Hey, you celebrate your way, I’ll celebrate mine.
Two things happened that totally jazzed my day. The first is that the envelope arrived at the office containing my driver’s license, so I can go back to work tomorrow. The second is that I got a notification in my Starbucks app that I have now reached Gold Level, which means that I get free refills on coffee and…… wait for it…… ICED TEA. My favorite thing in the whole wide world to drink is their iced black tea with cream. People think it’s weird as I watch them put cream in their iced coffee, but I think it tastes like Thai iced tea, so I do it anyway. So there huh.
If it seems like these things are on the same level of excitement, they are. I have my life back, in its completeness. I can be at Starbucks by 6:00 or 6:30 to await my 7:40 train again, drinking coffee or tea (as much as I want… squee!). I go to Starbucks and write so that I’m fully awake by the time I get to work, because I can’t take my coffee on the train with me. It’s a win-win situation, despite that. I get to think in longhand and then listen to a podcast or play Plants vs. Zombies or read or do any of the things that I would be doing at home, anyway. In fact, Amazon Prime lets me download movies and episodes to my phone so I can watch offline. I haven’t done it yet, because I don’t have much space on my phone, but it’s cool that I could watch TV on the Metro nonetheless.
Right now I’m obsessed with an MTV series on Hulu, though. It’s called Finding Carter, and it’s about a teenager that gets arrested for sneaking into a carousel with her friends, and is waiting for her mom to come and bail her out when the police take her into a special room and tell her that she was abducted when she was three and now her real parents have found her…. so she has this whole new life with all these people that she doesn’t know. It’s absolutely fascinating, and the woman who plays her real mother is someone I couldn’t put my finger on…. but I KNEW I KNEW HER. I hadn’t been paying attention to the credits, and when I saw her name, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
When I was a kid, my favorite soap operas were The Young and the Restless and Guiding Light. The woman that plays the real mom is Cynthia Watros. If you were a Guiding Light fan in the 90’s, I’m betting you just recoiled in horror. Watros played Annie Dutton, one of the most evil characters in the history of soap operas, to the point that Watros told stories on Oprah of fans hitting her with their umbrellas in airports. Seeing Cynthia Watros on TV made my heart flip, because in this role, she’s actually nice. I am hoping and praying that there will be some sort of Annie Dutton joke on Finding Carter, because it would make my day, as if it hasn’t been made already.
I am excited about getting to see my coworkers and celebrate New Year’s with them, and to get my license before Donut Day. We have Donut Day every Wednesday. I try to get there a little early so that I can get one with jelly in the middle. Those go first. There are also bagels, so for lunch I have a bagel with cream cheese. It’s bliss. It’s so much fun to work for a company that really values its employees and tries so hard to keep them happy. Our holiday party was incredible. Prime rib for everyone, and I had key lime pie for dessert.
It’s really put this whole Dana thing in perspective. So I lost her. But I’ve gained so much over the past few months that it’s not enough to stop me from being happy, because happiness is happening without her. As I have said before, releasing the burden of worrying about her is so freeing, because now I know she doesn’t want me to worry about her. She’s got her people and I’ve got mine.
It’s nice to have people. I didn’t want to begin again, and it happened despite my protestation about it. I am on the other side of a nasty divorce when I didn’t want it to be. I have a sneaking suspicion that even though Dana knew she was marrying a writer, she didn’t realize the scope of it…. and that’s okay. Whomever enters my life from here on out will have to accept it, because it’s not something I do. It’s who I am.
I have $1.83 to prove it.
Stories That Are All True 