Either I am a rotten blogger, or I have the most boring life EVER.
I am on 100% Supreme Autopilot, mostly. The wildest things have gotten in the past month was last weekend, when Tim and I had plans to go visit a friend of his who has totally wanted to meet me, allegedly, for some very long time; potential-boyfriend noises were being made, unless I'm completely over-interpreting things. I haven't even MET this guy; haven't even SEEN him. We're at that point of the party, folks; not QUITE "desperate acts based solely on the fear of dying alone", but getting there. Getting VERY there. And then the same weekend, out of the clear blue, CR called me and told me he was coming into town and wanted to see me. As in, "see" me. Which I thought was one HELL of a lot of nerve, coming from a guy who quite thoroughly eviscerated my self-image re: that topic as he left, but I didn't say so, because: see above re the current state of the party. All options are being kept open at this time. (Well, NEARLY all options. The guy at work who has a crush on me, the one who stinks so bad that even after he leaves, his actual CHAIR continues to stink; HE is not on the open-options list. Nor is Tim. So: All non-nauseating options are being kept open at this time.)
And so the weekend came, and the rain was so rainy and the snow so snowy and the weather so Chicago-in-March-y that we cancelled the gathering at Tim's friend's place; and then CR counted his money one more time and decided he couldn't afford the trip after all, but didn't tell me that til Monday, when the game of phone tag finally ended. So basically the weekend was a washout, which was really no problem for me; I slept. A lot.
I've been playing around on Facebook a lot lately. For the longest damn time I had exactly one friend on Facebook, and then Tim and Squeaky added me so I had three, but then Squeaky de-friended me as part of some revenge plot on someone or another--no, don't ask, it's just not worth it. So then for a while I had only two friends, but then one day I used that "Find people you know" tool, and it turned out that one of the few grade-school people I kept in touch with was also on Facebook. So I added her, and in her profile was "Our Lady of Visible Discomfort Grammar School, Class of 1984." And there, in one place, was...everybody from my class, mostly.
(I'm stopping here; though I've actually written QUITE a lot after this point, I'm going to hold off posting it til I see whether I might feel a little less self-pitying sometime soon. The same old shit, mah peeps--the "why" and the "what now" and the blah, blah, blah. If you want some of that, there are all sorts of morose old posts of mine to read, but right now I'm even making mySELF a little sick.)
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Birthdays
JP would have turned 40 today.
It's strange, being in this place; in some ways this feels like it could be one of the more vital times I've had in the past few years. I've made contact with some old friends--re-establishing some sort of framework of a past for myself; I'm moving toward meeting some new people--some of them friends of Tim and Squeaky, who have been wanting to meet me for a long while; others from the local feral-cat rescue group, with whom I've become affiliated recently. I'm starting to see my life once again as a place with possibilities in it, starting to plan some semblance of a future, no matter how vague those plans might be.
And in the middle of this tiny little pocket of hope, I'm bumbling happily along and turn a corner and there it is: JP would have turned 40 today.
I wonder if he would know me anymore, or if he would like what I've become. I have tried to stay true to the person I was--not so much out of guilt or a need to preserve what's gone, but because that person was the real me, the essential me, and to let go of that would not only have disrespected JP; it would have disrespected ME as well.
I talked to Debbi about it tonight, and we agreed: neither of us can imagine him at 40. I think, though, that the way the world has changed since he was 26 would have baffled him utterly; would have poked him and jabbed him and ground him down. I look at how angry most of the last twelve years have made me, how the world was taken over by an overprivileged jock-ocracy. I think of how betrayed he would have felt, and how cynical, how disillusioned, how miserably sad he would have become as his ultimate dream--his rock-star dream--faded away while the Fred Dursts, the Eminems, and all the rest came to ascendancy.
But no matter how angry, how cynical, how brokenhearted he might have become, I would have loved him still--.at 40, at 60, at 80--and so even though I know he's safe from all pain, and from any disappointment...even though I know these things, I would still so much rather have him here beside me. If he was here, we could bear those disappointmetns together; if he was here, I could love him as a person, instead of as a ideal memory, a long-gone dream.
It's strange, being in this place; in some ways this feels like it could be one of the more vital times I've had in the past few years. I've made contact with some old friends--re-establishing some sort of framework of a past for myself; I'm moving toward meeting some new people--some of them friends of Tim and Squeaky, who have been wanting to meet me for a long while; others from the local feral-cat rescue group, with whom I've become affiliated recently. I'm starting to see my life once again as a place with possibilities in it, starting to plan some semblance of a future, no matter how vague those plans might be.
And in the middle of this tiny little pocket of hope, I'm bumbling happily along and turn a corner and there it is: JP would have turned 40 today.
I wonder if he would know me anymore, or if he would like what I've become. I have tried to stay true to the person I was--not so much out of guilt or a need to preserve what's gone, but because that person was the real me, the essential me, and to let go of that would not only have disrespected JP; it would have disrespected ME as well.
I talked to Debbi about it tonight, and we agreed: neither of us can imagine him at 40. I think, though, that the way the world has changed since he was 26 would have baffled him utterly; would have poked him and jabbed him and ground him down. I look at how angry most of the last twelve years have made me, how the world was taken over by an overprivileged jock-ocracy. I think of how betrayed he would have felt, and how cynical, how disillusioned, how miserably sad he would have become as his ultimate dream--his rock-star dream--faded away while the Fred Dursts, the Eminems, and all the rest came to ascendancy.
