What people tell me about myself

In the last month, I have had people say things after meeting me for the first time that sort of surprise me. In a good way. In a way that makes me think that all the trouble I’ve taken to try to be more engaged in life might actually be doing some good.  The following terms have been used to describe me. None of these words, I don’t think, have ever been used to describe me before.

  1. gregarious
  2. outgoing
  3. charming
  4. extroverted 

Gregarious? Outgoing? Anyone who knows me realizes that I can be very talkative once I get to know someone. The catch has always been that until I get to know them, I have historically been unable to talk at all. That has always made meeting people a challenge. What is different, I guess, is that lately I have been able to talk to strangers too. 

Why?

Practice. Seriously. For two months, every Tuesday I went to the growler store and forced myself to talk to whoever sat next to me and to the servers. Easy, right? They were serving beer. I like to talk about beer! I talked to married men about their wives. I talked to an 75 year old man about his career as a pilot and current job driving a wine tasting party bus. 

It was kind of hard, but fun. I suppose it was good for me.  I was in training for the inevitable dating. 

I suck at dating. 

Or maybe I don’t–after all, I am not introverted/shy/awkward now. I am charming and gregarious. 

Who knew?


The fine art of being lazy

I’m lazy, I wanna be lazy,

I long to be out in the sun, with no work to be done.

under that awning they call the sky,

stretching and yawning, and let the world go drifting by..
-Marilyn Monroe/Lazy

There is a fundamental disconnect between night owls and early birds. OK. Several. I mean, there’s the obvious one. We go to sleep and wake up at different times. Which doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but can actually be an obstacle. 

Sex? If the night owl’s lover is in bed sound asleep by the time he comes to bed at 2 am, she may not appreciate his amorous intent. She’s frisky in the morning? He’s out cold. They better hope they get the house to themselves in the afternoon when they are both awake!

Not that the two have to be at war, but I find that very often the early risers do not respect those of us who have a slower approach to the morning. 

Wasting the day away. 

They don’t tend to appreciate the work that gets done while the late riser is awake for several hours after they’ve gone to bed, either. 

Which is really beside the point because what I am thinking about is the art of dawdling. In bed, in particular because I love to be in bed. I do. I love to sleep, especially right now because my sleep patterns are all fucked up by personal stress and now the onset of menopause. Nocturnal hot flashes will ruin a perfectly good night’s sleep. Totally. 

So sleep. Sleep is a fantastic thing to do in bed. 

Then there is reading. I have always loved to read while loafing around in bed or a chaise lounge. There is not much that’s better than a trashy novel out on the patio on a Summer day. I’ll read in bed before I fall asleep, in the middle of the night while I’m waiting to cool off after a hot flash or even in the morning before I get up to make coffee. Oh, ideally someone would bring me coffee in bed, but alas I don’t have a someone right now. 

And writing. 

It’s a fact that I write everywhere. I do try not to write in the car while I am driving, but everywhere else yes. If I am doing an extended bit of writing, I try to sit on a chair and do it properly with a keyboard. More and more though, I find myself distracted so I shut myself in my bedroom and do it there. Night. Morning. At night, I am usually finishing something I’ve started. In the morning I am usually making a note about something I dreamed about, or a song I have stuck in my head. This very paragraph was written while I dawdle in bed. 

On weekends, I usually stay in bed for an hour or so after I wake up. Thinking. Reading. Playing Words With Friends. Answering messages. Reading my Twitter feed. Writing. Coffee drives me out eventually. If I had a bedside coffee maker, there is no telling what might become of me!

On the other hand, if I was waking up with someone congenial there is no telling how long a bedded dawdling session might last….and with that, I think I will shut out the light and think about it a little. 

Samael and the hell hound

 

“But do you love me?” asked Mara. 

 “I do not understand the human idea of love,” Samael replied.  “I love all of humanity. You are my own. My treasure.” 

