Yesterday, a series of things that Give Me Hope (like FML, but with hope), to put me under the spell of “Maybe this time.”

When I have hope, I love it (albeit cautiously). When I don’t have it, I hate it and want it in equal proportions.

I warn myself not to project, not to plan, and not to get my hopes up. But…they’re already up. And so maybe I should just enjoy it? Because I know by now that it won’t last. A job won’t come through. What is easy conversation via gchat will be stilted and awkward. My email box will sit empty.

But, I drove home from work last night, and swear to god I had not thought of this song in years, but I caught myself humming “You Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees. Specifically I’m thinking of this part:

Totally lame, but in the moment, it sounded pretty good to me, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe being stuck as a glorified secretary whilst marooned at my parents house in Jersey is NOT the career/life/whatever death sentence I’ve been seeing it as. I don’t so much buy into “everything happens for a reason” – I believe it’s human nature to Monday morning quarterback things without even realizing it, to attribute significance to things after the fact – it isn’t so much that everything happens for a reason then it is that we reconstruct the now logical sequence of events once the conclusion has already been reached.

But I guess that right then, and maybe even right now, I have enough hope to think that I’m going to get to a place, or something’s going to happen, and it’s going to give me the ability to see what this was all for.

And so last night, I got myself to the gym, where I listend to Atlas Shrugged on tape. I got up to the part where Francisco has become something that Dagny can’t understand and for the first time in their lives she doesn’t understand his actions, and she’s terribly hurt, but has no choice but to go on, and to live with it, and to survive it. I, much younger, used to think that if Dagny could handle that, than I certainly should be able to handle whatever complication I was currently obsessing about.

Then there was an email; not one I was expecting/wanting, but a good email nonetheless, and a short g-chat conversation.  I went to bed feeling good for once.

And now it’s Wednesday, and there’s coffee tonight with a boy I’m not sure I want to have coffee with (bad signs: hard to pin down for a time for plans and has mentioned an Ex more than once. good signs: very polite. seems to think highly of me from what little he knows of me) but the fact that I’m going to have coffee with a boy is a big step. Actually, his mentions of his Ex are what made me realize I am ready to date: At no time in speaking to any of these guys have I thought to bring up any of my exes. It hasn’t been relevant, whereas in the past, it would have been relevant to everything. I knew I had baggage (and I still do) but I hadn’t realized how much I had to put away until I realized it wasn’t there anymore.

And I suppose, even if nothing comes of any of this, that was a great epiphany. And maybe that should be my proof that everything happens for a reason.