Nice guys

Date tonight, with a man I met the old-fashioned way: through friends. He is a nice man, very sweet, and a bit shy. I can tell that he’s a little nervous when he talks to me on the phone. But you know what? I like nice guys. Like all women, I’ve dabbled in bad boys . . . actually, even my “bad” boys have been very tame . . . but all my boyfriends have been nice guys.

I had such ambitious reading goals for this year, and so far, January has been a wash. Ah well. I am so easily distracted. Man. Rather, Men.

I am indulging a rather weird interest on my part: The Black Dahlia. No, I didn’t see the movie–it’s fictionalized, and it’s the real story that is compelling to me. I’m reading a book written by a man who believes his father was the murderer.

The snow coating Chicago is lovely. It’s so pretty outside. Ruby (the German Shepherd, for those playing without a scorecard) loves it. She frolics. And you haven’t really lived right until you’ve seen 95 lbs. of German Shepherd frolic. That’s the thing about dogs, you know? Their entire bodies convey their emotions. I suppose that’s true of people, too. We overly fixate on the verbal messages instead of observing body language. This is a skill I picked up when teaching high school. Several people have recently lauded my “detective” skills: my powers of deduction and my eagle eyes. Again, remnants of teaching high school. In fact, what I miss about teaching school is that moment when I’d catch one of them up to something. God bless their little, ignorant souls, because invariably, they’d think they were being subtle, sneaky, stealthy, and when they’d look up, there’d I’d be, from across the room, bemused look on my face (at least that’s what I was striving for), and I’d do that motion where I’d point at my eyes, then their eyes, to signal: I see you. I. See. You. The look on their face was priceless. Remember what it was to be a teenager? To believe that your intellectual prowess was simply as-yet unrecognized? To believe that the adults around you were almost intolerably dumb?

I know I thought I was rocket-science smart. I must have been nearly unbearable.