...and i'm getting a little closer to the thing that intrigues me most

I once had a friend.

I know. Shocking. But no, that wasn't the end of the thought.

I once had a friend who got angry with me over my least favorite word – potential. More specifically, he was angry because, at 17, I was spending my afternoons with him and my evenings with Mike, taking 200 level courses at the local four-year community college when, in his eyes, I could've been curing cancer, making a bid for office or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. No lie – these are his words, not mine.

At the time, I was furious. How dare someone tell me that instead of being a teenager, I needed to solve world hunger or prove the existence of a higher power or get involved in some new physical study? I was seventeen and a senior in high school already working hard on my second semester in college with a six credit overload – what more could he possibly want from me? {The part of me that feels a need to insert a joke in the middle of all this sincerity would like you to know that I found out exactly what more he could possibly want from me about a year and a half later and I really don't think Mike was happy with the exchange. God knows I wasn't.)

The friendship has since ended and it went up in a fiery mess that could hold most people in awe but, when quorum was last called, we'd found some sort of peaceful coexistence and, frankly, I think that's the most anyone ever could have asked of us.

Until this afternoon, I hadn't thought about that argument in three years and, for the first time since it happened – and, hey, I'm 21, so there's some air in between the issues – I realized that there are very few people on this earth who will ever have the fortune of meeting someone who believes in them that hard. How often do we meet people who believe that not only could we achieve something grand, but that we will simply as a matter of inevitable course?

My life, of late, has given rise to a lot of flogging and a few epiphanies, but I certainly didn't see this particular realization coming.

I won't say I miss him, because what I miss was someone who was never really real and I won't say I'm sorry for everything, because I'm not. What happened rests equally on the shoulders between us but what I can say for it is this – I should have taken better care of one of the people who used to believe in me most.

Luckily, and if I can keep my head on straight, there are still a few out there – a few bridges I haven't burned and I swear to god, I'm trying to put the matches down.

Angst In My Pants

Perhaps I don't have quite as much angst in my pants as I once did, but I spend a lot less time musing than I used to. Which, for you, is probably a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you probably pass by my page as often as you once did but, instead of finding 1000 words to read while you're avoiding – what was it, Susan? 18th C literature? – you end up with a whole lot of nothing or some vague one-liner about Christmas lights and how much I hate it when the flash. (Seriously, I do.) Nevertheless, this morning I woke up with a nagging feeling that today was not going to be one of those days. It wasn't.

Over the years I've been accused of a lot of things – not the least of which is that I'm a bit of a complete bitch. Look up "bitch" in the dictionary and you get a great big picture of me and a link to my website. I can go from the simply unfeeling to deliberately cruel in fifteen seconds flat and I can do it without batting an eyelash. There has been more than one casualty, laying limp on the side of the road of my life. I've deflated more egos than I've boosted and I've done most of it relatively unintentionally and even more unapologetically. While there are, of course, some people exempted from this rule, I tend to treat the people who I would call my friends, or at least my round about acquaintances a lot like I treat my so called enemies.

I can't say that I've ever spent a good amount of time wondering why it is that I'm so hard on people. I know that I can be nothing if not verbally abusive and it's never been a mystery why there are some who deal with the business end of that sword almost every time they come into contact with me – and sometimes simply when the memory of them collides with a bad day. What I never really considered was why people like King, Nate, Aaron, or even Mike, who, for the moment at least, I had made peace with, often felt certain – or should have, at least – that I had it in my mind to be horrible to them on a given day.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. Actually, I woke up at 11:30 last night, and 12:30, and 1:30, and 2:30, and 3:30 and 4:30…but at 5:30, I decided "fuck it" – and emphatically. Well, maybe not emphatically, but I don't really do anything emphatically at 5:30 in the morning. My point, anyway, was that between 5:30 and 6:30 I had solved a problem that has plagued the people in my life for years. Gotta love it when I day starts off like that – huh?

Okay, so maybe "solved' is a strong word. I haven't actually solved the problem, but it's less bad than it used to be. You see, there are very few people in my life that I'm not horrible to – and then I realized that there are very few people in my life who I don't hate a little, on some level and it all clicked into place.

The problem, not that you cared, is thus; if I'm treating you poorly and I haven't disclaimed my behavior with "I'm crabby today," the truth of the matter is that I probably hate you a little.