But no matter how angry, how cynical, how brokenhearted he might have become, I would have loved him still--.at 40, at 60, at 80--and so even though I know he's safe from all pain, and from any disappointment...even though I know these things, I would still so much rather have him here beside me. If he was here, we could bear those disappointmetns together; if he was here, I could love him as a person, instead of as a ideal memory, a long-gone dream.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Slurp
I have no excuse for my silence; I have merely been sucked into the Vortex of Facebook.
It's Tim's fault, him and that cute little farming-game applet he got me hooked on; then I found my grade-school's Class of 1984 group, which led me to a treasure trove of people I didn't used to like, who actually grew up into decent people. (Though I will say, one of the people who friended me was a HUGE shock; she was one of my mortal enemies back then, and she was none-too-friendly at the reunion either.)
Then I started looking for other people. I found some old friends who had moved away when we were still kids--including one who had been Debbi's best friend! And another girl who had been a part of all our sleepovers and giddy giggle-fests...It's weird to think about back then. It's even weirder to think that these people are married, have grade-school-age or high-school-age kids of their own. And here's me...well, it's not so bad, but it feels strange.
Then, I got an e-mail from an old friend--in fact, James had been one of David's best friends, and Joanne's boyfriend, and he had been responsible for introducing David to the woman he eventually married. We had all spent many weekends out at his family's summer place in Michigan, both with and without his parents there. It's one of those things that makes me wonder if I did right, making the decisions that I made. Anyway, he e-mailed me, and I wrote back, and the e-mail I got back was one of the coolest things I've read in a long time....mostly about how we maybe didn't hurt people as badly as we thought we did back then, and that they all seem to have gotten on just fine without us. "To be perfectly honest, I think YOU had a much better future than what could have been," he said, talking about my choice not to marry Dave. James doesn't see Dave much anymore--"I have no friends outside of work," he says--but he also says he has his sources for knowing what's going on with them. And for him to think that I might actually be better off with the life I got--and he knows about the life I ended up with, long stories and all!--well, it's nice to have one's worst fears contradicted, I'll tell you.
I'm not, as Firefly asked me recently, living in the past--I mean, not anymore than I've been living in it since JP died. It's not like these people are all going to become my close-knit circle of friends...but the way I have been living, with only two people in my life who knew me before I was 27 years old (Firefly and Debbi)...It made me feel like nothing before that time had existed, not in real life. There was the dream world that was JP, and it seemed only fitting that no one who was still in my life remembered that time at all; and then there was everything before that, grade school and high school and college, and there was ONE person who remembered each, but for the most part the distant past was just some dirty little secret. It's nice to look backwards at something other than that night in October, or the other night in April, or at any of the things that happened in the eighteen months between them. Those eighteen months have swallowed my life whole....and I was glad to let them. I still am, to some extent, glad to let that happen; it relieves me of the weight of trying to make sense of the senseless. But this provides a little background, something to turn my eyes to when I can't stare into the wreckage any longer.
There's much, much more to write; but if you'll excuse me, I have to go tend Tim's farm for him while he's away from the copmputer. Stoopid Facebook...
It's Tim's fault, him and that cute little farming-game applet he got me hooked on; then I found my grade-school's Class of 1984 group, which led me to a treasure trove of people I didn't used to like, who actually grew up into decent people. (Though I will say, one of the people who friended me was a HUGE shock; she was one of my mortal enemies back then, and she was none-too-friendly at the reunion either.)
Then I started looking for other people. I found some old friends who had moved away when we were still kids--including one who had been Debbi's best friend! And another girl who had been a part of all our sleepovers and giddy giggle-fests...It's weird to think about back then. It's even weirder to think that these people are married, have grade-school-age or high-school-age kids of their own. And here's me...well, it's not so bad, but it feels strange.
Then, I got an e-mail from an old friend--in fact, James had been one of David's best friends, and Joanne's boyfriend, and he had been responsible for introducing David to the woman he eventually married. We had all spent many weekends out at his family's summer place in Michigan, both with and without his parents there. It's one of those things that makes me wonder if I did right, making the decisions that I made. Anyway, he e-mailed me, and I wrote back, and the e-mail I got back was one of the coolest things I've read in a long time....mostly about how we maybe didn't hurt people as badly as we thought we did back then, and that they all seem to have gotten on just fine without us. "To be perfectly honest, I think YOU had a much better future than what could have been," he said, talking about my choice not to marry Dave. James doesn't see Dave much anymore--"I have no friends outside of work," he says--but he also says he has his sources for knowing what's going on with them. And for him to think that I might actually be better off with the life I got--and he knows about the life I ended up with, long stories and all!--well, it's nice to have one's worst fears contradicted, I'll tell you.
