So, I spent much of the summer radio silent on this blog, poking my head out only once or twice to call for men to better to the women in our lives and so on. It's not like I stopped writing, or stopped caring, I just got busy. This has been a very interesting summer on a lot of levels, and while I usually don't talk too much about personal life details all that often, I'll get nice and personal right about now.
My summer began with the grand adventure of dating. Those of you who know me best know how much I hate the dance of getting to know someone, and pretending to be the sexy version of myself so that I can have the privilege of buying dinner and paying for a movie so that maybe, sometime down the road, we can possibly have sex at some point (Yes, that IS sarcasm, but it's bleak out there). I was reminded that things tend to work out better when I don't try to be the sexy version of me, or the smart version of me, or whatever version I think someone will like. I tried being myself, a move I haven't done in a few years. The result? I get to hang out with an amazing girl on a regular basis. We're sappy and cute and disgusting -- in public, no less -- and it's kind of cool. Don't get me wrong, if I were to watch a couple like that from a distance I would probably projectile vomit all over the place (I'm a hypocrite. I'm also probably bigger than you.) but it IS nice to be so comfortable with someone you don't really worry about what the rest of the world thinks about it.
Midway through the summer, my brother and his wife announced that they are expecting a baby (everyone after me... awwwww). And then then world got like, hormonally crazy. People I knew are dropping babies like crazy. I haven't seen an epidemic like this since my days in the Diamond District! (Seriously, don't drink the water.) In a few days, a wonderful couple I met through my brother are expecting their own bundle of joy, and after the story I heard about the kid's sonogram pose, I acquired the nickname rights and hereby dub the soon-to-arrive person "L'il Baby Cool Breeze." I also expect to not hear from those parents until the kid is 6 with that nickname.
Of course, no story worth living is completely happy, and toward the end of the summer I said goodbye to my father. Without airing business, I will say that while we weren't as close as I would have liked to be (and I take a portion of the responsibility for that), I loved him, respected him, and will miss him dearly. I hope he was proud of his children, because we all turned out pretty damn good.
The positive to that story is in several parts; number one, it reunited my family under one roof for the first time in a while. Six boys, two girls, with spouses and children and baby bumps all over the place. It was chaos. I was in heaven. Secondly, my brother took my dad's SUV in order to have a vehicle to drive their kid around in (sidebar: newborns live the life. They get valet service, chauffeur service, room service, free rent, AND they get adored for it. It's their world, we're just living in it.). He's living in Louisville, Kentucky now, one of those places that no one ever thought any of us would move to on purpose, and he's happy there. Go figure. Anyway, getting the car there meant one thing: Road Trip! I logged my first ever road trip, getting to see Pittsburgh and pass through some very pretty country on the East Coast. Definitely one of my better memories. Lastly, my father's death made it necessary to do something I was looking at doing anyway. Last minute flights are expensive, so in order to do the flight back to New York, I had to take a loan. But since I was going to take a loan out to publish anyway, I did that. My next novel, The Favorite, should be out by the end of the year!
This summer has been a big one for me. I can't think of one that's had this many stories in it worth telling, and summer don't end until the Yankees are done playing, so who knows what more can happen? If the Yankees make the playoffs though, I'm going to be hard to deal with.
No comments:
Post a Comment