Not Felix and Oscar but....

I would have never, ever used the words perky, chatty, morning person to describe myself. Until now. Life with The Girl Friend gives me new viewpoints on my personality.

She is definitively NOT a morning person. Waking up is the most god awful experience for me, because while I view sleeping as a huge waste of time in which I might not be procrasinating, I love sleeping. A dicotomy if there ever was, I grant you.

For the past nine years or so, I haven't been working a regular 9-5 job, and thus spend inordinate hours alone in my home. Until now. Both GF and I haven't been working much, my summer job happens at home, except while I'm in Maine for the actual event. I teach childbirth preparation very sporadically for San Francisco Kaiser and am loathe to return as I hate the hospital system even in the teensy tiny amounts I have to kowtow to it. School, is online. All of this to say I am home A LOT. So is the beloved GF.

Apparently I wake up talking and in a good mood. Who knew? Before a cup of coffee and a cigarette (smoking happens outside for those of you worried about my asthma!), GF is really not ready for human consumption, and even then most days it takes a second cup of coffee and relative silence before grunting responses are given.

We both like to write, hence my blog (and in theory that stack of papers I owe which have due dates starting in October of 2004 - that is NOT a typo). She has always written. Alone. No one even home except animals, preferably in the middle of the night. In other words no one could possibly interrupt her with their words. It has struck us as rather miraculous that she has managed to write anything, even emails in my presence (we cut quite the post-modern picture, two lesbians, sitting on their futon couch, each with a laptop and at least one cat also on said couch).

So what's the Felix/Oscar reference? Well generally speaking it is easier for me to write and have GF break in with a comment, but for her - well it totally wrecks her train of thought. Today she listened rather patiently while I recounted someone's tale about their '92 Chevy Caprice and then asked me to try to check in first before regaling her with snippets of blogs that crack me up. I understand completely but I did feel somehow like an overenthused 7 year old who's mother is trying to balance the checkbook and keeps finding no money left in the account. Okay, I can do that, really I can.

Or maybe not. I seem to have a perky personality that requires frequent, extraneous bits of verbosity to errupt from my mouth. I never knew! You ask how that can be? Well somewhere in my lifetime I have moved from being a very shy (bordering on pathologically shy) to someone who has conversations with strangers in a clothing store about how to create rituals for their impending menopause. I am a bit unclear when the shift happened, but I have changed. The reality is that I am more upbeat than I used to be (think Pig Pen and the cloud of dirt is depression - that would be me). One downside to the New and Improved Me (I know Jennie, it's either "new" or it's "improved" in reality) is I talk too much for The Girl Friend's taste in the morning, when she's writing, when she's reading, and even occasionally when she's watching TV.

After finally finding my voice it seems my next lesson is learning to use it more wisely. Sigh.