I'm not, as Firefly asked me recently, living in the past--I mean, not anymore than I've been living in it since JP died. It's not like these people are all going to become my close-knit circle of friends...but the way I have been living, with only two people in my life who knew me before I was 27 years old (Firefly and Debbi)...It made me feel like nothing before that time had existed, not in real life. There was the dream world that was JP, and it seemed only fitting that no one who was still in my life remembered that time at all; and then there was everything before that, grade school and high school and college, and there was ONE person who remembered each, but for the most part the distant past was just some dirty little secret. It's nice to look backwards at something other than that night in October, or the other night in April, or at any of the things that happened in the eighteen months between them. Those eighteen months have swallowed my life whole....and I was glad to let them. I still am, to some extent, glad to let that happen; it relieves me of the weight of trying to make sense of the senseless. But this provides a little background, something to turn my eyes to when I can't stare into the wreckage any longer.
There's much, much more to write; but if you'll excuse me, I have to go tend Tim's farm for him while he's away from the copmputer. Stoopid Facebook...
Friday, March 6, 2009
Pointy Little Whirlpools
A few weeks ago, while roaming Facebook, I looked up my old high-school classmates. Most of the names were just people I sorta remembered; one, though, was someone who was once among my best friends. We stopped talking our sophomore year of college, when she and another friend came down to visit me and a few others from our class. They were staying in my apartment for the weekend, and they wanted me to go with them to a party with one of our other classmates on Saturday night, but I didn't want to go because I was having this enormous self-esteem crisis at the time--it was probably my first obvious major depressive episode, looking back--and so they went off to this party and I stayed home. Well, later that night, a guy I'd befriended in one of my education classes called and wanted me to come out with him and one of his friends. Since I knew both of them (unlike this party where there would be all sorts of strangers) I went out for a while. Apparently, while I was gone, my two friends came back to my apartment and found me gone, and went back to the dorm of the classmate they'd gone to the party with. When I got home, and when it got late and became obvious that we had missed each other, I tried to call the going-to-the-party guy's dorm room, where I figured they'd go. In fact, I tried to call all night, but they'd taken the phone off the hook and all I ever got was a busy signal.
The next morning, they came back to get their bags and stuff, and barely spoke to me. I told them what was the issue, but they didn't want to hear it. I let a week or so pass, and then I called one of them to try to apologize.
Here I suppose I should give a little snapshot.
These two girls--we'll call them Colette and Gert--had been among my best friends through high school. I had several groups of friends, actually, and though they occasionally intersected, they were actually very discrete groups. The group they belonged to had been my friends since freshman year, and they were the group of Normal Girls. Actually, Gert and I were the least normal of the crowd, since we both had weight issues, or at least we thought we did. (Gert did, actually, and she knew it. I thought I did, which was just as bad, but again: in pictures, I don't see a fat girl.) But the rest of the girls in this group--there were about eight or eleven of us--were fashion-conscious, interested in looking "correct" and in acting like "normal" people--in other words, not drawing any kind of "negative" attention to themselves. More than once they had pointed out my faults--holding my purse the wrong way, or my strange shoes, or being too loud, or whatever--but apparently my flaws were forgivable enough that they kept me around. Gert and I, by our status as the unusual ones, were very close--writing notes, planning sleepovers, long phone-calls, etc. We had a lot in common; we were both writers, both into science-fiction and fantasy, both very verbal and with very silly senses of humor. Unlike me, though, Gert seemed to aspire to the kind of normality that the other girls embodied, and as such, she was also extremely devoted to Colette. Colette was the Voice of Propriety, and Gert seemed to see her as a mentor, someone who could teach her how to be socially acceptable. Colette seemed to enjoy having a student following at her heels, and so they were very close as well.
Anyway, after Gert and Colette left my apartment in a huff, I waited a few days to let them cool down. And then, knowing that only Colette would be allowed to decide if I should be forgiven, I called her. But Colette wasn't having any of it. I tried to explain, I tried to apologize, and she just got huffier and huffier, and louder and louder, and finally I said "You know what? I tried," and she hung up on me.
That was the last time I talked to either of them, and that was in 1989.
And it's twenty years later--TWENTY YEARS, my god--and so when I saw Gert's name in Facebook, I figured We're all grownups now, right? and I dropped her a note: "Hey. It's been a long time; want to talk, or no?"
That was a few weeks ago. And today, I figured I'd check to see if there were any of our other friends she was in touch with, and I peeked at her friend list.
Her entire friend list is practically a roll-call of our old high-school classmates. I'm talking about people we never hung around with; guys from entirely different groups, people we wouldn't have spoken to for a million dollars back in high school, just everyone. Every single person listed under our high school and our graduation year is on her list of friends.
Except one.
I went into my Facebook profile after that, and I cleared out all mention of my school history. And then I took out all the information about my interests, and all the little fripperies that you can put on Facebook to tell others about you. And I added a status update: "Gladys is..." ...amazed at how petty people can be.
The thing is: I would not be surprised if the grapevine has had its way with my reputation. People who know bits and pieces, little details they can stick together with chewed-up bubblegum and spit and rumors, and weave into some amazing tapestry of We Always Suspected Gladys Was A Bitch. It's like at my grade-school reunion, when one of my classmates was finally kind enough to tell me why everyone had been making mysterious comments to me all night: because everyone believed I'd killed JP, who they'd never known or even heard of--but some of my classmates are on the police force, and one of them was stationed in JP's mom's neighborhood right around the time he died. And it all became a story that I'd killed him and been to jail, and I found it funny because I knew for a FACT that had JP been alive to hear that story, he would have absolutely REVELED in the myth that we'd created. But of course, even though it was funny, it wasn't really funny--it was just proof that people will believe anything, especially if it's something sordid, and especially especially if it's about someone they didn't really like in the first place.
