Alone vs. Lonely

So, another weekend pulls into the station, ready and waiting for excited passengers to jump aboard and kick off the two-day long celebration, only to meet me standing alone at the platform.  Dateless for yet another weekend, I'm kind of looking forward to a couple of days of me-time...could you hear that?  The sarcasm in my voice.  I heard it plain as day.  Actually the statement bordered more on a lie than sarcasm.  That could be why you missed it.

If you haven't gathered yet, I'm a pretty social chickadee, thriving off interactions with people (hence my gluttonous beseeching for comments! Where have they all gone?!) and loving every minute of socializing in whatever form I can get.  It's a pretty good thing that I have unlimited everything on my phone because if faced with more than a few hours of alone time, I will commence to blow up at least ten of my friends with "Whatcha doing?" texts.  It's not that I need to be around people; I just thoroughly enjoy it. 

As I've been working through this dating process (and "working" is the correct term here, people, it is not a leisure activity...yet.  Unless you count the text messaging from the other evening....stop!  I can't keep doing that!), a lot of my friends have told me that I have to like myself before I can expect anyone else to like me.  I get this, I really do.  If I hate myself and am constantly negative about who I am, it's not a very convincing argument for someone considering spending time with me.  If I can't be happy sitting in a room with myself for more than 5 minutes, it's unlikely that anyone else is going to want to do the same.  I'm down with this particular psycho-babble.  But, just because I'm fine being alone with myself doesn't mean I necessarily want to do it all the time.

And I'm by no means a lonely person, let me clarify that.  You know, there are those people in the world (I like to call them "The Eeyores") who just enjoy being lonely.  They feed off of their own loneliness, taking pleasure in sharing their misery with everyone around them and ripping to shreds any bit of enjoyment anyone else takes part in without them.  Ask them to join you and they come up with some far-fetched reason why they can't.  Because to join you would ruin their act.  That's not me.  I'm surrounded by people 99.9% of my life.  Enjoyable, entertaining, loving people.  It's that tenth of a percent that gets to me.

Although, the more I ponder this (i.e. search for ways to turn it into a positive...now I'm whistling "Don't Worry, Be Happy"), I can get a lot of things done in this down time.  I can read (lonely), clean my seemingly ever-filthy bathroom (lonely), treat myself to a mani/pedi (although fabulous and surrounded by pamper-ready people, still lonely), paint the blank canvas in my art supply box that has been crying out for color for weeks (lonely) or catch up on my DVR (lonely! Remember Mr. Saturday?  Not sliding down that slippery slope...).  I live in one of the busiest and most action-packed cities in the country, I can't come up with anything better than that!  Or wait!  I think I found a bright side.  A blank calendar of two, whole complete days and an evening gives me open availability for male suitors interested in meeting me face-to-face...hmmm...  Does that break the "don't seem like you have nothing to do when a guy calls and asks you out last minute" rule?  Are there any asterisks on this rule?  I know I said I hate asterisks before, but what if I said "Oh, my plans got cancelled, sure I'm free!"?  Hmmm...

During our more appropriate text dialogue, I told Mr. Italian that I was disappointed that the Braves weren't in town this weekend because I'd been hoping to get to a game soon.  As he usually does, he perfectly segwayed into "Well, since the Braves aren't in town on Sunday, what do you have planned for that afternoon?"  After deciding that a Sunday ask-out was perfectly acceptable on a Wednesday, I completely expected an invitation to follow my "Nothing planned yet" response, especially after the conversation seemed to be so perfectly designed for one.  Have I heard from him since?  Nope.  Well, unless you count his email of "Hi!" on Plentyoffish.com, ironic since we met on Match.com.  Seems we're both utilizing as many online dating resources as possible, all at the same time!  Maybe if/when we meet, he'll be ugly or smell like bleu cheese or something comparably disgusting and I'll be able to restrain my behavior to a level bordering on classy.  Urgh.  He's going to be cute and funny and witty and wonderful, and I'm probably going to behave like an inmate who just got paroled.

"One can't complain. I have my friends. Someone spoke to me only yesterday."

-Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh