July 13, 2010
Those? The gloves over there? Yes, they’re off.
When I was in high school, I had an absurdly massive crush on this guy we’ll call Joe. Joe encouraged the crush, but never acted on it – impressive, since he was definitely a “bad boy” and I was ridiculously naive. Also, Joe started dating a girl whom I promptly began to hate. Haaaate. Really dislike. Solely on the basis of her relationship with him, because there wasn’t much else I could see to dislike. She was petite, with dark curly hair and big brown eyes – in a word, gorgeous. They had the same friends, the same taste in music. And all I had was a stupid crush.
One night, shortly after they’d broken up, she and I sat on my back porch and became really good friends. I was her maid of honor years later, when she married an entirely different sort of person, the sort who did NOT wind up pumping gas in size 40 coveralls. I’m lucky, because I’d said some pretty horrible things about her, when I thought I hated her. All superficial stuff, all just desperately trying to find a flaw so that I could hang onto some hope that Joe would break up with her and finally be free to see what he was missing with me.
I read *entirely* too much Sweet Valley High at that age. Which, I’ll explicitly state for emphasis, was FIFTEEN. Not mid-thirties. And I certainly never pretended to friendship where none existed.
I know I shouldn’t stoop. I really shouldn’t. But now that I’ve taken the gloves off, I’ll have to bend over to put them down at some point – I do hate just throwing things on the floor.
June 1, 2010
No Judging! Judge-Free Zone! Not to be confused with Snark, which is plentiful.
So, one of my best friends from college (DF) was in town this weekend, and it was totally awesome, for about eighteen billion reasons.
One of these reasons, is that she doesn’t judge. So when I start to experience a little of the Crazy, she hops into my crazy motorcycle’s sidecar and proceeds to guide me through the maze – she’s been there before, she knows the way out.
And so, when the Lady Voldemort reared her ugly head AGAIN, attempting to install herself as the new best friend of someone close to me, DF happily engaged in some damage assessment (which might have involved some online “research”), followed up with exactly the right amount of snark, reassurance, and white wine.
“Well, you know what they say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”
March 16, 2010
Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands.
The Swiss-engineered, Vulcanized Hammer of Logic has seemingly quashed Voldemole.
THWACK.
Take that!
March 15, 2010
Joey, have you ever been in… in a Turkish prison?
Mr. Graves, you will be missed.
Some friends of mine throw a party about this time every year. It’s St. Patrick’s Day themed, though it rarely falls on the 17th, as my friends are the practical sort who would rather give themselves a Sunday of recovery, rather than quibble about dates. These are friends I’ve known for well over a decade, and the group that shows up has a fair amount of history with one another.
Including me, and the sociopath who tried to apologize.
You see, I’ve known this guy for, again, roughly 14 years. One of my earliest, and most vivid memories of him, involves an evening when he asked me to help at a rush event, then proceeded to make reprehensible statements of a sexual nature about my best friend and roommate – who was underage at the time, incidentally.
Oh – and when I relayed that story both to the girl in question, as well as to some of my other female friends who socialized with that group, he acted as though I were in the wrong, for talking about a conversation that had happened at a rush event. As though I were a disappointment for not agreeing to keep his behavior under wraps.
He was apologizing for a completely different incident, though. One where he, despite knowing full well that I was not amenable to any such pairing, told a mutual friend of ours that I was interested in dating him, and that he should ask me out. Because I’d been pretty clear about my lack of interest, it was obvious to me that this guy enjoyed putting people into awkward situations, and didn’t particularly care about the consequences for anyone but himself.
So when he pulled me aside and offered a glib apology, I smiled and congratulated him on his lovely family, and didn’t accept a word of his contrition.
Because I am not some vapid, simpering idiot, or neglected preschooler, to be so easily manipulated with a practiced smile and diplomatic pablum.
I hope he ends up in a Turkish prison.
March 11, 2010
Whackamole
That’s what it’s like. Except that this whackamole game is rrrrrreeeeaaaalllllyyyyyyy slow. Also, the whacking doesn’t push the mole back down right away. It requires repeated whacking, for a much longer time than is convenient.
In short, it’s the LEAST FUN WHACKAMOLE EVER.
It’s that project that you flubbed three years ago – and every once in a while, it flashes into your memory with perfect clarity, nibbling away at your professional confidence and wreaking subtle havoc with second-guesses and paralyzing self-doubt.
It’s that time when you should have been forthright, but said that you’d call, and then you didn’t. After the third date. And now you run into the guy, or someone who knows him, and you get that sickening, hot flush of shame that makes you turn noticeably red for entire minutes to follow.
It’s that guy you cannot believe you dated. The one that you can’t believe you introduced to your friends, the one who is still on the fringes of some aspect of your social life. And everyone KNOWS you dated this person. And whenever you’re reminded of that, you suspect they think less of you for it.
It’s a mole named Voldemort. And you do your best not to name it. You’ve taken it out and looked at it and tried to deal with it, and then you tried to shove it into the deepest recesses of your psyche when dealing with it didn’t make it disappear. But in mole-like fashion, it quietly tunnels its way up to the surface, and peeks its head out, squeaking and sniffing, eating your garden along with your confidence, and no matter how many times you employ the mallet, the little rodent goes away only when it’s good and ready. And you know that normal people could let this go. Normal people would not be playing imaginary whackamole against themselves. Normal people would just put the memory away, where it belonged, and it would stay there.
