i am my beloved's and my beloved is mine

We all know that I fear commitment. Besides my 11-year relationship with Verizon Wireless and the same phone number, I can't stay in the same apartment, job, neighborhood, et cetera for longer than a year or two. Relationships envy the 1-year lease I will sign to an apartment.

I pride myself on my flexibility- not physically (because I'm not), but emotionally, mentally, and socially. I have a wide variety of friends, interests, and I'm pretty comfortable most everywhere. Except funerals. I am the person at funerals making unfunny puns or trying to ease tension with a joke that is neither appropriate or humorous. But people are often surprised to meet my circle of friends. There are tomboys and metrosexuals, good ol' boys and high maintenance ladies, young and old, gay and straight- there is nobody missing from my spectrum of friends.

While I'm generally not the type to feel like I have to have an escape route- I'm not going to leave town tomorrow. I can be spontaneous, but it's usually more of a lackadaisical/ooh, you're right- that would be fun than a case of cabin fever. But I also like to know there isn't too many things or people that I have to have around. I can go with the flow. I can not answer my phone while out with friends. I can eat most anything or anywhere. I can sleep in any position. Besides a strong aversion to porta-potties and a complete revulsion to going to the bathroom outdoors, I can hang with most situations for at least a while.

Ain't nothing gonna hold me down, oh no, I got to keep on movin'...

Sort of.

I came disastrously close to not making my blog post today. I'm at my parents' house, and their computer has apparently been sleeping around, because it's got a nasty virus (I told them to cover it with a rubber sheet at night). I got to the local library 7 minutes after close. Panic was setting in. I realized I had no way to access the Internet. The Internet, where I communicate, where I work (sort of), where I pay bills and make sure they're paid. I need you, Internet. I don't want you, but I need you.

Do you need me? Probably not. But like some kind of evolutionary mutual parasitism, you can't exist without the Dales of the world. Is the Internet my only contact with humans? No. I could get by without it. It would be difficult, but it seems like even America managed to scrimmage around for a couple hundred years without it. I remember looking at Prodigy on my friend Maggie's computer in the late 80s and thinking, "this is the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Why sit in a room by yourself, talking to people you'll never meet?" And tonight, I'm sitting at my parents' little computer desk with a borrowed laptop (thanks Katrina!) in front of their temporarily useless monitor, pecking out a little blog that probably nobody outside of my social circle reads because if I didn't- well, I don't know what would happen, but I prefer not to find out.

It's an unequal relationship I have with the Internet. But it is a commitment, and that's a good first step.