Love is a Poor Man's Food*

The Man's been telling me about these guys for absolutely ages, but in classic fashion, I've ignored him up until now. I'm sure many of you will recognize this little dance: he finds something absolutely riveting online, and insists that I listen Right This Second while he reads whatever it is aloud, and I go on doing whatever it is I'm doing (trying to decide if my eyebrows are too thick or not, shopping for shoes online, etc). I say, "mm, uh-huh" and offer a few short, diplomatic spurts of laughter where possibly appropriate and then mumble variations on, "hah, wow, that's so cool, who knew?" and he knows full well that I'm not paying attention because I do the same thing to him, and he continues merrily doing whatever the male equivalent of shopping for shoes online is.

But recently, he implored me with more than the usual enthusiasm to sit down and look through these two blogs, and I acquiesced, because I could hear something really, deeply genuine in his voice, and boy am I glad I did. Here's why:

They're really cool! He's English and she's American. They met and fell in love in space of days. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, where they now live. Yes, I like their story for its parallels to our own, and I like the feeling I got when the Man said to me that it's nice to read about these people with a really amazing history and I got to say back, well, hey, we're not doing so badly either, are we?

But also, maybe more importantly, I like reading the words of two people who are unashamedly in love with each other. It's nice. It makes me feel all hopeful and warm inside. It's like the blogospheric (can I say that?) equivalent of playing with a very small, fluffy puppy, which maybe makes it sound more trite than it is. It's just somewhere between a favorite old book and a small animal, perhaps.

Part of me wants to say to myself: whoa, now, hang on. This is really, super creepy. You're basically peering across an entire ocean into the lives of two complete strangers, watching their every (virtual) move, and making judgments about them, projecting your own hopes and fears onto them. Stop being a stalker and GET A LIFE.

The other part of me says: oh, shut up already. Scruples suck, and bloggers don't write about their lives in the hopes that no one will ever read their words or identify with them as human beings (and if they do, wow did I get this whole blogging thing wrong).

It's the latter part that wins. You know what? It's nice reading something that makes me smile, and makes me feel normal(er), and also reaffirms my belief that human beings are actually really groovy sometimes.

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It's also made me think, maybe I haven't explained enough about the Man and me. It's always just been that he's a presence in my life (a big one) and, you know, he's English so sometimes we have some really funny interactions. But the thing is that I wake up every morning, and then spend quite a lot of time throughout the day, thinking how lucky I am and how extraordinary it is that I literally found this man that I love at a pub, in Oxford, in a sea of people. I mean, what if it had been a Thursday night instead of a Wednesday night, and he'd been at football instead of the Turf Tavern? I like to think that we'd have met anyway, but life's funny like that--you never know.

It amazes me every day, every moment that I think about it. I don't think about it enough, these days. I used to think about it all the time because it came up all the time, when he was introducing me to his friends or I was telling mine about him. "How did you meet?" they'd want to know, and he used to say, "fortune of chance," and I settled for saying, "at a pub," with the wryest smile you've ever seen. It just seemed too implausible. And implausible, I suppose, it was. I mean (avert your eyes, Mom!), I've kissed other men I've met at bars, too (not a lot, but still), and I didn't fall in love with them.

But I did fall in love with him, and he, extraordinarily enough, fell in love with me. I've forgotten of late not how much we love each other--there's no ignoring that--but about how incredible the circumstances of our loving each other are. We love each other across cultural boundaries and in spite of the distances between our birthplaces. A year ago I wasn't sure how the hell I was going to make a move to England work but now here I am with a boring office job thinking how dull making photocopies is, as if this huge, huge thing hadn't happened in my life to allow me to even have the job in the first place.

It's not that I take things for granted; it's that, in the words of Pico Iyer, who I've been reading a lot of lately, I'm "beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel." Iyer was talking about a place, and I could just as easily say that it's how I feel about Oxford, too, but I think it's just as apt about love. I don't forget that I'm lucky, or that my situation is beautiful; I forget that my coming here to this place (this city, this state of in-love) was so full of chance and happenstance. It just seems so natural. And hearing Ray LaMontagne sing that "love is a poor man's food," when all the newspapers predict a decade of austerity and financial ruin, when my paychecks barely cover the bills and we can't imagine ever having the funds to do something drastic like, hey, buy our own house, only reaffirms how important this is.

*Ray LaMontagne, "Hold You in My Arms"

Morning Post(al)

I'm up much earlier than usual today. I've had my breakfast and now I'm sipping tea. I'd like to say I'm enjoying the view (it's a beautiful blue-sky morning and I can even hear a few brave birds chirping) but there's an enormous black and orange truck parked outside the lounge window, so, you know.