And you wonder if the only way to get rid of it for good, is to smash the game or leave the arcade altogether.
September 29, 2009
Janice? Fran Fine? I’m afraid you’ll have to move over.
There is a new adenoidally-challenged woman in town, and she’s got you both beat by a mile.
Because not only does she seem to speak so entirely through her nose as to render her mouth superfluous, but her egocentricity is intense. And by intense, I mean that I don’t think I’ve ever seen her ask someone a personal question for which the answer wouldn’t convey some personal benefit. I’ve never seen her notice, or care, that maybe not everyone can drop what they’re doing *rightthen* to help, or listen, or do whatever it is she’s decided they need to be doing.
Intense.
And so, when in the middle of scoring a match, with a looming cloud of headache overhead, I did my best to look at my role in the conversation as an opportunity to experience some personal growth. Given that I managed not to say anything terribly offensive, I’d say my personal needs a longer inseam and bigger shoes.
Of course, I wonder if even thinking thoughts like this causes my personal to shrink, much like the Grinch’s heart, or Beetlejuice’s head.
September 18, 2009
I’m just going to stop plucking, and take up residence in a trashcan.
Because I have been *that* grouchy lately.
I suppose this is Karma’s way of letting me know she’s still around, despite the lack of conversation. I’d almost rather she just served me a diatribe, rather than let my own petard hoist me willy-nilly.
But the fact is, when you let noxious personages take up residence in your life for any real length of time, you kind of have to expect that they’ll leave trace evidence – like that time you accidentally used your real email address to purchase something, these slip-ups will deposit spam on your metaphorical doorstep for some time to come.
Sometimes, it’s nice to grab a jar of Nutella and a spoon, and think about what it might be like in a parallel universe, where the relationship you had, the one based almost entirely on your low self-esteem and bad judgement, never happened. And other times, you realize that this is part of the price you pay for learning every single thing the hard way, and you throw your sneakers on and hit the trail.
And then you take a shower and pick up the tweezers. Because piling a unibrow on top of the next mistake (that you’ll undoubtedly laugh about at some point after you’ve made it) would just be overkill.
September 17, 2009
To Whom It May Concern
I’m censoring myself now, and it’s because of you.
Not to belabor the point, but you seemingly left the door at least unlocked, if not actually open. If I wanted in, don’t you think I’d at least have tried the knob?
I realize that having a little space out here on the interwebs means that anyone can stop by and read, but …
I’m uncomfortable.
So now we go back to full comment moderation. And self-censorship, which kind of sucks the joy out of this for me.
Sigh.
September 14, 2009
Sorry, I just got up
I drove to the land of milk and honey Saturday morning, planning on accomplishing a few things:
1) do laundry at the parents’ house, even though I have not been in college for a LONG time, simply because their machines do a wonderful job AND don’t deplete my precious supply of quarters.
2) get reasonably gussied up, in a casual, i’m-not-trying-too-hard way.
3) attend my high school reunion
4) stay at Sibling’s, and thus be greeted with a giant hug at the end of the night.
Nothing went according to plan.
a) Parents were out of town, which I’d known about, except that they forgot I’d be coming up and turned the water off in the house.
b) I finally got ahold of them when I was supposed to leave, and was able to turn the water on for just long enough to wash my face and apply a little makeup, but nothing more thorough.
c) I was a half hour late to the reunion, and couldn’t remember who at least 7 people were, despite having graduated with a relatively small (200-ish) class, of which roughly 65 were in attendance.
- I did a lot of talking, a fair amount of which was devoted to figuring out who people were.
- I was starting to lose my voice by the end of the evening.
d) I drove to Siblings, frustrated with windy rainy-ness and what seemed like an especially dark evening, and was especially excited to be in a home-like Place when I got there. Except that the door was locked, which was kind of weird. And so I used my key, and saw that the house was dark – clearly, everyone had headed to bed, at 9:45 pm (such is life with two-year-old twins). And so I crept up the stairs, and apparently gave Sibling and Sibling Husband heart attacks, as they’d momentarily forgotten I was coming.
And I most definitely didn’t plan on getting sick enough to sleep for 13 hours and STILL feel like coughing hard enough to expel a lung.
But I will say, that it was all worth it. It was lovely to see people I’d lost touch with, and especially lovely to see how well everyone was doing. And really, just a relief that putting myself back in a place filled with high school didn’t turn me back into my high-school-self, not even for a minute. Even if my parents forgot me, AGAIN.
July 24, 2009
If you think this is about you, it probably isn’t.
“Does the word ‘duh’ mean anything to you?”
No, really. When someone doesn’t respond to your emails, disconnects from you on social networking sites, and never, ever initiates conversations with you…
they don’t want to talk to you.
If you know you behaved reprehensibly towards this person for an extended period of time, with a handful of truly inexcusable incidents…
you know why they don’t want to talk to you.
And you don’t need to be clairvoyant, or particularly intelligent, or even possessed of a scintilla of integrity to figure that out. Which is good, because that last one might’ve been a stumbling block.
And you certainly don’t need an explanation that you certainly don’t deserve.
Kthankxbai.
Seeking John Galt 