She loves me

She loves me! She loves me!

This is probably the singles biggest miracle of my life. Well, maybe it's a really close second to the fact that I'm still alive, against some pretty stiff odds. Escept that I have her to thank for the last seven years of that. When continuing to live is a daily (sometimes hourly) decision, the fact that she loves me is a powerful incentive.

I'll try to explain what I'm talking about, but it's hard to understand if you never had it. I know, because until I met her, until I loved her, I never really understood or believed in it myself.

Let's start with a term that everyone thinks they know:

~Soulmate~

The ideal of the soulmate is the perfect partner, the perfect match. All the fairy tales we grew up on tell us that each of has one...somewhere. Most of us spend our lives, searching for, and failing to find, this person. We come to believe that there is no such thing.

Part of this is because the fairy tales (and their modern form, movies) only tell part of the story. For one thing, the people in the stories are always perfectly pretty. (Personally, I think one of the best things that the "Shrek" movies did was to slap that stereotype right upside the head.) The other thing follows on the first: the aspect of in which the soulmate is most often presented is that of sexual compatibility.

So it is no surprise that when people say that they've found their soulmate, what they reallly mean (consciously or not) is that they're having fabulous sex, and still ha[[y to wake up next to each other. But sooner or later, the passion kind of fades, and normal life reasserts itself. This is when find out whether you really have your soulmate.

Here's a little quiz:

1. Are you still happy to wake up next to this person even though you were both too tired to even think about sex the night before?
2. Are you still happy to have this person in your life when the checking account is overdrawn?
3. and they just polished off the milk?
4. Do you talk about things besides day-to-day operating stuff?
5. Do you tell jokes in "shorthand"?
6. Can you cry on each other's shoulder, and know it's okay if you can't explain why you're crying?
7. When you argue, do you listen more than you yell?
8. When the arguments and you still disagree, do you still love each other?

These are just examples, but you get the idea. The more of these questions you can honestly say "yes" to, the more likely it is that you really do have your soulmate. The real key to all of it is this: Do you love each other for who you really are (and for that, you both have to know who you really are, and who each other is), or for who you want them to be?

That's how you know. Do they love you as much when you fail as when you succeed? Do you love them when your assets are down to $.12, two packets of Ramen, and a cat whose litterbox needs to be changed?

When I talk about my relationship, I often talk about the challenges, and about all the things I do (or at least that I'm responsible for, even if I don't manage to do'em all). And people ask me what I get out of it.

Sometimes the answer is "just enough to keep me going". Sometimes I try to be more specific:

• we laugh a lot
• she holds me when I cry
• we talk about all kinds of things, from science and history to our dreams for the future
• she understands me in ways that no one ever has before, and loves all of me.

But the essence of it is: she loves me. It took me 40 years, but I finally found that semi-mythical creature known as "soulmate".

What do I get out of it? Everuthing. She loves me, and that's reason enough to keep on living. Our life together is often hard, but "she loves me" trumps all the troubles.

She loves me. And I'm glad and grateful and amazed by it, every day.

Bluffing

Sometimes I feel like such a colossal fraud - like I'm bluffing my way through life, and it's just a matter of time before I get busted for it.

But I set myself up for it. In my personal ethos, after murder, the worst kind of sin is a lie - almost every other sin is founded in lying - and the worst kind of lie is a broken promise.

And yet, I do it all the time - the modern term is "over commit". I promise creditors money that I don't yet have; I sign up for projects that I'm sure I'll be able to complete on evenings and weekends; I promise to spend time with my honey; I promise to get chores done - the list goes on, as I try to take care of everything and everybody (including, occasionally, me).

That's the heart of the problem, I guess: that I feel like I'm the one who's responsible. For everything. And I am, really. Honey's disabled, so I work to support us. And try to juggle our limited income to cover all of our expenses. And because she's disabled, I'm responsible for all the housework, too - if I don't do it, it doesn't get done. So the place is a wreck, all the time. Because by the time I get home from work, I have neither the energy nor the inclination to do any of the chores. And this feeling tends to carry over into the weekend as well, so very little gets done then, even though there's more time.

Thus with the best intentions do I pave the road to my own very personal Hell. When faced with the prospect of fulfilling this vast store of promises, I am so overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, the sheer impossibility of doing it all, that I have tremendous difficulty summoning the will to do any of it. And so I feel as if I'm failing at everything, that it's futile even to try. I begin every day sure that - worthless creature that I am - I will fail again. Because in my poor, tormented mind, anything less than total success and perfection is failure.

Is it any wonder that it's all I can do just to get out of bed? I honestly don't know how I manage it every day - to get up, dress, go to work - all the while no one seems to realize what a failure I am.

I feel like such a fraud.

"Since 1988"

This phrase is a tag line on a radio ad, obviously meant to convey a sense that the company is well-established, with a long history. That's why it grabs my attention.

"Since 1988" is said as if that were a long time ago. 1988 was just a few years....

pause while I do the math....

well, it's 17 years....17 years?!....already?!?.....damn, I'm old....

This happens a lot lately, as I realize how many things have changed, just in my lifetime. For example, when I was a kid, there were just 3 channels, and color TV was the hot new thing. Now we have satellite TV, with hundreds of channels, and still manage to complain that there's nothing on.

When I was a kid, my parents bought a 3 bedroom house for less than $25K. Now that's the price of a decent car. In the San Francisco Bay area where I live, you can't get a doghouse for that. On the other hand, my daughter proved last year that it is still possible to get a house for that kind of money -- if it's a fixer-upper in a small village in southern Illinois. Oh well, I prefer this climate.

My first computer had neither hard drive nor floppy disk. I stored my data on a cassette tape, and programmed the thing in BASIC. When I got a computer with a 40 Mb hard drive, I thought I'd never fill so much space. Now there are programs bigger than that. My daughter told me last week that she's running out of space on her hard drive - she's down to 15 Gb of free space!

When I was your age.....

Intro

Hi. My name's Andrea, and my mind wanders. So will this blog, covering whatever catches my attention or goes through my mind at any given time. Comedy, tragedy, philosophy, art -- all this and more will find its way here.

You've been warned.