Make a new friend!

Oranges (and their ilk) are the perfect fruit for sharing. Is there any other food that's naturally compartmentalized like an orange? Share an orange and make a new friend today!

Silence dissolves all objects.

More cleaning done. Woo. An exciting life I lead.

"What are you doing Friday night?"

"Cleaning my apartment." I'm hot shit.

Did a little bit of reading, both research and fun reading. Grocery shopping, too. I seem to do it every 2-3 months now, even though I mean to go more often. I cleaned out the last of my fridge for dinner and then went out and spent almost $200 on food.

For someone who's stopped drinking alone, I sure did buy a good amount of alcohol. But it's all higher end stuff. I'm excited to break it out as soon as I have someone to share the experience with. I just need to have people over, which seems to be a recurring theme. "Come over and have a drink, and I'll make you food!" That's a standing invitation to anyone out there. Please don't mind the mess, it's improving. Slowly.

Trish called and we talked for 90 minutes or so. Worth the break, or the not cleaning for an hour and a half. She's referring to her ex as "that guy" now, so that could be a good thing. She got into some good rants (not all about him, especially the best ones) which was entertaining.

Today's quote of the day: "I made my husband be a whore." - Robyn Silberstein

More from Art to Choke Hearts:

I don't want a shoulder to lean on. I don't need it. The whole idea of "Someone, that special someone!" is for me a load of shit. I must be fully contained. No leakage, no spillover. Dependency is weakness. It's such a lie. Lying there in bed, in your lover's arms. She's behind me, she believes in me! No one is behind me. I am behind me. I believe in me. I don't need any support group to keep my head together. I know what I have to do, so I should just shut up and do it.

I don't necessarily agree with this, but there have been definite times in my life when that philosophy was so succinct and so right to describe what I felt. For so long I wanted no real contact with anyone else, and didn't even realize it. It took years for me to learn to be honest enough with myself, and even longer with others, that I did need that real contact, that honest and open contact with people I care about and who care about me. This required, to some extent, subsuming my egotistical independence into my social structure, but it ended up leaving me feeling more free. Honesty comes much easier even when it's not the easiest route to travel.

I went to Spain for five weeks the summer I turned 17. I was the only one in our group who felt that the bullfighting was cruel to the bull. I think my peers understood what I was getting at and just didn't care. Thankfully I actually got too sick to go to the stadium bullfight. But this explains why this passage was so great to me:

When I was seventeen, I went to Spain. Nothing adventurous, just a school trip. I stayed in a hotel with a few hundred other bored, horny students from all over the USA. It was as if I never left home. It was a big party where everyone got drunk and nobody got laid. One of the cool things I did was to go to this bullfight. It was me, the students, and all the locals. The locals didn't like us one bit. We always wanted the bull to win. We booed when they stuck the poor bastard with all the knives. There were three fights in all, and they all ended the same way. They would make a big deal of killing the bull slowly, and then the matador would put the sword through the bull's neck and kill him. They would drag the dead bull around the ring. Maybe to rub it in or to ensure that the matador got laid. The last fight was the best. The moment came when the bull and the matador were looking into each other's eyes and the sword was about to plunge. The bull pulled to one side and swept his horn up and ripped out the matador's kneecap and chucked his ass up into the sucker seats. All of us Americanos were on our feet cheering like crazy. The locals were booing at the same velocity. They sent in another guy, and he killed the shit out of that bull. They dragged his ass around the ring three times to let everybody know that you can't win when you're alone scared and crazy, pitted against a bunch of men with swords who aren't drunk and need to get laid.