Were King alive, I'd still hate him a little. Actually, I kind of hated him a lot. A lot, a lot. Less than I did at one point, but more than was probably good for either of us. I think I probably hated him the most out of anyone I was at all nice to. Aaron…well, yup, kind of hate him a little. Not at lot…mostly because I wasn't really a big fan of him already by the time he elected to start doing things that annoy me. Hell, even Mike, I kind of hate a little…and he still lets me sleep in his bed.

While I'd love to say that the moral of the story is "don't poke the bear," I have to recognize that none of my considerable loathing, for these people at least, comes from an action I can't "get" – I may feel, quite certainly, that I never would have done any of the things that they did, but I've always, at least, been able to understand why they make the decisions that they do. So, in that vein, I guess I have to consider the moral of the story a change that has to happen on my end, rather than the other way around and, from that perspective, the moral of the story seems to be "let it go." Granted, knowing the moral doesn't mean I'm going to do anything with it, for no one has trust and betrayal issues like me. Actually, I think there are some East German Jews and a few Native Americans with small pox who might win the rodeo for that title, but no one does it with the kind of flair I do. ;)

In the end, now that I've publicly defamed a dead guy, my significant other and poor unsuspecting Aaron (told you I was a bitch) I don't really have a lot to say other than "hey, the trust and forgiveness thing was already on the to-do list."

All The Emo Boys & All The Emo Girls

[[Note: I labored over where to put this. In the end, I decided to maintain the sanctity of the official site blog and keep it free from rants on "sensitive issues" but you can bet your ass that some form of this is making it to my deviantArt journal. Fucking hoodlums.]]

I am 21 years old and, yes, I have a hard time saying that. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice, put two close friends in the ground, lived through the fear of a best friend with cancer (and, no, she’s not one of the one’s who died) watched my married mother attach herself strongly to the description “polygamous,” destroying my father. I’ve made the call to institutionalize a friend. I’ve known people in hospitals who, by all rights, should never have come out alive. And the worst part is, I so don’t have even close to the worst life ever.

This morning, after waking up too early and responding to said early awakening by simply getting up, I grabbed my lap top and started doing what I do nearly daily – browsing the dA stock photography gallery. I do this, by the way, because in the great computer crash of 2006, my extensive supply of vector stock links was lost and I no longer have reference photo’s for projects. Not that it matters, but anyway – carrying on. Like many mornings, my search was fruitless, until – hark, is that another kid with a handgun?

Call me crazy, but I’d like to schedule a restructuring of the photo galleries at Deviant Art – Kids with Sharp Objects and Blood, Kids with Guns and Naked Kids with Low Self-Esteem. It would at least make my searching process easier.

Now, now – before you go on a “but it’s art!” rant, I, dabbling in hentai as I am want to do, appreciate a good naked female as much as the next girl. True, I tend to shy from the 300lb women who feel the need to take off all of their clothes, photograph themselves with a single long-stemmed rose and call it artistic nudes, but I’ve found many a use for the others as reference photos in vector renders and cell shading. Still, I’ve yet to get anything other than a stomach ache from seeing someone playing with a handgun and photographing it. Yes, I assume that anyone intelligent enough to operate a digital camera and the dA interface is intelligent enough to make sure the thing isn’t loaded and the trigger lock is on, but I cannot for the life of me fathom a need for this image to exist in the world. Not to make an example of her personally, though, because I’m certain a search of “gun” would reveal more than you could shake a stick at. If you looked really hard, I’m sure you could probably find Naked Kids with Sharp Objects, Blood and Guns.

I checked, it isn’t as though the dA’r is making a political statement – speaking to the strangulation of our generation or the tragedy of what happens when you send kids to war. They’re not trying to say “Hey, future suicide hotline callers – there’s another way out.” They’re just another little emo girl amidst all of the little emo boys glorifying yet another one of life’s many bad decisions.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not just Kids with Guns – if I see on more drop of cornstarch blood on that site outside the context of Halloween costume stocks I may borrow that girls gun and end it myself. They run lines of the stuff down their cheeks and pretend like they sliced themselves open. They douse their tongues in it and then run their mother’s cleaver along the faux wound with an angsty look on their faces and scream “high art!”

