Every weekday between five and six, after eight-ish hours at work, I get off the bus and walk the last block home. My bus stops in front of the hair salon with the cute (straight, Christian, conservative) hair stylist (is that what guys who do hair are called?) is, who’s cut my hair once, just past the bridal shop with new dresses on display weekly. Whatever randomly shuffles on blares through my headphones as I pass the house with particularly stinky garbage. I cross the street and turn down my street, digging in my purse for keys. Walking in the front door, I grab the day’s mail and open the apartment door. After sorting the mail out for roommates, I grab my own and walk towards my room. Cat #1 welcomes me loudly and gets scratched behind the ears, while cat #2 runs for the bedroom to have her belly rubbed. After giving the cats attention and dinner, and checking on the fish, I usually change out of my office clothes into something more comfortable (often pj’s in the winter, but today its too hot for anything more than a tank top and shorts - underwear is questionable). Flip on the TV, open my mail, start thinking about dinner.
Tomorrow I turn 27, and life is nothing like I thought it would be. I’m actually further from a career than I was a year ago, having decided to move away from my college major towards a goal more rewarding and challenging, but requiring further education. I own nothing valuable, not even a car. I rent. I usually make it from paycheck to paycheck, but just barely. I’m $25,000 in debt, including $20,000 in student loans 
is supposed to be paying but isn’t since becoming unemployed 2 years ago and watching his new wife go through radiation and chemo for the cancer that will kill her (and break what’s left of his heart) within 5 years.
My baby sister is married, has bought a second house with her youth pastor husband, and they’re going to start trying to have a baby in the fall. I have… three close friends who aren’t married and one former love interest.
I have no realistic love interests or possibilities, and don’t even have hopes for the matches from g2g.com that I found today. I have managed to keep 2 cats and 3 fish alive for nearly 2 years, but not a single potted plant.
Its way too hot for cooking today (92* at 8pm), so in a move that would shock my immediate family, I made a fruit salad for dinner. Amusing, I’m sure, since there’s about four fruits I mildly tolerate. They were all there: 1 1/2 bananas, the apple leftover from lunch, a handful of strawberries, and whatever cantaloupe wouldn’t fit in the Tupperware. It would have been smarter to just make four piles on a plate, rather than stir them together in the small mixing bowl - I ended up eating each kind separately. Bananas first, they’re my least favorite, then the cantaloupe that I should have waited until tomorrow so it would have been fully ripe. Then the strawberries, which had some mushy parts and weren’t as sweet as I wanted, and lastly the apple, because there was the most of it. Fruit salad is not filling at all - I’m still starving and its still too hot to cook. I might be able to swing a BLT (sans T of course), but I’ll have to do a truckload of dishes first. The dishwasher is temporarily broken. Maybe if I can get a roommate to dry… I’d rather sit in the living room where the fan is and watch TV and read my book (yes, at the same time), but I can’t figure out how to work the TV now that we’ve got cable. Maybe I’ll bring my window air-conditioner up from the basement.
*** (6/24)
If you find big hair attractive, I am the sexiest woman alive, after Diana Ross that is. This summer is the first in nearly a decade where mine is long enough to be affected by the humidity in a good way.
Today is my birthday. In three years I will be thirty, and I foresee that being fairly traumatic in a multitude of ways. This birthday wasn’t bad - I think it helped that 26 was a fairly good year. 23, 24, 25, all these were horrible and really deserved re-dos, but I’m OK with how 26 went.
I took the day off and had a day of relative luxury. I ran the air conditioning, slept in, watched some TV. 
came over and gave me my gift - a DVD I asked for and a cordless vacuum. We did a little shopping. She dropped me back home, and after making lunch. I took a nice nap with the cable blaring and the air conditioner blasting cool air in my direction.
Later I got together with a few friends for dinner, gift exchanging, and a movie. While waiting for the bus to take me home, a woman well on her way to being drunk, by her own admission, decided to talk my ear off. The bus at eleven pm is an interesting ride. Correction - the bus is always an interesting ride; nighttime only makes it more so. Three college girls in skirts and blouses (the church kind not the club kind) got on by the train stop and off in a less-than-desirable neighborhood. A junior-high-aged Latino boy got on with his younger brother and kindergarten-aged sister. An African American father with his young son got off at one of the worst stops. Nobody hassled me, which I was thankful for. I didn’t even have to sit next to anyone who smelled bad.
*** (6/28)
Tonight I took myself for a walk to the drugstore. The sidewalks were littered with couples on a stroll, hand-in-hand. It seemed to add insult to injury. After a particularly painful annual exam, I was on my way to pick up my birth control refill that I will probably never need for that. Fat women power-walking, skinny chicks jogging by, blond ponytails bounding, moms and dads with strollers, groups of college students enjoying the respite from studies, all of it was almost enough to propel my feet the extra yards to the ice cream shop, until I realized how tight my shorts were while squeezing between a stroller and a Snoopy sculpture.
I was bitter, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually been bitter about that. Sure, about being single, not having a date in over 4 years (and that’s with a very liberal interpretation of the word), being the unmarried one at family functions and reunions. But not about my probable inability to give birth to children. I don’t even think I was sad when I got the official diagnosis - thoughtful maybe, but not sad. It’s not just fat girls that can write bitter diatribes, you know (which, btw, is redundant, since diatribe means a bitter and abusive speech or writing). Us skinny girls can have a lot of reasons for animosity too.
