Why would OkCupid take journals away from us?  One of the best features that separates this from other sites.  Bring them back, Cupid, okay?

I just had a message from someone on OkCupid asking me how to sustain a long-distance relationship.  He had heard from another OkCupider that I had maintained a relationship with someone met on this site for over a year.  This is answer I sent him:

 

Dear ---------.

I am talking to my long-distance relationship (of one year) as I type this and asked him what advice he would give. He said, "I'd tell him, first of all, to get Skype with cams." I agree. By the time we met in person, three months after meeting online, we had spent up to nine hours a day together on Skype. When I went to prepare meals, I'd take him with me into the kitchen. He in turn bought a laptop so he could take me with him. Then we'd have dinner together and talked now and then as we each watched the same movie, synching them on our computers.

As I completed a book I needed to send to the publishers within a week, he edited for me. He even helped furnish illustrations for it! Each night, he played the guitar and sang me to sleep, watching his monitor to see when I fell asleep. So, in short, I'd say you can get involved in each others' lives even before you meet in person.

Secondly, try to meet once you know there seems to be both an intellectual and emotional attachment. I stopped off to see him for a few days en route to my family Thanksgiving, then he drove 1500 miles to join us for Thanksgiving. He then came down to Mexico for 6 weeks about three months later and I flew to the states a few months after he departed to travel with him for 6 weeks. If we could survive that, we knew we could survive anything. He will be back down here in November and stay, I hope, for a few months.

Will we ever be together for good?  No way to say.  He is unsure about living in Mexico and neither of us wants to live in Missouri, where he is.  Although we met a year ago, we've only been in each other's physical presence for a total of just under 4 months, and there are many differences as well as a number of astounding similarities.  In truth, we are 50 percent clones of each other, but the other 50 percent diametric opposites. I would like monogamy, he says he is not monogamous, but simply doesn't have time for anyone but me.  So, we are still both on OkCupid.  I know (hope) at the very least that we will be best friends for life.  Perhaps it will be more.  In the meantime, we are both still here on the site and still open for whatever it might bring our way.

Does this help? Hope so.

Filmartwordgirl

That's the punch line to a joke that begins, "A large white bear walks into a tavern and sidles over to the bar.......

Okay...this is a challenge...Write the rest of the joke.  The grand prize will be an award on your profile page that will reveal your genius to the world and attract the love of your life to you like a magnet!  Enter now...enter often.  Please note that no such joke exists at the present time.  It is waiting to be delivered into the world by your genius.

When I first joined OkCupid a bit over a year ago, I said to friends that one of my purposes was to recruit more interesting, smart, creative, dance-friendly, fiscally solvent, kind, funny men of retirement age to Mexico.  When I met such individuals, I even admitted this...saying that if they wanted to come, that if we didn't necessarily click in the chemistry department, that I was sure they could find other women who might be closer to their ideal.

So, once again, I want to make a PR statement about this wonderful place where I live.  

First of all, the weather is glorious...rated second-best in the world.  I believe the most ideal climate is somewhere in Kenya, but try finding an OkCupid match there!

Secondly, the cost of living is lower than in most places in the states.  

Third, there are tons of attractive, smart, active, adventurous, unmarried women who live here.  (Why there are not an equal number of similar unmarried men, I do not know.  Perhaps men are less willing to move to a foreign country alone.  Or perhaps there are fewer of you...or perhaps you can tell me why.)

There are scores of interesting places to visit within driving distance of Lake Chapala, where I live.

We are an hour or less away from Guadalajara, which has all of the big-city shopping, music, theater, opera and other cultural activities you might crave.

We are only 4 hours (or less, depending on your driving speed) from the coast.  Many who live here split their year between here and the coast, spending both hurricane season and the unbearably hot and humid months here, where our mile-high elevation combined with the lake breezes, makes it comfortable.

There are tons of retired people here, but they are generally people who are still leading an active life, involved in whatever their passions are or have come to be.

There are many opportunities for social service, volunteering, helping.

There are many artists, writers and musicians who live here, and many venues and outlets to display or demonstrate their work/craft/art.

We are relatively close to the States...(from one to two driving days, depending upon your speed and dedication to traveling long miles in one day.) There are now toll roads which can take you easily and safely up and back.

I live in a hot springs area.  The miracle mineral water comes into my hot tub and pool at 160 degrees F. and can be mixed with cooler water...or I usually wait until late afternoon or night to swim and soak under the sunset or the stars.  Below is the 60 mile long lake, spread out with surrounding mountains and even a distant volcano in view.  Flowering bushes and trees bloom year round.  Palm trees, cypress, vines, beautiful handcrafted homes spill down the hillsides.

There are an unbelievable number of wonderful restaurants as well as a number of clubs, and many of the bands are populated with a combination of Mexican and expat musicians who love jamming and playing together.

