Saturday, June 30, 2007
Watch how they are exhibited by a true professional.
MSNBC morning anchor Mika Brzezinski refuses to report on Paris Hilton’s release from jail and in so doing challenges Arianna Huffington for the title of Sexiest Woman in America:
Friday, June 29, 2007
Now that I have found the love of my life, I finally got around to doing something today that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I deleted my account with a certain online dating site.
I would have done it much sooner, because, truth be told, I gave up on such personals sites about four years ago, after my last promising flirtation in Los Angeles went up in flames. Over the course of seven years and associations with four or five different websites, I had wasted too much time looking for love or even meaningful human interaction there and came finally to the conclusion that I should give up on websites and women altogether for a while, since they had clearly given up on me long ago.
(Furthermore the evolving business models of such websites have made it apparent that they’re not interested in bringing people together so much as separating people from their money, as evidenced by Match.com’s drafting of Dr. Phil and his burgeoning empire of Things You Could Figure Out on Your Own If You Weren’t So Lazy and Didn’t Have $24.95 Lying Around Waiting to Be Spent. And don’t even get me started on that creep Dr. Neil Clark Warren and his cult of eHarmony.)
All this time I have kept my last personals account open (albeit inactive) for one reason, and one reason only: since the advent of The Shepcat Chronicles and the modifications that resulted in the current, non-sanctioned blog template, the personals site in question has functioned as my image-hosting server for the masthead photo on your right. After all these years — due to a combination of laziness, lack of curiosity and my not really being a photography enthusiast in the first place — I only recently figured out how to upload photos on Blogger and, in particular, to finesse one into the template for my masthead, which, until recently, was the only photo I’ve ever required here.
So that’s it. That’s my dark confession: I’ve been poaching bandwidth from a dating site because I figured I should get something from them in return for all the time and capital I’ve squandered on the Internet dating experience.
Far be it from me to sound hypocritical on this subject, but while it’s true that I ultimately found love on the Internet, I did so by coloring outside the lines, as has been my modus operandi for some time now. Internet dating sites might be a convenient way to meet someone, but they provide only a thumbnail sketch of a person according to a standardized questionnaire, and they create as much distance between people as they promote proximity. The blogosphere, it turns out, is a much better place to get to know someone in three dimensions, and the three-dimensional world is better still.
My advice, then: if you currently subscribe to an Internet dating site, cut your losses and get out now while you still have a little youth and vivacity left in you, before you become entirely bitter and disillusioned and have nothing left to offer a prospective companion but a desiccated husk of your former self. But feel free to steal a little bandwidth from them while you work out your next move.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
… of yours truly, Shepcat, happy. Smiling. Relaxed, even. Unclenched.
It’s astonishing, I know. And it happened in the home state of Vice President Dick Cheney, no less.
The young lady on my right, your left, has everything to do with it. The parenthetical smile, the twinkling eyes attended by creases, the casual stance, the carefree slope of the shoulders, the apparent absence of tension — it all happened on her watch (and continues to happen with some regularity, even though we’re apart).
So take a moment — won’t you? — and bask in the radiance of this rarest of sights, this Halley’s comet of photographic fortuity. Click the image for a larger view, a closer look. Compare and contrast it with the all-too-familiar masthead portrait, its study of brooding magnetism and repulsion in chiaroscuro. Linger as long as you must to let this new image stamp itself indelibly in your memory, to wrap your mind around it, to reconcile it with all you thought you knew about me.
Thank you.
This concludes our special Technicolor presentation of Shepcat’s unsuspected emotional range. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of Sturm und Drang, already in progress.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
SECURITY GUARD There’s two ways we can do this.FOLEY Yeah? What are they?— Out of Sight
screenplay by Scott Frank
I have never done anything the easy way.
My idea of happiness broke ranks with yours a long time ago. As you sunned yourselves in the blinding rays of instant gratification, I retreated into the shadowlands to chart a different course for myself, one based on the carefully calibrated but always precarious balance between happiness and misery. Instead of making a grab for the former, lining up with the rest of you like children scrambling toward a bursting piñata, I hung back on the perimeter — discerning, distrusting, certain that there must be a catch — and, for the time being at least, forged a cautious, observant association with the latter.
Keep your friends close and your adversaries closer, as they say.
