Motivations for a Doctorate

People have asked me and I have asked others undertaking the road toward a doctorate: “What motivated you to do this?”

It’s a legitimate question. A doctorate is a gauntlet that you enter naively, regret while pursuing it, and with any luck at all, will think was worth it when you emerge from the other side. I can’t know yet whether that last part will be true, but I do hold out hope that I haven’t wasted my time.

But when asked directly about my motivations, I’ve always been tempted to give glib answers. I wanted to learn more. I wanted a better job. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But my motivations were real. I didn’t really enter this lightly. I was already out in the working world and could have remained there and made a decent living, probably a better living than I will end up with following all this education. Consider that I was making more money at my job that ended in 2000 than I made in my first year of teaching in 2012. I had better job security. I had lifestyle stability. I could have had a job for life. I gave it up.

Why?

The reasons are many and I’m going to try to give you a picture of what drove me back to graduate school.

My job was unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong. I was good at my job. It was interesting and I was well paid. I was a writer and an editor for a variety of science organizations. I interviewed a lot of people about their work, about their specific knowledge, and then I interpreted that to the broader public. They had knowledge and skills. I had knowledge and skills. But, with each passing year it seemed to me that the work they did was real, and that somehow I was simply an observer on this train called life. Those I interviewed were saving species and traveling to spectacular locations, and making a difference in the world, and when they got back from their Indiana Jones lives I interviewed them and went back to my 1970s paneled office and wrote about their adventures. They were having all the fun. No one was ever going to pay me to go to Hawaii and study plants that grow on the slopes of volcanoes, or to South America to search for trees containing anti-cancer properties. I wanted adventure. I wanted to be more than a groupie for scientists.

I got a divorce. I married a lunatic and while we were divorcing he threatened me, harassed me, and generally made my life miserable. I knew if I stayed where I was, I’d never get any peace. I was unhappy and needed a clean break from the past. Starting a new career in a town where he couldn’t find me seemed like a great way to put it all behind me.

Which brings me to the next point.

I wanted to reinvent myself. When I left my job and got my divorce, I was unhappy. No. Not just unhappy. I was depressed. I had gained substantial weight during my marriage and I felt and looked awful. In that state, I simply could not tackle my physical issues, but I could begin to change my state of mind. In one defining moment, I decided to take control of my life. I decided that I was going to live my life for me. Not for my parents. Not for a husband. Not for my friends. Not to meet society’s expectations. For me. I found my passion and I went for it.

I wanted more control in my work life. One of the most attractive things I envisioned in an academic career was the elimination of shame and humiliation in the workplace. People make mistakes. I made mistakes. But there were times in my career when a boss would call me on the carpet. It wasn’t enough to point out my mistake and to ask me to work more carefully or to suggest methods of improvement. No. I was treated like a child. I was shamed and humiliated, sometimes in vast disproportion to the magnitude of the mistake. And I felt badly. I was shamed. I was humiliated. I was also distracted, unfocused, and unproductive. All the time spent feeling shame and humiliation, I was not being getting work done. So what place do shame and humiliation have in the workplace? I was not working with gross indifference to my performance. I was motivated to do a good job without shame and humiliation. People make mistakes. They make mistakes when they are stressed or hurried or overworked or tired. Compounding my dissatisfaction, I was expected to take responsibility for mistakes that weren’t my own. Not even mistakes made by my staff. Mistakes over which I had no input or control. As though I had a cloud of influence that radiated perfection in every direction. I had no respect for the bosses laying the guilt trips. I do not believe that shame and humiliation have any place in the workplace. In fact, I don’t believe they have any place in our lives. I wanted a job where very few people had the right to comment on my behavior. I wanted to be at the top of the heap. I wanted that feeling to be expelled from my life forever. Academia was the one place I thought it possible to reduce or eliminate the shame and humiliation from above.

I found the subject interesting. When I returned to school, I found the more I learned about plants, the more I wanted to learn. I found I had an aptitude for this work. I found that I truly enjoyed it. I found that I liked being around others who enjoyed it. I thought it was a supportive, interesting, mentally stimulating career choice. For the most part, it has been.

As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now, for the rest of the story….”

