Yeah, I don't believe in that"pot for every lid" or "you'll find someone when you stop looking" magical thinking bullshit but I do know that you NEVER know what will happen. I could not have imagined meeting and then freaking marrying someone as awesome as Bob when I was 38! But 3 years later here I am! And, yeah, we've compromised and adjusted our lives hugely to be together but I never compromised on wanting to be with someone who is as fun to be with as my best friends are! (That was my "high" standard when I was single.)

My best friend in CA who was also single for years also just got married, she met her dude pretty soon after I met Bob, and she's two years older than me and they are perfect for each other.

You really just never know!!

I've tried to convince myself that I didn't want to be a mom, ever. I put up a good front. I have a hard time being around friends with kids, and sometimes talking to my own niece and nephew on the phone gives me a lump in my throat.

Yeah, I have been there. And really still am sometimes. Being the age I am. The odds being what they are. I've often thought that my life would be a lot easier (emotionally anyway) if I 100% never wanted kids ever.

I can't seem to get myself together enough to experiment to see if there are particular foods, in addition to stress, which is the most obvious cause of my IBS.

I don't think there was any particular food, for me, that triggered it. I still can't suss it out, though the worst flares have been in the summer. I don't know what to make of THAT.

And I can't say that my IBS was a mistaken diagnosis, and it was gluten intolerance all along, because I still have IBS problems now that I avoid gluten.

I still can't suss it out, though the worst flares have been in the summer. I don't know what to make of THAT.

More fresh produce? I can't speak to IBS, but I know it's often harder to digest.

"you'll find someone when you stop looking" magical thinking bullshit

I think what truth there is behind this comes from the fact that often -- though not always -- when someone is looking, they can come off as desperate, which is not very attractive. But when thy "stops looking," there can be an attitudinal change from not seeming desperate.

Obviously this isn't true for everyone who is looking for a partner; lots of people are looking for partners and know what they want but aren't *desperate.*

I still can't suss it out, though the worst flares have been in the summer. I don't know what to make of THAT.

More fresh produce? I can't speak to IBS, but I know it's often harder to digest.

Ah, if only. I am shamefully lax when it comes to eating veggies. Though I probably *do* eat more fresh fruit... Hmmm. That might be it! Although fiber is actually very helpful with IBS, so you'd think the increased fiber would make the innards chill out.

Huh. Yeah, I don't know.

Man, I wish I still lived in NYC sometimes. Like when I read the following tweet from my boyfriend George Pelecanos:

I'll be reading from The Cut in NYC tomorrow night (8/31) at B&N, 150 E 86th St, 7 pm, with Laura Lippman. Come out and support bookstores.

Went to get a haircut because my license expires on the first and I'm going to the DMV tomorrow after work to finally make myself a legal NJ citizen. Salon is three minutes from my apartment. I'm 45 seconds from the salon when I notice a cop car tailing close behind me as I'm coming up on the triangle that has no yield signs and I never know who has the right of way. I think maybe I panicked/tried to drive normal/was confident in the timing of cars coming and going, went through the triangle and made the immediate left turn to get into the parking lot. Cop car followed and threw on his lights. Shit.

So he asks me if I know why he pulled me over.

For driving like an asshole? I ask. He said, yes, well, I did cut that car off (plenty of time! No cutting off!).

But, no, he apparently followed me all the way from the light by my apartment where I had to drive through the police barrier to get out. My street is blocked still on the other side of my driveway because the power lines are dangling in the streets (let me tell you about the banging on my door at midnight by guys in hardhats telling me I might lose power and giving me a heart attack) and so the street is blocked to through traffic. I think he thought I was trying to lose him when really he was making me nervous in an already tricky intersection.

Then he asks me if I was smoking pot, and that's it's not a terrible crime, and he has never been wrong when suspecting pot smoke, and that it's a very distinctive odor /Elliot Spencer. I assure him that I do not, have not, please check my car for the embarrassing moldy chicken bones festering in the plastic bag from lunch two weeks ago under the spiderweb in my backseat. I tell him there's cigarette smoke, sure. He's hung up on the pot. Then he asks me why I'm in the parking lot. To get a haircut: he checks to see if there is indeed a hair salon. Runs my license, which is still NH. Asks me if he'll find anything. God, you're about to find out! Then grills me on where I live, who owned the place previously, which house it is (the one where the fucking tree fell down with the Union Jack on the mailbox!)

He then suggests that maybe there are kids smoking pot next door to the salon, that I have thirty days to get a new license, and that if the ladies in the salon asked why he was talking to me, to say that my car matched the car involved in a crime (wtf?).

I went inside laughing hysterically and told them everything.

I haven't had car insurance for a year. God exists and is telling me to get that shit taken care of.

I think what truth there is behind this comes from the fact that often -- though not always -- when someone is looking, they can come off as desperate, which is not very attractive. But when thy "stops looking," there can be an attitudinal change from not seeming desperate.

That's true but I think it's also important to stay open to the possibility of love, if that's what you want, and let people know you are.

Just throw her a bible and tell her to skip the gang rapes and stuff?

Jesse, I miss Boston more for not seeing you than for not seeing my ex-boyfriend and I don't care how wrong that is.

I loved having a house and yard full of kids and babies on Saturday and it made me a little wistful. But not enough to want to be a chauffeur for kids the way I see many of my friends. That alone is enough to make me not fight too hard to make a baby. Seriously. So if I did want to make a baby, I'd need to move somewhere like NYC where I can teach him to take a cab or subway by himself. When he's two.

please check my car for the embarrassing moldy chicken bones festering in the plastic bag from lunch two weeks ago under the spiderweb in my backseat.

Did he actually check for the chicken bones?