It was my birthday yesterday. Only three people called me to wish me a day I no longer care about. Its a day. Sure, I won't mind someone else remembering this day for me by giving me a present I don't need or want. In other words, it is just another day. And it wasn't a pretty one either. It was dark and cloudy. I had to baby sit my niece and nephew since their parents were at work. My niece wasn't particularly well so everything I did for her was wrong and punctuated by a tantrum. I think of myself as a fairly calm person, especially around kids. But this belief was knocked over with a feather yesterday. I screamed louder than her in the hope she will realize who the boss is. But her voice chords are nothing to be trifled with. She was in full form. The combination of guttural screaming and big fat tears was too much for me. I caved. I brought my voice down a few decibels along while adding a new topic for distraction--an imagined cat that sneaks into the house and uses the computer upstairs! When the mother arrived from work, I was ready to scream or tear something to shreds. It was a moment of epiphany. I don't have kids because somewhere deep down I never really wanted them. I can handle them to a point--feed them, tell them to switch off the TV once the limit is reached, make pancakes or anything else their palate desires, play their crazy games, sketch, and even take an inadvertent punch to the gut. But beyond that the onerous task of building them into individuals and imagining their future through a set of mind-boggling tasks is beyond my pale. I haven't figured my own future trajectories, my own desires. To sublimate them for a child's sake has to be jarring. I can see my sister-in-law struggle with the tension between her imaginations for herself versus those for her children. I can see how she is not trained to be a parent in every possible way. She didn't have a mother from whom she could have learned the practical side of nurturing. So she has been running through it wildly, bearing on books her weight of responsibility towards her children, one of whom has ADD. Her own desperation to want to be something else in this place and time given her college training figures in her antipathy towards her son's diagnosis. If she could, she could have found a way to enter his mind, set up shop, and guide him through his academic years. But she hasn't found such a way. So she shoots words at him--words that are a combination of advice, anger, projected desires, blackened desires, unrequited needs, helplessness as parent, confusion over destiny's unexpected and unwelcome trajectory, bafflement that the child is hers, guilt, surrealism, psychedelic realities. I despair about my chronic singleness but this mis-en-sean puts all into perspective. It still doesn't take away the despair of being alone. But I feel encouraged to take care of myself since I am all I have right now. I can certainly take care of me--the me I have neglected in all my relationships--putting others before me, my wants, desires, dignity. I can't neglect her anymore. Anymore and she will be no more. Like Joplin, I will not compromise on myself---I am all I have got. Every day I feel strength in my decision to end my last relationship. Without the muddy emotions, I can see the impracticality of us and the emotional tsunami I could have wrought on myself if I had stayed. Right now I can recover, rebuild, rejuvenate. Another year, I would still be despairing, destroyed, and lifeless. I am not that kind of weak. I will take my chances at being alone and maybe even happy, even though sometimes it will suck so much that I would want to die. But living right now is the only option and hell, I kind of like myself more and more. I would like to fall in love too---with me, too.