While my debt (*cough* thanks ex husband *cough*) had me working a second job a couple of nights a week, I had few complaints. My affordable 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment was in a bustling and alive part of town, and it was painfully charming with its squeaky hardwoods, eat in kitchen and spacious back deck — ideal for writing under a canopy of leaves, among screaming squirrels and birds.

My rub with relationships then wasn’t a source of panic or frustration or desperation – it was one of annoyance and whybotheritis. I’d met and spent time with smart and wonderful men, they just didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit them.

Cut to: my seester.

My seester with a brain as giant as her overly generous heart, with her masters in forensic psychology and her multiple life-coach certificates. My sister, who always has time for one of my rambling ranty calls from across the continent.

As we spoke one afternoon, I imagined her in her LA garden surrounded by bougainvillea and under the orange tree near the guest cottage/her office.

“Go to your happy place.” she said, and I nearly choke-laugh which really isn’t that funny since I’m pretty sure I was driving at the time. “Do you have one? Maybe a park? Maybe a diner? Go there. Go there and bring paper with you and a pen – this can’t be done on a computer, there’s something primal and healing about the depression a pen makes in paper.”

I’m skeptical but intrigued and then skeptical some more, because I feel like there’s a hidden camera in the mix somewhere and I’m about to make a complete fool of myself.

“Make a list.” she tells me. I may have scrunched my nose or rolled my eyes or both.

“Make a list of what the perfect mate looks like – and I don’t mean physical attributes though a few of those are fine, too. I mean what kind of person are they?”

I’m at a loss, and I flashback to a seminar class I had in high school where there were no right or wrong answers but I still felt like every one I could conjure up was not only complete stinky BS, but also horribly wrong.

As if feeling the trepidation rattle in me via our shared DNA, she throws one out one of hers to get me started: “He walks up behind me at the kitchen sink on a Saturday morning when I have rat-nest hair and yuck mouth and tells me I’m beautiful and I believe him.”

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking, “that’s good. I’m using that.” She throws a few more at me and we hang up with the “I love you’s” we’ve been saying for thirty years.

Two days later on my lunch break I head to a park near my office with a blanket, my pen and one of my trusty yellow tablets. I’m still looking around for a suspicious van loaded with zoom lenses ready to capture my idiocy, and embark on the task reluctantly. The next thing I know there are 5 pages of requirements: heartfelt and goofy, they’re representative of things I’d had and never wanted again, things I had and wanted again, things I’d never had.

A few weeks passed and I’d already forgotten the list, the exercise, the trauma of waiting to show up on AFV or a list of Darwin Award nominees when I met The Mc at a social event. I watched from a distance…kind. Confident without being cocky. Laughed openly and freely. Handsome.

There were several weeks of awkwardness that followed before I gave him the nudge he needed to ask me out, and when he did I had circled back around to the list – I was armed and ready with my modern day Santa/cookie demands.

Some might say “the rest is history”, but I usually try not to be that big of an ass hat.

The 4 ½ years since haven’t been all ice cream and cool ocean breezes with sizzling sunsets, and the fact is I have no guarantee the he won’t grow weary of my shenanigans a month from now and kick me to the curb (though I don’t think he will). What I do know is it’s pretty great, and that having the list was no coincidence.

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your brain around it, humor me a bit longer and let me hit you with an analogy. When you need a new pair of jeans, where do you go? Knowing that we each have our own answer, I ask you next, where would you go if you’d never had a pair of jeans. If you’d never SEEN jeans? If you’d never even HEARD of jeans? You might end up at U-Haul rental or a florist or a recycling center. Right? Because you don’t even know what you’re LOOKING FOR.

Same deal.

So just now, I’m writing all this out for you on a yellow tablet in another of my happy places, with a sliver of Sunday morning sun sneaking through the cracks of two tall buildings. The sun is finding its way to my pale, rickety legs while I sip coffee and worry about you.

I’m writing this in case you’re lonely and trying to make something or someone fit that doesn’t. I’m writing it for you in case you’re lost and frustrated.

I’m writing it for us – that we might appreciate what we have or have not, as a reminder that if we focus, if we breathe, if we have patience – we will find what we’re looking for…if we know what we’re looking for.

If your momma never taught you to clean up after yourself and to have a tidy house for guests, that’s one thing. Maybe you were raised by a pack of High Life guzzling, ball scratching men with failing livers and an unhealthy affinity for bleach blondes with blue eye shadow and chests that remind you of rocks in socks. But you probably weren’t. And even if you were, I know for a fact you own a TV. I’ve seen it in your sty, and along with the tell tale dent in the couch directly across from it – it was still warm. Which means you’re probably not oblivious to the likes of HGTV, or one of the other half gaziilion channels with programming about how to sell your house. In fact, I also saw a computer in your “home office”, and a blinking router. That means you have access to them thar interwebs and could have done some homework ala Al Gore. You know. Research. On how to get top dollar for your house.

No? You’ve never thought of such a thing?

Well shucks. Then let me make it E-Z for you with my uber simple patent pending list of how not to waste a buyers time.

- Smoking in your house is probably not a great idea. It’s spring, your house is for sale. Go outside.
- Maybe clean the 15 years of cat hair collection memorabilia off your fabric window coverings
- Hide the Rogaine and fifteen other bottles of crap in your shower. Do not showcase the lack of space by propping them all up on the towel bar.
- Clean the toothpaste crust out of your sink.
- Scrub your shower. If you can’t, hire someone to do it for you.
- Get a foundation guy to come by and put a new brace under the dining room floor so I can’t feel the sinkhole/hear your china rattling when I walk across the room.
- Put up some screens on your roof line where the squirrels have been crawling in. This is Atlanta. They’re as plentiful as pollen and in all the same places.
- If you know the cellar has a leak, disclose it. Leaving the wet vac out with it’s nozzle in a puddle doesn’t count.
- Once upon a time you thought lavender was a good color for a room, or that “white washing” a door with primer was artsy. You were wrong. Spend the $100 to correct your mistake.
- Clean up all that crap from home improvement projects gone wrong from under the garage.
- I have no need for your old hangers, paint, broken clothes rods, BBQ or tacky azz wardrobe. If you’re going to vacate the house, take all your crap with you.

Hmmm…what am I forgetting…

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”

“The world can’t give us peace. We can find it only in our hearts.”
“I hate that.” I said
“I know. but the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.”

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining”

And perhaps the one most perfectly suited to my particular brand of juxtaposed defect and sensitivity:

“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”

Mmmmm hmmm.

Please, for the love of all things deep fried and layered in chocolate – do not let me hear you say “St. Paddy’s”.

The man was a SAINT, people. You didn’t know him personally and therefore you don’t get the privilege of calling him by some lazy and cheap nickname, any more than you’d call Mother Teresa “Tess”. “Yeah, Tess and I threw a couple back at Moe’s and Joe’s last night. That woman can put away some PBR’s…and you should hear her belch Freebird!”

The fact that Cindy and Karen say they call her “Momma T” is hysterical and completely beside the point.

Really. I have a shrimp fork handy and I’m not afraid to jam you in the nads with it.

kthanxluvyabai.

Moral Injunctions of Gestalt Therapy

Live now, stay in the present.
Live here, be with the present.
Stop imagining, experience reality.
Stop unnecessary thinking.
Express, rather than manipulating, explaining, justifing, or judging.
Give in to unpleasantness do not restrict your awareness.
‘Accept no “should” or “ought”, other than your own.
Take full responsibility for your own actions, feelings and thoughts.
Surrender to being who you are right now.