May 13, 2008 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings

There is nothing that makes me so acutely aware of my singleton status as getting on an airplane.  It’s not the ridiculous amount of extraneous space in the hotel’s king-sized bed, it’s not attending a yet another damn wedding alone, it’s not spending Friday nights with Stacy and Clinton or Kyle Chandler.  Nope, it’s sitting at the airport knowing that I don’t need to call anyone before I board my flight to remind them to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost tell them I love them. Knowing that I don’t have anyone to check in with tonight, to tell about my day’s adventures. Knowing there will be no one counting down the minutes or waiting for me at the airport upon my return.

(Let’s be clear, here – I haven’t had any of those things even while dating someone. Which may explain, in part, why we’re no longer dating.)

This is not helped by the airlines’ insistence upon showing romantic comedies on my long-distance flights. Please, please, I’ll take a seventeenth viewing of Transformers over Music and Lyrics or 27 Dresses or Once or Away From Her. Even stupid Alvin and the Chipmunks had a solid guy-tries-to-win-girl storyline.  I cannot think of anything more distracting than looking up from my laptop, where I’m supposed to be putting together a PowerPoint presentation, and catching glimpes of a movie that remind me, P.S. Nobody Loves You.

(Incidentally, does anyone know how I can look more like Hilary Swank? That might alleviate the problem.)

This is a challenging piece to write, because there’s no pivot point in here, no moment I can point to and say, “that was then, but look how wonderful life is now,” so if you’re looking for a Hollywood ending, look elsewhere. In real life, things are much more complicated. Most of the time — the vast majority of the time — I’m happy to be single. I’ve long said I’d rather be single than wasting time with the wrong person, and I really, truly, feel that way — when a long-overdue relationship ends, when I meet someone new who just doesn’t quite fit, when I wonder if I should be spending more time on cultivating a personal life. I like being single, and there’s no reason to force anything else. But, if we’re being brutally honest, I have to admit that there are moments when it really sucks.

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.

July 15, 2007 | Filed under: Boys Are Dumb, I Write About My Feelings

I didn’t set out to write this. But here we are — it’s written and I’m about to hit “Publish.” I suspect that the timing is all wrong, but that’s been a hallmark of our relationship, hasn’t it? Why should today be any different?

I didn’t go looking for it. The box, that is. Steve made mention of cashing in his savings bonds, gathered at various childhood functions — spelling bees, science fairs, Christmas gifts — and I wondered where my stash of similarly-procured savings bonds was. Initially I thought maybe they were still at home, in the stack of stuff on Dad’s desk, at the back of the slotted organizer where the bills go, next to the electric calculator and the sheet of return address labels. I should ask him about that, I thought. But then I remembered looking at them in DC, in the dining room of last house I lived in, so that means they must be here, somewhere, in California.

Curious as to the whereabouts of those darn savings bonds, and coupled with the fact that I’m meeting my financial planner this week and need to dig out some financial documents for her, I went through my Drawer of Important Documents. Stuff in there doesn’t go back very far, most of it was from the first month I lived here — utility hook-ups, new cell phone plan, and a healthy collection of receipts, warranties, and related service plans — but there was plenty in there that could be tossed.

I went merrily along, opening envelopes with old bank statements, various bills that I’ve long since paid online, insurance policies that have expired or been updated. Into the trash went all the envelopes and return envelopes and envelope-stuffer advertising printed in color on slick, shiny paper. Into a pile for shredding went everything with my name, address and account number on it. What a waste, all those trees.

I yanked open the bottom drawer — old, sticky, built-in cabinetry that’s wood-on-wood, without the benefit of modern wheel-and-tray drawer slides — to retrieve the shredder, and that’s when I saw the box. Most days I forget all about it. Occasionally I’ll remember it’s there before I open the drawer, and I’ll flip it off or stick my tongue out at it or pointedly ignore it. Even more rarely, it doesn’t register and I can ignore it quite absent-mindedly. The box, however, always punches me in the gut.

The box. The Box of Us. The things you sent me. Rough drafts of some things I sent you. Ramblings, musings, questions for you written on the back of the lead pages of my print jobs at work. The symphony program — an exact match to the one that contributed to one of your countless breakups months later. The picture.

You kept the Box of You and Her. You packed the stuff up and put it on shelf, sure, but you kept it. Convenient for when you got back together, huh?

(And, oh, if this were not a public forum I would use her name right here, you know I would, because it makes you uncomfortable, I see you squirm at the sound of her name coming out of my mouth, how it forces you, for a split second, to not compartmentalize the two of us. Oh yes, that is not an accident. Very few of my word choices are an accident.)

