Lately I’ve been feeling pretty adventurous. Over the course of my life I’ve waffled between a complete openness to new things and a desire for sameness and consistency. As a child I was terribly picky, but once I left home and realize that nobody was going to make food like Mom (actually Dad, most of the time), I started trying all sorts of new food, and new experiences.
So here are some of the new things I’ve been trying lately:
I’m having a wonderful time, in fact, and she’s an incredible young woman. Smart, accomplished, sweet, pretty, kind, and all sorts of amazing - quite an impressive lady. I’ve been nervous to talk about it, not because I’m uncomfortable with what’s going on - in fact, the defining quality of the relationship is its natural-feeling awesomeness - but because I know that some of my friends haven’t gotten to a point where they feel okay with the idea. No, it’s not their business, which is why I haven’t let them stop me, but I don’t want to make anyone else unduly uncomfortable. Trust me: I know how weird this is. But obviously the grieving process is different for somebody who occasionally thinks about Kellie’s death and a guy who has spent the last six months confronted with it every waking and most sleeping hours. Let’s say that I’m on the crash course.
Regardless: I was terrified as to what it would be like to re-enter the dating pool after all these years of married life, but somehow I lucked out. I met a girl on an online dating site, chatted her up innocently in email, met her for lunch, and immediately found myself deeply smitten. What’s funny is that it’s all this incredible coincidence: neither of us thought we were in the right frame of mind to be dating, I certainly never planned to be looking at this point in my life, and quite honestly, we wouldn’t have been right for one another if we’d met when we were younger. But she’s surprisingly similar to me in attitudes, opinions, interests and outlook, and more surprising still is that neither of us is annoyed by our similarities. I’m gob-smacked by how well it’s going.
So that’s how things are for me. Any questions?
It’s nice that places like Amazon and Ruth’s Chris steakhouse figured out enough about me from my past experiences with them to send me notifications about upcoming sales and specials associated with the calendar that they think are appropriate, but I do so wish I could tell them to stop with the jewelry and mother’s day specials. Not quite a stab-in-the face sort of pain, but certainly an uncomfortable moment.
There’s a new service called Muxtape that lets you upload up to 12 mp3 files to create the 21st century version of a mixtape. And unless you’re really into the idea of holding a microphone up to the radio, it’ll generally have better audio quality.
I created my very own: my depressing music. Listen along to the torture I put myself through on a daily basis. Yes, it’s all one band, and yes the audio volume hasn’t been normalized (take it up with whoever puts out the CDs). But I know somebody who would have liked it, and listening to all of this reminds me of her.