Call me crazy. Call me biased. Call me bitter. That’s just not art ladies and gentlemen – that’s an utter lack of coping skills and a total absence of perspective

Small, Medium, Large

Once upon a time in a land that seems far far away you could get a lot of things in three different sizes; small, medium and large. Now maybe there are some parts of the world where this is still going on but, here, in the United States of America, we have embraced a new tradition: medium, large, extra large, and as big as your head.

Today, while I was tinkering with the new version of MSN Messenger 8.0, something rather unsettling struck me. You see, several years ago, McDonalds was saddled with a very large civil suit alleging that they were responsible for making people fat. At around the same time, some idiot released a DVD documentary called Super Size Me. Now, again, for those of you that are unfamilliar, McDonalds origintaed, in fast food form at least, the extra large. A 32 oz soda and an amount of french fries that no person should ever consume in one sitting all for $3.00 and the health of your heart. Getting back to the civil suit though, in response to public pressure, McDonalds released a line of salads and grilled chicken salad made from parts of the chicken that cost more than $0.004 per lb in addition to what was a very socially responsible move - dropping the Super Size. Many were pleased - that is, until they tried to order a small soda and got a cup that had "medium" scratched out on the bottom. My boyfriend, however, has never had occasion to begrudge this change as his massive, 32-ounce Coke is still available - they simply renamed it "large." Are you following me yet? In ridding themselves of supersize what they actually did is rid themselves of the small to make you feel less guilty for ordering a cancer-causing beverage as big as your head.



What I'm getting at is that today, the day of strange occurances, I discovered something that has only small and medium. Granted, it's a piece of software, but what the hell.

The real thing that occured to me is this - how is it possible for you to have a small and a medium or a small and a large or a medium and a large or a supersize without three to reference them to? A medium is a median between two things and without a large and a small, one can't define medium.

Crabby coders and all that jazz. No coffee. No sleep. Bad idea. By the way, my avatar - how totally Punky Brewster is that face. I was so jazzed :)

Between The Lines

Last night was a fucking long night. But, last night was also the first night that I've ever laid down and fallen asleep almost immediately. True, it could be said that I was emotionally exhausted, because I was. For as much as I'm inclined not to sleep, I don't handle it well. Pretty much any morning where I wake up and my cuticles are bloody from me ripping at them is a morning I know didn't start off well, but it's OK.

Part of what made my night a long night was a 201 seminar on my blog. Seeing yourself through the eyes of other people is the same reason i've always loathed poetry and short stories. Sometimes, a story is just what it looks like - a story. At the risk of poking a bear, one of the few conversations Jeremy and I had was me explaining to him why I hated our bleeding heart liberal dyke professor for over-analysing everything. I cannot imagine any of my favorite authors being able to suffer through Lit 101 if their novels were the ones being taught, because I can't imagine watching someone analyse your sentance structure with a straight face.

"How were you feeling when you wrote the scene in which Harold commits suiicde?" and the real answer is "I was up against a deadline and I couldn't get the character to develop the way I wanted him to, so I killed him off."

My point? It's seldom as complicated as it seems with authors and it's certainly seldom as complicated as it seems with me. There are very scarcely deeper meanings to the things that i'm posting. For as much as I like to play my hand close to the vest with people in my life, there is nothing that is off-limits when I blog, so whatever i'm blogging tends to be exactly what I mean with no minced words. This is my life - not a comic novel. It is what it is and it's difficult to drive symbolism into shit when you're living it. Maybe one of these days when it's over i'll tell the story and I promise i'll throw some metaphores in there for you guys. In the mean time, if i'm talking about the Catholic Guilt Complex, i'm probably really talking about the Catholic Guilt complex.

A couple of days ago, I blogged this and like five people asked if I was OK. There is no emoticon to describe my face when they did, but I suspect if there was, it would have been all eyes.

I'm disclaiming. When i'm mad at someone and throwing punches - it looks like this or maybe this. See, idn't that obvious? When i'm depressed, it looks like this or this. When i'm wandering around the recesses of my mind thinking about something at random it looks like this.

Is it a bad sign when being in a fantastic mood reads like depression?

All i'm saying is, don't read too much into anything. If i'm in tears while I'm posting, you'll know it, because I'll say it. I can always be counted on for that :) Christ, I was listening to The Bangles for this one and who can be depressed listening to The Bangles?

