singleness rocks, part 1

So, I'm not going to lie.  Singleness is awesome.

It's taken a long time to get to this FUCK YEAH point.  But several lousy relationships and nearly a decade after my regular blogging days, I'm pretty thrilled to be where I am.

It's funny, the things that hit you.  Yesterday I was reflecting on the privacy.  Or rather, the complete irrelevance of privacy.  I can shit with the bathroom door open or stride around the apartment naked or belt out random snippets of songs or fart in bed without worrying about my dignity or anyone else's sensibilities.  It's great.

Just now I was mowing down some hummus (homemade; I'm starting to do things around the house again in a way I haven't had the energy for in at least three--but more realistically eight or more--years) and trying to remember who it was I knew who wouldn't eat hummus because they didn't like the texture, and I sat bolt upright on the couch elated by the realization that I don't have to tolerate anyone's weird food habits anymore.  All of my exes had weird food habits.  More than one of them hated tomatoes.  One wouldn't eat vegetables.  One wouldn't eat meat.  This one didn't like foreign food; that one didn't like cucumbers; that one hated hummus and yogurt and pudding and anything else that was neither definitively solid nor liquid.  This other one hated olives.  Another one hated coffee.  Lettuce.  Wine.  Fish.  Bananas.  I can't keep all their stupid idiosyncrasies sorted in my head anymore, and thank god for that--trying to keep that shit straight when I wanted to cook was fucking maddening.  It was like dating a class of adult kindergartners.  JUST EAT THE DAMN TOMATO OHMYGOD.

Not having to mentally juggle someone else's endless lists of food-hatreds while planning a menu and trying to balance it with what I like?  That's gold.

I was reading recently about how women are responsible for the vast majority of the mental labor that goes into running a household, so that even when men offer to help, the men are just thinking in terms of helping with the execution of a task, while women remain solely responsible for planning not only one task, but every accompanying and related task for every part of what makes the household function.  All day.  Every day.  And when you're planning the kids' lunches and getting them up and dressed in the morning and timing their schedules so they all get enough sleep but still get showered and out the door to school on time; then planning throughout the day all the errands you have to run that night, and what menus you should plan out and shop for based on what's on sale, and what special events are coming up, and when to start dinner and how much to prepare and how long all the prep work will take, and whether or not you have enough time to do some laundry while dinner is cooking...well, when you have the massive events-planning of two or more lives constantly running through your head, someone half-heartedly asking "What can I do to help?" is more a hindrance than a help just for asking rather than stepping in to try to take on some of that mental planning.

My own planning is fun for me.  It still occupies a lot of my mental space, but it's all by me, for me, of me, and the reduction in planning that I deal with just for being single is pretty damn sweet.

Also I can eat whatever I want without someone else whining about how they don't like perfectly normal and delicious food.

Like this amazing hummus.