An ever-growing number of galleries sell local arts and crafts, including those made by expats.

Health clubs and exercise opportunities abound. Tennis courts and two golf courses make use of our usually glorious weather.

Classes in Spanish language, art, music, dance, health issues and a number of different topics are ongoing.

A local cultural center, The Lake Chapala Society, furnishes an English language library, film rentals, research center, and information desk, along with free health services and meeting rooms for everything from line dancing to Scrabble to AA to films to lecture series.

If it is not in your plans to fraternize with other expats, a few minutes drive will take you to the other side of the lake where you will go back in time in small villages that are 100 percent Mexican.  The towns of Jocotepec and Chapala also are less frequented by Anglos.

Ajijic is a charming, busy village with a very large Anglo population, but it's Mexican flavor still survives.

Okay...information session is over.  It is somewhat ironic that I am writing this piece which is trying to encourage even more people to move into an area that I, like many inhabitants, wish would stay small and uncrowded.  So if you are a woman or already partnered, let me encourage you to look elsewhere.  But if you are one of the many men I have talked to who find after years on OkCupid that they still cannot find their match...I'd like to encourage you to look Southward.  At the very least, you'll have a wonderful vacation. But at the most, you might find a new home and, hopefully, a new love.

Hope to see you in the coming year...If you need more encouragement, information, help, motivation...feel free to drop me a line.

Once again, I've given up television to get my life back.  I can watch the real and/or fictional lives of others, or I can spend the time living my own life.  OkCupid is a big part of that process.  Here I've found interesting and often remarkable friends, although not all of them have kept me.   Every single encounter has changed me.

Okay, enough!!!  I'm going dancing.  It can be a struggle to stay out there in life, and it takes some work, but then the fun takes over and you tell yourself, "Thank God I haven't given up yet."

Better post this now or I never will.  But first I have to say that I didn't give up television because it was so terrible.  I gave it up because it was so damn good.  I could live watching Nurse Jackie and Madmen and Glee.  And Project Runway U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the Phillipines!  And sometimes I still do, In big blocks without commercials on surfthechannel.  Then I come back to my life. 
What am I doing?  Seeking out likeminded people.  Hoping one will end up as more than that.

In the meantime, I hope you keep writing, dancing, singing and making art!..

 

The Summer Home

 

 

When my dad bought the land

Where the Big White River and Little White River joined,

I couldn’t believe that we owned land with trees on it.

While he plowed the small field,

I walked the woods and found the abandoned shanty.

Its door was open, in fact it could not shut.

Inside was a mysterious, sweet and fecund smell--

The mouse smell new to me

That I couldn’t stop myself from breathing in.

The mildew and the dust,

The musk of warm linoleum,

 Every new  smell and sight was magic--

The enchantment of a house emptied of chairs and tables and beds,

Yet full of the accumulated energy of past tame lives

And present wild ones--

The moving of leaf shadows

Across the chipped linoleum of the L-shaped kitchen--

The dents on the floor where the kitchen chairs had set--

as though someone had taken care each day to line up the legs in their holders.

Upstairs I found crayon scribbles halfway up the wall -- 

The arm reach of a three-year- old.

 

 

When I asked about the house,

 My dad said that it was our summer home. 

And the next time we went to the field, I brought a broom.

I cleaned out the mouse droppings and the tumble weeds. 

I collected the peeled tile fragments, imagining gluing them back again. 

I washed out a quart canning jar at the pump and filled it

with spring water and sweet clover--

putting it on the floor  between the kitchen chair holes,

in the exact middle of the vanished table.

With the old shirt I found in the corner,

I rubbed mud and river sand from the linoleum counter tops. 

More sand worked as Ajax to scrub out sinks.

 

All summer long I worked on our summer home,

And for that summer and many summers to come,

I waited in vain for our move to the river house.

 I sat on its screened front porch. 

Outside the screen grew spearmint and peppermint. 

On the top leaf of the tallest branch was a grasshopper--

the kind that left tobacco stains in your hand when you held it. 

All around me were the trees--

the swaying shedding cottonwoods and scrub chokecherries. 

It was a wealth of trees I’d never seen before--

not in the town where we lived on the bare prairie. 

Not on the roads we traversed for hundreds of miles

 to see a movie or a dentist or to buy clothes.

 

Around the screens buzzed the heavy flies--

Their motors slow in the heat of July.

All the flies on the outside,

Wanting to get in.

All the flies on the inside

 Pressing the screen to get out,

Like I longed to get out, to the freedom of trees

Where black crows and dull brown sparrows rustled their wings

And flew from branch to branch.

In the distance, meadowlarks called the only birdcall I ever recognized.

No squirrels, no chipmunks.  But, rabbits? Yes. 

My father said no bears,

But he’d told me the story of Hugh Glass, mauled by a bear, 

Walking this  river for a hundred miles--

Past  this very  joining of the Big and Little White--in search of help.

