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It's too late, baby | page 1, 2, 3
I'm pondering whether to remain friends with an ex-boyfriend. He
and I lived together for eight months and broke up a year and a
half ago but occasionally we tumble into bed with each other. I
haven't met anyone I'm interested in yet. I told him I'd like for
us either to get back together and make another go at it, or else
forgo the sex and just be friends. But whenever I try to draw
the line, he crosses it, saying he can't be in my presence
without flirting and getting physical. He tells me he loves me
more than I know, and I end up feeling like a fish on a line. Do
I have no other choice but to cut this person out of my life? The
situation at present is just too confusing and painful. On the
other
hand, I can't imagine my life without him in it. I'm a loyal
person, and I'd like to think there is a deep friendship at the
heart of it all that is worth preserving, but
maybe I'm being naive? Floundering Dear Floundering, We need to get you some new underwear, the kind
with locks. Can't you just meet Casanova for lunch at Woolworth's
lunch counter? Order the tuna salad and sit there on a stool and
converse with him? What is he going to do, drag you into the
basement and ravish you in Housewares? My dear, you draw the line
by looking the man in the eye and saying, "I don't want to." You
don't say you're sorry, you just say no. If necessary, you say it
again, more clearly. If he doesn't stop then, say the word,
"Rape." If he doesn't stop then, scream like bloody murder. If
you have to go to Step 3, him and you ain't friends. Dear Mr. Blue, I fell accidentally into a career at 20 and now, three years
later, I make more money than any 23-year-old has a right to
make. I have a 401k, stock options, an investment portfolio and
an accountant. I have the life I want 10 years from now, and I'm
desperately unhappy. My mother says that I'm the luckiest woman
she knows, but I feel like a gorgeous failure. If Fate hands you
someone else's dream, are you responsible for fulfilling it? As a child I thought I'd grow up to be an actor, or a poet, or a
roller skating princess. Instead, I'm in front of this desk, in
these clothes, working overtime for no reason and looking at the
unfinished poems and plays that litter my apartment. Is it OK
to hate being a responsible adult, or am I being
juvenile and ungrateful? Am I just an enormous cliché in leather
pumps? Leather Pumps Dear Pumps, You can hate adulthood all you like, to your heart's
content. Adulthood is where you are right now, but you don't have
to be mature about it or grateful, and don't worry about being a
cliché. You are in an intermediate period of your life. Perhaps
it will last only another five or six years, and then something
else happens. You're responsible to yourself, to make the best of
your 20s. Stick with the day job and build that portfolio;
straighten up the litter in your apartment and sort those plays
and poems into piles, and one Saturday morning when you're in the
mood, sit down and putter with them. Fight the overtime; don't
let the job eat you. But hold a steady course for awhile. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a wannabe author struggling to write historical novels and
get them to say what I want them to say. Once in a while the work
seems to go well and other times it's like sucking water from a
dry well. Passages I thought weren't too bad on the first
reading, turn out on the second, or fifth, or 50th reading to
be terrible. I wish I had started doing this back when I was
20, instead of waiting until I was 50. I have a teenage
son, and I'm taking care of an elderly woman, and just recently
I've started teaching school full-time. I don't want to stop
writing. But I'm pretty exhausted, and rather depressed. I know
I'm getting to be impossible to live with. Mr. Blue Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.
Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue. Crashing in Maine Dear Crashing, Depression is a separate issue. So is exhaustion. Either one can get in the way of your work and must be addressed separately. Ignore any heroic tales you've heard about writers who composed the magnum opus with a carpenter's pencil in one hand and a quart of whiskey in the other, writing on the backs of cement sacks while working 18-hour days as a deckhand on a tramp steamer. Get your rest, arrange your time, deal with your depression and organize your work. Writing is not heroic, it is methodical, like dentistry or throwing the discus. The secret of good writing is rewriting, but don't sit down when you're tired and depressed and take a 50th look at a passage: The result can only be discouragement. Writing is hard enough without our putting rocks in our pockets. You may be able to write only on Sunday morning and in little stolen periods through the week, but if you make those few hours as good as they can be, you'd be amazed what you can achieve. Good luck. Dear Mr. Blue, I am a healthy 26-year-old woman. I exercise, I hardly ever drink. I don't eat greasy food or red meat. I have one bad habit that is ruining the way I look and feel: I am addicted to sweets! Low blood sugar runs in my family and so my reaction to candy is as intense as the average person's reaction to a cup of Starbuck's rocket fuel: I get on a candy high. Chocolate seems to make everything better, at least for five minutes. I consume so much that sometimes I break out into cold sweats. My moods are also made more unpredictable. I know that this is not good for me, but I cannot seem to stop. I have gone through periods where I go on high-protein diets and cut out sugar altogether, but I can never stick to these routines for more than a couple of weeks. It was a lot easier for me to quit smoking! I cannot imagine a day without candy. Can you help? Silly for Sweets Dear Silly, This is problem for many more people than would admit to it and nobody seems to understand exactly why, though addiction seems always to be based on intense pleasure and on the pain of withdrawal. Chocolate, by the way, contains theobromine, which is caffeine-like, and thus the high. The only thing that works for this is to cut off the candy supply at the source and to eat complex carbohydrates, which are absorbed more slowly and are sweet if you chew them slowly. Ruminate, in other words. And complex carbs don't lead to reactive hypoglycemia, which very likely is producing your weakness and cold sweats. If you have a family history of adult-type diabetes, you may be in a pre-diabetic state known as insulin resistance. See an endocrinologist or diabetes specialist about this. And thanks to the old internist (returned from the Aegean) for the answer. Dear Mr. Blue, My wife and I are expecting our first baby in February, a tremendously joyous experience for both of us, but one contentious issue has arisen: baptism. My wife was raised as a Lutheran, although she has not attended church for years. Growing up, religion just was not part of my life. But my family is Irish, and I have strong views about the history of persecution of Irish Catholics at the hands of English Protestants. I am indifferent about having our child christened or baptized but I would feel very strongly that if it was to be, it should be in the Catholic faith. I do not want my child to be baptized as a Protestant. To me, it would seem like a capitulation to the forces that persecuted Irish people for hundreds of years. I don't think my wife understands how important this is to me, and I am sure her family won't either. Can a child be christened as a Catholic, even if the parents are not members of the Church? Little Faith Dear Little Faith, You should trot over to the closest Catholic
church, ring the bell and speak to Father Mulcahy about this
matter. Meanwhile, I admire your ability to hold some poor
midwestern Lutherans responsible for the sufferings of the Irish
people. My people were Scots and what the English did to us was
unspeakable, but here we are using their language and everything.
Go figure.
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