Bitterness only kills, dulls. My eyes, normally wide and slightly lusty over the mansions on Summit, even after years, were less interested in the sights. My smile towards the man jogging with his little dog, both panting in the evening heat, a little dimmer.
Sometimes I feel like I’m on this grand adventure. Does everyone who settles down somewhere they didn’t grow up feel this way? Especially on the bus, I feel like an explorer, brave and curious, even when I’m passing sights I’ve seen hundreds of times. The river and its bridges still stir me, the slums and mansions alike catching my interest, the weather, people, and land still strange, even after having lived here nearly four years. And at the same time, I feel distinctly at home here, unlike every other place I’ve lived. It wasn’t instant, this feeling of home. Since moving here, I’ve had five apartments (not including the 3-month stint in Arizona), eleven roommates, four cars, at least eight jobs, seven fish, and two cats.
I’m starting to feel a little fuzzy. I’ve been indulging in sparkling apple cider (in a champagne glass, to complete the illusion), and since all I had for dinner was some cantaloupe, the bubbles are getting to my head (the non-alcoholic bubbles).
I made myself up a dinner plate from what I could find in the fridge that wasn’t an official leftover. Pita and hummus, 2 hard-boiled eggs, and some cheese - all alternative sources of protein. I do that, subconsciously crave foods that I’ve been deficient of. It’s still hot enough to warrant turning on my window air-conditioning unit.
***
I totally don’t get guys. I can go out and look my greatest and not get noticed. Sunday afternoon I walked to the co-op to buy milk, looking like a slob and not having showered, and this guy in the produce section - cute, ponytail, red shirt - totally checking me out. How is that? Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with enough things to keep shopping for, so nothing came to a fruition (though I did bring home bananas, apples, strawberries, and cantaloupe).
“Close Encounters” is on cable tonight. Have I mentioned my love of sci-fi? I’m a cute girl who loves sci-fi movies and books and is into technology - how is it some geek hasn’t found me and fallen in love yet?
***
I have impeccable taste. Every woman I know, with the exception of , asks me for clothing advice. I am always right, and they get compliments galore. I’m not as good with movies and music, but with books I also do quite well. This is problematic - I can’t seem to dress myself to the same degree of fabulous-ness as I can everyone else. It would be easy to reject my advice simply because I don’t look up to par.
I am also fabulous with relationship advice. However, I haven’t had a boyfriend for more than three months, and currently a date within four years. Again, easy to distrust my guidance.
And I’d really like to be automatically trustworthy. I wish I could dress well - classy, in vogue, chic. And I would love to have a boyfriend, finance, or husband. But I have no idea how to change either of those situations. I almost said “fix those problems,” but stopped myself in time. Fashionable attire, or lack thereof, hardly qualifies as a problem (unless its truly severe, at which point its tragic and perhaps irreparable). And singleness is not a problem. I often have to remind myself of this. I am not broken, flawed, incomplete without my missing half. I am a whole person.
Often family functions are the most challenging. I am nearly the only cousin unmarried on both sides, and those without rings have long-standing significant others with definite marriage possibilities.
I have plenty of single friends that I love. Frankly, almost all of my friends who’ve married have lost touch. And when we do get together, its not like it used to be. Nor should it be, really. You can’t go on living the single life after you’re married. I don’t plan on it. And I look forward to getting back in touch with my married friends, so we can hang out as couples.
popularity: 15%
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and I removed the shower head in our bathroom to replace it, found we couldn’t replace it with what we had, and cleaned it instead. She chipped off the remaining paint from the wall in the bathroom and I put the first layer of patch on. I’ll put the second coat on tonight. Trying to let it dry 24 hours between coats, even though it says 40-60 minutes. It’s just too humid and hot to believe that. We decided that since we’re not having a party Friday (more in a moment), we’d pick a date in July and come up with a plan so we’re not unprepared. We’ll make a guest list, a menu, and a list of things we want to get done in the house before having people over. And then we’ll do it. Really, this time.
for making plans for Friday for me without me, especially because I usually enjoy going to 
will be there and we’re going out afterwards (
and myself). I’ve been really annoyed with the situation, that my roommates and I had been planning on having people over Friday night, I took the day off, it’s my birthday, and this has been common knowledge since Memorial Day, and then it keeps being forgotten. Then I was thinking I was being childish, that people have birthdays all the time and it’s no big deal and I shouldn’t really be so selfish as to want a day for myself.
came up to Michigan (I’d only been there a month). 1999 (my 21st) I was 
and buying my first ear cuff at the Sea Captain’s Lady and having a lot of fun. So maybe it’s not been all my birthdays, just… the majority of the last 10 years’ worth.
, having a conversation that was nearly verbatim of the one I’d just had with 
is either married or soon to be married (sources weren’t exactly sure). I was shocked, no doubt. Not because someone said yes to him - goodness gracious, he’s fabulous and I’m sure had no doubt getting the girl he decided on. More that he actually decided and acted on it.
would have rivaled it, had we kept in contact past the three months of 24/7 stress that was called work (and living in oh such close proximity). In fact, 