And I could imagine one last bear or two hidden in my woods.

 

So at night, at home in our winter house in town,

When he told the story I loved the best,

 I was the one who discovered the bears’ cottage.

And the cottage was our summer home.

The chairs--too hard,  too soft,  just right-- I sat upon in turn,

 taking great care every time to nestle each leg

back into its correct place on the kitchen linoleum.

And when I lay in  the perfect bed of the little bear,

I could touch  the crayon markings on the wall.

 

And when the three bears  found me asleep in the little bear’s room,

They weren’t really very scary. 

But I ran anyway,

Into my lovely woods-- 

My dark and shadowed owl-calling woods--

My woods still echoing the daylit fluted calls of meadowlarks--

Their music shaken from the snarled leaves in the evening breeze.

I ran to  trees--

Their leaves frosted by moonlight and the Milky Way,

Their leaves that vibrated with the power of the Big Dipper and Orion,

the Seven Sisters and the North Star.

Into the trees,

To where I stored my memories

In the frog-croaking depressions under clumps  of grass,

In the tangles of creeping Jenny

And the fluff of dandelions,

In the sand hollows which crept up from the river banks,

In the cocklebur and the chigger-infested grass,

In the crooks of cottonwoods and caves of thickets,

In the tiny cupped palms of sweet clover and purple alfalfa.

In the wheat grass and the oats and trefoil.

 

The year my dad decided to  expand the field on the river bottom,

I pleaded, I cajoled, I promised, I prayed

For the summer home

Where I had lived for neither one summer nor one night, in actuality,

But where, nevertheless, I’d had faith I would someday live.

Of course,  there was no saving the woods and summer house.

It was rich river land--prime for irrigation.

The trees were a waste of soil. 

The summer home--everybody’s gentle joke on me.

 

After the  cats and bulldozers were through,

I went  with my dad  to see 

Where  trees had been ripped out,

The house burned to the ground,

The soil turned and planted

With crops that would build the land.

Their woods now  furrowed soil,

The crows and  sparrows

Had gone to some other shaded place.

The mice, back to the fields.

My former references of trees forever gone,

The present references of sky and fenceposts too wide and new,

I wasn’t sure where my summer home had stood.

The house’s ghost  destroyed by the bright sunlight,

The woodland paths replaced by tractor treads,

I watched instead a meadowlark

Soar over brown fields and settle on barbed wire,

Claiming the new field for its own.

With no house or forest left, my only shade was  chokecherry bushes,

My only chair,  the pickup running board.

And my  summers at the river

Vanished in the smoke of my summer home and smoldering tree stumps.

 

But every night, my woods again threw still shadows

Over my summer house--

And I ran once more  the corridors of moonlight

cut through  dense trees

like  parts in a small girl’s hair. 

I ran in the wet dew of the condensing summer heat. 

I ran on the fuel of my need for magic

and wildness

and rivers

and trees. 

I ran fueled by my need to be with something

 that lived outside my widow.

As I passed long nights in my winter house.

 

It lay in the lowing of the cattle in the stockpens on the other side of town. 

It lay in the sudden swift roaring of the semis

As they accelerated on the slight rise at the edge of the town. 

It lay in the dark tapping of the trumpet vine branch against my window.

 It lay in the crunching of gravel as someone walked by on the unpaved street--

out past midnight and I couldn’t tell who.

It lay in the pricking of the hair on my arm as I stuck it  out from the bed

And  pressed it to the screen.

Always, in town, it lay outside of me--

Except for when I floated  the paths

of the woods surrounding the summer house.

Until I joined it in dreams,

 night after night and then less frequently. 

Until the dreams came once a month or once a year--

In darkness, always recognized,

But nonetheless forgotten in the light.

 

So by the  time I saw the river field grown lush with corn,

I was a teenager in my first grownup swim suit,

floating the milky Little White in an inner tube,

down to the junction with the clear and colder-running water of the Big White.

My best friend next to me,

Our cooler full of Coca-Colas and ham salad,

Our conversations full of boys and music.

At the border of the field, to get to the river bank,

We crawled over the border of large tree trunks

laid horizontal, half-buried in sand.

I guess I knew they were the  bones of my  midnight woods.

I guess some part of me felt the ghost of my summer house.

But , as I lay on my back on the submerged sand bank,

The warm water flowed so sensuously over my shoulders and down my legs

That my suit seemed to peel itself

from my shoulders, breasts, thighs, calves.

And in a dream I floated the muddy water of the Little White,

Turning in the current until the water flowed inside of me,

 floating me down to the cool clear water of the Big White,

 Further and further away from the summer home.

 

-0-

 

 

 

 

copyright  1999. Please do not duplicate or disperse by internet or e-mail

* Please take my test: "The Do We Click or Clash Test" You can find it by going to the url below:

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/the-do-we-click-or-clash-test

It tests our compatibility, but you just might find that it tests your compatibility with Mexico, as well.

