I had another post somewhat prepared when I decided to give the Alice Wong-edited “Disability Intimacy” another read to see if maybe I related more. (Maybe I’ll publish the other post eventually—nobody is really that eager for a post about how you might actually like a twelve-year-old movie about ALS. Maybe I’ll just say that I think Emmy Rossum and Hilary Swank are amazing actresses here and let that one lie.) I read Alice’s editor essay about how she hadn’t been on a date—for some people, I do hope there is an afterlife and that it is truly hopping—and I was struck by the sentence quoted as my title, here “I would be ready in a nanosecond. “And it struck me that, even though I haven’t struggled as much as Alice and even had a few (too few, but that has been a post for way too many days) opportunities for certain things, I’m not built like that
. Maybe there have always been too many steps, too many hurdles to climb. Sometimes even saying “Yes!” feels like it requires a flowchart. Not that there have been many enthusiastic “Yeses” in my life of late; I’m feeling kind of estranged from everything that I thought might have served as an answer at one time or another and the most painful part is that it’s not because a bunch of shiny new answers have arrived to overwrite the previous ones. I don’t even have a My Show anymore, except to say that streaming “Psych” is fun and I shouldn’t have missed it on USA years ago. But I guess it is here for me now and that is something, but even that little flicker of joy pales compared to the reams of passionate postings another departed friend wrote about some show that featured love between gay pirates that I would probably never watch in a billion years(For all the things and people we did have in common, sometimes we were resolutely different people.) I found myself thinking that people who loved me probably didn’t pull that much emotion from me, and right now, that might be true, but given that I once wrote a 70-page crossover fan-fiction novella, it probably wasn’t always true. I’d like to blame #MAGA, but that is probably too easy.
Maybe I still don’t trust people, despite abandoning certain true-crime tendencies after I found myself…heated up while watching programming like “Killer Couples” and “Snapped “and feeling badly about myself. Some of my enthusiasm for life may, in fact, be missing, and I’m not sure how Alice could struggle so much harder and keep such a firm grip on joy and hope for the future and reaching acceptance of tough things that seems like it felt other than plodding.
Looking
for a dare-to-be great situation.
I’ll try to be ready in a few nanoseconds.