And no, i'm not crying or throwing anything. I'm having apple juice and wondering why my speakers wont go up any louder...I think some of the wires fell out. Easy tiger :)

Perspective In The Sunrise

One of the few perks of being an insomniac is the amount of sunrises you get to see. True, it’s not the only way – people who go to bed early get to see their fair share as well, but there is something unique about a sunrise when you haven’t slept yet. Some mornings, it’s foreboding – a sign that you’ve lost complete control over every aspect of your life, including those most id, like sleep. Some mornings, however, it’s refreshing. This morning seems to be one of those.

The air smells just a little bit like summer, even though tit’s still too cold for a walk on the lake, and the smile seems easy. In a kinder time, a 20-year old wouldn’t relish the feeling of a winter’s arthritic fingers shifting to the bursitis that settles in summer knees, and I even enjoyed feeling my spring allergies awaken in my sinus’s this morning.

Four AM is no good for me – but five…Five is different. Five makes me want to light a cigarette to smell the smoke. Five makes me crave Nutrigrain bars and wish I had a well worn cotton t-shirt that smells like Lake Michigan air. Five makes me smile fondly, breathe deep and remember all of the people that I’ve loved and lost for the good times – remember the love and the support and forget the loss and the betrayal. Five AM makes me want to discard my better judgment, call old friends and go for long walks.

This morning, I sat on my porch and thought of change as the sun crept up on me faster than I could type out my reminiscences. I remembered a time when my friends smelled like Bounce in the morning rather than leather, stale smoke and black coffee. Then, I lit a red because the stale smoke and leather were never so bad.

Sometimes, no matter all the damage, I’m stricken still by the amount of love that I’ve felt in my short life. Days like today are one of the few occasions on which I ever recall feeling truly lucky and it seems like every time I look up, the sun is a little higher in the sky and the day is a little closer to a close, but maybe that’s the way my luck always is.

I’ve had fortune of finding many – some who’ve loved and some who’ve obsessed – and most of them ended and none of them well but I can’t help but feel that It was worth it in the end.

It’s been a bad decade, but it’s going to be a good day.

Damned If You Do

I was thinking about apologies and guilt this morning. There are quite a few apologies that I am owed, and I would venture to guess that there are more than a few that I owe. I’m not talking about the little things – the bumping into someone on the sidewalk or forgetting to return a phone call from a friend – I mean the karmic destiny, major fuck-up, spend the rest of your life slightly haunted by the fact that you did this or that someone else did it to you. I’m referring to the kinds of actions that end friendships, shatter relationships and ruin lives.

The minute this train of thought pulled into the station (who says TV doesn’t make you think?) the resulting round of self-pity set in – a twinge in the back of your psyche that says ‘Look at all the ways I’ve been wronged’ but the more I thought about all of the apologies I’m owed and will, likely, never receive, I realized that, in most cases, the lack of apology is a greater sign of mercy, grace, and responsibility than the apology could hope to be. It is often been said that the average apology is not an earnest attempt to express guilt – but an attempt to escape guilt. You say you’re sorry, when you bump into someone in line at the grocery store so that, when you wander out into the parking lot, you don’t find them slamming the door of their SUV into your disposable compact car.

We say we’re sorry, in this culture, anyway, for absolution – for forgiveness – when, most of the time, we don’t really deserve it. With children, we send them to sit in the corner or restrict privileges until they apologize for something they’ve done wrong because we want to teach them the importance of repenting for your misdeeds, but are we really teaching them something different? Is the message they’re getting that once you apologize, you’re off the hook and if it is, how do we expect them to carry a different lesson into their adulthood? (Then, perhaps this isn’t a new phenomenon – the Catholic Church has been offering clean souls in exchange for apologies since their inception.)

I’ve often wondered how people can cheat on their spouses – how is it possible that you can come home every night and sleep knowing you’ve betrayed a person who loves you so completely? More than that, I’ve wondered how people can tell a spouse and expect forgiveness in return. How can you hurt someone – deliberately hurt them – and expect that, rather than spending a few nights on a buddies couch with the classifieds section, they will offer you forgiveness. Sure, as humans, we don’t admit to that sort of thing until we’ve come around the pass – realized we were wrong and genuinely, at the time at least, have no intention of perpetuating the relationship, but what right do we have to foist our guilt off on another and beg for them to tell us that everything is going to be OK?