Mara sighed, then smiled. Angels were apparently no better about answering simple questions than human men, but she had definitely never felt more cherished by anyone before.  She curled into his arms, and fell asleep.

Suddenly, Mara awakened to the sound of a dog howling in the woods near the house. She started to get out of bed to yell at whoever’s dog it was, but Samael put her back on the bed and placed his sword into her hands. As he got out of bed, he told her “no matter what you hear or see, no matter what I  tell you, no matter how injured I might seem to be or how much danger I appear to be in, do not get out of this bed or let this sword out of your hands. No matter what happens, keep the sword in the bed with you, and hold it as hard as you can with both hands. If you can, close your eyes and keep them closed. There may be things you would not wish to see.”

The angel disappeared and the night went black and still.

Time went by, Mara had no idea how much time has passed in that awful, dark stillness. She stayed in the middle of the bed, the hilt of the sword in both hands, motionless. Waiting for Samael to return.

Out of the silence, a rumble. Distant thunder.

Then, suddenly, some sort of battle outside the house which moved with the thunder into the house, through the house, into the bedroom around the bed.

Mara knelt in the middle of the bed, holding Samael’s sword as tight as she can with both hands on the hilt, wondering why he couldn’t use it himself. He was never parted from the sword, even in his most intimate moments with Mara it was within his reach every moment.  She wondered what would happen if someone, something, were to get the sword out of her hands.

Samael was fighting a huge black dog. Something like a black dog. It was more than a dog.  It was blacker than real black. It reflected the darkness somehow, making  the room seem even darker than it could possibly really be. The creature dwarfed any mastiff that Mara has ever seen. Almost as tall as a horse, but far more muscular.

Samael struggled to grapple with it. The creature didn’t bite, but used her teeth and body weight to try to pin Samael down. They were wrestling, she realized.

When Samael neared the bed, he looked at Mara, who tried  to hand him his sword. He snarled at her to get it back on the bed and close her eyes as the dog lunged for it.

He reminded her to stay on the bed with the sword in her hand no matter what. Even if he begged her to give him the sword. Especially if he begged her to give him the sword.

Mara squeezed her eyes closed, hard, and tried not to think about what it would take to make Samael beg. She tried not to think about how she would live if anything happened to him. She suddenly knew nothing would. Nothing could.  She knew it deep inside.

The sword got  warmer in her hands, starting to emit a light which gradually grew brighter until Mara opened her eyes to figure out why the room was so bright. The glowing sword drew itself up, so Mara had to stand to keep it in her hands. Until she herself was floating above the bed, sword pointing down at the black creature. She could feel an energy flowing through the sword that she would never be able to describe as anything but Love.

The angel rose, and stepped back from the dog. It was only a dog now. The largest dog Mara had ever seen, but only a dog. Still black, but only a normal black.  “Your dog,” she heard a voice say. The dog walked over to the door, nudged it closed with her nose, turned around three times, and sunk down to sleep.

Mara, looked down and saw she was still floating. The sword was not glowing any more. She looked at Samael, laughed and stretched the sword out to him.  It seemed to want to be with him again. He took the sword, and caught Mara as she started to fall back onto the bed. Still laughing.

Samael smiled.

“You are pleased with yourself, my treasure?”

“I didn’t do that,” she said, “did I? I couldn’t!”

“Only faith and love could have won that battle. It had to be someone, a human, with enough faith and love to bring the magic into the sword when it was needed. Only those can defeat this kind of darkness.”

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Know?”

“How did you know it would work?”

“Because in my arms you could fly. I knew. I trusted. These are things I am trained to know. It is who I am, ” he said.

Later, in bed, Samael’s arms around her, Mara wondered if he ever slept. No, she knew. He never did. He rested,  but he kept watch over her. Always. He was her defender.

“Sami?” She started to ask… 

“My name is Samael, my treasure. ” 

She smiled against his chest as he stroked her hair. She didn’t need to ask. She knew.

 

 

She sure hoped the dog was housebroken.