 

* I've just posted a second test as well.  It is the "How Deep is Your Love Affair with Chocolate? Test" You can find it by clicking on the url below:

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/how-deep-is-your-love-affair-with-chocolate-test

<!-- createCurrentRating('0', { star_width: '24', star_margin_right: '5', star_class: 'current-rating', blank_star_img: 'big_stars_off1.png' }); // --> Please remember to rate these tests!  If you have any comments about them, I'd like to hear them.

 

 

Would you rather be 10 minutes late, or an hour early?

• 10 minutes late
• An hour early

Would I rather be 10 minutes late or an hour early? As with many questions, this one depends on the situation. For a party, especially in Mexico, it is polite to be a bit late. The first ones arriving usually find the party still being put into being, with the family decorating, cooking, arranging chairs. Those who arrive early will probably actually assist in the party's construction, as the rest of the guests arrive on time (one hour or two hours late!)  But for a job interview, I'd rather show up an hour early to insure that I don't get there late due to traffic or some unforeseen problem enroute. For a dentist appointment or movie? Better be there on time. Usually, for questions like this where the questioner has obviously not thought out the answer fully, I just hit the "skip" button.

 

  

This year, 

All of the hard to reach places,

difficult situations, difficult people

are falling away.

And I’m letting them. 

I need an easier place for my heart.

Some gentler place

where my heart fits.

 

Meanwhile...

I've been misplacing everything.

And now it seems that it’s my heart that I can’t find.

Knowing myself,

I know that I will never find it by looking.

But instead, must wait until I chance upon it

in some spot where I would never think to look.

Some place where it has been placed absent-mindedly

to free my hands for other tasks.

Or perhaps someplace

where a part of me kind to myself

knew it would be safe for awhile

while I was not in need of it.

 

So I’m not looking for my heart.

Instead, I’m trying to build a new place

so that if I ever find my heart, it will have

a spot that it fits into just right.

Away from careless elbows extended

just right for knocking hearts off ledges.

 

The place for my heart

will not be a high place--

no careless place that earthquakes

could spill it from.

It will not be a low place--

too near toes that might stumble

over a heart brought low.

It will not be a place in direct sunlight

that might fade a heart away.

 

The place for my heart

will be a handy place

I don’t have to think about twice.

A dependable place like the door of my refrigerator:

grocery list, dentist appointments,

art openings, family pics, and my heart. 

Here in this busy much-used place

near food and ice water. 

 

A place like that

is where my heart will want to go

once I get it back again

from wherever it has fallen

or been kicked to

or hidden.

 

I am admitting that

I’ve lost my heart,

and I’m waiting.

Waiting for it to speak to me

in a whisper,

probably at night

 

Or maybe it will shout to me

over the swelling music of the village down below.

 

Maybe it has outgrown me

and is running in the mountains

near midnight with the neighborhood dogs.

Maybe it has always wanted to join the pack,

to bay at the moon.

To be free of me

and rules and schedules.

Maybe my heart still wants to be free,

and I won’t get it  back.

Heartless, they will call me.

 

Or maybe my heart has run away, wanting to be followed.

Hoping I'll hear it baying and lope after it,

to join the wild pack running the canyons under a full moon,

or sipping from the night-calmed lake

with their moonshadows falling under them.

 

Maybe it is my heart I hear when I think I hear the wild dogs.

Maybe it is my heart I hear in the croaking of the frogs.

Maybe it is my heart tap tap tapping on the window glass.

Maybe it is my heart walking across the rooftop.

Maybe it is my heart howling in the treetops.

Maybe it is my heart in the two long rumbles of thunder.

In the three minute violence of hail.

Maybe it is my heart in the rustle of the bougainvillea.

Or the weeping of the night bird.

 

Maybe it is my heart that is looking for me.

 

Maybe my heart is composing a poem

About losing its body.

Maybe it has a plan for where to put us both.

Maybe I need to go into the night.

listen harder for the shout of my heart.

Listen harder for its whisper.

Watch for the heart I barely even recognize.

Let it grab onto me and pull me after it.

So that while I’m building the place for my heart to fit,

It will grow too large to fit inside of anything.

And when I chance upon it,

my heart will be large enough to open and welcome me in.

 

 

 

Guys...a suggestion, if you are really interested in connecting with a woman, answering questions with one or two words is curt and seems insulting.  When a woman asks you a question, she is seeking to discover something about you because she is interested in you.  Answering, "Yes."  or "No." and signing off feels like a kiss-off.  Why would you wink at a girl and then kiss her off?  I passed on several guys I was very interested in because of this. I'm sure they are wondering what happened.  Or perhaps not...perhaps they were trying to get rid of me!!!!