Ramble and response to comment

I am Miss Popular this morning: my phone is ringing off the hook (mostly with recorded messages). My flight for tomorrow has been canceled, and American Airlines, bless them, has bothered to inform me of that (United did no such thing for the original flight--I only found out when I went to check in online). Then UPS called to confirm that they're getting the hedgehog. Then my mother called to ask whether I was snowed in.

I have to say, the snow and the canceled trip is a double-wammy: I didn't buy a lot of food since I thought I'd be away all week, I didn't get the Post today, and so on. I'm not complaining, I still live somewhere where I can walk to stuff... but not knowing whether the trip is on for Tuesday or not, I don't know whether I should buy fresh food for the week or just for the next two days. And I don't know whether the stores are open and/or stocked. But I need to get out, so I guess I'll find out.

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As I was formulating a response to Ernessa's comment (and digging out a path to my recycle bin), it occurred to me that I've taken to commenting on 'single' issues as much and in the same way that I've always commented on Russian and Jewish issues. That same way being, everyone's different, and take cultural generalizations with a grain of salt. For every Ian Frazier and his brilliant observation on Russians and their hour-long teas, which make them prone to 'unhealthy foreign ideas', there are ten idiots who completely misinterpret or overinterpret something.

Okay, that was my roundabout way of emphatically agreeing with what Ernessa had stated more articulately: everyone's different.

And I may not go as far as to deem Gottlieb's passage that compares single women to brain-dead accident victims offensive, I'll easily deem it inaccurate for the reasons I discussed in my original post: the unhappily married are cautionary tales, too.

I have (at least) one friend who "married him" because her older sister urged her to, said 'it just gets harder as you get older, so unless he's so hideous you can't let it go, marry him.' The guy my friend married is a good guy, but my friend is *not* happily married, i.e. not very happy. She's happy that she has kids, so maybe for her it's worth it--it's a trade-off each person can only make for herself.

Ms. Gottlieb's book is not going to change my life one way or another; there are no hordes of unattractive but otherwise wonderful men beating down my door. Nonetheless, I know that in other situations (job, house) where other people urged me to settle, I was really happy I held out until I found what was right for me. Neither is perfect in every way: had I held out for, say, Google-like working conditions, or a house right in Old Town with a newly renovated kitchen, I'd be worse off--but none of that is important for me. I'd also be worse off had I settled for, say, any employer that could reduce my commute or any house, period, because the time is right. So it comes back to what we've been saying all along: figure out what's right for you and go for that.

I twice recently mentioned 'He's Just Not That into You'--and I came across a quote that brilliantly captured the book's message: "If he likes you, you'll know. If he doesn't like you, you'll be confused." But I digress. There's another great book that I've mentioned on these pages, and it is one of my two go-to self-help books (the other is "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff"). This one is Karen Salmansohn's "How to Be Happy, Dammit: A Cynic's Guide to Spiritual Happiness". She talks about making choices with your soul rather than your ego, i.e. she makes the valid part of LG's argument without reducing it to an issue of being picky or not. It's not about lowering your standards; it's about being guided by what's really important rather than by window dressing.