Want #1

Cotton Eyed Joe just came on my iTunes radio. And the thumping, shouting tune brought me straight back to middle school dances, high school dances, college parties. I want my joy back. I want to jump up and down and swing around until I can’t breathe. I want to be panting and sweating so much that I can’t help smiling. Lost in the movement, begging for an escape, for delirium, for the mental haze that I’m sure I could get to if the music were only loud enough, the room dark enough, the crowded bodies pressing and huffing against me those of the people I miss. The people I spent my nights with, my exhausted walks home with, my morning after breakfasts with, rehashing our behavior through giggles, grins, and campus bagels.

I want my joy back, and I’m not sure how to get it.

For fun

I was reading kottke.org and came across this post and decided to participate.

You have to find 5 quotes from this site that apply most to you. Here are my five.

-After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956), on Shakespeare

-The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg (1933 – )

-There’s no easy way out. If there were, I would have bought it. And believe me, it would be one of my favorite things!
Oprah Winfrey (1954 – ), O Magazine, February 2005

-We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.
Lynn Hall, Where Have All the Tigers Gone?, 1989

-One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant (1885 – 1981)

It’s Like that Foreigner Song

I was just watching Sex and the City, and it was the episode in which Carrie and Charlotte attend the affirmations seminar about believing you deserve love. The gang has become cynical and pessimistic, believing that they will never find the love they seek (and in some cases, had thought they had found).

It got me thinking: do I doubt that I deserve love? There’s no doubt in my mind that I want to find love, but do I secretly think I don’t deserve it? I’m not sure I can answer those questions. After all, my experience with love (romantic love, that is) is so limited that I can’t even properly define it. What would it mean to be in love? Why would I want to be in love? What if I really do spend the rest of my life alone and get a bunch of cats? It may sound cliche, but it’s a real concern for me, who has never really dated or been in a relationship.

I was once really into this guy, I thought I was in love with him. After a disastrous encounter, everything came out. “You shouldn’t like me,” he said, “I’m not a nice guy. I’m an asshole.” And I had known this all along. But it didn’t stop me. Why would I get myself in so deep when I knew it was going to end badly? Maybe I don’t consider myself worthy of love, or maybe I’m scared of rejection so I seek the unattainable. I think it comes down to courage. Courage to get through the nights alone, to believe that someday (maybe tomorrow, maybe a year from now) I will find love. Or love will find me.

Until then, I will watch Sex and the City. And although I realize how unlike the real New York and real life it is, I will still wish that it could be like that.

By the way, the Foreigner song is “I Want to Know What Love is,”