Then there are situations where the damage is done – where the hurt has already been handed out and all parties involved are reeling. What then? There are apologies that I have waited years for – literally – and today it occurred to me that, rather than being angry about the apology that hasn’t come, perhaps I should be grateful that they’ve had the good sense to respect the wishes I put out there quite clearly.

In most cases of emotional wronging, I hand out a blanket ‘stay away from me’ warning and leave it at that – don’t call, don’t send me an e-mail, don’t stop by my house and, for the record, if you bump into me in a public place, walk the other way. It’s a good warning – it has served me well. With those that will listen, it has kept me from constant torment at the hands of people I can’t – or won’t – deal with. A phone call from the wrong person still has the capacity to send me diving for a bottle of Pepto Bismol with my face buried in Kleenex.

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from an old friend that left my in hysterics. Two sleeping pills, a great big hug and a very concerned boyfriend later, I had stopped wanting to hyperventilate or throw up, but I wasn’t ‘OK’ for days. True, the e-mail in question wasn’t a traditional ‘Hey, how are you doing – I haven’t seen you in ages’ outcry, though even that would have left me slightly nauseous. This e-mail was of a different kind – news that a man who tore my life apart had chosen another victim with a side note of ‘woops!’ about the hell that my then-friends put me through after it happened – anyone would have felt a little ill and I have always been able to take things like that to the physical illness extreme. At the time, I didn’t know what to think. It was too much to feel at one time – sick, simply for hearing the name – angry, because he’d attacked someone else – guilty, because I didn’t do more to stop him – and even a little bit self-satisfied because after five years of hell and dirty looks, a friend who betrayed me realized she’d done something wrong. I was so distraught when it first arrived that I actually let Mike reply to it – I had no idea what to do or say because there were just too many disparate emotions colliding with one another and all I could think for a long time was ‘I’d rather not know.’

So, this morning, as I was staring at yet another passive, unintentional and tiny reminder of a friend I don’t have anymore, I could feel the bile building. Defensive mechanism, certainly, to use anger as an anesthesia against fond memories, but most of the time, I can’t care less what my coping mechanisms are called. Twenty minutes and 864 words later, I realized that the missing apology isn’t something I should resent – it’s something I should be glad for. True, it’s always nice, when you’re quite as self-righteous as I am, to spend years doing your best to take the high road and have someone who hurt you come back and say “I’m sorry” but I realized today that the spoken condolences are an easy gesture of absolution and sometimes, doing the thing that is right for the other person involved is infinitely more difficult.

Then, maybe I’m just talking myself into something else.

Monday Syndicate

As most of my doubtless avid readers have noticed in recent posts, I've been going through a very non-traditional Spring Cleaning - I dusted the sills, washed the windows but I still haven't settled on the new treatments. Today, however - a more literal spring cleaning.

House guests this weekend left my poor sad kitchen in a state of Gatorade disarray. I mentioned to the SO that it was really looking like I was going to have to buy a giant pitcher and a bottle of everclear. Air matresses littering the living room floor, notes left on the toilet seat and vauge beverage stains all over the kitchen counters. That project is somewhat cleaned up but it was interupted by my sneaky nemesis - the Past.

A smidge of bad debt tied to even worse memories has been rearing it's ugly head over the last six months and I'm beginning to think that calling a priest is the only route to dispelling of the beast. I've been spending so much time in front of the PC lately that, rather than overstuffing my already overstuffed desk with glasses, chopsticks and half-hearted attempts at tupperware meals, I have actually been forced to upgrade to extending the thing - call it an annex - which brings me to my meandering point.

We eat the strangest things. This morning, as I was making some of the strongest coffee I've ever consumed - because nothing says coffee like 3 hours of sleep and spring cleaning - I poured myself a habitual glass of orange juice and an inevitable "Why?" occured to me. The Holy Trinity of breakfast beverages - coffee, OJ and champagne. Orange juice is almost a necessary side dish to a strong cup of very black coffee and yet, god willing, you will never find a cup of orange flavored coffee available at a Starbucks near you. It's disgusting, really. Coffee leaves behind that vividly bitter aftertaste and the orange juice does cut it somewhat, with it's sweet acidity, but christ what a foul aftertaste they create when combined. And then, throw in a bottle of cheap champagne and forget it. True, you will seldom find coffee and mimosas in combination in this house - partially because i'm too young to buy my own booze and partially because I know better than t combine alcohol and that brand of caffine - talk about immediate ulcers! Nevertheless, can you think of something more "eww?" for breakfast?

