Is it really stealing when you are able to connect to someone’s airport, say, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, and they don’t have a password and so your built-in airport card allows you to check your email and post a blog? I mean, if they didn’t want you to use it, they would put a password on their account, right? I’m just sayin’.

I’ve just finished another chapter in my book. I find I can’t write for more than a couple of hours every day, at least, not yet. I haven’t had more than a couple of hours until this week, and I’ve not been able to train myself to sit still for that amount of time.

When I was up at the farm two weekends ago, one of the wonderful house guests was a Broadway playwright. I asked him about writing fiction, told him about my book, and asked if it was okay that I wasn’t sure how it was going to end. He said that some degree of mystery was good, but that I should quit writing every day only when there was a fresh, new, exciting idea to start with tomorrow. I’m writing about a weekend, and it is fictionalized fact, so I know where I’m going each day when I sit down to write. But the end is elusive to me, and I’m curious where both my life and this novel will take me.

My innards feel markedly better today, enough that I went to my first yoga class in weeks, and I’m hanging around the neighborhood in hopes of looking at a new apartment. It is near 5th Ave here in the Slope, a duplex with a backyard and two separate, private floors. Sounds pretty cool to me, if certain other parts of my life fall into place.

I’m ready, I feel, I’m ready for so many good things. This year has been humbling and hard, joyous and heartbreaking, and I’ve made some difficult decisions and recoveries, and I really feel like it’s time to turn a corner. I want to live an honest, present life, and I want to be treated with the same respect that I’m trying to give myself. That’s all. I’m ready to allow some good things to happen to me.

I accomplished exactly nothing today other than having some strange and painful things done to my nether regions. I don’t recommend a colposcopy or biopsy if you are looking for a good time. It was fast, thankfully, but left me down for the count for the rest of the day. Wanna know what it’s like? Read ahead.

It starts with, of course, getting in the stirrups, but then there is something you don’t expect: vinegar. Cold, stinging vinegar sprayed all over where the aforementioned sun doesn’t shine. That is what shows the bad stuff. And then, the usual speculum, but then… then they take tissue samples and THEN your doctor says there is a suspicious-looking patch on your cervix, and then she takes the biopsy… a pulling sting of your deepest insides. After that, they have to put some goop on your insides so you will stop bleeding, and warn of “passing” it and not to be alarmed if it is black.

And then, quickly, it is over, and you lay alone on the little bed trying not to cry or pass out. But when you finally do go out, your brother is there waiting to take you for a veggie burger. And after that, you can go to your other brother’s apartment and watch cable all day and all night without feeling guilty.

Except when the 9/11 specials come on the tele. I have no feelings of guilt associated with it, but I’m unable to drool and fall half asleep like I can when I’m watching “John Q” or “Signs” on cable. The show we watched tonight was beautifully done, but I don’t know how much I need to relive those days. I find some peace in the stories of the people who were in the buildings and lived to tell about it, but I don’t think I need to watch the towers fall again. I saw it the first time, and then had to watch it a hundred times on TV to believe what I saw live, but I believe it now. I don’t know what I’m doing Thursday and I don’t know what I want to do. It’s going to be another beautiful day, just like it was two years ago.

A week from Thursday I’ll know if I have to have surgery on my cervix, depending on the results from the biopsy. Fun, fun, fun.

I worked at my restaurant today, one down, four more to go. Right after work I cycled to my new personal trainer, who is beautiful, thoughtful, alert, sweet, and smart. I can’t afford her, even though she is comparitively dirt cheap, but I feel like I can’t afford not to hire her. She will be all good in my life. Straight from there I headed back into the city to have my first meeting with the folks at my new job. My schedule is set, and is sweet, and I’m also working the opening next week. The week after that, I’m off to California.

Tomorrow morning I get to have wee cameras put in a place where the sun really ought not to shine. It is not going to tickle. But at least it will be done, and I’ll know if I have to have surgery, and I should also know tomorrow if the Peace Corps is even an option in my life.

