OK, yes two posts, one day, but I've got a lot to say (and geez, that rhymed). Anyway, another discussion with my brother's friend led him to say, "I don't know what to say when people recognize me and come up and talk to me. Usually, I just say thank-you. That's something they don't teach you in drama school. There's no handbook for it." To which, I laughed because he was definately baffled by the whole concept and then I got to thinking--a handbook. yes, that would be nice. People complain about there not being a handbook for raising children, but yet there are so many on amazon. For this, this survivorship/patientship when you're in your twenties, there truly is no handbook.

Let's take dating. Let's look at that bestseller, He's Just Not that Into You. Why is this book flying off the shelves? Instead of deciding that we should decipher all those crazy signals that the men give off, let's just put it simply: Everything would be a whole lot easier if someone would just tell the truth. And that is why game playing for me, at this stage of my life, is off the table. I know that with dating comes the inherent cat and mouse, will he, won't she, but geez, I just don't have the time or the energy to expend. Seriously, I know some people will counter and say, "No one does" and I'll agree. The whole lying pieceof the dating jungle. But here's this--do you know what it's like to have your doctor look you in the eye and tell you she's 100% sure you'll live and then like a year later you find out from your slightly tipsy mother that this wasn't the case. That the doctor, in fact, thought you might not live at all? Ahhh, but no, please tell me you really think I'm great and can't wait to see me again. Because, really, I want to spend my time wondering what I did wrong for you not to wave back to me at the bar, and not at all concern myself with the nagging pain in my back. It's a matter of courtesy. People think that lies will soften the blow, when they just enhance the delusion. Tell me you really don't think you want to get together after this--I'll be pissed but I won't wonder. I HAVE TO SPEND THE NEXT FIVE YEARS WONDERING IF I'M GOING TO DIE I DO NOT WANT TO SPEND EVEN FIVE MINUTES WONDERING IF YOU'RE GOING TO CALL ME BACK! Goodness, serioulsy that's the book that should be on the shelves: all those who are dating, and or married, please stop fucking lying to each other and be honest. Stop staying in relationships just in order to be with someone, and/or not die alone. Don't tell me you love me if you don't. Don't be with me, if you dread the sight of my face. I need to be able to live life to the fullest, and when we lie to each other--all in the name of caring, then we're not doing anyone any favors! And it shouldn't take a life altering event to make us act better.

Back to the other sides of dating. I don't want pity. I also don't know when it is appropriate to tell someone and should I be angry if it scares them off? I had friends for years who drifted away, can I blame someone who just wanted to hang out for having some apprehension? I met this guy once who told me he dated a girl with cancer, I think she had leukemia and she kept relapsing. I asked him, "Is it hard to date someone with cancer?" And he grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eyes and said, "No. It is not hard to date someone with cancer. Geez, why do you guys think that--she said the same thing. Anyone who makes it about them isn't worth it in the first place." But at the same time, I know it's hard. I know that it's not easy to be on the other side of the mirror. I would love to just date for the fun of dating, but I know that most guys see the baggage behind me and wonder if getting involved with me immediately means a committment.

I have this huge scar over my right breast and it makes me very self-conscious. I've started to wear spaghetti straps because I'm trying to be like, "HERE I AM" but at the same time, I am wearing a blazer over said top. I can't really drink anymore, and I hate that the only line any guy can use is "Can I buy you a drink" and if I say "No, I really don't drink" they get insulted and/or feel that they have to push said drink on me...note to all those that do that: you will not get any more charming the drunker I get and I will not sleep with you no matter how many Amstel Lights I have. I can't be around cigarette smoke, so when we're walking from bar to bar, sometimes my friends have seriously guilty faces about smoking and want to walk next to me and tell me how sorry they are and then I feel bad because I don't want them to feel bad and not want to be around me, and even this sentence is making me dizzy so imagine how I feel after a shot of Soco and Lime! Dating is hard in general; there's so much PR that we do. I'm petrified of becoming emotionally invested in anyone--I'm afraid that the minute I'm happy the sky will fall.

I was talking to a friend of my brother's last night, who's an actor, and he said that the one thing that is true among all people is that they all want to be special. And that's completley true. So when I was reading a review of a book in the New York Times of the Book, "Janet and Me" I was very taken with a line from the reviewer, Joyce Johnson: "''A Story of Love and Loss''? How often have we heard that one? As if all human tragedy is becoming Oprahized, memoirs of disease and dysfunction endlessly appear on publishers' lists. Personally, I refuse to equate memoir writing with therapy; nor do I believe that it rewards one with transcendence." As an aside, she does say that the book got to her.

"How often have we heard that one?" So many times because it's not simply a story of a single couple's struggle with cancer but it's now become part of the human condition. We all want to believe that our struggles are unique while at the same time searching for the commonalities so that we have someone to relate to. Though the treatments and the side effects can be pretty much standard, there are still so many ways, that each diagnosis, each day, each "dealing with it" is different. There are some of us who are blessed to have the chemo work; others who stare at their collapsed veins wondering why if they were willing to poison their bodies to get better that the sacrifice wouldn't be enough to get well. Some who pick up and move on; some who can never seem to shake the trauma of being diagnosed. Some who seem to have found every single good person on this planet to be their friend or relative and are constantly surrounded by love and support; some who find themselves lost and alone. Some of us can walk around and proudly wear our survival in a yellow band around our wrists; and there are others who are ashamed, feeling that this has tarnished who they are and hide their disease like a bad test grade. I don't think that anyone diagnosed with cancer is lucky, there are just different degrees of unluckiness. No that's not pessimism--that's just well, realism.

Ms. Johnson gives a quick thought about transcendence, and her lack of regard for this being valid. This notion that being sick somehow gives you a new vision into the world at large. Ha! As if that's at all true. Movies would love for us to believe that due to the fact that we've become afflicted with something horrible we will be rewarded with some type of knowledge the rest of our brethren don't have (cue the Lifetime music). But well, it's probably more along these lines. Shall I remind everyone of a very memorable quote by the hilarious Bill Murray in Caddyshack:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Unfortunately for this reviewer, who may feel that the stories that get to the heart of the human condition can only be told by those great writers who can weave a fiction tale around words and schemes that the "ordinary" person is far too well, ordinary to convey, human tragedy has become Oprahized. Not because it's just than any old hack can write something about their life, but because disease and dysfunction has become so prevalent. We search for the discrepancies that give us the stories but they top the best seller lists because everyone has been touched. Or if the story is far to terrible to even imagine happening (i.e. Augusten Burroughs) then people will say "that boy was far more unlucky than me" but at least he got to write a bestselling novel about it. When you're fighting for your life, or fighting to die with dignity, you are not thinking that there is some critic out there who is going to call your specific story banal. Because when it's your struggle, your fight, your body writhing in pain, there is nothing that ordinary about it.