Days like this one - I really think I should reconsider my policy on Irish Coffee.

To Be or...

I wonder if you ever stop wondering?

Girls – and girls in the true definition – start to wonder whether they could cut it as parents at the age of three and I’m wondering if it ever stops.

A few days ago, I had a two hour discussion about abortion, adoption and babies in general. Through the wonders of the internet, five different people weighed in on the topic in separate little anonymous, compartmentalized windows. Through experience, the wisdom and thoughts of others trickled through.

The first time I ever remember saying I didn’t want to have kids, I was about 11. I don’t think I said it to anyone else, at the time, but I knew – then and there – that kids were not for me. Of course, I’m relatively certain now, though the details are fuzzy, that my then 4 year old brother was probably pulling my hair at the time. By 15, I’d developed a list of sixteen criteria that had to be met before my want could ever come into the conversation. By 18, I was beginning – in embarrassing moments - to wonder what I would need to do to meet those eligibility requirements.

Today, it’s a craps shoot. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, a cute little baby girl in frilly dresses learning to talk resides. Next to that, an angry 15 year old boy is flunking math and stashing drugs in his closet.

While I have yet to find many things to cosmically thank my parents for – I can at least say that a lesson was learned, on my part, when they brought my brother into the world. In infancy, he annoyed me because he never slept through the night. As a toddler, he drove me crazy with his refusal to actually potty train until he was nearly four. As a kindergartener, no shiny $17 CD was safe from his jam hands and kleptomania. As a third grader, no evening of baby sitting was complete without a literal attempt on my life.

Yes, having a sibling has taught me many things – patience, self-defensive techniques, stealth – but none will ever be as important as the healthy fear of pregnancy I learned from him. At 13, his anger management issues are, mostly, under control, but he’s already fallen down a slope into the D and F range that I could never forgive a child of mine for. His interests go no further than video games and skateboarding and, more infuriating than anything, he excels at neither. Just around the corner is a classic display of the family's alcoholism gene – though, I must say, he made it longer than I did.

Sure, I ask myself questions no other sane individual would. What would I do if my child was stupid? It’s better that I ask it, I’m sure, than being dumbfounded by a “average” result on an IQ test, but it does make me sound cruel – no? What would I do if I ended up with a “sports” kid – something I lack interest, understanding and patience for.

To a degree, by 18 I felt like I had already dealt with most major parenting hurdles. My childhood was a strange one – one that involved more inclusion in family decisions and, most noticeably, the parenting of a younger sibling, than most kids my age. I knew the ins and out’s of a lot of it – the discipline balance and the various and sundry things that sound so easy on paper but never work when you get home.

At 16, I had conviction and I was informed. At 18, I had my first scare.

Okay. It was less a “scare” than a “paranoid episode” in which I did a silly thing, mussed up my pills for a few days, and panicked when, three weeks later, my period was three days later than it should have been. The nurse I called, nearly crying, laughed at me and muttered something about ‘calming down’ but that week from hell opened up a whole new set of fears.

What would I do if it happened by accident?

Normally, it’s something I dissuade with a new brand of pill or by picking up a prescription for Plan B - and then one of my stupid extended-friends has to go get themselves accidentally pregnant and slam the pastel-blue “Baby” bumper car into my passenger door.

I’m a stark believer in “pro-choice politics,” but I never purported to be someone who could go through with it. I’ve always wondered if the 15-year old drug addict who lives in the basement of my cranium would be enough to out-last the 24 hour waiting period. Then, I do know adoption wouldn’t be an option for me. Maybe it’s something that would be easier for a single girl with no relationship but in my quasi-married state, I’m not sure that even I, the Mistress of Gift Wrapped Problems, could compartmentalize nine months of food cravings and swollen ankles away to hand my child over to someone else.

So, I’m left with two options – I could attempt a mission abort and risk losing it completely, or I’m in it for the long haul – 3 days in a 35 degree left over while the boys in the trenches try to catapult me around the moon. (That’s another reason I should never have kids – Mike has me weaving Apollo references in by accident. I can’t imagine what the two of us would do to a child.) It’s the “To be or not to be” of the 20-something female.

