I may not have all the answers, but for once I asked the right question

By all accounts, I am a very private person.

When good things happen, I rarely shout it from the rooftops; when bad things happen, I tend to suffer in silence, letting only a few close friends in on my misery. I've learned to open up more in the year and a half since I've lived in LA, but I think that my need for privacy is a personality trait that's just going to stay with me for as long as I live. And I'm okay with that.

At some point though, things become too big, too much a part of my daily life to not mention. Like the fact that, over the past few months, I seem to have found myself in the midst of a long distance romance.

I had been putting off writing about him/it/us for a number of reasons, the main reason being that he reads this blog. Back in February when I created a MySpace profile, I posted a single link to Lori MacBlogger, thinking that it would be an easy way for old friends to reconnect. I didn't expect to start dating any of them. But I also didn't expect that someone I had known for ten years already, someone whom I knew both in college and in New York, would decide to reach out to me after I had been living in LA for a year. And quite happily, thank you.

But he found me through MySpace back in August, and has been reading this blog for just as long. You may recall that I took three very long, very drawn out work trips to New York this summer. Because the universe has an interesting sense of humor, John contacted me the week before my very last trip. I was there for 12 days; because of our schedules and a little game I like to play called "hard to get", it wasn't until the 10th night that we got finally got together. But the 10th night was pretty damn good and we managed to meet up the next night as well, my last and final night in New York until just this past weekend.

I came back from that trip, happily humming Simon and Garfunkel, complacently assuming I would never hear from him again. Summer fling, don't mean a thing, right? But then he kept calling. And emailing. And we spent a good few weeks going back and forth, getting to know each other, testing the waters. Somehow it was suggested that he come for a visit. The next thing I knew, I was frolicking in wine country, taking pictures of San Diego sunsets, and figuring out how to blog about him without really blogging about him.

Because what if I said something out of turn? Like, that I was "dating" a guy in New York, if he only thought we were casually hanging out? (You know, because flying across the country is so casual. Clearly I have the Relationship Intelligence of a moron.) What if I jinxed things by writing about him, just like I did last time? What if writing about it actually led to talking about it, and OMG!, I might actually have to have an adult conversation! About a relationship! It would be MUCH better to ignore the situation completely and talk about parachute pants.

But no, I decided that when I went to visit him this weekend, if the coast looked clear, we would have THE DISCUSSION. The big, bad, blog discussion, so I could regain my creativity and write about real things again. Or, in a worse-case-scenerio, know where we stood so I could move on with my thoughts and blogs. In a nutshell, blogging about him or not was a metaphor for my comfort level with the whole situation, so you can probably gather by now that I am fairly comfortable with how things turned out.

Of course, that's not to say that I'm not still afraid of jinxing it. I've gone out with far too many guys who have said one thing one day, instilled all sorts of positive thoughts and plans for the future into my head, only to change their mind and break up with me two weeks later. For the record, that has happened twice in the last three years alone. So you could say that I am nothing now, if not cautious. But it's a risk worth taking, and I wouldn't be honest with anyone if I didn't start including him in what I write about my life. Because somehow, he has made himself a part of it, and I rather like that.

We were at dinner when we had "the discussion"; although, to be fair, the discussion had been taking place, naturally, in bits and pieces all afternoon. Like a schoolgirl asking her crush to the Valentine's Day dance, I nervously asked, "So, can I blog about you?" I didn't even have time to hold my breath in anticipation before he broke out in a huge grin and said, "Of COURSE! I have been WAITING for you to write about me!" And we both burst our laughing, partly with relief, and partly at the absurdity of the question: Can I blog about you? It felt like the adult-hipster equivalent of the junior high standard: Will you go out with me?

Just another way, I guess, that I am acting more like an adult and less like a silly schoolgirl.