Speaking of Peace Corps, I got the rare pleasure of meeting Jill, a blog reader from D.C. She was in the Corps and inspired me to apply in the first place, and answered all my questions since my application process began. I should be so lucky to find such good people by writing this blog.

Why does general anasthesia have to be so dangerous? Why come? Why can’t they just put me out tomorrow and wake me up long after the ugliness is over?

Sigh.

In better news, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!!!

138 Americans died during the invasion of Iraq. 149 have died since then. I’m going to heave a heavy sigh, refrain from belaboring the obvious, and leave it at that. Though one of these folks who is running against said Yucky Man should hire me.

I like spending my days writing. Is there a sugar daddy out there who wants to pay my rent? In exchange for conversation?

The year is 1986. I am thirteen, Sean is fifteen, and our family has just disintegrated. We are living with my mom in a condo we couldn’t afford in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Sean and I share the master bedroom (him on the top bunk of his bunk bed, me on a futon mattress on the floor). We are talking, I am lamenting (great surprise!!) the loss of some guy. Or maybe Sean is lamenting the loss of some girl. Actually, we are probably talking about something totally random, since we both were able to procure pretty much anything we wanted, if only briefly. So Sean says something like, “I can’t believe that he/she did/said that about so-and-so”. Apparently I quite nonchalantly replied, “Well, everyone always knows the truth about everything, we just choose to believe the lies we tell ourselves.”

Sean still quotes this, and quite literally mentioned it today. This was the same year that I joked, “To love someone is to change everything about yourself for them”. Oh, the things I had figured out at thirteen. It was also the same year that my dad came to pick me up for a day and found me passed out in the living room with about ten people he’d never seen before and the remains of a night filled with fuzzy navels. The sheer amount of empty bottles of booze in the kitchen could have been enough to put him over the edge; it is greatly to his credit that he just laughed about it and figured I’d come out okay in the end.

The idea of believing your own lies, which I’ve done a few too many times in my own life, ties in with another tragedy of being a thirteen-genXer. We are now fully capable of making informed decisions on who we spend time with. In our world, there are no arranged marriages, no proper code of courting, no rules really other than taking your own time to get to know someone. Obviously, we still fail, fail all the time, but that is often not because we don’t make an informed decision but because we choose what we, deep down, know is wrong or doomed. Again, believing the lies we tell ourselves.

My problem, you know, in the top 20 things in my life that give me pause, is that I don’t lie to myself as much as I reinvent other people. The only people who are real and true in my life, as in the only people who have not been altered by my mind are my family. My mom, my brothers, my three “sisters”, and my dad are the only people who I haven’t reinvented into something foreign to who they really are. These are the only people who I really know, and also the only people who continually surprise me with their kindness, goodness, and humor. Which is telling, because if I didn’t reinvent the others in my life then maybe they could surprise me rather than disappoint.

I don’t do this so much with my friends. I know I do it to some extent, but it is usually that I am quick to believe that my friends are simply wonderful. They are then bound to disappoint, which hurts me, but brings me back to the idea that I’ve idealized them and so can’t be hurt when they are human. The place where this tendency of mine does the most damage is in my relationship with men. I always knew how dangerous my long-distance relationship with Wayne was because when he wasn’t there I could believe he was the best, most brilliant man on earth. Before him, I would keep my men at an arm’s length or choose men who would keep me just as far away. I could then invent who I thought that person was and love him all the more.

I’ve also been prone to putting all the misery of my world onto the idea of a person, and used that as my catalyst, my button, my touchstone of dread. I lie to myself and the world, saying if this one thing was good, if I could have this one thing, then everything else would fall into place. And, in the meantime, reinventing this person into being the absolute best one, the only one for me, the answer to everything. I’ve done this more than once, and I’m going to try to not do it again.