Anyway, after cleaning off my Facebook info, I went to my Classmates account. I'd had similar encounters on Classmates: people who had been closer to me than siblings, in at least one case, who never answered my attempts to get back in contact. So I sent a couple of e-mails to those people--a kind of "one last try" thing, with my e-mail address included--and then I sent a message to the Classmates admins, telling them to cancel my membership and delete my profile. Before I left, I looked at my guestbook.
On Classmates, the guestbook tells you who has looked at your profile and checked a box to let you know that they were there. There were a few names there; a couple of my old students, and two girls from grade school...and my ex-husband.
No, not CR; we, at least, have an understanding. No, no; I'm talking about DAVID, the infamous First Husband, the one who destroyed my credit, kept many of my belongings, followed me around the Internet til I told him "don't ever contact me again". I guess he doesn't think this counts as "contact".
Of course, I had to see what he put in his profile. (And no, I did NOT check the box that would let him know I was there. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.) I can tell you what he did NOT put in his profile: the fact that he's now on his THIRD marriage (at least, his third that I know of); any information regarding those first two marriages (I left him for another man; his second wife wrote a crapload of bad checks on his employers' account, then took off); and in terms of the parts of his life I know about--1990 thru 1995, basically--anything even REMOTELY resembling an accurately-portrayed, truthful FACT. The man is a scumball. He's a self-aggrandizing macho bullshit artist. Reading his biographical story, you would think that once he got out of high school he'd magically transformed into a combination of Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley, and Saint Peter. There are jobs where he claimed to have "managed" or "run" or "been in charge of" something, when in reality he rode his friends' coattails and did so little actual work that his friend finally told him "maybe you'd better go find something that can pay you, because we really can't". I would love, love, love to go over that pack of lies with a red pen and clear up all the inaccuracies; put in the things he left out, and cut down his inflated, egotistical, totally pretentious bullshit.
The funniest thing of all: After this blog post, I probably won't even think about him for months--maybe in April, when our anniversary would have been; or November, around his birthday. About 361 days in any given year, as far as I'm concerned he might as well have never even existed...but right now I would take an unflattering amount of unmitigated pleasure in writing a rebuttal to that puff-piece. Seriously, it's SO MANY FRICKIN' LIES. It's like he did plastic surgery on his life, and only kept the little bumps and smile-lines--the flaws that make him SEEM "real", the things that serve to cover up how much he's actually taken out, that keep him from seeming "fake". Well, he IS fake. And every time I've come across him, from the moment I left him, I've been reminded again and again of exactly HOW fake he really is.
Needless to say, my mood--to say nothing of my opinion of the human race--is fairly low. I just don't know why so many people from my past want nothing to do with me--why people who were once my dearest friends can't even be bothered to answer an e-mail. No one, I'm sure, ever wants to think they might be a bad or unlovable person--and if it was just a couple of people acting as though I was best forgotten, I'd be more able to dismiss their rejections--but really, it's starting to seem more like a consensus, and that worries me. I can think of at least six or seven people, without even trying, who won't acknowledge me, and no matter how many ways I try to frame it, I'm still hurt and stung and worried by their opinions.
The next morning, they came back to get their bags and stuff, and barely spoke to me. I told them what was the issue, but they didn't want to hear it. I let a week or so pass, and then I called one of them to try to apologize.
Here I suppose I should give a little snapshot.
These two girls--we'll call them Colette and Gert--had been among my best friends through high school. I had several groups of friends, actually, and though they occasionally intersected, they were actually very discrete groups. The group they belonged to had been my friends since freshman year, and they were the group of Normal Girls. Actually, Gert and I were the least normal of the crowd, since we both had weight issues, or at least we thought we did. (Gert did, actually, and she knew it. I thought I did, which was just as bad, but again: in pictures, I don't see a fat girl.) But the rest of the girls in this group--there were about eight or eleven of us--were fashion-conscious, interested in looking "correct" and in acting like "normal" people--in other words, not drawing any kind of "negative" attention to themselves. More than once they had pointed out my faults--holding my purse the wrong way, or my strange shoes, or being too loud, or whatever--but apparently my flaws were forgivable enough that they kept me around. Gert and I, by our status as the unusual ones, were very close--writing notes, planning sleepovers, long phone-calls, etc. We had a lot in common; we were both writers, both into science-fiction and fantasy, both very verbal and with very silly senses of humor. Unlike me, though, Gert seemed to aspire to the kind of normality that the other girls embodied, and as such, she was also extremely devoted to Colette. Colette was the Voice of Propriety, and Gert seemed to see her as a mentor, someone who could teach her how to be socially acceptable. Colette seemed to enjoy having a student following at her heels, and so they were very close as well.
Anyway, after Gert and Colette left my apartment in a huff, I waited a few days to let them cool down. And then, knowing that only Colette would be allowed to decide if I should be forgiven, I called her. But Colette wasn't having any of it. I tried to explain, I tried to apologize, and she just got huffier and huffier, and louder and louder, and finally I said "You know what? I tried," and she hung up on me.