Hindsight is 20/20 and with that I will now detail why I think academia may have been the wrong choice. Granted, my experiences are limited to my work as a graduate student under the mentoring of an academic, but I have seen a little of the inside as well when I was a Visiting Asst. Professor for a time.

The Scrabble Paradox. I’m not good at Scrabble. I have an extraordinarily large vocabulary, but it seems that people—regardless of their education, level of proficiency in the English language, or age—are able to thump me unceremoniously. I draw all vowels. I draw all consonants. Someone uses the space I had earmarked for an 8-letter word worth 4000 points. I lose and lose often. Luckily, my livelihood and my self worth are not tied to my Scrabble performance. Not so much with academia. My area of specialization is not in favor with funding agencies at the moment and, if I am honest with myself, is unlikely to be popular during the totality of my career. It’s considered marginal work at best. I find it extraordinarily fascinating and it has great potential to benefit the human condition, but pollination and reproductive biology isn’t sexy. And funding is the name of the game in academia. Promotions, tenure, bragging rights, stature…everything depends on your ability to attract research dollars and the bigger the payoff, the bigger the professional rewards. I don’t enjoy a game I can never win. My choices are to pursue research that doesn’t interest me but is fundable or to languish at the bottom of the food chain.

The profession creates assholes. University professors have an obligation to train the next generation of scientists. Training generally entails learn-on-your-own, on-the-job training with students doing the grunt work of their advisor’s research. Students are regularly abused from a legal standpoint. In return for this dedication to their advisor’s research, do they receive quality training and mentoring? Oh, hell no! I once pointed out to a professor that a student needed a particular class to qualify for the career he desired. The professor emphatically stated that the class in question did not support the student’s research project and would not result in publishable papers, so why should the professor support the student’s taking an unrelated class? As though the student’s career needs are solely defined by the parameters of a single research project! When I pointed out that the student was here to get training for his career, the professor seemed unfazed. I can only hope the professor advised the student to take the course.

Undergraduates are like face-eating zombies. More specifically, it’s those pre-med students who nickel and dime you for every point, eat up your time with their incessant need to discuss their grade. Most of these students are doing exceedingly well. Their problem is they are unable to accept anything less than perfection in themselves and they will gladly impose that impossible standard on you. They will gripe and complain about assignments, tests, grading, lectures, labs, and anything else that diverts attention away from them. Don’t’ get me wrong. I am willing to offer advice, help, assistance, and additional time so that a student can get up to speed, improve study habits, or learn something they don’t understand. However, I can’t fix a problem that doesn’t exist. I can advise students who don’t test well, don’t study, don’t want to come to class, wants something for nothing, or simply wishes to blame me for their poor performance. I will work with the folks trying. I can’t abide the folks complaining because their success isn’t successful enough. It’s a constant battle to keep the zombies from eating you alive.

The profession is your life. I hope you are already married and have a tolerant spouse. You’ll work long hours. Mostly alone. You have an impossible workload. You will submit subpar work because of outrageous deadlines. You will feel frazzled. You won’t have friends outside of work. You will panic a lot. No one can help you. They are feeling the same pressure. You better love it. This is your life.

Collegiality is absent. There. I said it. I don’t think academics are particularly friendly. There is no love lost between the old timers and the newbies. You are lucky to find one colleague you can tolerate and work on making that person your best friend for life. Good luck.

Overall, it would be a great profession if I could be excused from bringing in my own research dollars. If I could just go out and do research on the cheap (luckily, my research can be done cheaply). Because grant writing is a bitch and I’ve not been very successful.

Taking Back Control

Today, I was happy.  It's been a long time since I was happy.  Sure, a police officer exposed himself to me, and that didn't necessarily add to my happiness, but I overcame that, found the humor in it and integrated it into my happy day.  I was cheerful and playful with my co-workers.  Even those who have done me some grave injustices lately.

It was such an unusual occurrence for me to be happy that I actually spoke it out loud.  I believe I said, "I think someone put something in my Cheerios."

