When I was thirteen, I could make it rain. When I was that age, thirteen, and fourteen, I could wish things into being, and I did so, all the time. It was always temporary, but I swear to you, anything I wanted, I had, even if just for an hour or a day or a week. I actually remember it scaring me. I could make it rain. Or so I believed with such a conviction that it didn’t matter if it was true or not.

Do you ever need to type so badly that you go cut your nails so your fingers can fly more easily? I had to do this, just a week or so ago, to write to a friend about his music, and I find I already need to do it again.

So anyway, I could make it rain. And then for years and years and years, I couldn’t. God, I pined to, and pined for so many other things- really awful men, really bad shows, one or two good men, one or two good shows, events, happenings- and rain. And sometimes things came my way, sometimes it rained, but it never felt connected to me and so I always felt so powerless. I remember when I was living in Kansas City with the Nightmare Ex-Boyfriend, who used to get off work at 4 AM, go do various drugs, come home at 7 or 8 (or noon or not at all) and insist that the house be quiet while he slept, and I put up with it. There may be no worse feeling in the world than knowing you are being a schmuck and being a schmuck anyway.

But tonight I had an experiece- and it may sound banal, as the night was nothing but a dinner- that reminded me, so strongly, of how I used to make it rain. (Actually, it reminded me of the night when I was 13 that a 17-year-old guy and I tried to sneak in to see Modern English at a bar in New Jersey, and when I got turned away {which didn’t happen often to me in those days, due to my ample bosom and shamelessness} we went to go see the movie “Legal Eagles” in Morristown, and ran into an old boyfriend. But that’s another story.) So I’m sitting at this dinner table with people in my profession from all across California, people who do my job in other agencies, people twenty, thirty years my senior. And listening to their stories, listening to the state of their agencies (all of us suffered the same budget cuts three years ago), I finally realized what I have accomplished here. The parts of my agency that I feel are fledgling were miraculous to my peers. The initiatives they thought they needed to begin are already on the table in mine. The vast majority of them have gone all-volunteer; I doubled the budget of my organization in one year. Most of all, I KNEW WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT. I had concrete ideas, thoughts, concerns, and suggestions. I had answers. Yes, there were those there whose agencies far surpass mine, whose experience is far deeper, but to use an analogy I hate, if the boys and men were separated at that table, I know on which side I’d fall.

And, for once, it didn’t matter that the host insisted on paying for my dinner because he thought I was hot. It didn’t matter to me how I got there, or that I didn’t have any of the same education as everyone else, it didn’t matter that I was younger and less experienced, it didn’t matter that I spent a fair amount of the dinner being “on” instead of being “real”. It didn’t matter that I haven’t accomplished nearly everything that I want to. Because the realness of the situation is I fucking made it rain.

I don’t know what is going to happen. My organization may shut down next month, but in the scope of things, it doesn’t matter, because I remember now what it feels like to be so… powerful. I know I do things differently now than I did at thirteen- and thank ye gods for that- but it’s significant to me that all that time ago, I knew I could CHANGE things if only I was given the opportunity.

I swear to all that’s holy that driving home from dinner, if I had been in a convertible, I might have sprouted wings and sailed out of my car. I know this feeling is fleeting, this feeling of abso-forking-infinite possibility, so I am going to cherish the crap out of it while it’s here.