That was the last time I talked to either of them, and that was in 1989.
And it's twenty years later--TWENTY YEARS, my god--and so when I saw Gert's name in Facebook, I figured We're all grownups now, right? and I dropped her a note: "Hey. It's been a long time; want to talk, or no?"
That was a few weeks ago. And today, I figured I'd check to see if there were any of our other friends she was in touch with, and I peeked at her friend list.
Her entire friend list is practically a roll-call of our old high-school classmates. I'm talking about people we never hung around with; guys from entirely different groups, people we wouldn't have spoken to for a million dollars back in high school, just everyone. Every single person listed under our high school and our graduation year is on her list of friends.
Except one.
I went into my Facebook profile after that, and I cleared out all mention of my school history. And then I took out all the information about my interests, and all the little fripperies that you can put on Facebook to tell others about you. And I added a status update: "Gladys is..." ...amazed at how petty people can be.
The thing is: I would not be surprised if the grapevine has had its way with my reputation. People who know bits and pieces, little details they can stick together with chewed-up bubblegum and spit and rumors, and weave into some amazing tapestry of We Always Suspected Gladys Was A Bitch. It's like at my grade-school reunion, when one of my classmates was finally kind enough to tell me why everyone had been making mysterious comments to me all night: because everyone believed I'd killed JP, who they'd never known or even heard of--but some of my classmates are on the police force, and one of them was stationed in JP's mom's neighborhood right around the time he died. And it all became a story that I'd killed him and been to jail, and I found it funny because I knew for a FACT that had JP been alive to hear that story, he would have absolutely REVELED in the myth that we'd created. But of course, even though it was funny, it wasn't really funny--it was just proof that people will believe anything, especially if it's something sordid, and especially especially if it's about someone they didn't really like in the first place.
Anyway, after cleaning off my Facebook info, I went to my Classmates account. I'd had similar encounters on Classmates: people who had been closer to me than siblings, in at least one case, who never answered my attempts to get back in contact. So I sent a couple of e-mails to those people--a kind of "one last try" thing, with my e-mail address included--and then I sent a message to the Classmates admins, telling them to cancel my membership and delete my profile. Before I left, I looked at my guestbook.
On Classmates, the guestbook tells you who has looked at your profile and checked a box to let you know that they were there. There were a few names there; a couple of my old students, and two girls from grade school...and my ex-husband.
No, not CR; we, at least, have an understanding. No, no; I'm talking about DAVID, the infamous First Husband, the one who destroyed my credit, kept many of my belongings, followed me around the Internet til I told him "don't ever contact me again". I guess he doesn't think this counts as "contact".
Of course, I had to see what he put in his profile. (And no, I did NOT check the box that would let him know I was there. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.) I can tell you what he did NOT put in his profile: the fact that he's now on his THIRD marriage (at least, his third that I know of); any information regarding those first two marriages (I left him for another man; his second wife wrote a crapload of bad checks on his employers' account, then took off); and in terms of the parts of his life I know about--1990 thru 1995, basically--anything even REMOTELY resembling an accurately-portrayed, truthful FACT. The man is a scumball. He's a self-aggrandizing macho bullshit artist. Reading his biographical story, you would think that once he got out of high school he'd magically transformed into a combination of Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley, and Saint Peter. There are jobs where he claimed to have "managed" or "run" or "been in charge of" something, when in reality he rode his friends' coattails and did so little actual work that his friend finally told him "maybe you'd better go find something that can pay you, because we really can't". I would love, love, love to go over that pack of lies with a red pen and clear up all the inaccuracies; put in the things he left out, and cut down his inflated, egotistical, totally pretentious bullshit.
The funniest thing of all: After this blog post, I probably won't even think about him for months--maybe in April, when our anniversary would have been; or November, around his birthday. About 361 days in any given year, as far as I'm concerned he might as well have never even existed...but right now I would take an unflattering amount of unmitigated pleasure in writing a rebuttal to that puff-piece. Seriously, it's SO MANY FRICKIN' LIES. It's like he did plastic surgery on his life, and only kept the little bumps and smile-lines--the flaws that make him SEEM "real", the things that serve to cover up how much he's actually taken out, that keep him from seeming "fake". Well, he IS fake. And every time I've come across him, from the moment I left him, I've been reminded again and again of exactly HOW fake he really is.
Needless to say, my mood--to say nothing of my opinion of the human race--is fairly low. I just don't know why so many people from my past want nothing to do with me--why people who were once my dearest friends can't even be bothered to answer an e-mail. No one, I'm sure, ever wants to think they might be a bad or unlovable person--and if it was just a couple of people acting as though I was best forgotten, I'd be more able to dismiss their rejections--but really, it's starting to seem more like a consensus, and that worries me. I can think of at least six or seven people, without even trying, who won't acknowledge me, and no matter how many ways I try to frame it, I'm still hurt and stung and worried by their opinions.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Or I Could Just Smoke Crystal Meth, Instead.
I have found the most ridiculously-addictive thing in the entire universe, even more addictive than the little shortbread cookies with a dollop of fudge frosting that they sell at the Dominick's by my Saturday office--and that's saying something.
