't know why, and I have no idea how, but it's as clear to me as anything I've ever known for sure.

Bite me, Rufus

"I'm sorry - I was a little quiet around my own family," he says, and slips his hand around mine as we walk back through the sweet-scented summer dusk toward my Jeep.  I'm regretting the new peep toe heels, they keep slipping off the ends of my ankles and I'm struggling to keep a dignified gait.

"Well - it's understandable,"I say.  It was his Uncle at dinner, next to his thoughtful-eyed girlfriend, my new boyfriend's cousin and her fiance.  Conversation was kept afloat in part by my dubious small talk skills, honed by years of sales lunches with strangers.  If I hadn't blathered on, it would have been pretty quiet.
"You haven't seen them much since it all went down, right?" I ask, looking sideways at him,"That's probably what it was."

My heart catches suddenly in my throat.  He is achingly fucking handsome, with perfect white teeth and an etched Greek God bone structure, Adonis muscles breaking out of a white button-down.  His eyes now are yellow with brown flecks, though they fluctuate from green to grey to dark flashing brown. 
"No," he replies quietly,"This was the first time since then, though I've emailed back and forth with my Uncle."
We're quiet until we reach the door and he breaks into a smile.
"What do you wanna do?"
"Go to your place and make out?"
"Hell yeah."
We get into the Jeep and negotiate through the human stories speckled on the sidewalks of the funky Vancouver neighbourhood, back to his house.

***
Our relationship to date has been based on pure, unfettered honesty, and perhaps that's why the immediacy and electricity of our connection.  Things spilled out of my mouth the first time I met him, when we walked the sea wall and listened to each other intently.  But he gathered them up earnestly and delved in unapologetically with his own raw, sometimes alarming, confessions.  Neither one of us typically spill our souls on a first date but there was something about the fabric of our chemistries that fostered an immediate trust. 

***
The air on the 27th floor of a Vancouver sky rise in June smells like leftover magnolias, ocean and traffic.  There is a quiet din of the transit system whirring below, people muffled in their apartments two doors down, laughing and clinking evening wine glasses.

Thoughts are flying through my head: I am plunging too quickly, I know I always do this, I get vacuumed in and then panic quickly, wanting out of the suction hole and flailing in the debris I brought in in my initial eagerness.  But then - it has never been this easy, this perfect, I can't concoct that part of it.  There is no forced effort on my part to try to ignore a niggling doubt, an errant fanny pack or a troublesome wardrobe choice.  Though, in reality, there are more red flags here than in any other relationship I've had in the last two years, they seem like tiny crushable roadblocks compared to the long term potential: the very real awesomeness of this man.   There's no: will I see you again?  Will you like that stripper more than me?  Will you start to become obsessive and buy me cars?  There's just comfort and a ridiculously, floaty, melty feeling, underscored by an electric excitement that makes everything more vivid and hopeful.

***
He kisses me softly and I exhale sharply.
"I am in trouble,"I say, and he smiles.
"We fit perfectly."
We do. It makes me panic, it makes my heart soar, it makes me wonder what the hell is coming next.

Girlfriend

"It's a certain personality type,"Lara says carefully.  We're sitting in a light-filled pancake house, our minions engrossed in chocolate-sprinkled confections beside us, drawing studiously with broken crayons on restaurant-issued kiddie menus.

I meet her gaze evenly.

"They're gregarious, and charming,"she continues,"And they've got that addictive personality in everything they do.  With women too: from the beginning, she's the one, she consumes them and then six months in the shrapnel flies everywhere and it's done.  Just be careful, just take a step back and breathe."

My hair is tied back in a messy knot and I haven't had the chance to shower before I had to pick up my son this morning.  I'd spent the night with him last night, again, and I was still vibrating and buzzing with recent laughter, ease and the feeling of his fingers on the back of my neck.  I looked at Lara soberly: she is right.  She is warning me to slow down, in silent words she is warning this is what you always do, don't do it this time, remember your friends and your goddamned head for a change. 

I stab my fork into some green peppers and hashbrowns and swallow, but the breakfast gets caught in the butterflies that have been swimming in my stomach for weeks now.

