Signs and Portents; or, the Importance of Signs

Yesterday, I ran a red light.

Tonight, I saw a shooting star!

w4m

My first self-description blurb:

Who I am: a big dork who thinks proofreading is fun, yippee! No, really, I'm a glamorous professional dancer. No wait, I'm an "educator" who thinks Israeli dance is a "gateway to Judaism" or some bs. No, that's not it either. Well, I'm a bookslut; that much is clear.

What I'm doing with my life: trying to get it sorted out on a new side of the country. Dancing and reading; being a dance teacher and a librarian. Trying to learn Hebrew. Looking for love. Looking for me. Looking for a cynical, sarcastic, smart guy who knows the difference between "your" and "you're" but still, deep down, has hope for the world. Ok, has hope for his own personal happily-ever-after.

My second attempt:

I currently love: dance movies and kickboxing; sushi, peanut butter, and ice cream. Being sore from working out, being sore from making out (?). Good puns, bad puns, language jokes, geeky jokes. Reading, Running, Harvard Square, NPR. Israel, Hebrew, Israeli dance. Robert Downey Jr., wandering around a new city, road trips, having a foul mouth, summer, going barefoot. Kisses on my neck, frisbee in the park. Conversations that end up requiring diagrams on napkins. Making a mess, enjoying the mess. Camus, Dostoevsky, John Irving, John Steinbeck. Nick Hornby, Tom Robbins. Eating. My friends, my family, my family-friends. Well-defined shoulder muscles. Christopher Guest movies, but "For Your Consideration" sucked. Wonder Woman. Helicopters. Moxy Fruvous, McSweeneys, Tom Stoppard. xkcd. I'm hoping to love forever: a tall, smart, sarcastic, honest boy who loves many (some? a few?) of those things as well.

Which do you like better? Which is more likely to nab me the Boy of My Dreams (TM) ? Are YOU the BoMD? Do you know him? Can you send him my way, pretty please?

<fiction> <\fiction>

So I have this friend who can see the future. I mean, I’m not sure I exactly believe that he can see the future, but he claims he can, and well… sometimes you want to believe that you have such a friend and so you suspend a little disbelief. My friend, he doesn’t tell me the future in a straightforward kind of way; he never says, “the Yankees are going to win the Series this year and make sure you have band-aids in your purse; you’re going to cut your knee getting out of the car this afternoon.” It’s just that sometimes I’ll bemoan the state of things as they are, and he’ll subtly allude to how they’re eventually going to be instead, but not in a “everything’s going to be fine” way. It’s always something more like, “Don’t beat yourself up so much about not being fluent yet. You’ll catch up in no time when you move to Brazil with your husband.” This, when I have neither plans to move to Brazil nor even a boyfriend… but apparently he can see the future, and in the future I have both.

In the future, I’m also apparently going to write and publish a few novels. Maybe all my friend’s predictions are self-fulfilling and I’m only going to do the things he says because he has said them. This feels to me how it’s likely to go with the writing; I don’t believe I’d ever have tried writing this without benefit of his prophecy, but here I am writing this, so who knows. If you’re reading it, them maybe he was right all along and maybe his saying it made it so. If it is the case that things happen to me, or that I make things happen, simply because he has told me they would be so, I sure wish he’d tell me I’m going to lose twenty pounds this year. Hell, I wish he’d tell me I’m going to lose twenty pounds this month.

fiction?

So, a friend of mine is convinced, or claims to be, that I’ll write a couple of novels some day, within in the next ten years or something. Supposedly I’ve just been gathering material so far and I’ll be ready to start soon, at which point some other things in my life will come together as well. I always tell him that I write every day, which is true; I write every night before bed, in my journal, at least a little bit about the day that’s just ended and often a little about what I expect or hope for in the following one. But that’s writing for myself, he says. I need to start writing for other people. Aren’t successful artists of all stripes always saying that you need to practice the art for yourself alone?

About what would I possibly write, if not the trivialities (vagaries?) about my day? I have no idea. I’m not about to write non-biographical non-fiction, that’s clear. Am I to write about my own life in a thinly disguised sort of way? Am I to write essays, memoirs? Is that really different from what I already do? And did I just sneeze all over my monitor? I think I’m getting a cold.

I admit that I’ve had an interesting life. Probably not interesting on the Grand Scale of Interesting; I’ve never been molested or lived in exotic places or shot a man or overcome great and unique obstacles. It’s more the combination of things I’ve done in my life that seems interesting to me: sure, plenty of people went to work for start-up companies during the internet boom of the 90s and traveled to Europe to lecture to heads of multinational and multimillion dollar companies… and plenty of people teach kids to dance. It’s just unusual that one person has made her living doing both of these things by age 28, like I have.

I’ve lived in four states: New York, Florida, Massachusetts, and California.

I’ve been to 14 (16?) countries outside the US: Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Poland, Israel, France, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Norway, Turkey, Belize, Honduras (Roatán, not mainland), and maybe the Netherlands if you count a few hours on St Maarten, and maybe the Bahamas if you count a day on Princess Cay. (Hell, I was once in the Austrian airport, but that *definitely* doesn't count.)

I’ve studied two languages besides English: Spanish and Hebrew, and I’m fluent in neither of those.

I’ve been in a four-year relationship, a five-year one, and a few months-long ones, including an eight-month one. Only one was truly bad.

I read a lot, I dance a lot, and I spend a lot of time alone. I’m not very good at making phone calls, or returning them.

I am beginning to think that I do an inordinate amount of physical exercise, possibly to compensate for the truly inordinate amount of food I eat.

For some definitions of "fun"

How many calories in a slice of pizza? I think this is a fun party game: tell your friends to think, but not say aloud, how many calories there are in an average, not ginormous, normal slice of cheese pizza, no special toppings. Insist that they think of an actual number before anyone says anything, because the fun part is the ridiculously wide variation in the numbers they’ll come up with. The first time I tried this, the lowest guess was less than a fifth of the highest.