These days I'm...

Listening to...Ray LaMontagne.

Watching...30 Rock. Recently we've particularly enjoyed their rendering of Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia," and also James Carville's guest appearance (I couldn't find a YouTube clip of that), though as he's aged he has started to look increasingly like a character from Lord of the Rings and it's hard to believe that when I first saw The War Room I actually found him weirdly sexy. That was definitely a triumph of brains over brawn.

Reading...Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Let me explain: ever since I met him, the Man's been going on about how funny Terry Pratchett is, and reading me excerpts from the only two Pratchett books in the house (I'd like to draw your attention to that number--two--so you don't get the idea that the Man is a Terry Pratchett fanatic of some sort), and I've been duly ignoring his suggestions that I have a go at reading one, paying more attention to my eBay adiction or whatever book I did happen to be reading at the time. The Man likes to read Pratchett before bedtime--make that re-read, for the five-hundredth time, probably--and I've gotten used to seeing his book covers as they slump down onto my pillow and the Man slips into sleep. I even bought him two new Pratchett books this Christmas, partly because I knew he'd enjoy them but also partly because I'd gotten really tired of looking at the same two book covers all the time.

I didn't actually consider reading one until I got sick last week and couldn't be bothered to get out of bed to find a suitable book. So I reached over and grabbed Going Postal, and you know what? It's really, really, quite good. I keep reading the funniest bits out loud to the Man, who tries to hide the look on his face that says, yes, that's great, I've actually read you that passage before and you ignored me. Last night I told him I was thinking of putting this into a blog post and he said, "so it's basically a blog post about me being right?" and I said, "yes, yes it is." So there you go.

Ugly truck update: two men got in and drove it away a few minutes ago. The birds are chirping with increasing authority and bravado, but the blue sky appears to be diminishing. But none of that matters, especially, because by this evening, we're going to have a new POTUS, and man, that makes me happy.

Now I have to get off the couch and go to work.

Does This Make Me Look Fat?

I never realized how differently we see matters of fashion until today. I mean, I knew we have different opinions, and I knew that I sometimes need a reality check from someone less taken by the whimsical but utterly impractical styles of Vogue, but I hadn't fully understood that sometimes, where I see one thing, he sees something else entirely.

I was in the bedroom, trying on my mom's cast-away clothing (a slightly juvenile ritual we go through each time I visit her, or vice versa). First she gave me a dress--polka dotted and colorful, nicely cut. I modeled it in the kitchen to the (admittedly tame) approval of the men. So I was feeling good about the next piece: a dark navy wraparound dress with bell sleeves. In front of the mirror, mom and I admired how well it hugged my curves, how lovely the fabric, how all around fabulous it was. Privately, I thought its finest feature was the way it hung on my rear, but I never got a chance to showcase this to my love: as soon as I entered the kitchen, he said one word, with a wrinkled nose:

"No."

"What?" I said. I figured I'd misheard. Maybe he had been talking about something else. Maybe he had been responding to a voice in his head, or maybe he had made a mistake with his eyes, and thought I was wearing a trash bag. But surely he'd come to his senses.

"Oh, no," he said again. I blinked.

"Really?" I said.

"It's the sleeves," he told me. "They look like something a forty-year-old woman would wear."

"Look at this face," I said, gesturing wildly. "Does this look like the face of a forty-year-old-anything?"

"No," he told me. "That's exactly the problem. It's--it's completely incongruous."

Back in the safety of the bedroom, I considered myself in the mirror. My buttocks looked fabulous; my breasts looked rounded, my abdomen looked--astonishingly--flat. But there it was: floppy forty-year-old-woman sleeves. I tried hiking them up, but no. All I could see was a middle-aged body with a twenty-something face.

How can two people see the same thing so differently? And which one of us is right? More importantly, to a girl trying to make her way in the world with some semblance of fashion sense, how on earth am I supposed to know what really looks good and what doesn't? The worst bit is, I can't even write this off to his being a man: he's shockingly good at picking out clothes for women, and some of my all-time favorite pieces were spotted not by me, or a trendy girlfriend, but by my own true love. I trust his judgment; but I also trust mine, and I'm fascinated by how oppositely we can react to something as simple as a little navy blue dress.

The next thing I tried on was a forest green turtleneck jumper, which I liked mostly for its color. It had a seam in the back and the first thing he did when I came into the room was frown and ask if I was wearing it inside out.

"No," I said emphatically, trying not to sound too petulant.

"Oh," he said, his face falling.

But I put it in the "keep" pile anyway, just in case.