***
Here is what I can say: he is brilliant, a software engineer, breathtakingly handsome in a way that makes people, male and female, stop dead in the street to stare at him.  He was a model in Italy and Japan, but only after he'd started up his first entrepreneurial venture, the premise of which blows my mind with its brilliance.  He is a little obsessed with fitness, and his sense of humour is so ironic and awesome that in his company I can often be found doubled over, torso muscles clenched, heaving with laughter.

The first two dates were tentative: I told him about my baggage, and he unloaded a cartel of his own.  We stared at each other a lot, and by the end of the second date we were perched at a patio beside the ocean, in the throes of a rare Vancouver heat wave.   We talked for hours, clicking with a frenetic evidence that shocked us both, growing tangibly more stoked at the revelation of mutual understanding before we stood up to leave. Our eyes locked before he grabbed my hand on the walk back to my Jeep and I mumbled, electrified : "What the hell is going on here?"

He didn't miss a beat before replying,"I don't know but it's fucking awesome.  Don't think about it."

***

It's hard to believe that it's only been a few weeks.  On our third date,  I took him to meet my best Vancouver friend, kgrrrl, and though she'd had hesitations revolving around his Facebook photos (some of which may have involved his muscled torso in a mankini) - she was predicably charmed by his awesomeness. 

"Find me one of those," she said and I felt a sweeping wave of OhmyEff This is So Right.  In two and a half years of dating, I've never introduced a man I've dated to any of my friends.  After I introduced Corey to K, I realized why: it's never been right before this.  Now it is. 

My Mom thinks he's fantastic, he was able to hold a conversation with my crotchety Father, an impossible feat.  My brother thinks he's cool and my son was instantly smitten.  

***

We're ensconced in the purple blue light of dawn in his blue-glass Vancouver shoebox apartment on our sixth date. It's hot and muggy on the 27th floor of his highrise and his shirt is off and we're typically absorbed in each other's breath and he opens his mouth to speak.  His hesitancy is unnerving, he tells me his vulnerabilities and admits, inexplicably, that I make him nervous.  He hasn't dated much since his wife left him.

"I was talking to my friend last night,"he says, locking his yellow-green eyes on mine,"And I called you my girlfriend, that's what you are, right?  That's OK?"

I look at him and I feel a surge of something that can only be defined as hope and I say," Of course."

"And you'd tell me if you...wanted to see anyone else?"

"I have no desire to be with anyone but you."

He smiles and I grin and we both have miles of baggage and a long way to go before we really know the depths of each other's souls, I know this.  I understand that I get excited in the beginning of a new relationship, that I often place the horse hundreds of kilometers before the careening cart.

The strict middle school teacher inside my brain is telling me to keep it quiet, be even keel, know that illusion is everything in life and he may not be what he seems.  My core, though, the soul of what I am, is on fire.  I don't know what is going to happen, true.  What's also true, though, is the fact that I have never before felt such an immediate and intense connection with another human being in my life. 

And there has to be something said for that.

Soul Mates and Soul Friends, also: Larry King

So - I know I owe some details and updates and maybe some fresh edgy writing for a change but I'm steeped and electro-charged in life right now.  Despite a bathroom in disarray (a pipe leaked through to my brother's suite and damaged his ceiling) - and a fix bill that's creeping up to 13K (money I don't have just sitting idly in my bank account) - life is really, really good.  WTF, how did this happen and why didn't I know about it before good.  I have given myself a deadline of Saturday to write it all down here before I forget the details.

I'm slammed with work but I couldn't let today pass without posting this:

My soul friend Shannon is going to be on Larry King Live tonight.  I couldn't be more ridiculously proud.  I'm going to make an exception myself and keep my eyes peeled on the small screen.

Seeing

I've often wondered what it is, that instantaneous connection that humans have with other humans about 2% of the time.

We've all had it, haven't we?  That headlong tunnel rush of recognition that engulfs a space in combustible flames, an ohmygod you see me and I see you and it's effing wicked kind of feeling. It can happen with someone who might be a mentor, a confidante or a lover.  But it occurs rarely.  When it does happen, it feels like soaring over a mountain top by a thread, down a powdery crevice at three hundred miles an hour.  It's soul fodder, that connectedness, that universal feeling that we all understand and covet and need like water.

Midway through a hike with a new friend, a person who sees me and is just as stoked that I can see him too.