I would like to officially take responsibility for everything I’ve done, for all the joy and misery in my life, for my terrible mistakes and for all the good things I’ve been able to do. I’d like to acknowledge, once again, that I live with both feet in my mouth, and I never, never, never want to be the cause of someone else’s pain, even inadvertently. There is so much shame in my life, and that is partly why I write this blog. I’m shaming my shame in public, exorcising it, acknowledging it for all the world (or rather, the twelve people who might read this blog) to see. I don’t want to reinvent people anymore, and I don’t want to make anyone into something they’re not.

I got my third PAP results back last week, and it turns out that the cells on my cervix are behaving even worse than they were a month ago. My doctor told the colpo doctors that I had to be seen as soon as possible, and the colpo doctors made space to fit me in the next day, which was last Thursday. Well I woke that morning with my period, so I am now having a colposcopy and biopsy of my cervix on Tuesday. I believe in a body/mind connection to some degree, and always believed I could talk my body out of cancer. I’ll know much more after Tuesday but I feel like it’s worth it to examine my life and think about what I can do to make my cervix happier.

I just got home from work… yes, it’s 3 AM… and I turned onto my block and the very familar smell of a burnt house almost knocked me over. I was terrified that it would be my own, but instead, as soon as I got home, the fire trucks started crashing through my neighborhood. It may be the only thing I brought with me when I stopped working for the Red Cross, but I will always be able to pick out that smell.

I am on an email list with about 20 college friends. These friends were not mine in college; they belong to Sean and Ian. I’ve met some of them over the years, but most were relative strangers to me when I was invited to join. I’ve been a part of it now for five years, and just last month finally met the last member. It is a group of thinkers and artists, without necessarily defining themselves as such, and even when I don’t have time to write back, my life is richer and cooler and funnier because of this list.

Some time back, a member decided he was going to quit the list. This man was not the most popular guy around, but I didn’t have any real feelings on the matter because I had never met him. But it was the way he quit that gave credit to the others’ opinion of him. He wrote an email to the list saying that he was off to bigger and better things, that being part of this list was “getting in (his) way” and “slowing (him) down”. As if we were a bunch of drooling losers filling his inbox with forwards of blonde jokes and African bank account scams. So he dropped off, never to return except, once or twice, to plug shows he was doing. I believe I met him some time later but it was during the last fuzzy Los Angeles year and everything looked like solid poop to me. I don’t remember the meeting.

I was thinking about this today as I was reading some of Ian’s old blogs. There is no doubt that he is the better writer, and really, the better thinker. He also has the benefit of not just five years, but also of education and more practical experience in writing than I. When he was writing Wednesday’s Child in the Daily Tar Heel, I was wearing sequins and dancing and singing bad Bette Midler songs onstage somewhere in California. I was writing all the time, and I had a terrific editor in my mom, but I didn’t focus on it nearly as much as I could have.

I was also thinking about my blog versus the novel I’m working on. How will keeping this blog affect my commitment to my book? Which brings me back to the issue of quitting my job. One of my managers, who I can now say can be a real toad, told me he didn’t understand why my job at USC kept me from writing. Apart from time spent both at work, and exhausted from work, I tried to explain something to him: The main reason I’m leaving my job is that if I don’t, I will not succeed at anything else. I am reasonably challenged, very successful, and make enough money (almost) to keep a roof over my head. I have tried and tried to work out a schedule that allows me to work on the other passions in my life and it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for three years. So I am going to find a job that I will not take home with me, and one that requires as little time as possible to make ends meet. And one that I don’t love so I will be inspired to do my other things.

Which brings me back to my blog. It is a very selfish thing, something entirely for myself, in a way, as it has mostly replaced my journal writing. In this forum, I can be good or brilliant or average or bad and it doesn’t change my life one way or another. I am not proud of anything I do that is average, but this allows me to write every day, to put words together on a page. I can be scattered or irrelevant but at least I’m writing. And so, back to my original thought, I was wondering if this blog, where I’m neither successful nor unsucessful, where I can let my mind go in any direction, where I can vent my anger or expose my broken heart or talk about my butt (or my cervix!), will this affect my other writing. Will it “get in my way” or “slow me down”.

