...In the end, I guess it doesn't really matter.

Seeing exes ranges from good (they know you better than most) to awkwardly uncomfortable (...I'm sure you can imagine the reasons.) But regardless of circumstance, as everyone who is remotely competitive knows, a breakup is a competition. It is very important that you don't 'lose' the breakup. On the one hand, you realize that breakups are bad and it's not a competition and it's nice to keep the friendship. On the other hand, you want to win.

This is what led me to a more frazzled ritual than usual this morning- not because I've gained weight since the breakup, just to make sure I look particularly excellent, I told myself. I would be seeing not one, but two exes, for the first time in a while.

Tall Boy, who takes pride in being the tallest person I have ever dated- I'm not sure why, I don't particularly enjoy standing on tip-toes to kiss someone who is practically bent double- is a nice person who I was on-again off-again with once. And by that, I mean we were on for a month, off for a year, and then on again for a few months. I don't really understand him, which is, I guess, what made him mysterious and attractive at the time. He seemed rather sensitive after the breakup, so it is my personal opinion that I won it, but by now, he has a nice girl at his college that he's started seeing, and we enjoy each other's company, so there are no hard feelings, although I don't think he likes hearing about the Boyfriend.

Boy-Next-Door moved into the apartment below mine back in the day, and we were very close friends. At some point, the line between dating and friendship got hazy. Then I realized that when you pass that line, BND suddenly becomes very, very insecure and you are way too close. We dated for much longer than we should have, and, while that entire relationship was just very bad for everyone involved and we both started seeing other people very soon afterwards, I am privately of the opinion that I won the breakup.

I feel bad, because on the one hand, I don't want to be winning anything. BND isn't particularly happy with his relationships, romantic or otherwise, right now, and the relationship he got into right after ours seemed quite unhealthy. On the other hand, I find it important to look good before seeing these guys, although when it gets down to it, I am just happy to see them and I really do like to talk to both of them. BND is one of my closest friends, but that uncomfortable period where we were more than friends occasionally hangs over our heads. And I've lost a breakup before, though it was a year or so after the fact when it happened. Believe me, it was not fun.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is, but I'm glad I'm not dating any of these boys anymore, so that, I suppose, is worth all the awkwardness and hassle.

Go Forth and Appreciate!

A weird thing happened to me today, and I am in a terribly satisfied mood.

I am a big believer in living and loving for the moment. This does not mean spending all your money and indulging in base desires (although, when it comes to food, I do tend to believe in indulgence)- but it means not being afraid of the future, not letting yourself settle for something less than what you are looking for, and not waiting to appreciate people until they are gone. Rather like that quote, "Live as if you'll die tomorrow," which I tried to attribute to someone but has been, apparently, said by everyone and their mother, so screw it.

And so, today, I was in a very good mood and wrote a very appreciative letter to the Boyfriend, which is not terribly weird for me, although long letters are not something I do regularly- after all, if you're not in the mood, they take even more time and effort and become rather like work, something I tend to avoid (as part of the darker side of Living in the Moment).

When I finished, it was close to my bedtime and I was very sleepy. I trekked upstairs to tell my family I was going to bed, and on the way down, I slipped, a tiny tiny bit. I am a very clumsy person, so to me, this slip was barely worth noticing, since I didn't even fall on my ass, or bruise something, or even experience pain. Seriously, I moved less than an inch. But the part of my head that is aware of these sorts of things watched me fall all the way down the stairs and break my neck.

I don't experience visions very often, and I doubt this one was the work of anything more than an active and rather morbid imagination fueled by a love of detective shows, but it made me pause. I felt so fulfilled, having sent that letter. Don't get me wrong, dying right then would have sucked, but if dying were to have happened, I would have been so glad that I had sent the Boy that letter beforehand.

The point of this post is not that someday we will die and so we should do stuff before it's too late. The point isn't to focus on the dying, it's to focus on the living. I was thinking about this, before I wrote this post, and I was motivated to write a short letter to each of my friends, telling them why I believe they're wonderful. Telling someone they are appreciated can cheer someone up after a crappy day or keep them from committing suicide, but I am not trying to explain how I am surrounded by people who are at risk for offing themselves- I am just surrounded by people I love, and I'm lucky for that. I hope they know it- in fact, I told them, just in case they don't.