When I stopped to think about why I might actually be happy, since it appeared that nothing in fact had changed much since yesterday when I was pleasant but not happy, I could see only one difference.  I have begun to integrate the idea that I am leaving school into my psyche.  The end is here.  I'm not leaving with a degree, but I am leaving.  And the lack of a degree is discouraging, but I am less discouraged by that than I might have thought.  The reason I think I am not discouraged is I know I haven't made significant progress toward my goal in the past year.  Despite having some funding, I have had to beg, borrow, and play "let's make a deal" to get the supplies I need to further my phylogeny.  The GC still isn't working and there seems to be no plan in place to get it working. The undergraduate charged with growing my plants has succeeded in growing only a single species.  I am getting ridiculous emails from pissed off peers that are so clearly outrageous that I can't believe anyone takes them seriously.  And those same students have begun to make it clear that they don't appreciate my wealth of experience borne of either age or tenure at this institution.

I am happy to leave this all behind.  I suspected I wasn't happy over the past year, but I didn't have any idea what a toll it had taken on my attitude until....well....until it was gone.

I want that job so much that I dare to say it out loud.  I want it.  I think I will be good at it.  I sure hope I'm given the chance to succeed at something.  I need that opportunity.

It would make me even happier.

Advice for 30 year olds

If I had one bit of advice for 30-year-old men, it would be this: step away from the bottle.

D-friend Bek is 40 years old. She's expecting. Gutsy move, yes. Foolish? Hardly. But there is one part of her situation that does make her condition more difficult. She has a husband who drinks. And when I say "drinks", I don't mean 6 beers on the weekend. I mean he takes time off work to work on their house and drinks 18 beers in a single day. She suspects he's an alcoholic. She doesn't know because he doesn't drink every day. They have had week-long spats that drug in in-laws and friends and destroyed relationships with many concerned. They have separated for two-weeks at a time over the drinking. She calls me up regularly to vent about his drinking. I don't have the heart to tell her that, yes, her man is a drunk, and if his drinking bugs her that much, her marriage may be doomed.

Now don't think I'm just a negative person. Because it isn't about dooming her relationship. I am speaking from what I have seen and experienced in my years growing up, growing older, and growing wiser. Or at least having the awareness of people and things around me to have seen patterns emerge.

I believe there is a point in your early 30s when you make a decision. Perhaps I should say you have an opportunity to make a decision. You can decide to be a grown up or you can decide to string along your youth beyond its natural lifespan. People who decide to grow up make changes in their lives. They slow down on the drinking. They start to save money for the future. They invest time and energy in their careers. If they haven't started families, they may begin now. They are concerned parents. They are making positive, meaningful, adult decisions in their day-to-day lives and considering the future. They rid themselves of the stupidity of youth, they analyze their experiences and relationships, they shed the party boy/girl image, and they quit doing things counter-productive to their goals.

Or they don't.

Men, in particular, seem to have trouble turning this corner. They get caught up in a "I work hard. I deserve to relax and let loose once in a while." All the time, never realizing that once in a while comes far more often then even they are willing to admit. Never taking into consideration that all that drinking, recreational drug use, hanging out in bars is playing with fire. I have seen this attitude destroy more marriages than I care to count. In fact, there was a time in my life when I could count on one hand the men I knew who weren't alcoholics or drug addicts or daily, dedicated users of marijuana. I will be brutally honest when I say that my marriage ended long before my divorce and long before the really difficult part of making the decision to leave. My marriage ended the day I realized that my husband would never, ever, ever stop smoking pot every single day of his life. Pot was his hobby. I couldn't go anywhere with him. I couldn't take him, for instance, to a work function, because he would show up reeking of pot. He had become an embarrassment to me. I nagged. I prodded. I begged. I withheld sex. Not me, not the promise of intimate relations, not his children, not his career, nor any relationship in his life could cause him to even slow down. He had made his choice. Pot was the most important thing in his life.

Now, if I had told him this he would have called me crazy. Of course his children were important. Of course I was important. But as he was fond of saying, "actions speak louder than words". He smoked pot in the car on the way to his daughter's wedding. In his tuxedo. A wedding in which he had to walk her down the aisle in front of 500 of her closest friends and new family. Helloooooo.