Maybe you never stop wondering – because maybe the older you are, the more you wonder.

Mental Illness

From time to time, I get accidentally introspective. The last thing I try to do during my time alone is get introspective. Sure, that might seem odd but, for the most part, I prefer to avoid thinking about all of those things that are wrong with me and my life. If I were to indulge that need, I’d probably end up in a place many a proud self-loather has landed…and the clean-up is just so damn messy. Still, occasionally, it seems to happen without my knowledge or consent. Sitting quietly reading a news clipping or watching Ted Kennedy make a fool of himself and WHAM, a fact of life has stricken you out cold. Today, I hit quite a few.

I am hesitant to admit this. I’ve made it through four or five almost-posts and deleted them before they made their way to “Preview” because I realized that posting them would only open a can of worms I don’t want opened – too many misunderstandings and a window into information and assumptions I don’t want. I’m still not sure it’s a wise idea, but at least given my current, semi-nauseous state, I’m inclined to think that the lenses you’re all wearing might take on a tint that fairs favorably for me not losing my mind with any of you in the next few weeks. I accidentally landed face first in a conversation about Colin and Sean and, as is want to happen when I’m discussing Colin – the event, not the individual – with a female, the darts started flying almost immediately and the sick need to defend him surfaced. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not new – even in the immediate days following I defended him with what energy I had after defending myself and that is sign of a psychosis I wouldn’t even ask Aaron Beck to explain. Everyone knows by now that I’ve reached a peace with him I didn’t necessarily anticipate would come – I promised not to run him over with my car as long as he promised not to cross any lines…like the ones that would involve him talking to me. Gracious, no :P That’s not the point – it might be a new admittance to some of you but how much I care is really limited. Alas, I am not as cold-hearted and cruel as I wish I was (or as any of you think) and, yes, it’s quite a bit disappointing. The point is that, midway through having this discussion with her, painting the pretty picture and trying to issue a defense which I suspect is less faulty than I sometimes need to believe, I was faced with the lonliness that is very familiar now. I miss him. Why tonight was so difficult I don’t know, but there I sat, clicking around because I knew if I clicked long enough, I’d find a post on someone’s blog that I could get inside of enough – that could take me back to a moment that could make me loathe him again. I got there, no problem – the difficult details aren’t hard to drag out, no matter how deeply I bury them – but I find it’s somewhat sick to realize how fully we all rely on our loathing.

When you can’t deal with something – you hate it – simple human nature. We rebel against the things we know are right for a hundred reasons. Sometimes, like now, we do it to restore strength in a conviction. Others, we do it to avoid a reality. Whatever the case may be, each and every single one of us needs hate. You hate your boss to avoid dealing with the fact that you made a mistake last Friday afternoon. You hate your employees to prevent yourself from admitting that you trained them poorly. As children, we hate our parents because, as much as we believe we know better, we know there are situations we really can’t deal with – and we hate them as adults for not preparing us for those circumstances. We hate the government for getting too big and meddling in our lives, and we hate it in others for not regulating more heavily to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives – research, discipline… In the end, it seems that hate is always a way to avoid responsibility.

Just when that subject was getting dangerously close to ending in the core of everything – the “P” word – I double-clicked my digital pacifier and queued up a few episodes of Firefly. Tonight felt like a firefly kind of night. Besides, Nathan Fillion as Malcom Renolyds is always yummy and River is just fun. It never made sense until just now, why I watch this show when I miss King, but 13 episodes of it are the first things I watched when I got the news that he died. 13 episodes, straight through, without interruption. Anywhoo, I made it all the way to 88 before the anesthetization started to really take effect, but by what would have been 72 , another interesting fact surfaced. This one isn’t particularly new either, it’s something that I’ve known about myself for ages – I attach to actors in the role of their characters and, even more strongly than that, I attach to my concept of a character.

Another sickness, and another one without proper medication (though I bet if I took enough Xanex, I wouldn’t connect quite so fully.) The DVD extras on Firefly destroyed my love of the series for nearly three months all from one comment Nathon Fillion had the audacity to make – first, because words were put to why I was attracted to that and every other character I’ve ever fallen for and then, too quick to follow, because those reason were dashed by the statement that actor had no grasp of character. The quote was something to the end of “I’m not that hopeless, tortured man Malcolm Renolyds is.” A few hours soul searching and, well look at that, what a pervasive set of personality traits? Sad. Predictable and overwhelmingly ill.