But I’ve realized what that friend on my email list obviously did not. That list makes us think, exercises our brains, challenges our views, and lets us make plans with twenty people at the click of a button. This blog will not tell me where to get drinks tomorrow night, but it is writing, and writers write. I will continue to be varying in my brilliance and mundanity (ha HA! And make up words on the way!) and every day, put more words together, work that muscle harder.

I’ve quit my job, the opening of my new job has just been postponed to the third week of this month, my heart is still a mess, I can’t afford yoga, I can’t inspire myself to get on my bike in the morning, I don’t have enough money to pay the rent, and I have to have a colposcopy and biopsy on my cervix this Tuesday because my most recent PAP was worse than the one just a month ago. There ya have it. That’s my life. What can I do? Sit down and do this, once a day. Write.

A man I somewhat respect said this to me today: “Leap, and the net will appear.” Now that just may be new agey twaddle, but it also might be comforting advice. Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Where Indy has to take a leap of faith to get to the Holy Grail? He lifted his foot to step into the abyss and my heart stopped beating. When he put his foot down, and found a bridge that was there all along but perfectly camouflaged, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that he had so much faith, and then I couldn’t believe that the bridge was there the whole time. It was just too much to take in.

I have a net of sorts, this job at the East Village bar, but it is net bound with what looks like really frayed, weak thread, and I wonder how much weight it will hold. My first invisible net showed up at work today when a good friend gave me the number to a catering company. My friend has worked with them many times, said they are a family operation and wonderful, and that I could work as much or as little as I’d like. God knows I’ve catered before. My uncle had a catering company and every younger Williams child cut their teeth in the hospitality world right there in Covina, California.

On a whole nother note, I’m supposed to go on a date this weekend with that guy I met walking home from the blackout. I can already smell the doom. We talked on the phone at length tonight, and he seems like a really nice, slightly bizarre, very intelligent and caring human being. But… and even my brothers can’t fault me for this “but”… he’s not funny. He’s just not funny. It’s what it comes down to, in the end. My brothers will claim, and think it’s simply hilarious, that the only men I find attractive are a) alcoholics and b) covered in tattoos and c) abusive and small minded and d) do something really dangerous on a daily basis like ride a motorcycle or choose not to eat so he can get drunk more easily.

That’s just a really hysterically funny joke about me, right? The fact is, I have dated men with some of these qualities, and one had most of them, but there is a reason I’ve been single for almost three years. I’m not going to choose like that again. Men like that, men who are childish and users and abusers and “dangerous” and foolish are a dime a dozen and no longer exciting to me. I want a man who is none of those things, who is kind and cool and smart and thinks I’m the best thing since spice racks. But I also want him to be funny. Being funny is not making random jokes that, while possibly amusing, berate or put down random persons or person. Being funny means being engaging and observant and sincere and self-depricating and gently acknowledging the silly parts about the people around you. Or not so gently, but with no real ill will. Being funny goes so much deeper than jokes. I’ve been around funny my whole life, inside my family, and it is something I won’t give up. I can’t. I want someone who is sweet and cute and funny and brilliant.

Won’t you tell him please to put on some speed.

Tonight alternated from tolerable to really really freaking sucky, and I am exhausted from simply trying to hold it together.

A good friend at work was accused of stealing by a new manager. This manager accused him before asking him, and without realizing that his was an incredibly common mistake (putting a bottle of wine meant for table 41 on table 42’s check. The table numbers were changed recently and all of us are screwing it up). I brought this up when I gave my notice because it really upset me. Well the manager I told went to the GM and to the accusing manager, but all of this happend Sunday night after I left. Accusing manager then made life hell for my friend all during that shift. I get back Tuesday afternoon, but all my friend tells me is he wished I had come to him rather than to management, that it has strained relations, etc., etc. I apologize, tell him it really upset me and that we had talked about my bringing it up the other night… the other night being midnight after drinking since 7. I feel bad, tell him so, get over it.

