throw your gown up and down

Is that really the line from the Dar song? I always thought it was, but writing it looks so strange. Hm. Anyway -- I was only even thinking about that because in the car just now, I was listening to the Best of Dar mix CD that H. and I put together a hundred years ago, and "Playing to the Firmament" came on, and somehow the line when did you cave into this role that you were cast in stuck out, and then it dovetailed with something I've been meaning to write about here for, like, a year, and now I'm writing here instead of working on the freelance project/book review/letter of recommendation I'm supposed to be working on, and that little wordless problem we talked about a while ago? Yeah, not so much -- there are SO MANY WORDS in my life right now, and fortunately many of them are quite lucrative ($35-an-hour lucrative, lucrative such as these words have never seen), but they are not leaving too many left over.

Yes.

Anyway.

What I was thinking about was this: It's funny how many prospective lives all of us tease out. I feel like we all have these sort of alternative realities, most of them involving us living together in some kind of big communal space and working on some kind of big communal project. First it was the Spinster Lodge (which, let's be honest, is still my favorite) -- but it's kind of fallen apart because several of the lodge's planned residents are dramatically reducing their qualification for spinsterhood by doing things like getting married.

Then there was the applesauce (don't ask) farm in Vermont with my college friends. There was the daily commuter newspaper I was going to start with other people from college, the idea for which has been completely appropriated by the W*shington P*st in the last year or so. With no credit to us, I might add, and we suck for not doing it first. There was the semi-pathetic "if you and I are single and age X, we're getting married and having babies," which of course resulted in him being the first one of my friends to actually get married. Now there's a new one, recently floated by my old roommate J., which consists of all of her DC political friends getting together to run one of us for C*ngress; I now have a job among these people overseeing hypothetical polls and writing hypothetical press releases about how awesome she is, which I would do in a heartbeat.

(There are also a few that only I participate in -- including but not limited to writing books in the silence of a snow-covered cabin in Canada -- but those don't count the purpose of this story.)

Why do we do this, do you think? Is it just a beautiful thing to think about so many people you really like being in one place, working toward one real true thing? Do we all just like the junior-high vision of us being 2gether 4ever? It's such a bittersweet pleasure. We know it probably won't happen -- but it's so funny, even in that sentence, I can't bring myself to leave out the word "probably." I can't bring myself to rule out the possibility. Each one is so appealing, things that seems like they should be within our collective reach, and I don't know if the fact that they're (probably) not is good or bad. They make me sad and happy at the same time.

OK. That was my single profound idea for the evening. No more words! Editing lucratively now. Edit. Words. Go.

P.S. I feel like I have to confess to the Lanky friends: I am cheating on you by going to the Melting Pot tonight with 14 other people (same number as the wineglasses of the last post -- what are the odds), none of whom know the meaning of "meat! fruit! both!" Even though I think most of you, especially the Queen of the Melting Pot, have been there with other people, it feels wrong somehow. I will think of you when I drop my piece of broccoli in the boiling oil stuff and have to fish it out with a spoon...