Cleavon: A man drinks like that and does not eat, he is going to die!
Gene: When?
-Blazing Saddles

When I went to PA, one of the Eye Guy's friends asked me how all of us at the local know each other if we don't work together. We are certainly an eclectic group-an English professor, a PR person, an optometrist, a vet, a fashion designer, a musician, a camp director...the list goes on and I realized that pretty much no one worked in the same field as another. Nor do we come from the same state/hometown. Nor do we share the political beliefs. Or religious morals. Or film tastes. In fact, it seemed upon reflection that there was absolutely nothing we had in common.


I told him that what we had in common was we were all misfits. True, we were all misfits in different ways, but misfits nonetheless. For whatever reason, most of us were odd man out. We had bad relationships. We didn't "hang out" with our colleagues. We feared returning to our empty apartments and listening to our non ringing phone for the messages from the boy/girlfriend we don't have. We didn't have to worry about attending weddings or baby showers because our crowd was defined by our inability to form any bond except that of friendship. And even those bonds were formed in unusual and tenative ways.


You noticed the shift to past tense in that last paragraph, didn't you?


But now the Amazon is moving in with Big Bad and Mu has already moved in with High Life and my bar is being invaded by talk of going to Ikea and colors for bridesmaid dresses. I've become a failure even amongst them now. Odd man out amongst even the misfits.


I went to a formal event this weekend, and I was seated next to a 95 year old man who had a date. I was there with my mother, and he had a date. Friends of my ex-boyfriend came up to me talk about their grandkids who are going to law school and their children who are getting married and I thought, "Just fucking kill me." Seriously. I was in a bathtub marinating this weekend thinking, "I am not going to be able to handle 40 more years of this crap." Forty more years of other people's bachelorette parties and baby showers.


And this is supposed to be something that I should have accepted by now. I knew by the way I was treated in middle school and high school that although I'm attractive to the opposite sex, I am not the type of woman that men want to marry and certainly not the girl they want to have children with. I knew it. There isn't a question about it. And yet, even at this late date, I can't help but wish that things could be different. It wasn't my dream at 31 to be going to Montreal with my mother.


The Amazon tells me this is a good thing for her because "you know, I'm not stable." Right, you have a job and you are moving in with your boyfriend, who also has a job. I, on the other hand, as of May am going to be without a job continuing to live with only my cat. And of course there is always my disability-you know the one that has covered my body is scars and prevents from the pleasure of being able to walk up a flight of stairs without considerable effort. And the depression.


And the only viable solution is to switch bars.