sea of love

it was 80 degrees a little over a week ago. for one quick, sunny day it was 80 degrees.

i woke up around 6 a.m. two friday mornings ago, and i couldn’t get back to sleep. the sun was shining, and i woke up extremely happy. it was one of those mornings you just want to roll around in bed, messing everything up until it becomes a nest you can't get yourself out of.

i spent what seemed like hours on a stuffed, delayed red line. i was sweaty and a little hazy. i could smell red wine from the night before in my sweat. every time the train doors opened, the entire train seemed to exhale in relief.

it’s so funny how people react to weather. when it’s cold, we want it hot. but the second it warms up enough to make us sweat, we’re begging like babies for a 50 degree day.

i came home to a sleeping apartment. i like being the only person awake in my apartment. with open windows, the whole place smelled like spring.

when lara woke up, we decided to spend the day walking around. it was nice enough for short sleeves with pants.

she dragged me into GNC, which is one of my least favorite places. the (only) best part about GNC is the arnold schwarzenegger protein powder. it’s going to pahmp you up.

there was a blind man in the check out line in front of us. he turned and asked us for help signing his receipt because the cashier was on the phone. i walked up to him and helped him put pen to paper.

“you have such a bright spirit,” he said. who doesn’t love to hear that? especially from someone who has no idea what i look like on the outside. he can’t see the hair that i styled or the eyelashes i painted with mascara for five minutes this morning.

the next things he said, i don’t exactly remember. but the thing i do remember is that he said, “in order to love other people, you must first love yourself.”

now, lots of people have said that to me. i get it. well, i don’t exactly get it, but i get where they’re coming from. they have context. they know me. they read the blog. blah, blah, blah.

but who is this random stranger telling me to love myself?

i keep my religious and spiritual feelings to myself because they are mine to have. i wouldn’t say i am religious in a traditional sense, and my yoga practice has a lot of influence on the way i think about spirituality.

but it feels a little like someone meant for me to help that man in that GNC on the best day (weather wise) of the year.

especially considering that i decided to give up dating for lent.

usually every year, i give up sweets (because i love fruity gummies) and then i challenge myself to do something every day to make me better. one year i gave a sincere compliment to at least one person a day, another year i made sure to smile at anyone i made eye contact with, and last year i told myself once nice thing about me every day.

this year, i gave up dating.

which made lots of people laugh, but i wasn’t really sure why.

i think that i have come to a time where i am actually, honestly, truly okay with being myself. …and being by myself.

internet, it only took me nine months to get here.

and so, on easter eve, to celebrate 40 days of self-induced singledom, we drank, and we danced, and we ate pancakes.

at a gay bar. surrounded by dancing bunnies and drag queens. it wasn’t exactly the morning i thought i would spend in church, but i left the club feeling so full of love and happiness.

side note: the club that we went to seemed to be very popular with the hispanic gay community. the dj spoke only in spanish, the drag queens spoke only in spanish, they played only spanish music, and we had no idea what was going on the entire time.

but we danced, and we hugged, and we laughed just the same. just the same.

my GIRLS reality

i’ve been trying to write a blog post about this topic for a really long time, but nothing really came to me very organically. i wouldn’t consider myself a “friends” type of person. i allow very few people into the safe and trusting parts of my life. i see a distinct difference between friends and acquaintances and an even larger one between people i consider to be friends and best friends.

this all seems very elementary when i write it out, but, for my life, it is very true. some not so great things happened to me at a very young age that quickly taught me who to trust and what to trust them with.

i would never have considered myself a “girl’s girl.” girlfriends rarely appealed to me in high school. as long as i had a boyfriend and my mom, i was set with the people i needed in my life to support me.

so, considering that, after reading this article about 5 things we “get wrong” about GIRLS retaliating to this article that talks about why GIRLS is bad for women, i decided to put all (and save just two) of my sense in about how and why i love GIRLS so much. and why i think i am (now) a GIRLS girl’s girl.

probably about a year ago, i was talking about GIRLS with a few coworkers. the other girls who had seen the show liked it, and one guy who had seen it didn’t like it. like many who dislike the show, he wasn’t crazy about lena dunham being naked.

like most (if not all) women, i have always battled with my weight and my perception of the number on the scale. i always thought i was the fat kid growing up, and a lot of that negative body perception has followed me into my adult life.

like many, i battled eating disorders. after an ex-boyfriend told me his mom said she was surprised he was dating “a normal sized girl instead of a thin girl” (at 17, i was a size 2) i lost about ten pounds in four weeks on what i told myself was an “apple diet.” i didn’t eat breakfast, had an apple (sometimes peanut butter) for lunch, and ate half of whatever ended up on my plate for dinner.

this is fucked up, and it makes me sad to know that i am not the only one who went through something like this.

seeing lena dunham naked on tv made me feel better about myself. if she can be confident in her body, so can i. seeing the weird things about her nakedness helped me accept the weird things about my nakedness.

i think it’s especially interesting when emma woolf, the author of the anti-GIRLS article, talks about when two women share a bathtub. while it is true that i haven’t shared a bathtub in a long time, i do a lot of weird shit with my girlfriends.

on top of painfully relaying, dissecting and analyzing our love lives constantly, we talk about gruesome, dirty and embarrassing things about being women. we can talk about good sex, bad sex and the lack of sex in our lives. we can talk about the messed up relationships we have with our parents. sometimes these conversations happen glamorously at a bar over $1 beer, but most of the time they happen sprawled out in the hallway between our classes or in the middle of a three mile run.

and i think it’s interesting that people feel the need to criticize the relationships they see on GIRLS. just because you don’t spend your time with your friends in bathtubs doesn’t mean a relationship that finds itself in a bathtub is more or less realistic than yours. there is no such thing as a realistic or normal relationship.

the criticism of GIRLS’ sex is also something that really gets to me. the more i learn about sex (about 90% of it NOT being from experience), the more i’ve realized that it is weird. different people like different things, and, from what i’ve gathered, there is little rhyme or reason. lena dunham’s sex is more realistic than most of the other sex i’ve seen in other shows and movies.

while there are some valid criticisms to be made about GIRLS, very few of them can be made from seeing only two episodes of the show.

as a writer and a confused 20-something, i find myself relating to hannah horvath constantly. while the situations we find ourselves in are generally unalike (i’ve never wore neon mesh without a bra), the feelings we find ourselves having are often very similar. hannah horvath somehow validates how fucked up my life seems at times. as in, someone wrote an entire HBO series about how shitty and great it is to be me, and now i get to watch it unfold on tv.

and although i’m happy that hannah has found some love from adam, i hope they break up. there. i said it.