I'm sure you have all heard of Sudoku; this is sort of Sudoku-like, except it involves actual math. Now, for those of you who think that sounds like as much fun as a root canal...well, yeah, I guess there are math-phobes among us, and I suppose I can't blame them, but this isn't like, DIFFICULT math; it's little addition/subtraction/basic multiplication/division stuff, and...
I'm going to stop trying to justify this, and just throw the link out there.
Meet...the Kenken.
If anyone needs me, I'll be working on the 9x9 grid.
I'm sure you have all heard of Sudoku; this is sort of Sudoku-like, except it involves actual math. Now, for those of you who think that sounds like as much fun as a root canal...well, yeah, I guess there are math-phobes among us, and I suppose I can't blame them, but this isn't like, DIFFICULT math; it's little addition/subtraction/basic multiplication/division stuff, and...
I'm going to stop trying to justify this, and just throw the link out there.
Meet...the Kenken.
If anyone needs me, I'll be working on the 9x9 grid.
Cognitive Dissonance, or Why I'm Updating My Resume
Every day I talk to people who are my friends, my family, whatever--people in my real, non-work life. Many of these people think I'm smart, or talented, or capable, or creative, or independent, or clear-thinking, or whatever. Some people even think I'm more than one of the above. They know me as the person who, faced with a problem, will come up with a solution; the person who can cook anything, find information on the Web, build furniture, fix broken things, write an awesome letter of complaint. They know me as the person who will generally come up with new ways to accomplish some goal, when the old ways aren't feasible. Most of my friends, at least once in a while, look to me for help or advice or something--they think I have a clue of how to get through life.
But every morning at 10:00, I walk into my office, and immediately I am surrounded by people who remember my every mistake, my every flub, my every flaw; people who think I'm incompetent, a liability, a joke. If you listen to these people, I'm the most remedial person in the department; my mistakes are used as punch-lines, and my personality flaws are fodder for the office wag. Even when I -do- manage to say something insightful or useful, my boss credits the idea to someone else--someone less-stupid than I apparently am--and when I object, or say "Actually, I was the one who said that," he laughs it off and encourages the rest of the gang to play along. Other people are given extra tasks and projects, letting them display their capabilities; I, on the other hand, am left out of even the simplest projects, and when I ask why, I'm either accused of being "angry" or "touchy" or "whiny", or I'm reminded of assorted past mistakes. Apparently I am the only one, of the six people in the department, who has ever made a mistake; or perhaps the other ones' mistakes are forgivable, where mine are evidently not.
Somewhere there's a middle ground, between my away-from-the-office self, with the giant "S" stitched across her chest; and my at-work self, sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on her head while all the other children laugh and point. One side is more-right about me than the other; one side doesn't know me very well.
Tonight, though, I don't know which side is closer to the real truth.
But every morning at 10:00, I walk into my office, and immediately I am surrounded by people who remember my every mistake, my every flub, my every flaw; people who think I'm incompetent, a liability, a joke. If you listen to these people, I'm the most remedial person in the department; my mistakes are used as punch-lines, and my personality flaws are fodder for the office wag. Even when I -do- manage to say something insightful or useful, my boss credits the idea to someone else--someone less-stupid than I apparently am--and when I object, or say "Actually, I was the one who said that," he laughs it off and encourages the rest of the gang to play along. Other people are given extra tasks and projects, letting them display their capabilities; I, on the other hand, am left out of even the simplest projects, and when I ask why, I'm either accused of being "angry" or "touchy" or "whiny", or I'm reminded of assorted past mistakes. Apparently I am the only one, of the six people in the department, who has ever made a mistake; or perhaps the other ones' mistakes are forgivable, where mine are evidently not.
Somewhere there's a middle ground, between my away-from-the-office self, with the giant "S" stitched across her chest; and my at-work self, sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on her head while all the other children laugh and point. One side is more-right about me than the other; one side doesn't know me very well.
Tonight, though, I don't know which side is closer to the real truth.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Mid-Winter
You know spring is coming when the countdown calendar on NASCAR.com says "14 days to Daytona!!!" I'm going to have to say: things are...improving. Not "good" yet, exactly, but improving.
I've had some major realizations recently--I've had plenty of time for major realizations, since I was at home sick for two days with the evil cold that has been circulating around my office. (It's somewhat better now, with the exception of the tendency to periodically launch into a high-speed machine-gunning of sneezes. As in, aCHOO!aCHOO!aCHOO!aCHOO! with no time to take a breath between them, in some cases; the sort of sneezing which practically guarantees the eventual loss of a contact lens.) Anyhow--major realizations.
First: I've been putting wayyyy too much expectations on the medication. There is not a pill in the world that's going to fix the main things that trouble me--one, JP's continued absence; two, the growing sense that I've missed a HUGE chunk of my life, which is not coming back either; three, the sudden understanding that I will never be 24 again, and that all the experiences and discoveries of that part of my life are behind me. There's not really much NEW from now on, and that's hard for me to take; and meanwhile, I feel like I would imagine a coma patient feels, waking up after fourteen years to all the changes that have taken place, to a world that's moved on while they have stood completely still. I miss JP; I miss the idea of him--the little details particular to only him, which no one else will ever be able to replicate even if I wanted them to--and I miss myself, as well. I miss who I was before JP died, before CR came along and smashed my self-image and my confidence to pieces, before LJ finished the job with his years of indifference. I consider going out into the world and trying to meet someone new, someone I could have a relationship with, and there's an enormous disconnect in my mind; as an abstract thought, I can see it, but when I actually put myself in that picture as the object of attention or affection, it becomes a "yeah, right."