My brother's old chocolate lab, charbroiling patently in the late May sun.  He's  turning 11 this autumn.

The little boy who makes my heart soar over the mountain, every single day.

***

I know this post is a little cryptic but there will be more to come.  In the meantime, I wanted to write something down in the wake of one of the best weekends of my life.  When life is good, it's really effing good.

It's been a while since I've heard from a lot of you.  What was the highlight of your weekend?

Toss em

I know that I'll be spending most of the evening with Chad about five seconds after we walk into the venue. 

I'm here with Lara, who has invited me as a wingwoman on her second-date adventure with the uber hot drummer of an alternative local band.  He's going to be playing a lot of the night, so I'm there to nod and tap feet and help her suss the situation when he's on stage.

His band dresses up in earth-toned jumpsuits bedeckled with Top Gun badges and apparently have a big beat/experimental sound.  I have no idea what this means and I'm intrigued by the Christmas lights on the ceiling of the bar, the ambigous maybe dudes/maybe female couple stroking each other's asses. I'm also partial to the blond dreadlocked dude rolling a Safeway cart down the appealingly seedy neighbourhood sidewalk.

Lara's date is Brandon, a tall, breathtakingly handsome flight attendant cum drummer.  He looks at her like she is the Milky Way and my immediate thought is approval. They have a tangible connection.  My secondary thought, upon glancing at his lolling friend on the bar stool is: Chad is going to be my entertainment for the evening.

Chad is curly-haired and shock-eyed, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and awkward pointy shoes, and he keeps sniffing his front pocket, which is obscenely filled with an array of crayon-sized pot joints.  While Brandon and Lara intertwine hands, whisper and coo, Chad leans in next to me and whispers: "Wanna go hotbox my van?"

No, I totally don't wanna hotbox his van, plus I'm driving, but he's effing weird and I like that and so I join him outside for a stroll in the lilac-scented evening air. 

He puffs away at one filtered joint and then another, and he's patently harmless and fascinating: he stops short in the middle of a skunk-smelling alley and stares me up and down.

"You a sag?"

"What? A Sagittarius?"

"Yeah."

"No, a Taurus."

"Hmm.  That's odd."

"I don't give much stock to astrology.  I don't have many of the typical Taurean traits."

"When were you born?"

"April 22."

He starts making circles in the air, tasting his finger, puffing and heaving.

"Well, you're not a Taurus.  You're on the cusp, and you're more Aries than Taurus."

"Oh.  Well, I don't really follow my horoscope."

He stubs out his joint and beckons me to follow him back to the bar.  Lara is sitting at the table with some young snowboarder-looking dudes and Chad motions to me to take the only available seat.

"I know this shit," he says.

I look at him.

"You work your ass off, and you're good at what you do.  You're used to getting what you want, and when you don't, it's hard for you to digest it."

I stare at him, and he pauses to sniff his pocket.

"You throw yourself wholeheartedly into people, into guys in particular, and when you're done with them, usually quickly, you discard them and never look back. You leave a bit of a trail behind you. "

I stare at him.

He sucks back his drink and fiddles with his Hawaiian print.

"You should work on that," he says.

I punch his information into my Blackberry and tell Lara I suddenly believe in Astrology.  And would prefer to change its tenets.

Soaring Skylines and Singing Muscleheads in Mauve

The most endearing thing about New York City, from an outsider perspective, is the blase reaction that its longtime inhabitants have to The Truly Insane. 

A nearly seven-foot, muscled man with a hairy chest and a delicate mauve tutu could be blowing bubbles and singing in a perfect baritone about Jesus in a delicatessen and no one would look twice.  A carefully rouged 97-year-old matron could rip an extraordinarily loud spot of gas in a quietly elegant piano store and its patrons would not even pause in their murmerings about shitty cab drivers and clueless tourists. 

There are obscure happenings at every corner, lights and sounds and vibrating stimulus, all encapsulated in soaring towers and endless sidewalks.  It's a city that makes my mind reel, flooding it with stories, humanity and possibility.  I feel at home here, in an electrified, above-normal kind of way.  I love the loud, brash ways of the long-time New Yorkers, I love the frenetic pace of the city, I love the possibilities that come alongside the absurd, the beautiful, and the overpowering.