He smoked pot on the way to work. On lunch breaks. On the way home. While driving the car I paid for. He smoked pot in front of the tv every night. I don't even want to think about how much money that man spent on pot. If he had spent that much on golf clubs and green fees, or fixing up a dream car, or traveling, or Bear's tickets I might not have minded so much. But to watch your husband sit in the dark in his den with nothing but a doobie and a bong day after day, week after week, year after year was more than I could take. One day it dawned on me I had married a dedicated loser. He wasn't going to change. And this was my life. Forever.

That was the day my marriage ended. Some little spark that had nearly been beat out flamed for just a minute. Some little voice whispered inside my head, "Oh, hell no." And then that flame grew stronger and that voice grew louder. I was done.

So I watch Bek struggling with that same set of circumstances. Just change the word "pot" in the paragraph above with "beer" and you've got her life. And yes, he does drink and drive. We all know how tragically that has ended in my own life. My oldest brother is serving 15 years for involuntary manslaughter. That's legalese for having killed someone while driving drunk. I watch Bek worry as her belly grows and her marriage disintegrates. I am afraid for her. She's 40. She's old enough and wise enough to know where this is going and she is struggling, not with concern for her husband, but concern for herself and her baby. She has my greatest sympathy. Because none of her nagging and even the prospect of fatherhood has given her husband the push he needs to start behaving like a grown up. He is fighting it tooth and nail. I think he is fighting it because he's addicted to alcohol. He hasn't gotten the picture yet. He's trying to fool himself with the "I don't drink everyday" mantra. " I can't be an alcoholic if I don't drink everyday."

Gentlemen, I don't know how to break it to you. But if you have had more than one argument in a year about your drinking, smoking, recreational drug use, it is interfering with the relationships in your life. If you defend yourself by any means possible, you are playing fast and loose with those relationships. If your significant other, parent, friends, and co-workers have told you its time to slow down or quit, do yourself a favor: LISTEN. You may want to be a lot of things in your life, but "a drunk" isn't one of them. Trust me. I've seen it all.

I think it's why I don't drink at home anymore. Beer will linger in my fridge for months. I never drink hard liquor unless I have friends over. Alcohol is just not a meaningful part of my life. I hope this makes me a grown up.

Some dreams die hard...very hard

After my ex tried to kill me for the second time, I figured it was time for a change. After my boss had fucked me over for the umpteenth time, I knew it was time. I decided I wanted to become a professor. Oh, how naive I was in thinking it was just a matter of a few years in school.

As I sit in a hotel room chasing research that I am funding with my own money, I realize that I am paying a greater price than just the money pit that is graduate school. I am being changed by this process and I don't think this is a good thing. Let me explain.

I wanted to become a professor. I wanted to teach botany. I love plants. I wanted to pass on that excitement to others. I wanted to inspire in the way nature inspired me. I wanted to do research, to make some small contribution to science. I chose to go into "basic science" because at the time I started, the scientific community was saying over and over and over again that it's greatest need was for "basic"science. For systematists and taxonomists. So off I went secure in the idea that there would be plenty of funding and plenty of job opportunities awaiting me when I got out. If you think about it, I was doing a sort of civic duty for the scientific community.

After visiting a number of universities and getting a feel for their programs and approach, I picked this one. My criteria for selection was based primarily on a reputation for good science and an atmosphere that seemed low key and low stress. I'm too old to give a shit about competiting with my fellow graduate students. Hell, I'm older than most of the faculty. Some programs seemed intent on having students live in fear. I don't know how to explain this except to say that I've survived two attempts on my life. Professors can't scare me.

And then, I got to graduate school. And basic science fell out of favor. Like overnight. Everything is all global warming. No one cares about basic science. Funding dried up faster than my sex life. Not even top researchers in our department are able to get funding in systematics. My advisor told me, point blank, that mine was the last project she was taking on involving systematics.

Excuse me while I feel left out to dry.

I have written more than 20 grants in support of my research. The only funding I have received was a merit-based fellowship that came at the end of my fourth year. From the sounds of it, my department chair doesn't want me to be able to take full advantage of the two years of the fellowship because that will make me a 6th year graduate student. He wants me to graduate at the end of the fifth year. Despite the fact that this is the first funding I've had to do my project. The stress of all of this is crushing me. So, for now, I'm paying for my own research. I'm out in the field driving around looking for my plants with my own money. And it's not going well. It's time consuming, frustrating, and expensive. And it's all borrowed money. Money borrowed on the promise of a Ph.D. that is feeling more and more improbable, and a job that may or may not exist for me when I get out.

