Perhaps you may enjoy my Flickr page. Modern Times — Bob Dylan. It's been years since I read a copy of Rolling Stone magazine, but I still pay attention when they issue one of their rare five-star reviews. The good news is that your painful, hurtful patterns of responding to that one person are destroyed. The bad news is that your collection of seashells from family vacation when you were ten are also gone. It all gets washed out to sea. . — September 15, 2005 Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become part of the moral tissue. — Edith Wharton "Ticket" by Meg Kearney I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.	September 6, 2006 Studio apartment I'm reaching the end of my first year here in this little apartment in Decatur. When I signed the lease for this little space twelve months ago, I was full of hope and curiosity about what it would be like to live alone in this place. After a general lifetime of sharing my space with siblings and roommates and spouses (well, just one spouse), I really didn't know what to expect. The short story is that it's good, and it's difficult. Living alone is not for the faint of heart. Then again, neither is living with a partner, or a roommate, or a sibling, or anyone else. Living alone rather perfectly captures my general frustration with mankind at large. The great thing is, there's nobody around who is wanting to engage you in conversation when you just feel like curling up on the couch with a pint of ice cream and Elizabeth Gilbert's delicious little memoir. The terrible thing is, there's nobody around to listen when you come across a particularly moving passage that just begs to be shared. Two of my closest friends have given birth for the first time in the past year. Both are women in relatively young marriages, and both of them gave birth to sons. Beth and Lalah are entering into motherhood vested with mighty stores of wisdom and love, and it's been a true pleasure spending time with them this summer, witnessing their passage into motherhood, getting to know their fierce little baby boys. Inevitably, every time I leave one of these women to come back to my own place, I am sure of two things: (1) I have absolutely no desire to have children of my own; (2) I am really and truly jealous of these women. Of their beautiful proud families and the roles they are stepping into so gracefully as their families grow. This unprincipled, divorced, non-parent thinks, on the long drive back to my tiny studio apartment which is peopled by neither roommate nor lover nor cat: That's the sharp blessing of having children to raise. You know what you're doing tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.... and, oh, what a comfort that must be. Beth, naturally, tells me the monotony is the hardest part so far of being a mother. It's just a conundrum, I tell you. A friend that I haven't talked to in a while sent an email last week. He asked me how I was doing, and then added that he suspected I was very happy with my life these days. I wanted to write him back and explain all of this, the push-pull of my present happiness and melancholy. I wanted to send him this bit from Wallace Stevens that I ran across recently that just about knocked me flat when I first read it: The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it. It's true that I spend a lot of time over at my boyfriend's house lately. Sometimes being here by myself is just a little more reality than I care to handle. At the end of the day, he comes downstairs from his attic woodworking shop, and he smells like sweat and sawdust, and I want to just take him in my arms and ask him to tell me every single thought that he's had that day. Or I want him to take me in his arms, and ask me every single thought I've had that day. Of course, neither of these things usually happens. I brush a little sawdust out of his hair and ask him if he's eaten dinner yet. And we talk about small, managable things while we cut up the vegetables. Maybe it's not such an unusual thing to be in this state, this state of longing for solitude and soulful company at the same time. Access Hollywood would disagree vehemently, but maybe it's not such an dreadful thing to be alone, a homebody, even, someone who looks forward to coming home from work on Friday and not having to put on makeup for the next two days. I have noticed that the busiest night for the laundry machines here at the apartment building is Friday night. All of us in our little separate units, apartments, coming out to change the loads from washer to dryer, then whispering back into our little studio apartments, picking up that cup of tea again, finding the part in the book again, reading and dog-earing the page for some future reading for the friend that will understand it and love it as deeply as you.