great spurts of lunacy

This ends an incredibly crazy week in my life. As you may have read from past posts (if you are my one loyal reader, tanya), I have been so consumed with the thought of how boringly vanilla I was and how I was spending the best years of my life not being spontaneous or loony enough.

Oddly enough, my friend Tanya commented about that post by giving me a different perspective about people’s perceived personalities. She said something that just made so much sense –

“The key is to be deliberate. People are intriguing, whether vanilla or spicy, when they believe in who they are.”

For quite a while now I was being deliberately but uncomfortably vanilla – not wanting to be so tame, yet not knowing what to do to change. And I couldn’t defend who I chose to be or what I chose to do.

This week was a study at how decidedly insane (or stubborn) I was. Trying to organize a speed dating event without guys, without human or financial resources, with the venue suddenly canceled, and with a partner backing out, the obvious choice of course is to suck it up, give up, and pack up. But I begged and pleaded complete strangers online to go, whored myself of little piece by little piece, made my existing friends hate me for being so pushy, groveled in front of unsympathetic male species, and everything you can imagine of that sort of desperation.

*as a little side note, I also found myself smack in the middle of a scary singles party with an equally terrified friend, scouting around for vulnerable guys we could beg to go to our little humble attempt at speed dating (none went, by the way – THANK GOODNESS). We had the very exciting choice of being color-coded as (red - single and looking for love, or pink – virginal and are to be hooked up with greens – attached but willing to cheat). To forever document our terrifying foray into that end of the single-scene spectrum, I took a picture of us amidst all the chaos. –must upload said photo soon. Our faces were a combination of constipated and confused. It’s hilarious.

Sometimes it is so surprising which of your friends will actually come through for you. I won’t go into specifics, but the evening went on despite a tire burst and an almost-towing, me getting more guys than I needed, the delivery people bringing less chairs and tables than I wanted, more food left than I expected, and me more calm that I ever thought I could be given such terrible circumstances.

But somehow, matches were made, and fun was had. While I cannot speak for everybody of course, I realize that you cannot please everyone. I’m just glad that some people got what they came for, and that I survived in one piece.

At the end of it all, a good friend of mine texted this:

“am proud of you. gotta hand it to you though. One woman show. That took guts.”
To which I replied:

“I think what it needed was someone who had a great dose of lunacy within her to believe that such an obvious flop would succeed.”

And then she said:

“I don’t know how you missed it, but lunacy is what you always bring to the table, Ia.”

Hmm. I didn’t realize that.