In the span of three days, my gentleman caller has called — twice — and has sent three emails. Three of these correspondences came after I sent an email saying that I was trying to get through the end of the semester, and that I would call as soon as the madness was over. He sent an email acknowledging this.

Ten minutes later, he sent another email, followed by a phone call the next day.

Needless to say, I am no longer interested.

In my younger years, I would have seen this eagerness as sweet, cute, or some other innocuous gesture. Now I see it as a nuisance. This is a very stressful time for me, and I need to dedicate all of my energy to completing this task — a task that has already dragged on far too long.

I don't know if he was just overly excited, or if he just doesn't care about what I am trying to do — I really hate to think this is the case. Fact of the matter is, I see his behavior as a bit on the insecure side, and I am not attracted to that.

I am not quite sure how I am going to handle this. Exams will be over in a few days, so maybe I will check it out then. Problem is, after graduation, I will have a whole new set of priorities — job search and the like. If he doesn't understand that I need time right now, what will happen later?

My girlfriend just emailed me and asked if I had "blog block." Yup guess that's it. A name for my condition. I didn't realize it was an official condition till just now.

You may have noticed the date of my last post. So what — you ask — have I been doing?

Well...everything you could possibly imagine and some stuff you wouldn't even believe.

Lately I have only two speeds — GO and PASS OUT — and I maximize every hour of the day I am blessed with.

Funny, I write all day long in my head but apparently my head and my hands have not been communicating. I assume that would translate into Blocked- Head as opposed to Blockhead which is so unfeminine....

So I am in search of the antidote to Blog Block and I aspire to my next post — shortly.

Debbie

After my Ingrid Michaelson song post, someone commented, "It's just a song people."

I loved the responses to that, but I especially loved this one:

"And a poem is just a poem? And a painting is just pigment on a canvas and (so the song goes) life is just to die? Sorry, I don't buy that. I think it's good, great, wonderful to look to art, music, architecture, nature — all these things — to try to find or understand our connections to one another and to find some meaning to go with our experiences."

I spend more time doing this these days — finding new meanings in pieces I've already known. Songs, especially — whether they're about splitting up, or, more recently, being in a relationship that makes me happy — songs I've known forever I hear again and suddenly understand, suddenly feel like they're connected to me.

Suddenly, there are songs that mean something. Books that suddenly make sense. Poems that make me feel like I know where I'm going.

Because I like that — that feeling of connection — and because I want to irritate the commenter who thinks songs mean nothing but a paycheck to the songwriter, I'd like to spend a little time this week on those connections.

That's the thing about major life shifts: There's new meaning to find, and there are others trying to find the same meanings. Sometimes they say it better than we do.

I remember the exact moment I realized that things might not work out with my husband.

We had been married a couple of years. His job had moved us away from our family and friends, but we were back in town for his friend's wedding. The trip corresponded with my birthday and I was excited to celebrate it with all our old pals.

My husband and I had an agreement that he would get to spend a bunch of time with his friends and I would spend a bunch of time with mine. His friends preferred video games and drinking beer while my friends liked going out dancing and enjoying the nightlife. It's not that our friends didn't intermingle, but it was definitely a situation where the guys hung out with the guys, and the girls hung out with the girls.

The morning of my birthday my husband took off with his friends. He was gone all day long. I didn't have anyone to spend time with during the day because all my friends were at work so when I asked him to carve some time out of his day for me, he got really defensive.

"You said I could hang out with my friends as much as I wanted!" he argued.

Yes, I had encouraged him to spend time with his friends during the vacation, but I guess I figured that maybe my birthday might be cause for some time together. I didn't even care if he had invited me along with whatever they were all doing that day. I just didn't want to sit alone on my birthday.

Silly me.

Late that night he came back to the hotel with his friends and a cake from a grocery store bakery. They all stood around me and sang "Happy Birthday" in a way that tipped me off that all these guys knew I was mad at my husband, and they all thought I was a typical hysterical female. Have you ever heard "Happy Birthday" sung by five very unenthusiastic men who wanted to be somewhere else? It's not pretty.

I've been listening to Ingrid Michaelson all week. One particular CD — it's like she's crawled into my head and is digging about it in, only in a catchy/lovely/song lyrical kind of way. My past two years are there in their entirety, neatly, in 10 tracks or so.

This one song — "Corner of Your Heart" — I can't stop listening to it. I can't stop because it upsets me so much, like a bruise you can't stop pressing. It's beautiful and haunting and infinitely disturbing. I can't turn it off.

"There's a corner of your heart just for me," it goes. "I will pack my bags just to stay in the corner of your heart. Just to sleep underneath your bed. Just to occupy one minute of your day."

Now, I don't know if this intended to be a love song. Maybe it is. Maybe to other people there is romance in it.

But to me, it's horrifying. It's everything that was wrong about my relationship: me just wanting something, something, anything that would tell me I was loved back. It's me being offered only a corner, being willing to take that. Being happy with that. Giving up so much in hopes of that one minute.

I can't stop listening to it because I want to know if that's what it's meant to mean. Because I recognize myself in it. And because I'm so far away from that place now and don't want to go anywhere near it again.

Also, it's a really pretty song.

Lindsay knows exactly what to do when a friend is getting divorced. She doesn't press. She doesn't pester with questions. She doesn't fill the space with reassurances or aspersions - she allows silence. She allows time. She knows that what's needed is normality.

