No telling where love is lurking.

It could be right around the corner or reaching over your shoulder to grab a beer.

And people, all I have to say is, if love's going to dance in front of me I'll be damned if I'm going to be caught watching!

Why? Because love isn't playing fair, that's why. And I think he knows it.

Seven men are loaded up, sitting in a helicopter with a box carrying nitroglycerin containers on a rescue mission up top Mount Everest. As they lift off the ground on this impossible mission one of the hero’s lifts up off his butt looking under him to the right, then looks under himself to the left. Finally he grabs one of his legs and raises it as far over his head as he can. In exasperation the guy sitting next to him says, “What are you doing?” and our unlikely hero says, “I’m trying to kiss my ass goodbye.”

Well here I am trying to arrange a get together…oh good grief, I can’t even type it…DATE. It feels more like some impossibly dangerous mission. Each word a potential canister of nitro that could explode at any time. Yes, I’m prepared at any moment to “kiss my ass good bye”.

Wow, amazing how much turmoil can be caused in waiting for a response back on this. Sometimes I feel like it’s a bit hopeless – this meeting someone and taking a chance there might be a spark there. I step up. Then I wait to see what happens next. Will the other person respond positively?

Each and every step seems so impossible, so much more unlikely. When do I open up and have to share my lack of normalcy? The most profoundly embarrassing truth, that I never know exactly from one day to the next, just what I can do physically. How could any normal healthy man be attracted to that?

I choose active, outgoing social men. What in God’s name can I possibly offer them? I feel like crap just now.

I’m feeling most vulnerable. In my head I’m still thinking like a physically active person, the reality smacks into me head on like a Mac truck. I am no longer a physically active person. However did I think I could keep up with one?

Then I'm thinking, when was the last time I was in love, and had a sane, interesting man in my life? Not since I was a married person, that would make it 4 years now. Yikes!

I have dated but not in almost two years. I’ve turned down so many guys. I simply wasn’t interested. But now… Now it’s nerve wracking cause I actually like someone. (someone who's actually single )

Oh man, I’m feeling hopeless, very hopeless right now. Sure, I should appreciate the fact that this is life, proof that I’m getting well and can feel this way once again, that I should relish these emotions since they so seldom come to me.

I must remind myself who I am and that I am no coward, if I make a complete ass out of myself then so what? That maybe this guy might still see in me what my friends do. That perhaps he’ll see all the life I have in me, whether it shows on the outside all the time or not. Okay, I’m feeling better about this. Maybe I’m not a complete idiot after all. By Wednesday I think I’ll be able to manage going out to Rush with my head held high in his presence. And by then maybe my words won’t feel so much like nitro waiting to explode each time I say something to him.

Is it possible that like our goofy hero in the helicopter, I too can survive this dangerous mission?

Time Traveling

She’s right, my sister-in-law is.

Andrea had found a similarity between a character in a book she’d been reading and myself. She wanted to recommend this book to me but also wanted to be sensitive to the possibility that I might to make a connection between this character in the story, and it might be painful for me.

I haven’t gotten very far yet in the book and already I’m crying. Holy cow, I can so relate to this storybook person it’s killing me inside, great book by-the-way. The book is called the Time Traveler’s Wife and the character is Henry.

Henry travels through time, backwards, forwards and all around. It’s called Chrono-impairment, an uncontrollable popping in and out of the present to other points in time. It’s uncomfortable when it happens. He disappears and reappears taking nothing with him so he’s naked as he appears. Sometimes he finds himself in the freezing cold or sliding down a carpeted hallway getting a dozy of a carpet burn.

Here’s how I relate to this character, I, myself pop back and forth through the present with spurts of energy. Like an on and off switch, my body either is working or it's shut down. And like Henry, I never know when my impairment will rear it’s ugly head and take me away into that “crash and burn”, leaving me immoble, stuck in bed. It is a most uncontrollable thing and happens to me at the most inconvenient moments. It limits my life on a grand scale and as I continue to read about how Henry deals with his disability, and it’s interruptions, I sigh and shake my head in a knowing fashion. What can I say, I know just how he feels.

Sometimes Henry’s nauseous from the time travel and throws up — that too we have in common only I don’t throw up — I just have trouble eating.

I’m having one of my bad days today. I can hardly stand to sit up let alone write these paragraphs, and just like the time traveler, poof I'll soon find myself back in bed. But no fear I’ll be back at some point I always am.