constance | YOU GOTTA REMEMBER WHO FUCKIN LOVES YOU, MAN.

Well! After weeks of this debilitating panicky buzzing static overwhelming me whenever I tried to say something, anything, to anyone (it's taken me a while to realize that this phenomenon seems to be summer-related, which is it possible to have SAD in an inverse sort of style, and also, WAY TO GO SELF-AWARENESS), I woke up this morning, which was, probably not coincidentally, a nice cool morning, with the Urge to Spill. The words, they are fighting to get out, and so I am just going to let them and not make any promises and not question anything. Okay? Okay. Here goes.

I turned 39 last week, and after years of being sanguine about my approaching Middle Years, suddenly it's much harder to deal. Sure, I'm aging pretty well. Sure, I am active and healthy and inquisitive and don't much resemble the specimen I had in my brain of 40-year-old women when I was, like, seventeen, but God, come on, I am kissing my thirties goodbye and I am so very reluctant to stop! (Despite the fact that some of my thirties were truly lousy, I've liked being in my thirties quite a lot.) Anyway, this goodbye kiss. I feel it should be a really long sloppy open-mouthed slutty one, you know, the kind that when you see them between strangers in the streets you're hard-pressed not to gape and snicker but really who kisses like that in public if they don't want to be seen, right? That kind of kiss. I'm not sure how to go about it, I'm just not that sort of person, but for once in my life I want to be. I am thinking about how I want this year to go down. I don't want to spend it the way I might otherwise be tempted to spend it: lazily napping and reading in

my new hammock, which was a much-coveted birthday present this year. In spite of my nebulous wishes to do something spectacular (or maybe even more than one spectacular thing) in the next eleven months and twenty days, I've been spending a fair bit of time doing this very thing with the first few days of my fortieth year. But see, if I'm reading out on my porch, I can watch for falling limbs, which are still falling a month after the tornado, more damage in them there trees than anyone (and by anyone, I mean I) suspected, I guess; and also I can spy discreetly on my fascinating new neighbors, who are real-live rednecks, complete with indeterminate numbers of small diaper-clad children and lots of big loud trucks and terrible beer and that neo-redneck buzzcut which has long since replaced the mullet as the hairstyle of choice amongst the men of this demographic, and who last week during some sort of fight aired my new favorite Proclamation o'Love: YOU GOTTA REMEMBER WHO FUCKIN LOVES YOU, MAN. I am trotting this one out whenever I can, which is not, perhaps unsurprisingly, all that often. But I say it to you now. Because I can.

The hammock, by the way, is configured in such a way that it makes my butt fall asleep if I linger too long. I love it anyway, though. I do love me an imperfect life, a lovely thing with just a stinging edge of discomfort to it.

In other lazinesses (and as part of an ongoing effort to avoid the beginning of the end of BSG), I am slowly revisiting Deadwood and loving it even better the second time around. And oh, my. I'd remembered so many of the things I loved about it: everything about my father's spiritual twin Al Swearingen; the weaselly, prolix nastiness of EB; my future wastrellous, fabulous first wife Calamity Jane; so much, much more. But I'd sort of forgotten how incredibly, mind-bogglingly hot Seth Bullock was, or maybe I never felt it the first time around (actually, I liked Sol much more the first time around, now that I think about it), but now whenever he's onscreen, I have a hard time concentrating on the actual scene, I just want to watch him smoulder for a while, and the noteworthy thing is that it's not Timothy Olyphant who's making me squirm, since I'm not really an Olyphantgirl; it is all about Seth Bullock. MMmmmMMmMmm.

Despite these sedentary non-adventurous activities, though, I am still losing weight. I've lost quite a lot now, in fact, enough that people have taken to boggling at the change, and while I know people mean to be flattering (and while obviously it is nice to have a waist and also to be able to wear all the nifty summer skirts that hung forlornly in my closet for years because I loved them too much to throw them out but couldn't actually get them buttoned or zipped or indeed over my hips), I find myself resenting this specific attention a little. I mean, yeah, thanks for telling me I'm looking good, healthy, fit, whatfuckingever, but no thanks for the implication that I was looking crappy before. I should probably deal with this resentment, right, before it gets the better of me, before some well-meaning guy tries to flirt mildly with me and instead of smiling and being nice and moving uncomfortably on I stick around long enough to haul off and punch him in the face. That'd be uncool, I know.

And finally, I have a delicate question for you that only you, gentle reader, can answer. I've been catching up, in the last couple of days, finding out what you've been up to in the last month (and realizing in the process how few of the journals I've got friended are still actually active), wanting to comment sometimes but feeling weird about commenting enthusiastically on a post made three weeks ago, because even if I am just coming to you, you have moved far past that moment, and so this is my question to you: what exactly is your statute of limitations for comments on past posts? Do you even have one?