At the same time, she'll let you that, anytime you need, it, you can call her and she'll drive out and spend the day with you, or the afternoon, or the hour. She'll take you to lunch, she'll go to a movie, she'll just sit with you so you're not alone.

When you move to a new place, she's the one that will spend the first night with you so you're not alone, making the weekend into a party instead of a chore, keeping any of it from being sad. She'll unpack boxes. She'll organize your closet and your kitchen.  

She is, in short, an invaluable friend. 

The other reason to look to Lindsay is that she has a marriage that makes me rethink my certainty that relationships can't last. Years in, she and her husband are still in love, still happy, still right for each other. They make room for each other's lives while still sharing them. They compromise. They talk. They are each other's best friends, and they still make out.  

There are people like this in the world. There are relationships like that out there. This is good to remember. 

After Hurricane Katrina blew my life apart, but gave me the opportunity to escape my prison sentence with Stinky, I was in what some people call a bit of a state of shock. I was traumatized. Yep, that storm blew my house, my children's school, and my office away, and Stinky had knocked me clean stupid.

So, though it's been two and a half years, sometimes I long for those first months (okay, it was actually a year) of being so confused and unhappy and scared that I couldn't hold down a full time job and was afraid to really do anything more than get up, get the kids to school, and brush my teeth.

That's when I found my new friends: Crown Royal and Mimosa. Mmmm. I had no money, but I actually bought the complete collection of all six seasons of Sex In the City and after the kids were in school, I would come home and I would put in the next DVD open a bottle of Frexinet Brut or Extra Dry, mix a mimosa and sit down to plunge into complete oblivion watching four hip chicks living their lives in the Big Apple.

Ahhh. Those were the days. By noon, the champagne was gone along with a king sized bar of Hershey's dark chocolate, I would lay down and sleep for two hours, awake refreshed, brush my teeth, again, and go get the kids.

Then after baths and homework and giggles and stories of their day, and once they were both snuggled in for the night, I would shower, slip into my bed and put in the next DVD and hit play. I would also begin drinking the four Crown Royal highballs that would lull me into a deep sleep, so deep that I would not have the nightmares that had plagued me the first few weeks after my departure from the coast of Mississippi.

I am excited by the thought of life on the other side: 9-5 jobs, no homework, time for a social life.

A social life? Really? The horror...

This unnerves me more than just a little, for it has been a long time since I have had one of these — a real one. For the last four years, my life has revolved around school. My friends were people I met through school, and most of what I talked about — you guessed it — school.

I find myself thinking about the time immediately after leaving the military - another large part of my life, which, much like college, has a way of defining who you think you are. When it's all said and done, and you have to assimilate back into mainstream culture, it is quite possible to feel a bit gun-shy.

Already being a bit socially awkward (I'm a geek, what can I say? We're all awkward), this is something that I am more than a bit concerned with. Will I be able to become a social chameleon, rolling with the punches and make the transition with ease?

Or will I live in a tiny universe, filled with books, empty Cheetos bags, and overgrown houseplants? Okay, so that may be overstating things a bit, but the fear — and the possibility is still there. I can't say for sure what things are going to look like, but I am sure it will make for some interesting times.

Funny thing about not having time to think about the rest of your life: that's usually when you can't keep those thoughts from invading your brain.

I am sitting in my peapod of an apartment, trying feverishly to finish all of my assignments, and feeling quite giddy about the fact that next weekend seems rather non-committal. By the end of the week, the thesis will be no more, and there will be just one more paper and two finals to go.

For the most part, this week is all that stands between me and guilt-free napping and cable television. Problem is, my ADD won't let me focus on getting my work done.

My mind is plagued with thoughts of life on the other side. What does one do with gratuitous amount of free time? I know for a fact that I don't handle copious amounts of unscheduled time well. Most of the silly things I have done in life have come because I had more free time than I knew what to do with.

Ironically, I can't wait to see what kind of trouble I can get myself into. Humans make mistakes, after all, and this school business has left me with very little time to be human. I am ready for a change of pace...

Counting "divorced" as one of my personal adjectives is a bizarre thing. Like it or not, this is now a huge part of who I am. I don't like this as an identifier, but there's no getting around how much this has shaped me. You don't spend 15 years with someone and lose them without it becoming a part of you. But still — I'm tall. I'm a teacher. I'm divorced. This is a descriptor. This is uncomfortable.

I was about to meet Mike's parents, and realized this was how they know me — I'm someone from college. I'm someone from California. I'm someone who's divorced. Worse, actually, I'm someone who is getting divorced.

I had no idea how to bring this up when I started dating. When do you tell someone? You bring it up too early, it's, "Whoah, hey, that's a lot of information for someone I just met." Too late, "How could you not tell me this earlier?" The problem is, of course, compounded by the fact that the thing isn't final. I tried casually slipping it into conversation: "We used to do so and so — oh that was back when I was married," but was never able to pull it off successfully.

What was nice about Mike was that he has known me since college, so there was no news to break. There was, though, that horrible moment way at the beginning, when he said, "So, when did your divorce become final?" And having to answer, "Well, it's not."

Eventually, this will be so far in the past that it will cease to be a top-three descriptor. Eventually, everything will have been finalized for so long that I won't have thought about it in ages. Eventually, I'll stop worrying about what parents and new friends and colleagues think. This day, honestly, can't come soon enough.