Eat Love Pray and a few more verbs

A good friend of mine is reading through Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Love Pray" and we are both benefiting.

My friend/ coworker is a fellow "Lesbian Fat girl club" (for those of you that don't know, don't ask. And yes, we get to wear hats) She is also a fellow woman who is strong and young and pretty and has dreams and wants things to go right for once. She's not a christian, she doesn't eat meat and we disagree on a number of things other than that but when it comes right down to it, we are pretty close.

She is going through a long and drawn out split from her tragic booyfriend which reminds me much of my own station in life at this particular time. We have been complaining to one another about sleepless nights lately. Of missing our collective "hiim"s. Of our respective loves moving on and living fruitful lives without us and leaving us to clean up the mess they made out of our lives.

After reading a particular passage in Ms. Gilberts book, the two of us just looked at eachother and laughed. It's a great page long explanation of how we loose ourselves and give of ourselves to our mates to the point that our own self and desires and personality are extinct.

About how we would give of our time, money, our dogs time, our dogs money, the sun the rain and, when those would not do, sunchecks and rainchecks and love and peanut butter and jelly and sex and poems and brains and silence and music and all those other things one is or is not even entitled to will away to another person.

We laughed because we understood. We laughed because we knew that's what we'd done. We laughed to erase the thoughts of how pathetic we were. We laughed because we realized now that we were owed all those things we so carelessly gave to someone else. We laughed to save ou sanity and excercise our vocal chords. We laughed to keep from crying and beating ourselves up.

Another, less poetic outlet I have settled on for my pent up heart break and feeling of loneliness and faliure is the new delicious Britney Spears album. It's all about sex and desperation and regrets and I love it. Because it has no depth. Because it is so desperate. Because in my mind Britney's a real person with real feelings who might just be disapointed in herself and her choices. And now she's trying to figure out what she wants. Without all of her clothes on. Poor thing.

Poor me. Cheer's to poetry, music and the art of desire.