Here Comes the Sun . .

Ever so slowly . . . I am woefully behind in responding to personal email. My sleep schedule went out of whack this week totally due to my excitement over happy prospects. I'm an optimist. It's easy to be cynical. I'm in a total bind now as the prospects dangle in the horizon so I feel like the character from Dr. Doolittle Push Me Pull You. All of this was happily compounded by the arrival of my new cell phone. Yeppers. I am so excited. My Verizon contract was up but the offerings were not to my liking. Too damn expensive. The "free" phones were awful.

A little online comparison shopping yielded something much better. I signed up with AT&T and got myself a lovely Blackberry Curve (red) for FREE. FREE! For the past two evenings I've been playing nonstop with my new toy. I've long admired the icons the iPhones have and found someone who replicated the icons for download onto Blackerry phones. And that's what I did. This phone was an amazing deal. I still can't believe it was free with the two year plan. A PDA and phone all in one.

Tech toys brings the sun out.:) It's the simple pleasures that can keep you sane.

The Tide is Turning

Dare I say it but things are starting to look up.

I approach the future with cautious optimism. The extremely difficult times of the past few years caused the worst personal humiliation I have ever experienced in my life. In such tight spots you find out who your friends are. During the past six months, I have had people I wasn't that close to offer immense support and assistance and I have experienced a few cases where the last hope, last resort decided they were done with helping you. The reason they are done is they imagine my life and ever changing circumstances was something I had some control over, as if there really has been a silver lining and I can make gold out of mud. Yes, that is a fantastic concept to have given all that I have related here and privately through the past few years.

Sometimes the help and withholding it is about power. I have had three instances now where that seems to be the case. The inexplicable expectations expressed to me as if nothing I have shared over the past few years was really true.

And then there are those friends you talk to and they turn it into a pissing contest as to who has it the worst.

If I am indeed moving towards a better situation, I am taking along the knowledge that I will never feel the same way about some folks and some folks I will work to develop the budding friendship.

I am there for people I care about. I have stupidly used money I didn't have to be with them during tough times because to me, that is what a friend does. But the feeling is not returned. I do not do things to be constantly thanked. It's not something owed back to me. But it is difficult to understand coldness where you expected comfort.

If nothing else, it's made me strong but there has been a negative impact on me that I cannot shake.

Today I started what is expected to be a long term position with the possibility of being hired. It is a job I know I will love. I am also being considered for another position at an agency where I will also love to work.

Things are looking up but some terrible things have been learned in the process.

Ho hum

Now entering the third month without a job. No fun.

Edward G. Robinson and The Ten Commandants

One of my favorite rituals during the Easter weekend is to watch Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandants. I usually find Charlton Heston annoying in anything else outside of this film. The reason I ever wanted to see this film in the first place is because of Edward G. Robinson. When I was a teenager, I became a big fan of this actor and when going to see Soylent Green in the 1970s, of course I didn't know then it would be Robinson's last film (also starring Heston).


Back in the 1950s during the infamous McCarthy witch hunt for communists, Robinson's liberal sympathies were labeled "too leftist" for the mainstream and he soon found himself not able to get work in Hollywood.

But ol' Cecil wasn't one to be intimidated by anybody or told how to run his business. He called Robinson one day and offered him the role of Dathan. Dathan was a good role and a visible one. Originally a convert he soon became a nudge to the leader Moses, quickly put in his place once Moses part the Red Sea. Quite a trick. DeMille made a version of The Ten Commandants during the silent film days and is the only person to have parted the Red Sea twice. Try topping that.

Eddie Robinson's Dathan put the industry on notice that he was back and he was staying.

The Un-Couple

An old friend of mine called me about two weeks ago and we yakked for about an hour. We started talking about old flames and I told my friend that I had come to believe that which Katharine Hepburn believed - two people in love need to live in separate abodes. The place can be near each other but the times I have been in love, I felt I still needed to live separately from my boyfriend.

"But you do live with someone," my friend countered. "You've shared an apartment for ages!"

Living with a lover and living with a best friend are two different things. There is also the fact that many friends don't necessarily feel they could actually live with each other in an apartment or house. We don't have the potentially explosive conversations lovers have such as -

"Please come with me to my reunion/event"

"We haven't had sex in months . . ."

"Why do we always have to go to your mother-in-law's house for the holiday?"

Okay, just some lame examples but you get the idea. When you are sexually involved with someone, when you are part of a couple, there are expectations from both sides (and society has certain expectations as well) and emotions tend to run hot.

The only possibly similar conversation I ever have with Kay (who feels the same way I do about living with a man) is "Do you want to go out and do something?" One or the other may be momentarily disappointed if the suggestion is declined but it's nothing compared to what happens when lovers respond they don't want to do something with the other.

Life for me is far less complicated. And I prefer it that way.