What’s sadder is I realized, it’s just me. I have no favored actors – no one who could convince me to see a movie. Mike will give pretty much any Tom Hanks movie a chance, unless it’s You’ve Got Mail!, but my mother is the only person in the entire world who liked that movie and she only watches it for Meg Ryan. I can’t watch a Robin Williams movie unless he plays a generally well disposed character with a core of sadness somewhere within. The saving grace of Keanu Reeves is that so much time passed between Bill & Ted and Siddartha and A Walk in the Clouds and The Matrix I can scarcely consider it the same actor – but tell me he’s in a horrid band and I’m disgusted. I had a similar relationship with one Shane West. Bring the movie he did with Mandy Moore within 50 feet of me and I swear, I’ll scream harassment, because I won’t watch it and as long as I don’t watch it he can remain the irresponsible rocker he played a few years ago in Once and Again and he’s playing all over in ER and everything will be a-OK. The mental blocks are good, of course. Show me Matt Czuchry in Eight Legged Freaks, and my impression of Logan Huntzburger won’t be tarnished, because I built myself a wall around Logan that even the atrociously written episodes Amy has been putting out lately can’t hurt him..

What to do!

And finally, we end up at the last, somewhat amusing and sadly, completely true. It has long been said that I have a skewed and somewhat insane impression of the way that friendships were meant to be. I only know one way to have a friendship and it’s a apparently fantastically inappropriate, but it’s what I know and, ultimately, it’s what I love. I leanred to cope and I thought I was over iand yet today, in a binge to clear out some of my unanswered reviews, I thumbed through a story only to find that I’d convinced almost half the people who reviered were convinced that the married woman was having an affair with one of her husbands friends. Have I lost all grip on reality – or, more appropriately, did I never have it at all and I still don’t have as good a grasp on it as I thought.

My inclination isk, of course, to remind you that these are the same people who can’t figure out whay “Please remove the banner in your chapter summary” means, and that the vast majority couldn’t’ navigate themselves out of a sentence, let alone the complex concept of an intimate friendship, but I’m reminded that, from what I can tell, these kinds of relationships exist only on television and in the bubble which I have built for myself. Unlike the television versions, mine always seem to end badly.

Two and a half pages of rambling is enough for me at nearly 6 am. I’m going to stare at the ceiling for a little while before I decide to tackle “potential.”

Good People

I'm starting to think that online dating might not be as insane as I think it is.

No, Mike - breathe - i'm not shopping for a new man, I'm making a point :P

I've always berated the many men in my life with match.com, etc... profiles because how insane a concept is online dating - really. First off, odds are that these people are feeling just as desperate as you are to have put their profiles online. Doubtless you're already aware of why you are as desperate as you are, so don't you think they're probably equally fucked up? Half of the time, they live far far far far far away which makes the entire courtship a little awkward. Wouldn't you rather meet someone the old fashioned way. Drunk. In a bar. Trying to stand up straight?

Course, I haven't been single ever in my adult life, so what the hell do I know.

Anyway, we all know how much and why I hate being alone. Now I have a few real friends and not a single one of them has asked how I'm doing. I'm okay with this for several reasons. 1. Most of my friends weird me out on one level or another. 2. My friends are assholes - so to hear them being too nice to me - considerate and friendly...It makes me fucking nervous and I start to wonder what they've done. 3. My friends can be damn annoying from time to time. Of course, at times like this, i'm almost willing to put up with "damn annoying" just to have someone to talk to.

Anyway, what does this have to do with online dating? Well, over the last few years i've forged rather a few e-friendships with what must be the only 5 females on the face of the planet I could ever get along with. They're scattered from London to Colorado to Texas and Australia (the geography behiind the relationships might be the reason it works.) What's ironic is that of everyone I know, these are the only people who checked in on how I was fairing with my empty house. When I was freaked out about a procedure I was underinformed on, it was one of them who jumped up with information, medical reference books and experience. When my boyfriend terrified me with phrases that had the word "join" and "military" in the same sentance, it was one of them who came to the rescue with 6 hours of filling my brain with more than I ever wanted to know about the air force.

I'm thinking that maybe there is hope for online dating - maybe people like me really do have to scour the globe for people they can stand.