Listen to the Olsens

When did I forget how to entertain myself?

M. went home for the weekend yesterday, and since then I have been wandering around like a lobotomy patient. When I got home from work last night, I was at a loss. I'd left my friend MB a message suggesting we have a widow's night out, as his bf is also away, but he's a lawyer and works late, so it was all I could do to sit here and stare at the walls. Or, rather, spend the next two hours of my life in inappropriate and wasteful ways that provided only the most fleeting glimpses of comfort or satisfaction.

Sure, I could have called another friend - although it seems that most of my friends have either moved away or are moving away or are just away - or engaged in any number of other meaningful activities. I've got bills to pay. The house needs cleaning. I have books that need finishing, a wedding that needs planning. There's the vacuum cleaner we still haven't bought. It was a nice night for a peaceful and solitary walk. I need new work pants.

Yes, at least twenty potential activities, but I was helpless to do any of them. To be fair, it was a Friday night. Today was better - I managed to get up early, go to yoga, eat a pear, do the laundry, drink a smoothie, drop off some drycleaning, buy some toothpaste and sunscreen, all before 1:30pm. But once those things were all done, I was back to Just Me again.

What did I used to do before I met M.? Did I simply alternate between laundry, errands and porn, filling in the gaps as needed with sleeping and eating and going to work? Did I feel fulfilled by that? When M. and I broke up for a summer, I poured all my energy every night into building a mosaic tile-top dining room table. Before we met, I used to go out six nights a week to gay bars and gay clubs and gay parties.

I suppose, then, that are two issues at hand. One is the fact that I find meaning through activity; if I am not busy, I am not living. If I am not busy, I also start to feel isolated and scared and depressed, but this is something we're discussing In Therapy, so perhaps it's best not to enter that snake pit right now.

The second issue is equally perplexing, if not quite so psychologically convoluted. Allow me to don my Carrie Bradshaw hand puppet for a moment:

[close up on letters being typed on screen]

How do we keep the "I" in marriage?

[cut away to Groomzilla lying on bed with laptop propped against gut]

That is, how do I maintain my integrity as an individual, my ability to negotiate this world on my own, while at the same time existing as part of a two-man team? How do I make sure that I'm still me, that I still do the things that bring me happiness and meaning, still see the people I want to see, while at the same time bask in the glory of being part of a we?

Point-counterpoint, isn't this the whole reason we're driven to find love? So that we'll be less alone? So that we'll have a constant traveling companion, someone to hold the map while we try to make our way down the ill-paved streets of existence? Someone to appreciate and foster our uncanny penchant for metaphor?

Does it really take times like this, when we're separated from our significant other, to realize that, Holy Shit, I forgot how to do this?

Speaking of therapy and traveling companions, I finally sat down to watch New York Minute this afternoon, after weeks and months of searching for it on our HBO On Demand and Cinemax On Demand and Showtime On Demand (it was on Cinemax). I must say that, while I was hoping to be able to come up with something biting and clever to say about it, I actually found myself at several points laughing out loud with actual, genuine laughs. Of course, this is coming from someone who spent his day all alone and has lost his right-brain functioning. I don't know that I've actually heard Mary Kate or Ashley speak since they were seven, and hearing grown-up voices coming out of their their Muppet face mouths is disconcerting at best, but it was not the worst acting I have ever seen (exception: Jack Osbourne, with an ill-advised cameo as a teen record producer/enfant terrible, and Dr. Drew, who plays the twins' father much like a robot or vacuum cleaner might). MK is by far the more attractive of the two, except when she turns her head and her profile disappears. And I was excited to see that one of their biggest scenes, in which Mary Kate slaps Ashley across the face to get her to face the very real and dire predicament in which they have found themselves, took place right across the street from my therapist's office!

In the end - spoiler alert! - the two sisters realize that they can, indeed must, maintain their unique personalities while at the same time treasuring their synergistic force, and therein lies the crux of yet another very effective segue about love and marriage.