Well then my other good friend brings it up again as we are doing sidework. She tells me that I ruined his night, he was miserable, she felt terrible for him, i.e. I am a terrible person who thinks only of myself, blah blah blah. Finally, I tell her that I doubt she felt more terrible for him than I did, and ran up to the linen closet so I wouldn’t bawl on the floor.

I have two things to say about this: 1) I am human. I am fallable. I screw up, I live with my foot in my mouth. I am WELL aware of the times I act poorly, and really don’t need to be reminded or berated for actually having faults. 2) I am tired of it. I’m tired of screwing up, tired of being broke, tired of needing fixing, tired of being out of control, tired of feeling bad, tired tired tired. Two more things to say: 3) I’m doing the best I fucking can. I’m changing my life, for better or worse, and I’m going to make the best choices possible in every moment. And 4) Some people are exhausting as friends. The friend who brought up my horrible, terrible deed tonight is someone that it seems I can’t live up to. I’d rather let her go then try to be someone I’m not, i.e. an infallable machine. Christ.

I’ve picked up a shift or two over the next couple of weeks, and have two nights of training for my new job as well. I’m trying, god, I’m trying to be gentle with myself and only figure out the next minute rather than even the next week. It’s overwhelming, my life is overwhelming right now, and I’ve simply got to stop beating myself up.

Ian, Tess, Kellie, Laurie, and I went shopping today. It started as “antiquing” in Hudson- a practice not appealing to me at all, but something I forget until I’m in the middle of it- but then we headed to a ginormous supermarket to really spend some money. My New York family already has a plan in place in case of some major bad event in the city. What we also now have is enough food and supplies to last us for weeks in case there is no access to public goods and services. Tessa downloaded a list from redcross.org that listed the best foods and goods to have on hand in case of an emergency, and the five of us explored both the supermarket and a Target, lists in hand, until we had everything we thought we needed for now. Of course we also got chocolate syrup and chips and snacks, which we dubbed the “fun” food. Most likely it will also be the food that mysteriously disappears when more than one person sleeps over (and if the chocolate syrup has already made its way to the kitchen, well, don’t look at me).

It was actually an exhausting day, and maybe not exactly how I would have chosen to spend Labor Day, but it was necessary and at least I had a small part in making it happen. This will be my refuge, both in emergency and also when I have a weekend off, and I am willing to do whatever Ian and Tess need, to work for my welcome.

I’m still trying to figure out this whole quitting my job thing. When I’ve been away, for a long weekend or a summer, I haven’t missed it, and I think that will carry through. It’s scary. However, there is a list of things that this new job, or rather, leaving the last one, might make possible.

Speaking of lists, I’ve decided to make one of the things I want to accomplish in the near (relative) future, in no particular order. Some are more important than others, but I feel all of them are attainable. Well, maybe. I’m just making this list up. I’ll see how I feel at the end.

1) Create a writing space in my apartment, with an inviting desk, great chair, in front of one of my parlor windows

2) After November 1st, find a new, larger, cheaper place to live, even if it is with roommates, in an environment conducive to writing

3) Create a writing schedule: every day, either x amount of pages or x amount of time spent in front of my computer, in order to train myself that this is actually what I’m doing

4) Eventually get a lighter laptop that will encourage me to bring said computer into the city on my bike so I can write anywhere

5) Search for writing gigs

6) Publish as soon and often as possible so I won’t have to work until 4 AM as often

7) Spend weekends with my family, upstate or in the city

8) See my friends, from work and from my other lives, on a regular basis

9) Hire a personal trainer to help me get back in shape

9) Open myself to the possibility to a long, lasting, good relationship with a man who is emotionally and physically available

Wow, of all of them, number 10 seems the most elusive. It is also one of the things over which I have complete control. Guess I’ll have to work hard on that. Number 9 is already in the works. Don’t know if it is the best financial choice but it is definitely a good one.

The farm is haunted. Tomorrow, back to the city, and back to one of the last shifts I’ll work at my current job. This is going to be the hardest time, I think, committing myself to something, even for a night, to something I’ve already decided to leave behind. I have to believe this is the best choice I’ve made in a long, long time.