I miss LA. You know how much easier it is to miss someone when you know they�re going to be gone for an undetermined amount of time? Maybe forever?

I�ve made the fatal mistake of getting a Netflix account. I may never leave the house again. It�s only the first month. Things may even out for me as time goes on. Not that I haven�t gone on watching stuff binges before. I have. Then, after awhile, I�ll get tired of it and go on a fast for a couple of months.

Tonight, I watched Desperately Seeking Susan. This is a movie that came out when I was a kid after we had just gotten HBO. It was on constantly, but I never saw it from the beginning, so I never knew exactly what was going on. That was the problem with HBO, I saw the ends of things dozens of times and the beginnings once or twice, if I was lucky.

Thanks to Netflix, I finally know the whole story, and I�m actually grown-up enough to appreciate it.

It seems like we all have a Roberta and a Susan living within us. The thing that keeps us in the middle must be that all Susan�s want a little security in life and all Roberta�s want some excitement.

Anyway, I think I�d rather be Roberta because that character had some actual depth. Susan just seemed to think she was Madonna in a movie.

Somehow, I�ve managed to grow some real security in life. I don�t know if it�s luck, determination, or something else. I just know that it really wasn�t that long ago when I was a street urchin in a ghetto, whose cocaine addicted father, in a moment of clarity, sent her and her brother to the Midwest to live with people they�d never met before.

As awful as that sounds, it was really the only thing that could be done at the time. Also, by the time I had reached that age, I�d lived with so many relatives, friends of family, and neighbors and had so few belongings, it didn�t matter.

I thought stable lives were the stuff of fairy tales, just like snow. Once I moved to the Midwest, I learned that both those things do exist.

I wouldn�t actually earn that stable life until� well, about now, give or take a few years.

I won�t deny that I had landed in something cushy early in life when I married a wealthy man at a young age. The big things were nice; all the shared things. He wasn�t about to live like riff-raff, you know. It took me some time to believe that I deserved to spend money on myself, which, I personally found harder to do if I hadn�t earned the money myself. Therefore, it took extra long.

I wouldn�t call that a stable life because I was desperately unhappy.

Now I�m only mildly unhappy. I�m still trying to equalize, I guess.

At least, I hope that�s what it is. It might be job stress. I�ve been going on and on about this because part of me is so relieved. I feel like a marathoner who has finally collapsed after a long awaited finish line. Another part of me feels like that pre-Susan Roberta.

I was just thinking the other day how I always sleep with one foot off the bed. I discovered this one day, when I was asleep in bed and my ex came into the bedroom and started talking to me. I started and woke up and he expressed some kind of surprise that I was sleeping.

I asked him what gave him the idea that I was awake. Was it the way I was lying completely motionless in bed?

He told me no, it was because both feet were on the bed.

I was confused. Where else would they be other than with me, on the bed, where I was sleeping?

This is when he told me that when I am asleep, I always have one foot off the bed. Sometimes it�s under the covers, sometimes it�s not. That conversation was the beginning of my awareness of one foot almost always being off the bed when I sleep.

Since then, I�ve assumed that it is some bizarre and completely barbaric form of temperature control. The other day, I was thinking that maybe it�s my way of feeling not too overly grounded.

I like feeling a little unstable, a little free.

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