how it feels when things start to go right

So the big news is that I got the Spaceship after all; the property manager emailed me this afternoon, and I'm good to go. I have to run out and get a cashier's check for the deposit and first month's rent, and then I will have keys...and have my own real space again for the first time in a long time. Even though I had the studio in the dojo, that was always a stopgap measure. There were certain concessions I had to make to live there, and it felt distressingly temporary. But then, so have so many of the places I've lived.

Talked about this with a new acquaintance, Spiral, over dinner last night. She's a neat lady; although her nieces and nephews "behind the Orange Curtain" apparently don't understand that having a witch aunt who lives in San Francisco is very, very cool. I told her that for years, I had it in the back of my head that any place I lived was sort of a way station until I met the person with whom I was going to form the Big Pair Bond. How I didn't necessarily hold out for places I really liked, and settled for places that were almost but not quite right, because in my heart I expected that when I met my soulmate, we'd be moving in together somewhere else anyway. I thought I was the only one who did this, but a conversation with a family friend last month in Detroit disabused me of the notion, and so I don't feel as strange admitting to it. I'm not proud of it, but there it is: as much as I disdain the idea that single people are somehow incomplete, I was manifesting it myself.

Well, no mas. I found a place that I like a lot, a little place just right for me, and this week I get to start moving my plants and books and artifacts into it and make it mine. I'm especially interested in the fact that I will be the first person to live there--the building is so new it doesn't have all its stickers peeled off--so there's no karma, good or bad, in the walls or appliances. Offgassing chemicals, oh yes, probably. But no mail for former occupants, no need to cross someone else's name off the door buzzer, no nicotine oozing through the paint in the bathroom like Son of Blob out for flesh. No echoes of screaming matches, or odd smells of burnt food. I get to fill it with enthusiasm and creative spirit.

If anyone out there of the ritual-minded persuasion has suggestions for ways to mark this occasion/sanctify the space, I'm open.

The other big news (it's been a pretty exciting couple of days for news) is pretty quirky. Last summer I applied to a program in Connecticut for theatre critics, a sort of critic boot camp. It turned out that I wouldn't be able to go because of a change in the program's schedule that conflicted with my previous commitment to teaching aikido summer camp. I was bummed, but the director told me he'd hold onto my application and I could try again this year.

So this year, the application deadline came and went while I was occupied with my father; I made my peace with the fact that I wouldn't be going to boot camp this year either.

Well.

Yesterday there was a voicemail for me that I'd been accepted to the session, and that a New York Times-funded foundation would be covering the cost (as they do for all working journalists who attend; only non-journalists pay their own way). All I needed to do was buy plane tickets.

I went nuts. I'm committed to aikido camp already, I don't want to screw up the dojo, but I didn't even apply and they want me. Both AX and my mother gave me stern talkings-to, and then Spiral a slightly more gentle one; there was much talk of divine intervention and not turning away from a thing I'm apparently really supposed to do. So I'm thrilled witless, and have to have a serious talk with LabRat and my sensei about professional opportunities versus screaming children who constantly need their noses wiped and little belts retied. There's got to be a way to make this work.

It's just so nice, too; ever since the summer of '01, it's felt like one painful or difficult thing after another. Breaking up with Slice, moving out of the Oakland house, my dad's first diagnosis, and then 9/11 (all of which happened in a three-month span)... while there have been some great things since then (belly dance, dear new friends, belly dance, new writing markets, belly dance), I still really appreciate having a couple of really cool things happening so close together. It makes me feel like I'm not just pointed in the right direction, I'm actually in motion again.

I wish of course that I could tell my dad about all this. He would have been so pleased for me. Maybe I'll write a letter and burn it.