And this on top of being made to feel as though I don't measure up because my project has failed to garner funding. Every single day I enter my building, I feel a weight settle in on me. A big boulder I carry through my day that reminds me I am failing. That I'm not doing enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not a real researcher. Half the time, I wonder if professors pass me in the hall and think to themselves, "well, she didn't turn out as promising as we thought." There are days I dread waking up in the morning.

Sometimes, I wonder if my lack of "fear" of faculty makes it worse on me. I think some professors confuse respect with deference. Failure to fear the all powerful Oz equals a lack of respect to some.

I now have crushing educational debt. If I don't get the Ph.D., I fear that I won't be able to find a job that will allow me to pay off that debt. So I can't walk away. But with each passing day, I have less faith that it will happen. When I think about my committee, I don't think about a group of people working to help me. I see a very large obstacle standing between me and my dream. I thought a committee was a group of people helping to train you to a profession. I'm afraid to say anything to anyone about my concerns for fear that, if I do, they will actively work against me. That a PhD won't come at any cost. Graduate school is the only place I have ever encountered where you have no friends, no allies, no help, no hope, and no promise that anything, ever, will get any better. There seems to be a promise that all things will, in fact, get worse. Things happen TO you. You have no recourse. You just have to take it. Perhaps, it is some combination of people and circumstances and my own mental health that has brought me to this point. This point of hopelessness. This point of having no idea what to do next.

I see now why so few single people survive this process. It takes a team to prop up the one running the gauntlet.

I can't believe that this is what it takes to be a college professor. I can't believe this is the process. All I wanted to do was inspire some kids. Make some small contribution to a field that I loved. The job requires a Ph.D. The people who hold those keys don't seem inclined to help me anymore. I'm not really sure what happened, but I don't think it's all me. I don't think I deserve, or any graduate student deserves, the life-sucking, spirit-crushing process that is graduate school. I don't think I'll ever get beyond this. I don't think I have the ability to take on a student and put them through this process as well.

I want the person I was back. I don't like this person I've become.

New Year's Resolutions

Ok, now is the time that we turn our thoughts to new beginnings. New year. New administration. New me. Let's see how we did on last year's resolutions.

December 31st, 2007

OK, here we go. With the best of intentions, I make up this list every year. As with all things, I tend to do better at the beginning than at the end.

1. Workout regularly.
2. Make time to go to Chicago or anywhere else I'd like.
3. Get some funding for my research.
4. Publish, or at least prepare a paper for publication.
5. Learn to make a really great home cooked pizza (cheese optional!)
6. Get out there and meet someone special.
7. Exercise the dogs more.
8. Try at least one new recipe a month.
9. Go out more often, especially to the movies.
10. Finish all existing house projects before starting any new ones! Yes, that means installing the bathroom ceiling fan.

Results:

1. Failed.
2. Didn't make it to Chicago. Did make it out west for research on Liz and Liv's Kick Ass Wild West Adventure despite failing at #3. I went to my mother's for Christmas. This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but travel-wise I guess not too shabby for the year.
   
3. Failed spectacularly despite numerous and persistent effort.
   
4. Failed, primarily due to #3 above.
5. Succeeded. For those interested in learning to make pizza, I recommend going here, following the directions carefully, and then when you have perfected crust, you go here and make the salad dressing. Then use the salad dressing as your pizza sauce and add cooked chicken, onions, green peppers and a spattering of mozzarella cheese. Don't overdo the cheese. Bake and enjoy. I call it my Curried Chicken, Onion, and Pepper Pizza. You can call it The Pizza That Daktari Won't Share.
   
6. Succeeded. Possibly. Don't know yet, but trying anyway. Have to say, a little disappointed he has to work on New Year's Eve night, but...hey! At least the man has a job.
   
7. Failed. Although, that may more to do with Nevada getting old than anything else. We're picking up at the end of the year.
   