So go on, write a letter when the mood strikes, or make an appointment to meet a friend over some sort of amenable beverage, or make a short call. Don't force yourself to labour over something for hours and hours- it doesn't even have to be long, if you're not feeling verbose. But do me a favour. If you find yourself thinking of someone, even if you don't have that much to say, tell them. The only downside might be forcing yourself to deal with a little awkwardness, and that's a healthy thing to be doing, anyway.

Me and my prudish values* are disappointed in last night's How I Met Your Mother. To summarize, the show's in the middle of its fifth season, and the main plot point of last night's episode was that all the main characters are smokers and have been, unbeknownst to the audience, for the entire show. I didn't find episode was that funny, but I'm so sensitive to cigarettes that watching the episode made me a bit queasy, so I surfed the Interwebs to see what their zeitgeist reaction was.

I found things to be fairly mixed. Some people loved the episode, some don't disapprove of smoking but found it unfunny. (I assume the people without strong opinions didn't voice them.) Josh Lasser's article on Zap2It made the probably-observant point that the show perhaps had a tough time tonight with the non-smoking crowd. I don't think that non-smokers can ever really understand the insane lure of smoking." So maybe that's the reason for the split.

To get a better idea of the viewers, I also looked up U.S. cigarette smoking statistics, which informed me that about 20% (23.1% of men, 18.3% of women) of U.S. citizens smoke. If most of the people who don't smoke didn't find last night's episode funny, then, well, the episode was of poor taste. I do hope that smoking will return to the background as it did before, though. I've never associated with smokers, nor anyone who has begun smoking since I've known them, so from my probably-sheltered point of view, I've lost respect for the characters and the show. Actually, I just find the whole thing disgusting.

I suppose the person who wrote the episode was writing what they knew, but he ought to be aware of his audience. The first comment on the article above tells Josh Lasser: "please don't push your anti-smoking rhetoric onto people." (I thought it was nice that they said please.) I generally consider myself to be very open-minded on the scale of open-mindedness (or perhaps just extremely persuadable) but, thinking about it, I don't find anything wrong or persecuting about an 'anti-smoking rhetoric'. I mean, the boxes are required by law to say "Smoking Kills" on them, sometimes accompanied by pictures of various deformities. I can't think of anything more anti-smoking than that. Yeah, yeah, quitting is hard, but if you're going to smoke, you can be an adult and know the consequences of your actions. Like sounding like Harvey Fierstein. (And with that, I ostracize 20% of my readership.)

*Obviously not that prudish.

Apparently, I Was Destined to Be A Scientist

I ran into a friend from high school today. He was one of those people with whom you had mutual friends and who took a girl you'd known for a couple of years to prom for the first time but then he graduated and that was the end of it. The point is, I don't know him that well but he's a pretty cool guy. The one thing I really know about him is that he wears glasses but prefers not to.

Once, No Glasses started talking to me on Gchat, which was strange because he'd never done it before or since. He was very stressed by a secret he couldn't tell any of his friends. As I insinuated earlier, NG and I don't know each other very well, so I made him an offer: he could tell me and I would promise not to listen. Strangely enough, he told me something that must have been a big problem in his life since he was a boy.

Anyway, we went out for pizza. NG was paying, and I wasn't that hungry, so I told him to pick the type. He chose one that was veggie-topped, and I began to pull the olives off of my slice, as I customarily do.

"NG, have I ever told you why I hate olives?"

Ever polite,he did not attempt to speak with his mouth full and just shook his head.

"Now, when I was little, I loved grapes. In addition, my parents weren't the type to leave me at home with a babysitter while they did adult things. So once I was taken to some sort of adult party and my parents set me down to amuse myself. (I was a very easily amused child.) They came back a couple of minutes later and found me by a bowl of olives, carefully putting them one by one in my mouth: nope, this one's not a grape; hmm, nor this one; not this one either. By then, I'd gotten through about half the bowl."

"That sounds extraordinarily traumatizing."

"It was! It's interesting that I didn't stop after one, or a handful, or when I realized olives were disgusting."

"Well, there was no way to make sure that none were grapes until you had tried them all. You were just looking for the outliers."

Família Mexicana

I recieved my Mexican family today, and they sound like a perfect match for me- a lovely girl about six, a young boy aged ten, a father who works as an IT consultant and a mother who promises that I will learn a lot and have a lot of fun during my ten-week stay with them, which sounds decidedly intimidating considering that it took me a good couple of minutes to translate that one sentence from Spanish to English. They don't smoke, which is a big relief. I have lived in places with terrible air quality and done alright, but smoke gets to me like nothing else.

They also have a dog, and I remain comforted by the fact that at least I will not have to worry about him understanding me.