Letters and Sodas

I’m happier right now than I have been in a really long time. Yeah, you read that right. I've still got a presentation tonight that I'm wicked unprepared for, and I've got my thesis hanging over my head, but I can't stop smiling. And I really can’t think of anything I’ve done to deserve this, either. It occurs to me that maybe that gulf between what we deserve and what we get is there for a reason. Well, for whatever reason, a really really great girl found me recently, out of the blue, and decided I was worth a shot. It almost seems that all the things I try to hide at first (my sick sense of humor, how creepy I can be, my near-fetishistic adoration of Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are the parts that attracted her to me in the first place. It’s all very new, and I really don’t want to jinx this, but to the casual observer, it looks like I found happiness by... being myself?

Strangely, I want to be the guy that deserves this happiness, and I want to be the guy that gives happiness back to her as good as he gets. It’s times like these that the lessons I’ve learned from all the mistakes I’ve made over the last 27 years will come in handy. Funny, but it’s also times like these when I wish I’d made more mistakes. Those of you that have been reading this over the last year have witnessed some of my mistakes (Phantom of the Opera, crossing against traffic...), and those of you who actually know me have seen some of the spectacular (romantic) screw-ups that I tried to keep to myself. So, you know that I’ve got a diverse body of knowledge to work from.

Now that I got all that out of the way, I return to my original point. I’m happy. I’m excited. I’m hopeful. Why? Well, at different points over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been every character from Liz Phair's “Fuck and Run” (once you remove the gender identification, it becomes a lot easier to identify). I’ve woken up alarmed, sad and ashamed over what I’ve done. Yeah, I’ve been that guy. I’ve been the guy that makes someone sad and ashamed just by being the wrong guy at the wrong place and time, and I’ve longed for something real and traditional. I think I'm becoming that guy that she sang about but never met, the one who brought letters and sodas. I'm trying to be that guy, at least.

I like being that guy.

[that guys blogs at biblebeltbabylon.blogspot.com, blog.myspace.com/moontos, and xanga.com/moontos]