And yet underneath it all I want to be ME again; want music in my life, want to wear my hair down with long braids in it, and string bracelets, and hi-tops, and to get a tattoo, or another piercing. I want to wake up in the morning full of ideas and plans; or to play hooky because it's a beautiful day and I can't bear the thought of wasting it at work, instead of because I can't bear the thought of leaving my nice safe bed. I want to have the energy level and the motivation I had when I was in college, and the confidence in my own ideas. I want all the "I can'ts" to go away, and all the memories of the things that created them in the first place. I want to stop being all self-effacing, pretending I don't know something so that the other person feels superior to me even if we're just equal.
Don't get me wrong: it's getting better, I think. Today, for the first time in can't-remember-when, my day off did not involve sleeping all day; I got up at 8, went to the clinic, went to the grocery store, went for a long walk, cleaned up the apartment a bit, helped Tim with the online portion of his cell-phone account, did Squeaky's taxes for her, then did my own because why the hell not, and then did laundry while making spaghetti sauce. Mind you, I'm freakin' EXHAUSTED; the anti-d's are apparently screwing with my sleep cycle a bit, because I haven't slept well for nearly a week now, since my dose went up; I'm just hoping it's a temporary thing, something I need to get used to.
Work...Okay, look. I love my job, okay? But right at the moment it SUCK SUCK SUCKS. The Crazy drove away a new employee after only four days, by humiliating her for not knowing The Crazy's last name yet; then, after that, there was The Big Post-Budget-Meeting Come-To-Jeebus Talk, in which we were informed that overtime will no longer be paid, our on-call hours will no longer be paid, there will be no more travel, much less training, and we will be stretching out the lifespan of the computers to five years instead of the original three--even though at least half the computers in question were found to have a fatal flaw which causes the motherboards to melt down, and even though every solitary one of these flawed machines is now out of warranty. Meanwhile, my immediate boss--despite his total lack of a spine--had a Come-To-Jeebus talk with ME, about how I wasn't doing enough work tickets. The reason my numbers were screwed was because I was not counting the things I did on Saturdays--clearing paper jams, helping students with tiny trivial problems--simply BECAUSE they were tiny, trivial problems, and I thought they were beneath notice. Well, once that convo had ended, I started tracking my Saturdays as well; my numbers are now toward the TOP of the pack, rather than the bottom. But there are things that could be done that would make ALL of us more efficient, and management flatly refuses to consider them--and now, if there's money involved, even just $10, now they've got a watertight excuse for WHY they refuse.
Meanwhile, the Circus has left town.
Squeaky found a place to live--a place with a family, a father, daughter, and her kids, where Squeaky gets a room of her own and can keep the cats, in exchange for a minor amount of rent and light babysitting chores. (I don't know if I blogged about the big catastrophe; basically, they had a place to stay til Tim's hospitalization, at which point their roommate--a 61-yr-old friend of Squeaky's, remember--said Tim was no longer welcome there. Shortly thereafter, he reconsidered, and one night Tim was there when he and Squeaky got into a fight and Squeaky had one of her screaming, violent meltdowns--Tim was trying to walk out the door to cool down and get away from the argument, but Squeaky wouldn't let him go and physically blocked his way, and when he pushed past her and walked out the door, she ran after him into the ice and snow--barefoot, which ended up causing frostbite--and directly into a small knot of police officers, who had been called by the neighbors. Tim came here, and when I went to bed that night it was with the information that they were "done"--that Tim had finally had enough, that he was through dealing with her.
The next morning I woke up and she was asleep on my floor with him.
Apparently the 61-yr-old had told her that SHE was no longer welcome either, and that if either of them wanted their belongings, she could either take them with her or they'd need the police to get them. Anyway, they stayed for two weeks or so; Tim worked on getting a storage space for his stuff, and Squeaky worked on getting a place to stay (for herself only, and the cats). Finally she found a place with a family--father, daughter, daughter's two kids--and went to get her and Tim's belongings on the day she was to move in.
Her stuff was all there. Tim's stuff--his more-expensive clothes, his video camera, the laptop I'd given him, and a bunch of other stuff as well--was gone. Apparently the 61-year-old's twentysomething "friends" had taken it and hocked it or something.
I'll get to the rest of this story in the next post.....
I've had some major realizations recently--I've had plenty of time for major realizations, since I was at home sick for two days with the evil cold that has been circulating around my office. (It's somewhat better now, with the exception of the tendency to periodically launch into a high-speed machine-gunning of sneezes. As in, aCHOO!aCHOO!aCHOO!aCHOO! with no time to take a breath between them, in some cases; the sort of sneezing which practically guarantees the eventual loss of a contact lens.) Anyhow--major realizations.
