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April 02, 2002: The story is my life
If you're wondering, this month's metropass is that pinkish purple colour I'm using for the sidebar and title. Aren't you glad I'm not using it for the body? Me too. I didn't like last month's colours; I thought I would get used to the white on blue, but I didn't. White text on a dark background looks lame these days, it seems. I'm into black text on off-white. I also painted my condo off-white, so maybe this is a trend or something. I'm feeling much better today. (Ugh, aren't journals boring, "I feel like crap", "I feel better", "I feel like crap", etc, over and over again.) I was feeling guilty and miserable, the same guilty and miserable I feel a lot of the time. Guilty because I don't practice, and guilty because I told my parents I would send them something and I haven't done it yet. But I'm not sure if the guilty came before the miserable, or vice versa. I rather think the miserable came first, and then, feeling miserable, I determined that I'm a rotten and lazy person for not doing those things I should do. Rinse, repeat. So I smacked the miserable around a little bit; I smiled at some people, I applied the 5-year test to the stuff going on at work, I let myself stop worrying about the things I should do but don't, I emptied the dishwasher. And I cuddled with Blake, and slept well last night. And voila, no more miserable, and the guilty feeling is mostly gone too.
I'm listening to Counting Crows. I used to listen to this CD back when I was living with Mike in Ottawa; I would come home from work, and go into his bedroom to pick up my email on his computer, and I'd listen to this CD. He used to get home after me, and we hung out and talked in his room. It was a really weird situation. I had this huge crush on him, (I mean, who wouldn't? He was a fantastic guy! Still is, probably.) but I was too self-conscious to act on it. That was before the trip to Europe, the trip which taught me how to talk to people. It's such a long story, isn't it? I mean, it's so many stories, all connected. See, my parents are not sociable people. I can count on my fingers the number of times we had people over throughout my childhood. And similarly, we never went to other peoples' places. I never saw my parents socialize, except in a most superficial way (like, with store clerks), and as a result I never learned how to do it myself. Somehow I always managed to make friends, but I never knew how to break the ice with strangers, or how to make conversation at a moderately deep but not intimate level. Then in 1998 I went to Europe. I spent four months backpacking alone through England, Scotland, Italy, Croatia, and some other places. I stayed in hostels most of the time, and I quickly learned to plunge headlong into conversations with anyone who showed the slightest interest in talking to. And freely, without fear, because if I should have happened to make an ass of myself I knew that either I or the other person would be gone the next day and I'd never see them again. I got into some fantastically intimate conversations, about being 22, about university, about life, about men, about friends. Having a new conversational foil every day is a great way to learn about yourself, because you don't settle into the comfortable rhythm of topics and evasions which happens with friends. You get to test the truth of what you say against a new sounding board each time. Not only that, though, I also learned how to be interested in people, how to learn about their lives and views, how to start conversations with strangers. But I lived with Mike before I knew all that, so I would sit in his room, tongue-tied, with a million things I wanted to say and no way to say them. I just enjoyed being in his space, and listened to Counting Crows. And then... I might as well finish this story while I'm here, right? I mean, I can't really work because we only have one license for that crappy software which keeps crashing anyway, and doing this is better than reading the Internet. When I was living with Mike in Ottawa ("living with" in the sense of roommates, you got that, right?) I was going out with this guy in Waterloo. I had been going out with him for a couple of years, and it was... whatever. Suffice to say I was young and really did not know who I was or what I wanted, and I was just really happy that any guy would have me after the long, cold dry spell that was high school. But after a couple of years some part of me -- some part which had been shouting for quite some time -- finally shouted loud enough for me to hear. It shouted that I would be better off alone than in that relationship, and it also shouted something about the badness of being in a relationship while sustaining feelings such as those I had for Mike, and in addition it shouted that when there are men such as Mike in the world, I surely didn't want to continue going out with that other guy. I didn't really catch the details, though, I just caught the shouting, and I broke it off with the other guy. I still didn't do anything with Mike, though, because he was going out with someone, and because I lacked the confidence, and because it really seemed easier to worship him from afar. Which it was. But I did keep visiting the other guy in Waterloo, simply because it meant I could spend four hours each way alone in a car with Mike. That's lame, I know, but not as lame as the fact that I barely spoke to Mike on those long rides, because I didn't know how. What a waste. I totally could have seduced him away from that other chick if I had had the courage, and conversational ability. And that's not even the end of the story, because of course, the story is my life, and it carries on. That was October or thereabouts, of 1994, and the work term in Ottawa ended in December. I moved back to Waterloo for January, and I agreed to move into the same house as the other guy, my ex-boyfriend. That was dumb. Everyone knows moving in with your ex is dumb, but everyone does it anyway. And it was easier than trying to find another place to live. I was also still, sporadically, having sex with him, which is even stupider. I did it because I didn't want him to be sad, I didn't want breaking up to hurt him. That was also stupid. Clean break, people! Clean break! I think he thought we might get back together. That would not be an unreasonable thing to think, really, since I had left that possibility open, again, in a vain desire to hurt him less. (It occurs to me that all these clues I have about breaking up with people are going to go to waste, since I have no intention of breaking up with anyone ever again.) So there I was living in the same house as my ex, occasionally having sex with him, and then I met Blake. And then I stopped having sex with my ex, and I think that's when he figured it was all over. The story has a happy ending, though; he got himself a little 17-year-old blonde girl, and I got Blake. Yeah. |