The Adventures of Sally Tomato, Cosmonaut

Key things to note are: I got two new tattoos with Dadda over Christmas; my (non)boyfriend kind of dumped me soon after; and I got so overwhelmed by the responsibility of accounting for nearly 200 thousand unspent grant dollars that I had a breakdown at work. (And by breakdown, I mean I started crying in front of my boss's boss and another male co-worker and had to leave.)

These three items pretty much encapsulate everything. My new-found closeness with my family, both my Mom and Dad's sides. The oppressive sense of isolation I've been feeling. And my balls-to-the wall efforts to transition to having a boss I can cry in front of (namely, me).

I am so far from my family, and for the first time in ten years, I actually care. As more of my friends tie the knot, are in serious relationships, or spend more time with their own families, I'm starting to feel the absence of siblings, aunts, uncles -- really anyone who has to love you unconditionally -- quite keenly.

This is second time in my life I've really disliked being an only child. The first time was when my parents divorced, and I was just exhausted hiding things like Dad's cancer, and being a constant support for my mom. The people who know me the best, friends from college, all live in other countries now. I have wonderful friends here, I really do. But I'm learning, as my Mom is, painfully, that friends can rarely take the place of family.

I wonder sometimes if this is part of why the deterioration of romantic relationships is so hard for me. My good friend, Mary Brigid, once said that love isn't so much about romance or butterflies, as it is about wanting to make that person a part of your family. And so... well yeah, I concur. 'Nuff said there, I suppose.

On to the break-up... The hardest part of that situation - after the fairly standard feelings of rejection and "why doesn't anyone love me?!" - has been all the stuff about me that I'm discovering and having to admit. Pretty steep learning curve there, actually. Many curves, in fact, like a roller coaster. Like, did you know that I have a difficult time telling people I care about that they hurt my feelings? Me neither! Whoosh! (Yes, that's the whoooooshing of my emotional roller coaster.) Just as I get my head around that - whoosh!!! - I realize I'm actually quite devasted by feeling ignored and un-prioritized, and I cope by giving more and more and more... Hence my present state of romantic (and professional) exhaustion.

Then there's the stuff I have to admit. Turns out, I do want to be in an intimate, long term relationship. Who knew?! It doesn't have to be a marriage, or a house in the suburbs, or anything involving children. I just want to know and be known. I'd like to help someone achieve their goals, and have them help me reach mine. I want someone that I'm attracted to to cook for and to travel with. Relatively simple, right? And yet these seemingly undemanding hopes are consistently dashed by the Universe. Because my life is a cosmic farce, no doubt.

And so I throw myself into work. Not my day job, so much--like my current romantic entanglement, I'm trying to inject a healthy dose of not-caring into the Job That Made Me Cry. I mean my freelance writing.

The other morning I had what my mother called a Prophetic Dream, during which, after a series of garbled events, I proclaimed this manifesto to the chochy businessman, who was putting together an ad-filled magazine about the crisis in Haiti:

"Scholars say that the Holocaust is a disconnect--literally a hole in human cultural history. The only way we can begin to comprehend crises of this magnitude, whether they are man-made or natural disasters - is to tell the story of this earthquake through as many voices as we can. The children who felt the earth move, the elders, the medical relief workers... That is the only hope we have of even beginning to understand devastation like this."

I felt weird when I woke up. Like I had found My Life Purpose, if indicated only by the fact that I have an extraordinarily articulate self-conscious, and managed to remember what I said. My mother, a charismatic Christian, also attached all manner of epic, spiritual significance to the thing.

The sense of purpose and direction lasted a few days. Now I just feel overwhelmed. I have all the ideas and no idea what I'm doing at the same time.

And that, my friends, brings you up to this very moment, where I am mitigating the feeling of overwhelmed-to-the-point-of-drowning by writing something relatively inconsequential for my blog.