November 17, 2009 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb, I Write About My Feelings

This is when it’s the worst: two beers after work and I’m relaxed enough to want some affection, some attention, a connection to someone who wants to know how my day was and to tell me stories about his in return. Instead, I’m on my way home to an empty house where the only thing awaiting my attention is the dishwasher that needs to be unloaded.

* * * * *

We broke up two months ago. Feels like six. Or yesterday. Or a lifetime ago.

In my head, I know it was the right thing. To my family, I characterized it as “square peg, round hole,” which is accurate, but gives short shrift to the emotional intricacies of it all.

I feel sadness, to be sure, mixed in with a dash of anger and a hearty scoop of frustration/annoyance. And there’s this weird achy hangover sort of thing that I’ve never felt before. I think it’s called regret. For someone with a “no regrets” approach to life, this merely leads to more anger and more annoyance.

If I could take it all back, I would. Undo, somehow, the last four and a half years, gather it all up and shove it into the Pandora’s box from whence it came, never to see the light of day. Yep, in a heartbeat.

I hate that that’s true.

* * * * *

This is when it’s the worst: in the middle of an average day, when I’m listening to a series of boring speakers and the next one starts and I wait on the edge of my seat, counting the minutes until the panelist says those two words that he and I both know are coming. FLAGSHIP ISSUE. I look around the full room and realize that there’s no one to share the joke with.

* * * * *

Believing in me is easy. Believing in him wasn’t that hard, either. But at the end of the day, after all that was discussed, all that was promised, all that was intimated … none of it came to fruition. It was a man behind a curtain, nothing more.

I believed in us. And I was wrong, oh so wrong. That’s going to take some getting used to.

* * * * *

I miss him, sort of. More accurately, I miss us. I miss the good parts and the spectacular parts and even some of the so-so parts. I really miss the components of a stable, workable relationship that we never had.

At the risk of sounding like a song from middle school, there’s a hole in my heart that can only be filled by him. And it never will be. I know this; I’m not holding out for some sort of magical twist of fate that will change that. Nor do I expect that anyone else, ever, no matter how wonderful he/she is will ever fill precisely that space. All I’m hoping for at this point is that I can turn the vase and have the blemish face the wall, thereby presenting a perfect face to the rest of the room. Flaunt the good, disguise the ugly. It’s the American way, at least according to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

* * * * *

He had a birthday recently, and for the first time in three years I wasn’t there to take him to dinner at his current favorite restaurant. I wonder which one it is. I wonder who was there instead. And I know that no matter who it was, or is in the future, she’ll never be able to replace me.

* * * * *

This is when it’s the worst: crawling into an empty bed, wondering if I’ll ever feel that kind of closeness again, and holding out hope that maybe, just maybe, next time it will be for real.

June 28, 2009 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb, Thinky

I want him to be cute and smart and funny, but doesn’t everybody say that?

I want him to be sensible and responsible and responsive to others’ needs.

I want him to have a job he likes and finds fulfillment in.

I want him to have a positive view of marriage and building a family. It would help if his parents are still together and actually like each other, but I recognize he’s not in charge of that particular dynamic.

I want him to have friends, some of whom will become my friends.

I want him to be good in bed. Yes, I said it.

I want him to come with only an overnight bag’s worth of baggage from previous relationships, if at all possible.

I want him to still be hopeful.

I want to walk down the street with him, holding hands. When we’re 60.

I want him to be athletic.

I want him to know, instinctively, that we’re on the same team. Some days we’ll be running a relay race, others we’ll be the core of an offensive line, but always we’ll have matching jerseys.

I want him to like his family.

I want him to like my family.

I want him to read and explore and travel and be willing to join me when I suggest something crazy like, “Let’s hike the Grand Canyon!” At the very least, I want him to willingly hold down the fort when I go off and do something crazy like hike the Grand Canyon.

I want it to last.

January 26, 2009 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb

At the outset, let me just say, if you’re looking for happy! fun! entertainment! you should probably go elsewhere.  Unless you’re big into schadenfreude.

We ended things in December. Yes, “things” is about the only way to describe it, as it was never a real relationship. That doesn’t stop it from feeling like a real break-up, though, albeit with far fewer tears. Strange how that works.

Thus began the long, complicated work of being friends — a strategy I do not necessarily endorse, but did not want to be too quick to rule out. However, let me offer you three data points:

• Building a friendship is hard work, particularly when starting from this somewhat awkward point.
• He does not believe in hard work. Maximum output for minimum input is his M.O.
• In my entire lifetime, I’ve become friends with exactly zero people after dating them. Some people I’ve been friends with, then dated, then reverted back to friends, but that’s it.

You can see why I’ve been deeply suspicious of this approach.

Our first get-together ended in awkward silence, followed by a tortured e-mail conversation, wherein it was promised that things would get better, eventually, but with no game plan as to how “better” would magically come about.

Our second get-together was more civil. I chalk that up to occurring in the middle of the workday and mostly talking about work things.

Our third get-together was fine, until it ended abruptly. And then was followed by a phone conversation with honest-to-goodness yelling. And a terse e-mail conversation the next day, to wrap up some of the loose ends from the phone conversation.

So. This is the point at which I generally tell people to take a permanent vacation from my life. Right now, though, I don’t have a plan, a desired course of action. Part of me wants to be able to be friends. Part of me says it is not at all worth the aggravation. Another part of me just wants to take a nap. (I’d say that part is about 72% of the total.) Do you think I can just sleep this off like a rough night out?

November 19, 2008 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb, Is She Still Talking?

