Commitment and Irony

I'm only writing today because I told myself I would. This is therapy-eve and I'm two weeks without any fresh insults/insights from this blog's title character. Without his prompting, I'm apparently devoid of original thought. Not only has he suggested that I am co-dependent, I'm apparently now dependent on HIM. How's that for irony?

My brilliant nephew won the school spelling bee this week. I learned of it by picking up our twice-weekly newspaper. The story's headline was "School Spelling Be (sic) Winners Announced". They misspelled Spelling Bee. They misspelled the easy part of Spelling Bee. Again with the irony. And that ain't all. Below his picture was an explanation that his winning word was "collobrate" - a word with which I am not familiar. I called to both congratulate him and chastise him for not notifying me personally of his accomplishment. I never won a school spelling bee. I remember vividly misspelling "coffee" (lost an f somewhere) and "colon" (got lost after c-o-l...). I remember them vividly because any time someone mentioned "spelling bee", my mother would recount my dual failures with great glee - each time demonstrating her own proficiency at spelling both words.

As it turns out, "collobrate" was told to the newspaper as "collaborate". Only "collaborate" wasn't really the winning word, either. It was "contradict". No one at the school could remember, come press time, just what the winning word was, so they picked a plausible "c" word for the paper's purposes. Doesn't matter. They'd have misspelled "contradict", too, given the chance. Funny....I realize just now that my two bungles were "c" words" and his winning word (depending on who you ask) was also a "c" word. That means absolutely nothing. But I noticed it. And it took up 3 more lines of blog, further fulfilling my commitment (another "c" word) to write today.

I'm not good at commitment. I quit violin lessons after 4 years. I quit scouting somewhere around Webelos when they started talking about campouts and rubbing sticks together to make fire. If I had known then what I know now, I'd have been there with bells and a jockstrap on having my first sexual experience with a boy like every other boy scout did. I quit track after I realized that the point of running laps on the quarter-mile track was to see who would vomit first. (That's probably not the point, but it's the lesson I took away from it when I vomited first.) I walked out on auditions for my high school's musical my senior year when it became evident that despite my top ranking in the state for vocal talent and my recent star turn in a play, I would not be playing Harold Hill. When the cast list was posted on the auditorium door and I had been cast in a minor role, instead of initialing like a good child, I wrote "Hell No!". I was a late blooming but fully formed diva at 17.

We know I've never entered into a reciprocal commitment with a man. Hell, I told The Advocate's editor the other day that I twice quit taking pills because I couldn't handle the commitment. (There, I worked in again that I was interviewed by "The National Gay and Lesbian News Magazine". I'm quite tickled, if you can't tell. Watch for me on your news stands in March.)

So maybe we'll talk about that tomorrow in The Good Doctor's Office. Or not. Maybe this is the week I'll tell him that I became sexually active at a shockingly young age...just to see if he blinks. Or not.

Either way, today I kept my commitment. And I suppose that's the way it is with commitment..."One Day At A Time" and all that. I'll consider this boyfriend practice.

P.S. The blog's spell-check feature doesn't recognize the word "blog". Irony everywhere, I tell you.