Just to keep it all updated and whatnot, and to tell all my girls how the romance be going down Italian style... Here's the 411 on the italian dating scene:

Easy.

Step 1. Be an american girl.
Step 2. Meet someone through friends at aperitivo.
Step 3. See each other next time at aperitivo. Declare you are leaving this city (or country) soon. Give your email or phone number to him.
Step 4. Spend the next 6 days receiving 20 text messages saying how beautiful you are and how he cannot wait to see you again. You are american, you must revel in this forwardness. Be warned, however, that Baci (kisses), although seemingly meaningful, is actually commonplace in italia.
Step 5. Receive 10 more messages, write back, be a good girl.
Step 6. Cinema with Friends, Dinner, the after-dinner passegiata to be taken only with him.
Step 7. He is in love and dreaming of marrying you and going to America (when he's not entertaining the 3 other girlfriends you suspect he has...) Hopefully you are preferred.

It is great actually. I really hope he continues to see and write to me when i'm in Rome. I would be so happy. I am half consciously working/dreaming now. However, I will not tell you that he's 33, and that I don't think that 12 years is a big difference. It's unmentionable. Especially to my mother, who upon hearing i was dating an italian, hung up on me.

'MEGHAN. remember, you are coming HOME, after italia.'

that's just what she thinks. We have our differences now.

.....

Some other notes i wrote the other day on italian love:
//So I find myself in the 3rd phase now... After a good 30-40 text messages... i am really quite hooked. It feels a little bit like middle school, the nerves, the everything...but after being called ' my little hurricane' (which i loved...), and after being told to 'fai la brava', which translates to 'be a good girl! (dont look at the other boys!)', and after being given so many italian text message kisses, really--one can't help but feel a little a flutter.

//Here. It is expected that people should love each other. It is not a surprise. And the result is that all the spaces , unimportant whether private or public, can be used for the actions related amore...(American response: Oh my god! grosss! how disgraceful! who makes out on a park bench..!!?? 'GET A ROOM PEOPLE!!') I can't believe that we think so differently from the Italians and yet our TV is so much more explicit. I am convinced we are lost in confusion about our puritan heritage in the days of the scarlet letter.

//Yeah, but now my mother's words are ringing in my head...." remember, you're coming back...." [you're not allowed to stay there, and marry someone foreign] But at this point in my life, i find it audacious for her to continue to dictate things like this. especially in matters she does not know about---for instance, she believes that Italians are really terrible people. I don't know what i can teach her at this point in her life, except to keep repeating that really, it depends on which italian person you talk to. They really run the gamut of personality types. We have people who i love, and people who i can't stand...She only sees the bad.

When i was telling her of how exciting my life was , of how i have this really nice italian boy who sends me 3 text messages a day, and then emails, and invites me to play tennis, and to go out for aperitivo, and to go out to the cinema---she couldn't handle it. She went silent, and then i believe she hung up on me, on purpose, and didnt' call me back. I guess she is afraid of the things she doesnt know about. Like, she never had the same opportunity as me, where I have found that at my schools....my most interesting friends are the ones with parents from two different countries. Why? 1. they have the innate advantage of speaking 2 languages, 2. they have 2x the options when it comes to what they want to do with their lives, and 3. they are so much more worldly and broad minded, and politically saavy. Going to Stuyvesant HS then Cornell really has opened me up to that. I think of people i know, like Juan, like Sven, like Cayley, like so many people....people who i want to talk to.

Really, that's something that I want. There are a lot of obstacles, and then a lot more freedoms as well. The difficult part about finding a spouse abroad is your ability to guage what kind of person they are beyond the simple fact of different nationality. It's much easier in the US for me to guage, because I know all the brandname colleges, i can guage what kind of job a person has, i can tell if a person has the same amount of money as me, and what kind of family they have... i mean, the understanding of what is considered normalcy is so much easier to judge in the US, when you are among your own people.

Yesterday on the bus, i realized that at somepoint in my life i would have to decide where i want to live. I faced it while looking at a little girl on the bus, a baby, in a stroller, and then the line from The Bridges of Madison County floated back to me ...."When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move." Really, for this, i was afraid.

I am so young. I have realized it.