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Leftover Zodiac

I coined a new t-shirt slogan while at lunch with my girlfriend Gerry yesterday (you know us poet-types never speak in plain English!):

Every star we discover is not part of a constellation.

Okay, maybe more of an inscription inside a Get Well card than a t-shirt franchise, but you get my drift.

Gerry and I were talking --again-- about balance in our respective lives. I love getting together with Gerry b/c our six lunch dates a year (in a good year) have converted themselves into years worth of hugs, tears, confidences and teachable moments. The other reason I love talking w/Gerry is that she thinks like me in a lot of ways, confirming that I'm not entirely crazy. (The alternative, of course, is that we're equally insane).

We talked about serendipity and how easy it is to be misguided by its allure ... "I wasn't even going to that Blockbuster at first, but I needed to get a copy made from the place next door and ..." or "Can you believe that on the one day that I finally decide to take those peppers to Mother Lewis' house, I run in to ..." We love it when those stories end in true love, grand fortune or even just a great parking space. Hell, I do.

Hi, my name is Dasha and I'm a hopeless romantic ...

Who wouldn't want to have their whims and hopes confirmed by moons and stars and horoscopes and surprise phone calls and cancelled appointments and shiny quarters waiting to be found on the the ground. So when I was ready to launch a new artistic venture last year (a project I now know would have forced me to take a very long walk along a very short pier) I admit that my operating philosophy was Way of the Aligning Star. Now --hundreds of hours, a couple of grand and, sadly, one friend later-- I can clearly see that I had connected the wrong dots against the night sky.

See, until that project fizzled, the thought of not pursuing every plausible, great idea had never occurred to me. Even now --after a fairly successful year in too-much-itis recovery--I still have to talk myself out of committing to projects and meetings and engagements and whatnot simply b/c I'm capable or available or invited. So you can imagine my fervor whenever I perceive "the stars to be aligned," right?

Romantic notion or intuitive guidance?

Nonetheless, I advised Gerry against a thinly-veiled opportunity and, as I heard the new slogan for 2006 fall from my lips, I realized that we were a hopeless pair. Every star is not part of a constellation so we should agree to admire those single stars for what they are.

Every star is not part of a constellation.

This is going to be harder than the words. In fact, right now I'm pursuing a life-alterning project based on the close timing of a few emails, coffee chats and cell phone calls. That's right: pursuing, not considering.

It's the Big Dipper, this time, I know it!

Hey, we hopeless romantics can only commit to being careful; we could never make promises against chasing dreams.

So Gerry and I hugged and silently agreed to ignore our own sage advice this one last time. True, some stars are averse to forming patterns in the sky but it's a lot more fun to try and manipulate the splatter into recognizable patterns, don't you think?

So cancel the order for those t-shirts. I have some stars to go and wish upon.

Comments

Mahogany L. Browne said…
oh snap! i didnt know DAHMER was milwaukee's? damnnnn! see ya soon :)
8:38 PM
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