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CasualMonique came over yesterday, after a couple of weeks of not seeing each other due to mutual busy-ness. She got a late start and got caught in traffic on the way down (yes, I-880's traffic can suck even on a Saturday). She hadn't really eaten anything all day, and all I'd had was a sandwich, so I took her to Palo Alto where we went to the Peninsula Creamery, which she liked quite a bit. (It was a suboptimal Creamery experience for me, as they screwed up my milkshake, exchanging "with bananas" for the "extra thick" I'd ordered; plus we had two waiters who didn't seem to know who owned our table, and a third guy kept trying to take away our dishes before we were done with them; sheesh! Apparently I've been bit by the bad Bay Area restaurant service bug that's going around.) We decided to pass on the movies at the Stanford Theatre and instead went to the two bookstores on University Ave, where Monique picked up some huge quantity of books, all very cheaply. As we were leaving Border she exclaimed that I hadn't bought a thing! I've already got a huge stack of books to read (see left for a few of them), but I do like to browse.
 When we got back to my place we had a talk. Yes, one of those talks. Basically, we're going to stop dating. Monique's motivation is that she just wants to stay single for now. I think she's just feeling like she has too many responsibilities and as she wrote she's feeling like she hasn't spent enough time making new friends. (I think she's still going through her "adjustment to living in a new place" phase, although it's a less dramatic phase than mine tend to be.) For myself, I've found it difficult to feel like this is a relationship really taking off because of the physical distance between us. As Monique put it, the timing is bad, and I added that the circumstances are also not ideal: We live 60 miles apart, we have schedules that tend to conflict (I work all week, and she's often busy on the weekend), and that's made it really hard get to know each other in the sort of depth that I think relationships require. I suppose a hopeless romantic would say that if we really wanted to make it work, we could, and that's probably true. But we'd be giving up other things to do so (other friends, other plans, other experiences), and I don't think that's what either of us wants to do. Also (and we talked a little about this) neither of us are really temperamentally suited to that sort of sacrifice for a relationship: We each like to have a certain amount of time to ourselves (Monique has actually written about this more explicitly in her journal than I ever have). But, we ended it amicably, even rather quietly. We spent the rest of the evening sitting in my living room. I made us some hot chocolate, and played a succession of tracks from a whole bunch of CDs in my collection (plus several albums in their totality: Michael Brecker's Two Blocks From the Edge, October Project's Falling Farther In and Bob Geldof's The Vegetarians of Love). We both read John Callahan's memoir, Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?, and I introduced Monique to Alison Bechdel's great series of comic strips, Dykes to Watch Out For, which she loved. And aside from a little teasing, the results of The Talk weren't a cloud hanging over us. Which I think (hope) is the way we both want it. So we're going to remain friends. In fact, Monique says she's earmarked going to the Winchester Mystery House as something she wants to do with me! So that will be good. Well, at least Tom will have to stop teasing me about my "dirty woman from the dirty Internet"! Thank ghod.
One thing Monique and I discussed tonight was the (for lack of a better term) allure that journallers like her, and Eleanor Mason and Rob Rummel-Hudson have that others don't. Monique suggested (though this idea might have come from Eleanor originally) that they all have a certain energy which attracts readers. I think it's a combination of that, a positive outlook, and an off-the-cuff written sense of humor which makes their journals work as both light reading and more substantive material. Other journallers (for instance, Ceej and Lucy) have these qualities to varying degrees, too, although not usually in the same quantity (and often, I think, deliberately; I think some folks find that sort of writing tone to be not so much 'alluring' as 'relentless'). I'm sometimes envious of the larger readerships that they have (I think Rob's notify list is five times as large as my entire readership), not necessarily because I want more readers but because it makes me feel deficient as a writer. I know my writing tends to be very matter-of-fact, often rather dry, and that I talk at great length about subjects that many people have no interest in. (Anytime I write a review of something, I know only a small slice of my audience is going to read it. For instance, Monique I think is nearly the only person who's said she enjoys my movie reviews.) I mostly don't worry about it, since I'm writing this journal primarily for myself. Still, I often wish I could drop my writing style into one of those easy-sounding, drop-dead-funny writing tones that many journallers seem to pull off so well. It's especially frustrating since I can behave that way in person (although I'm just as likely to fall into "total pun mode"; it entirely depends on my mood and which way my mind happens to be leaning on any given day), but writing is a different animal. And, basically, I enjoy writing what I write about, and don't really want to put a whole lot of effort to make a big change in that way. What, really, would be the point?
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