Love on a Two-Way Street

If you knew that was a song by The Moments, you're an old school gal/guy like me!

MamacitaG posted about Pandora, which is like your own personal jukebox. You put down one song, and it finds other songs similar to it based on musical analysis -- melody, style -- and it just keeps finding more and more stuff all based on one song!

I did "A House is Not a Home" by Luther Vandross -- and I've gone back thirty years thrilled t0 listen to three-minute R&B hits I haven't heard in that long a time. It's terrific... I love trips back like that... especially on our first rainy day in LA.

Clean, blue sky in Los Angeles is delicious.

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Speaking of "I found love on a two-way street and lost it on a lonely highway"... (okay, bad segue, I admit it)...

The one-week-old crush is over.

Quickest recovery yet.

I learned enough to say "Schwarzewald" (Black Forest), where he's from in Germany... but I realized you just can't "make" people love you, especially if you're not their type... I'll just be a friend for now and continue with my work on myself...

(Go ahead, try it, I dare you. Think of someone who liked you a lot but you couldn't reciprocate. And no matter what they did, how nice they were or how much weight they've lost (!) -- could you like them? LIKE like them -- like THAT? Nope. So it just sucks being on the other end of that equation. Oh well.)

I did have a bottleneck of feelings though, as he brought his "friend w/ benefits" to our monthly end-of-class party... I was a bit shocked, but I didn't feel like the usual loser... just felt a bit sadness, a tad of longing.

So I went to see a nice mushy romantic comedy, Just Like Heaven. Roger Ebert likes it, so I'll go. I take the ride, loving performances by Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo... and as predictable as this movie is (okay, I didn't know exactly EVERYTHING, there was one big surprise I didn't anticipate), at the very end...

Out poured the tears. And I couldn't stop though the entire credit crawl.

It's not often I get "there" about "relationship." I'm too guarded, too full of excuses and promises to myself (when I lose weight, when I finish school, when I get a better job, apartment, life) to be open the possibility of finding a partner/lover/husband to witness all the minutiae that makes up a person's life and make them feel seen and vulnerable and loving...

And as good as it feel to be open for those few minutes, which was spurred by my hardcore, week-long crush... it reminded me how closed I am 99% of the time I am. Open for others... but not for me. So I vowed to stay open. And I've cried just a little bit more.