First: I've been putting wayyyy too much expectations on the medication. There is not a pill in the world that's going to fix the main things that trouble me--one, JP's continued absence; two, the growing sense that I've missed a HUGE chunk of my life, which is not coming back either; three, the sudden understanding that I will never be 24 again, and that all the experiences and discoveries of that part of my life are behind me. There's not really much NEW from now on, and that's hard for me to take; and meanwhile, I feel like I would imagine a coma patient feels, waking up after fourteen years to all the changes that have taken place, to a world that's moved on while they have stood completely still. I miss JP; I miss the idea of him--the little details particular to only him, which no one else will ever be able to replicate even if I wanted them to--and I miss myself, as well. I miss who I was before JP died, before CR came along and smashed my self-image and my confidence to pieces, before LJ finished the job with his years of indifference. I consider going out into the world and trying to meet someone new, someone I could have a relationship with, and there's an enormous disconnect in my mind; as an abstract thought, I can see it, but when I actually put myself in that picture as the object of attention or affection, it becomes a "yeah, right."
And yet underneath it all I want to be ME again; want music in my life, want to wear my hair down with long braids in it, and string bracelets, and hi-tops, and to get a tattoo, or another piercing. I want to wake up in the morning full of ideas and plans; or to play hooky because it's a beautiful day and I can't bear the thought of wasting it at work, instead of because I can't bear the thought of leaving my nice safe bed. I want to have the energy level and the motivation I had when I was in college, and the confidence in my own ideas. I want all the "I can'ts" to go away, and all the memories of the things that created them in the first place. I want to stop being all self-effacing, pretending I don't know something so that the other person feels superior to me even if we're just equal.
Don't get me wrong: it's getting better, I think. Today, for the first time in can't-remember-when, my day off did not involve sleeping all day; I got up at 8, went to the clinic, went to the grocery store, went for a long walk, cleaned up the apartment a bit, helped Tim with the online portion of his cell-phone account, did Squeaky's taxes for her, then did my own because why the hell not, and then did laundry while making spaghetti sauce. Mind you, I'm freakin' EXHAUSTED; the anti-d's are apparently screwing with my sleep cycle a bit, because I haven't slept well for nearly a week now, since my dose went up; I'm just hoping it's a temporary thing, something I need to get used to.
Work...Okay, look. I love my job, okay? But right at the moment it SUCK SUCK SUCKS. The Crazy drove away a new employee after only four days, by humiliating her for not knowing The Crazy's last name yet; then, after that, there was The Big Post-Budget-Meeting Come-To-Jeebus Talk, in which we were informed that overtime will no longer be paid, our on-call hours will no longer be paid, there will be no more travel, much less training, and we will be stretching out the lifespan of the computers to five years instead of the original three--even though at least half the computers in question were found to have a fatal flaw which causes the motherboards to melt down, and even though every solitary one of these flawed machines is now out of warranty. Meanwhile, my immediate boss--despite his total lack of a spine--had a Come-To-Jeebus talk with ME, about how I wasn't doing enough work tickets. The reason my numbers were screwed was because I was not counting the things I did on Saturdays--clearing paper jams, helping students with tiny trivial problems--simply BECAUSE they were tiny, trivial problems, and I thought they were beneath notice. Well, once that convo had ended, I started tracking my Saturdays as well; my numbers are now toward the TOP of the pack, rather than the bottom. But there are things that could be done that would make ALL of us more efficient, and management flatly refuses to consider them--and now, if there's money involved, even just $10, now they've got a watertight excuse for WHY they refuse.
Meanwhile, the Circus has left town.
Squeaky found a place to live--a place with a family, a father, daughter, and her kids, where Squeaky gets a room of her own and can keep the cats, in exchange for a minor amount of rent and light babysitting chores. (I don't know if I blogged about the big catastrophe; basically, they had a place to stay til Tim's hospitalization, at which point their roommate--a 61-yr-old friend of Squeaky's, remember--said Tim was no longer welcome there. Shortly thereafter, he reconsidered, and one night Tim was there when he and Squeaky got into a fight and Squeaky had one of her screaming, violent meltdowns--Tim was trying to walk out the door to cool down and get away from the argument, but Squeaky wouldn't let him go and physically blocked his way, and when he pushed past her and walked out the door, she ran after him into the ice and snow--barefoot, which ended up causing frostbite--and directly into a small knot of police officers, who had been called by the neighbors. Tim came here, and when I went to bed that night it was with the information that they were "done"--that Tim had finally had enough, that he was through dealing with her.
The next morning I woke up and she was asleep on my floor with him.
Apparently the 61-yr-old had told her that SHE was no longer welcome either, and that if either of them wanted their belongings, she could either take them with her or they'd need the police to get them. Anyway, they stayed for two weeks or so; Tim worked on getting a storage space for his stuff, and Squeaky worked on getting a place to stay (for herself only, and the cats). Finally she found a place with a family--father, daughter, daughter's two kids--and went to get her and Tim's belongings on the day she was to move in.
Her stuff was all there. Tim's stuff--his more-expensive clothes, his video camera, the laptop I'd given him, and a bunch of other stuff as well--was gone. Apparently the 61-year-old's twentysomething "friends" had taken it and hocked it or something.
I'll get to the rest of this story in the next post.....
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