8. Probably did. Only have details from January and February. If you want a kick ass raspberry-lime sorbet (January), see me. If you want a kick-ass chocolate chili ice cream (December), see me. Weird that I tend to make cold desserts in the winter months. I've already told you where to get great homemade pizza. Interestingly enough, I didn't learn to bake bread this year, nor did I bake as many cakes as I usually do.
   
9. Success. I went on one date. I went to the Cellar many times with school mates. Bek and I went out to eat a lot. Probably too much. I went to see a lot of movies, maybe not once a month, but I do think I went about six times, which is plenty more than I went the year before. I remember seeing Wall-E with Bek and Matt. I saw The Dark Knight with Liv. I just saw Seven Pounds with my mother and sister. I saw No Country for Old Men, but honestly, I think I saw that and Charlie Wilson's War in 2007. I saw Iron Man and Quantum of Solace, my first Bond movie since 1979's Moonraker. I saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I rented a lot of Netflix movies, too. Not bad for a chick who doesn't watch TV. I was hampered by the lack of interesting films, and movies I was interested in seeing didn't always come to C-dale.
   
10. Sorta finished. I finished the pantry project, but the ceiling fan still isn't on the bathroom ceiling. Lucky for me, it has now been integrated into the "new" bathroom project and shouldn't go up until all the other work has been completed. Like the new bathroom ceiling. Ouch.

So I'm 5.5 or a squishy 6/10. Let's say 50% success rate. Sure, I had other successes that didn't make the list. For instance, In October of 2007, I vowed not to purchase any more shampoo or conditioner until I had used every last bottle I had in my house. (I would conservatively estimate that when I made that resolution, I had about 14 unopened bottles in my bathroom.) I am on the next to last bottle of conditioner now and I had to purchase shampoo (for the first time in 14 months) in November. Chalk one up for discipline. I also sold unworn socks in my garage sale and limited myself to my "best" 30 pairs.

But back to the resolutions I actually made. Unfortunately, two of those have to do with food and not in a good way. So I'm a little leery about making any resolutions for 2008. But I'm daring if nothing else, so here goes.

1. Make significant and meaningful progress toward finishing my phylogeny and my breeding system studies.
2. Finish the shower stall installation, complete with new drywall, ceiling, tile work and ceiling fan.
3. Paint the front porch.
4. Get to Chicago for fun and adventure. Anyone want to join me?
5. Get in shape to climb a mountain. Then climb it.
6. Limit eating out to twice a month for lunch, and once a month for dinner. Oh wait a minute, does Dollar Pitcher Wednesdays at Quatros count? Sheesh. I see my first fail for the new year.
   
7. Clean out the backlog in my freezer.
8. Take Jake hiking at least once every two weeks.
9. Enjoy sightseeing close to home and a weekend trip now and again with friends. I'm thinking Nashville, Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Kansas City, New Orleans, etc.
10. Make new friends. Quit being a hermit and get out and expand my circle, meet new people and cultivate new friendships.

There are things I'd like to do this year, but think it would be challenging, shall we say, to put on this list. Like a new front entry to the house. (With Nevada gone, no real reason to keep the wheelchair ramps around.) Presently, it is sitting on broken moorings--the victim of two drunk people running into it. A deck on the back. Some little thing where I could have a table and chairs and my little bbq. Someplace nice to have friends over. You know. A lovely new flower garden plot. Ok, that will happen for sure, so no need to put it on the list anyway.

Let's hear yours.

I know a little about love

Tonight, I want to talk about love. You might not think it to talk to me, hell, you might not think it even if you knew me well, but I miss being in love. For all my bitching about marriage and the utter and absolute failure that mine turned out to be, being in love is...wonderful.

And the fact of the matter is love isn't hard, relationships are. I am the first to admit that half of the problem in my marriage was me, but there seems to be something larger going on here. When it comes to love, my siblings and I suffer from poor mate selection. Three of us are divorced, the fourth getting divorced after having stayed together just for the kids. (Trust me. The kids would have been better off if those two had gotten away from each other years ago.) One brother married a mental ward nurse who stole psychotropic drugs from her patients. My sister married a philandering counterfeiter. I married a pot-smoking, chronically unemployed man whose life ambition seemed to be getting on disability/unemployment without cause. My other brother married what I can only term as the biggest bitch on Earth, and I mean that in a respectful way, because she really had an aptitude for it. Although I have spent hour upon hour reflecting on this matter, I still have no explanation for this universal failure in my family. My parents seemed to have an incredibly life-affirming, strong, healthy, meaningful, and loving relationship. I'd have given anything to have met a man like my father. My sister and I joke that our man-pickers are broken.