You threw away everything I wrote, everything I sent, everything I didn’t think I could or should say but pushed myself to say anyway. It didn’t occur to you that I’d want me back. I didn’t need you to keep any of it, but I sure as hell thought I would get it all back.

I keep the Box of Us, despite the fact that it always punches me in the gut. No, I keep the Box of Us because it always punches me in the gut. I keep it not because I want to remember Us, but because I want to remember that I kept Us, while you did not. You threw Us away, literally and figuratively.

You kept the Box of You and Her, anticipating, perhaps, that she would remain in your life. You pitched the things of Us, assuming that I would cease to be part of your life. Well, I think, gathering up the shredder and slamming the drawer shut,
I can certainly make that happen.

I never did find those savings bonds.

June 25, 2007 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings, The Fam

Wow. Apparently I get a little crabby when I stay up past my bedtime. (Uh, 9 PM.) Sorry about that.

The parents have returned safely to their homeland, and now we can get back to our regular schedule of intermittent and all-too-infrequent posting here. Ahhhhhhhh.

We’re so accustomed to living far away from each other that sometimes it’s weird spending that much continuous time with my family. While all that togetherness drives me a little crazy, I am often struck by an overwhelming sense of “I am SO MUCH their child.” (This is not unique to me — my siblings suffer the same fate.)

These days, though, we’ve moved into more of a peer relationship, and less of a parent-child relationship. We talked about financial planners and life insurance and mutual funds, people, mutual funds. (I’m in need of one. Anyone have a recommendation?) In describing to my parents how the Comcast On Demand feature works, I characterized it as telling the remote control to “Bring me my movie, bitch!” Mom tried to scold me for using naughty language, but she was too busy laughing.

But then there were the times when I felt like the parent. Or at least the official worry-wart. They are clearly aging, especially my dad, and it concerns me. He often doesn’t realize you’re talking to him until the end of the sentence, and then you have to repeat the whole thing. He loves to drive and has spent most of his adult life in the transportation industry, but now he is less confident about where to go and how to get around unfamiliar places. He accelerates too much and brakes too little and is absolutely going to pitch a fit when we finally take the car keys away from him and, short of him being in a coma, I don’t know how to accomplish that task gently.

I think about where they might retire and if they can afford it and worry about them making new friends there. I wonder if we kids will live close enough and be available enough to help out, or if we’ll fall into the same visit-for-one-week-during-
the-summer schedule that defined our childhoods and our relationships with our grandparents.

I wonder if I worry too much.

But for now, when I’m not around to see it everyday, I can ignore their aging and they will live in my mind’s eye as the parents I left when I went away to college. And I’ll be surprised again at Christmas to see how much they’ve changed, and I’ll start worrying all over again.

June 5, 2007 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings, People I Like Even More Than My Job

You know, if you don’t want to run again, I respect that. But if you don’t run because you think it’s gonna be too hard or you think you’re gonna lose, well, God, Jed, I don’t even want to know you.

A while back I had dinner with my friend Danielle and, as we put back a bottle of wine, we discussed our respective career plans and personal life exploits and hatched plots to Escape from Alcatraz California. (She, by the way, is already implementing her plan. Bitch.)

Of course, in looking ahead to the future, we also analyzed the past — what worked, what didn’t, how we ended up where we are. About her selection of undergrad majors, she said, “Everyone said it was hard, so I was going to do it.”

And in that one moment, our eight years of friendship suddenly made a lot more sense.

I don’t know that I choose things simply because they’re hard, but I certainly don’t shy away from things that are challenging. (See, e.g.,: moving to California, climbing mountains, running a half marathon and dealing with stupid boys.) As I’ve explained, some of this is just hard-wired in me.

I really don’t mind new challenges, but what is driving me nuts is the seeming endlessness of the quest. The pursuit of a goal, without any intermediate victories to sustain me, my god, it is soul-sucking. It makes me question whether the pain is really worth it. It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t stop with the banging-head-against-a-brick-wall lifestyle.

I expressed some of my doubts to Danielle, explained why my pursuits are nearly in vain, why perhaps I should focus on a slightly more attainable goal — like single-handedly curing cancer — rather than continue headlong down this endless path of futility, how I have to come to terms with the fact that maybe things aren’t going to work out for me like I want them to.

She looked at me, and asked pointedly, “But you’re not giving up, right?”

And the thing is, for all my doubts (not doubts in my abilities, mind you, doubts that The Universe will come through for me) and all my pragmatic thinking and the reminders that maybe I won’t get what I want, I.Will.Not.Give.Up.

So. What’s next?