Metaphorically speaking

This past Valentine's Day, also known as Singles Awareness Day (or SAD) my dear friend, Kailei retweeted Rick Warren.  The tweet said "Sometimes God removes a person from your life for your protection. Do not run after them."  Now, I know that St. Patrick's Day is almost here, and you're reading this thinking, "I know Lil's not the most punctual girl in the world and it was just daylight savings time, but is she really a whole month late?" Well, yes, but I read this only once and knew that this is so my life!  If you're reading this and have no idea what I'm talking about, perhaps this is your first time reading my blog.  If that's the case and you want examples of the losers I've chased after or people who I end up attracted to or who are attracted to me, feel free to go back and read some of my earlier posts.  There aren't many of them.  Trust me, I don't do this half as often as I'd like to.  (Blog, that is.  Not chase after/be chased by losers.  I do that more than enough.)  Classes and speech consistently get in the way with this as well as my poetry.  However, if you're too lazy to go back and read my earlier examples, let me give you a more recent happening.  A few months ago, one of my besties from elementary school, Amanda, came to visit.  We went out for drinks, which was a lot of fun, as drinking often is, . . . until she tried to get a hold of this guy she used to mess with around here.  So, we drove out of town to meet up with him, which involved us leaving the bar, going to wherever he was, waiting, picking him up, dropping him off at another person's place, waiting, waiting, leaving him there because we got sick of waiting, him calling us so we go back and wait some more and then finally picking him up and dropping him off again.  I don't know if you understand how big of an issue this was for me.  First of all, all that waiting without drinks completely made me lose my buzz.  Second, this whole time I just kept thinking about how big of an asshole this guy was, and how I didn't understand how my girl didn't realize this.  So, eventually, I went home, sober and kinda ticked.  I just couldn't understand what was wrong with my girl, and where she had misplaced her balls.  I mean, this chick was the most bad ass thing about my childhood.  Calling up people on three-way and cornering them into saying something nasty about the silent person on the other line causing huge arguments, smoking in 5th grade, getting in fights with people in middle school!  The girl was crazy!  I effing loved it! But what happened?  My bulldog of a friend had turned into a... (hmmm...what's a horribly lame and cute and soft puppy? Umm...she turned into a golden retriever? No,

Happy Easter! From your balls.

that's not right either.  Hmmm...we're going to have to go inter-species here.  A dog would have fetched its balls, not misplaced them.  Ooh!  Got it!)  She turned into a rabbit.  A soft, cuddly, eating out of the palm of this guy's hand rabbit.  It was literally like seeing your favorite childhood superhero defeated right before your eyes.  I was crushed and confused. 

Then, about a month ago, the Worst. Possible. Thing. happened.  (Okay, that might be a tad overdramatic.  No one died or anything, but just play along.)  I did the same thing!  Only it was worse than when it happened to her!  I mean, my girl had been slightly drunk when we did this, but this time I was fully sober.  Okay, background:  I drunk dialed a guy I like and made plans with him for the next night to go visit a mutual friend of ours.  So, I went to his place to pick him up (Do you notice that loser-y guys never seem to have their own ride?  Red flag!  I think I need to pay more attention to TLC "No Scrubs"), and I waited.  I waited and called him and texted him and facebooked him and waited.  I waited for a little more than an hour before finally giving up and leaving him there and heading over alone.  Where had my balls gone?  I mean, granted, I left some slightly ballsy messages, but what did it matter?  Why was I there in the first place?  And why in God's green earth did I stay for longer than a freaking hour waiting!?  I was a soft, pudgy rabbit.  (I'm starting to think the rabbit metaphor may not be a good thing.  Rabbits have a lot of sex...okay, so that's good and all, but they also probably have balls if they're doing that...do rabbits get neutered?  Maybe that's what we are.  Neutered rabbits.  But I think that's not exactly accurate either.  Fish don't have balls.  Do fish have sex?  Fish are coldblooded, though, and rather distant.  That doesn't work either.  Girls.  Girls don't have balls and they get caught up in the dream of what will happen.  Okay, so we're girls.

Don't let the pig-tails fool you.  I will
knock yo' bitch ass out!

That shouldn't have been that hard.  And we're back!)  I was a pig-tailed, pudgy, freckled, little girl.  (No, no.  That doesn't work either, because when we were girls was when we had balls to be bad ass.  Ugh!  Anyway, moving on.  There's obviously no usable metaphor here.) 


There's a radio show on NPR called This American Life.  One episode, Break-Up, (and yes, this is the one I've used for my Dramatic Interp - for you non-speech geeks out there, feel free to just gloss over that part) talks about break-up songs (torch

Something seems to be going
wrong with this ball of mine.

songs) that "are about the most pathetic, desperate, and lonely part of yourself.  The part you'd never admit to your friends.  The part of you that knows without a shadow of a doubt that you would take him back, not only that, but he wouldn't have to beg or even apologize."  That part of you, is the empty space where your balls should be.  And it comes and goes.  Sometimes, I'm quite ballsy.  Other times, I'm a wreck of an unstable mess.  (Kittens!  Kittens have balls, but they're made of yarn!  Soft balls of yarn!  Oh yeah!  Metaphor found!  Nailed it!)


I hate that confidence comes and goes like that, though.  Sometimes I feel like I look really good (Today, for example, running around at home in shorts, and my legs look fan-fucking-tastic, aside from that little bit of back-of-the-knee fat. Or like yesterday, when I celebrated spring with a sundress and some guy in a white truck yelled out about that dumb "baby, you want fries with that shake?" comment. (What's the point of that?  Seriously, if you're interested, stop and say "hi".  Ask for a number.  That's why I have a phone, people!).  Then, other days I feel like I look repulsive.  Some days I have the balls to speak my mind.  Other days my balls have turned to string, and I'm sitting outside in my car waiting, and it's the loneliest I've ever felt. 

The comfort that I get from this experience, though, is that I realize we all have these moments.  At some point, we're all holding our balls of yarn wondering what happened to them.  I'm just like my girl, Amanda.  We're both kittens and yet we're both bulldogs. (Lions, maybe?  YES!  Keep to the species, AND lions have great hair!  That's so us...oh, fuck it.)  Amanda's still super bad ass!  She's got balls to stand up to guys and to look out for her kids and to be her.  I've still got balls to compete in forensics and to be me and to learn from shit like this and to blog about it and post it to my Facebook page and on Twitter and here where anyone can read it. 

Like you.