Well, here we are again.  You get paragraph snippets instead of nice, well-thought-out posts, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do this blogging thing properly.  But, hey, at least I’m only a few weeks behind here, as opposed to the six years behind I am at work.  Which, ha, is funny because I’ve only worked there a year! HA!  (Kill me now.)

Oh yeah, the election

New Hampshire went well and all our candidates won and we kicked ass in my traditionally-very-Republican county, so it was a win all around.  Again this year, I was moderately happy on Election Night, but nothing overly emotional, which is fine by me. And then I spent part of the plane ride home crying.

(Did I not tell you this story from Indiana 2006? I was probably too busy then, too. Anyway — I’d picked out music for the candidate to use at the victory party, a long looping of “Take Us Out” (go listen to it on iTunes, I can’t link to it from here) from the Rudy soundtrack. It was perfect. The day after the election, I got on a plane back to California, exhausted, and spent most of the flight asleep. Slept through beverage/snack service, slept through announcements about the in-flight entertainment, slept through most of the movie. I woke up, put my glasses on and in a few seconds, recognized that the movie being shown was Rudy, rather than some much newer release. Having seen it so many times, I knew we were near the climax of the movie, the last game of the season. I popped my headphones in the armrest and lo and behold, that exact track started playing not 10 seconds later. And I lost it. The end.)

This time around, the emotion was driven largely by what electing Barack Obama means for this country. I am proud of US. All of us.

Yes, it’s historic that we’ve elected a non-white leader. But even bigger than that, we’ve chosen optimism for the future over the old way of doing things. I cannot tell you how many people were truly excited about his candidacy. This wasn’t 2004. People didn’t vote for him because he’s not George W. Bush, they voted for him because he is who he is. And, more impressively, people got involved in the political process because they were drawn to him and his vision.

One woman I volunteered with — someone my mom’s age — came up from Boston. She’d never done anything political before, other than voting, but back in the primaries she said to herself, if Barack Obama is the nominee, I’m taking a week off of work and volunteering somewhere. And she did. Yes, this was a campaign that involved a lot of young people — they always are — but his message resonated with those who are a little older and a little wiser and who are crafting a future that they want their kids and their grandkids to experience. A future that’s better than what we’ve had for the last decade.

Another volunteer told us about the cashier at Wal-Mart who commented on his Obama-Biden button, days before the election. “I’m not really supposed to talk about this stuff here,” the cashier said, “but I want you to know I support him. I’d love to be involved, but I can’t — I have to work — but I just think he’s going to do good things. He can really help people like me.”

Yes, he can. Together, we all can.

Bleeding heart, of a less liberal variety

There’s no good segue into this, so I’ll just say it: a couple of weeks ago, in the midst of all my traveling, my dad had heart surgery. A triple bypass, to be exact.

The good news is, the surgery was the result of diagnostic tests, not a massive heart attack. The bad news is, uh, it’s still major heart surgery. After racking up a bunch of points toward that Daughter of the Year award through annoyingly frequent heartfelt long-distance phone calls (meanwhile, my sister spent a week at the hospital and at home and EVEN MY BROTHER was around for the surgery and two recovery days) I finally figured out that, hey, maybe I should go home, even if I can’t be there for the exact day of the surgery. So I am. (Mother: Well, you don’t HAVE to…  Me: Of course not. In our family, we don’t NEED anything. But I’m coming anyway.)

It’s like a hobby, only not as fun

I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time lately furniture shopping, both online an in real, actual furniture stores, all of which are conveniently located 20 to 100 miles outside of DC. (You think I’m kidding.) After six months of living here and not having made any real progress on the living room and kitchen areas of the house, I figured it was time to get moving. Part of that is also because I knew I didn’t want the happy lime green and and yellow and white stripey-ness that was summer furniture this year, so I had to wait for that stuff to get off the sales floor.

As time- (and gas-) consuming as furniture shopping is though, it’s been much more rewarding now that I finally stumbled upon my theme. (It came to me in New Hampshire, of all places.) Bascially, I want my living room to be like fall. The walls are painted green and there will be golds and pumpkin oranges and rich, chocolatey browns and it will make you feel like oatmeal raisin cookies and hot apple cider. Eventually, there will be furniture. And pictures for you, of course.

Retreat! RETREAT!

Him: Maybe it’s tough for people in their early thirties to understand this sort of thing… *meaningful glance in my direction*

Me: Did you just assert that I’m in my early thirties?!? That’s got to be worse than anything I said this weekend.

Note: I’d said some pretty stupid things over the weekend, including getting upset about something that really, really shouldn’t be a big deal. I even realized at the time that it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it was still gnawing at me, so I said something ugly. At the end of the day Sunday when I went to take my pill, I realized why I was making a bigger deal out of this than was warranted. I’m thinking I should just add a recurring appointment to my Outlook calendar for five days a month: “Dear Self, Do you suspect that you’re over-reacting about something, but just can’t shake it? Are you generally frustrated and can’t figure out why, so you blame everyone else? ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN.”

April 22, 2008 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb, I Write About My Feelings

I like to be right. And I like to win.

(I know, this revelation shocks you.)

I want to tell him he’s wrong, wrong, wrong, point out all the ways in which he’s wrong, all the places where things could have gone differently, if we had but made other choices, all the ways in which what did happen was a direct result of the choices we, individually, made. And I desperately want to correct the assertions — explicit and implicit — from that last conversation and his subsequent e-mail. (Which is still unresponded-to, I might add.) Heck, I’d probably even tell him that he’s right about a few things, though it’s clear he doesn’t understand why those things are they way they are.

But I won’t. Because in this scenario, winning is defined entirely by my ability to not speak to him. And even more than being right, I like to win.