***

Business meetings will take up the vast majority of my time here: that's the purpose of this trip, but unlike last time, I'm determined to doff bed for adventure.  It's a wise decision, in the end.

Last time I was in New York, I stayed with Karen in a hotel that had a bit of an efifng ginormous flying cockroach problem in the bathroom.  The hotel sent up a tiny frail Greek dude to squash them, sans equipment and yelling Mediterranean obscenities to the toilet.  A flush and a curse and he left, but the cockroaches stayed with us.  The Sofitel was an inexpensive option on Travelocity and I was amazed to find that it was a completely gorgeous hotel in Midtown Manhattan, close to everything and with fantastic service and rooms.  Highly recommended to anyone destined for the Big Apple. 

The lobby of the Sofitel, blurred because I don't yet know how to use my nice camera and I was trying to negate the flash.  Everything in the hotel smelled like sugarplums and fairy dust, and if you could ignore the dude walking in concentric circles and muttering about labias out front (which of course everyone but me could), the place was serene perfection.

The view from my meeting room in New York.  Nothing short of completely spectacular.

On Monday night, as I was procrastinating on the suitcase packing, Alaina talked to her friend Matt on the phone as I hunched over my laptop.

"You're gonna be in New York City tomorrow?" she asked him through the phone, and then looked at me,"You guys should meet up for a drink."

"He's an awesome guy,"she said, and I kind of knew already, because she'd introduced me to his blog a few months ago.

"For sure," I said, with half-hearted intention of following through but then I thought: any friend of hers is a friend of mine.  She has good taste in people.  So I texted him when I arrived and I'm pretty glad I did.

Matt and I careened hodge-podge through the city, late into the night, and talked about music and life and the spectacular power of the Internet, of tragedy and triumph and if there is a singular highlight of my trip it might be the after-work amblings spent with him.  He's just a good egg, one of maybe ten humans in my life that I've instantly liked, and if you ever have the chance to meet him, he comes with high recommendations from this neurotic amazonian Canadian chick.  He also attracts Weird Goodness, which is high on my list of attributes for good friends.

I pulled the eyelashes of the guy in the middle, because he urged me to.  The guy on the right has a carefully crafted pyramid in his hair and a non-heterosexual love of tall blonde women and Vancouver.  The guy on the left came into the picture sometime around 3AM and so I think his name is Pedro and he has a dog named Fluffy, Furry Buddy, but I can't really be sure.

Another thing to adore about New York City: the gigantic piles of garbage, randomly piled on the sidewalk, waiting for pickup by harried disgruntled dudes in yellow hats.  Matt took this so I can't take blame for the acid-nature of the wobbliness, but it's kind of captures the spirit of the night of its own accord.

We were on West Coast time so we stayed out way too late.  Times Square is kind of surreal with quiet at 4 in the morning.  

I don't know what this is.  But like everything else in this city, I like it. 

**Edited to exclaim about the mind-blowing smallness of the world: I received an email from "dude on the right" today (the guy with the rad hair pyramid and steely blue eyes) One of his friends had been reading my blog this morning and recognized his photo - and sent him a message on Facebook notifying him and  inviting him to check it out.   I only have about 200 daily readers from NYC, so the possibility of this, in a city of millions, is...next to nothing!

Anyway, his name is Travis.  And I'm totally hoping he'll come see me in Vancouver one day and spread his New York Awesomeness around my city, too.

Zipped

I got home from three days in New York City last night.  I went for business and hung out in my spare hours with a truly cool person, one whom many of you will likely know.

 I'll tell the story and post pictures of long-eyelashed strangers, triangle hair, stellar views, walking barefoot, and Times Square at 4:00 in the morning, but in the meantime I am buried with work and personal issues ("Mike" spent the days while I was in New York reading my blog for the first time, and was a little surprised and hurt by what he found and I don't blame him, I should have said directly a lot of stuff I inferred and wrote her instead. Blog lesson number 5342 learned.)

But I don't want to neglect you.

So go ahead and watch this: And then go over here to give kudos to Ms. Single Mama on her mad editing skills.

(Full confession: I think that bungee cord has been ensnared in my tree for over two years.  I vaguely believe that it has something to do with trying to concoct a bird feeder for the winter weary sparrows.  Not that I'm excusing it, because, wtf?)