The problem with marrying poorly is that you don't rebound like you did from the girlfriend-boyfriend relationships. It took me a full two years post-divorce before I could even think about dating again. But in that down-time, I did a lot of soul-searching and I learned a lot about myself, my desires, my sexual triggers, what I find attractive and what I do not. I don't know if it was the severity of the breakup that caused the intense reflection. When someone tries to kill you, isn't that natural? In any event, I've come to understand my faults, identify my idiosyncrasies, and also to know my own strengths and how I can use them to benefit a relationship. I have worked to tone down the more distasteful parts of my personality. Dare I say that I almost think I might have something valuable to offer someone in a relationship? I think I've achieved some measure of emotional maturity.

At the same time, my tastes have changed. I don't need a bad boy. I know what I find desirable and attractive and for once I can honestly say that if I find him, I doubt he will try to kill me this time. So here I am at 45 thinking maybe, just maybe, I'm ready to try again. So I put on my suit and dared anyone to say something about the way I look in it and I'm ready to dive in.

Unfortunately, someone drained the dating pool.

While small-town America was as good a place as any for undergoing this transformation, it isn't a great place to crawl out of your chrysalis. I've got these boss new wings and no one to flash them in front of. I have isolated myself in the middle of nowhere, over-educated myself, developed some pretty strong opinions, learned to stand on my own two feet, and realized that I don't NEED a man for anything. While that may be very empowering for me, it doesn't exactly put me high on the dating list for the pool of single 30- to 53-year olds in Poontwang, USA.

I'm reminded of those empty-nesters who say that now that they've learned all the lessons and gotten the kids out of the house, they finally feel prepared to raise a child. All that wealth of knowledge just...what? Wasted?

I try to be patient. I try to get out there, wherever there is. I've done the online dating thing. I've been willing to go on blind dates or be set up by friends. I seldom pass up an opportunity to meet new people, to mingle, to try. Nothing has been terribly successful. In the past 8 years, I haven't met one man truly interested in a serious, meaningful relationship. I've met an awfully lot of overgrown boys interested in recreating scenes from their favorite pornos. And ya know, I'm better than that. I just think that there is more to life than random sex or sex-buddies. I don't understand them....the players. They are just satisfied with the nothingness of meaningless sex. They don't even seem to be interested in love. I'm just left with the feeling that I could have done a better job myself, and I wouldn't have had to change the sheets. Love is such a wonderful feeling. Sometimes I wonder if I was ever in love at all. After a while, you being to doubt things.

There was a man once that I am sure I loved. I was young. He was forbidden. It was over really before it even started. It will be the greatest regret of my life if that small taste was all I ever get.

And if you wonder what prompted this, I'll tell ya. Take a look at this. I know at first it might not make sense, but it is relevant. He makes a statement about mid-way through this. Right about the point that he starts to get serious. He says, "I am an expert on my own story."

It's an excellent point. We are all experts on our own story. A little self-analysis, a little introspection, even if we don't find the ultimate answer, is seldom a bad thing. If it weren't for self-introspection, I'd still be drunk dialing old boyfriends. And usually our behavior and our outlook are more important than our achievements and whatever glory and reward we seek. Whatever I have learned about love....whatever I have learned about being a good person in this world....I have learned from examining my own story and making sure it was leading down the road I wanted. Making adjustments, constant vigilance. And we don't have to be embarrassed about sharing these things. Craig Ferguson can do it on national television. I can do it in a blog. I had a professor give an extremely moving life lesson to a classroom that expected a lecture on Hamlet. We needn't hide behind some veil that makes us pretend not to be human. We fuck up. We learn from it. We move forward.

I did a terrible disservice to a man when I agreed to marry him. I should have known better. Now I do. I want to love again. There, I said it. And I feel better for it.