Everybody is driven by something, be it virtue or vice, and as far back as I can remember, I have been driven by one thing above all others: love. The absence of it. The pursuit of it. The certainty that once I had it, everything else would fall into place.
At the core of my being, I have always believed that love in real life can be as bold, as dramatic, as powerful, as heroic as it is in fiction. Art imitates life, right? I never saw any reason why I couldn’t experience love on those terms. Once that mentality is hardwired into a person’s nature, it almost guarantees that he or she won’t have an easy time of it. But that’s the point: in order for love to be all those things, it can’t be easy; it has to be a challenge; you have to earn it. And you have to be willing to wait for the right one to come along, someone invested enough to pursue the adventure with you, because you almost never get more than one shot at that kind of happiness.
This is the story of my long-shot gamble and how it finally paid off.
I arrived in Los Angeles in August 1997, seeking salvation, redemption, love. Perhaps it was naïve of me. I mean, I had a pretty good idea going in, but I had to see for myself. And it should surprise no one that none of those things exist there. At least I know that now. I left in January 2006, older, wiser, not entirely empty-handed, perhaps a little battered but stronger than before and more certain than ever of who I am.
I would rather not elaborate about the ways in which my homecoming has been a crushing disappointment. Suffice it to say that, instead of career opportunities, I have met blind alleys, and the few months I thought I’d be living with my family have become 17 (and counting). My employment and income have been scant; my social life has been necessarily curtailed; I have been humbled by my boundaries and limitations.
I should have made better use of all this spare time. I should have been a better, more present friend to those who have always been such good friends to me. (For that, I extend my most heartfelt apologies.) I should have written more, both in this forum and on my long-gestating novel-in-progress. I should have focused my energies instead of letting the time get away from me.
In one sense, though, I have no regrets: I have instead been writing the single most important correspondence of my life, engaged in an enthralling conversation that I believe will never end.
One good thing happened to me in 2006. One. But if I had to choose only one, it would be this. It would be her. It would be Adriane.
It began here, in the blogosphere, with bon mots tossed insouciantly into the comments sections of our respective online confessionals. Adriane discovered me first, dropping dime on another blog, after which I found her during a moment of self-Googling vanity, and slowly we circled each other, becoming over time a mutual admiration society, drawn intangibly to each other’s creativity, talent and perspective en route to making eventual inroads on the emotional landscape.
I liked her instantly. I have always been certain that you would too, given the opportunity.
On Christmas 2005 I e-mailed Adriane in an act of daring, a breach of etiquette and a crossing of the line that I was afraid might backfire, although we had each left behind the bread crumbs of invitation for the other to find along the way. That first e-mail led to others, a correspondence that coincided with my last month in Los Angeles and my first month back in Kansas City.
Our first online chat commenced just after midnight on, of all days, Valentine’s Day and stretched through the night and morning and into the afternoon, spanning 13 hours. Two nights later we chatted for two hours before I suggested that we might talk on the phone instead. Adriane typed out her phone number, I dialed her up, we heard each other’s voices for the first time and talked until sunrise.
In the months since that first marathon chat, we have spent literally thousands of hours together online and on the phone and have never run out of things to say. We have lowered our defenses, earned each other’s trust, challenged each other’s intellect, championed each other’s causes, offered our counsel, shared our confidences, confessed our passions and secret fears, deprived each other of sleep, developed intimacy, flirted shamelessly and pointedly avoided certain subjects while looking forward to our inevitable rendezvous.
On Friday, June 1, 2007, a little after 12 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, we met face to face for the very first time outside her house in southwestern Wyoming. Before I could turn away from my car, Adriane sprang into my arms and held on to me so tightly I thought she might never let go. I didn’t want her to.
We kissed then, and the past, as it does, became prologue. Later that evening, we each said “I love you” for the first time, having waited months to admit it out loud. All that time, we just knew.
The next five days were the happiest of my life so far, if you can believe that; the sixth day nearly tore me in two. Now that Adriane and I have finally found each other, our next obstacle is to close the thousand miles between us, to recalibrate the balance between happiness and misery decidedly in our favor and to begin writing the next chapter of our improbable romance together. It isn’t going to be easy, but that’s always been how I roll.
I have no idea what the future holds, but at least now I know who’ll be at my side as it unfolds.
This is the end of me.
This is the beginning of us…
Friday, June 08, 2007
