That last post was number 666. Interesting.

Number 667 will be a survey in which you can only post one word in answer to questions, taken from Emily's myspace blog. I kinda like the way it turned out, and since I've been lacking appropriate, non-incriminating subject matter for this fine site, I thought I'd use it here. Because, really, how much trouble can I possibly get myself in one word at a time?

One-word answer: Lots.

--
1. Where is your cell phone? Somewhere.
2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend? Husband.
3. Your hair? Poof.
4. Your grandpa? Dead.
5. Your father? Guitarist.
6. Your favorite item? Vibrator.
7. Your dream last night?
8. Your favorite drink? Tequila.
9. Your dream car? Scion.
10. The room you are in? Bedroom.
11. Your ex? Missed.
12. Your fear? Abandonment.
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Better.
14. Who did you hang out with last night? Scott.
15. What you're not? Satisfied.
16. Muffin? Blueberry.
17: One of your wish list items? MacBook.
19. The last thing you did? Tae Bo.
20. What are you wearing? Sneakers.
22. Your favorite book? Jurassic.
23. The last thing you ate? Food.
24. Your life? Sexless.
25. Your mood? Eh.
26. Your friends? Distant.
27. What are you thinking about right now? Fourteen.
28. Your car? Focus.
29. What are you doing at the moment? This.
30. Last summer? Sam.
31. Your relationship status? Sexless.
32. What is on your tv? Oblongs.
33. When is the last time you laughed? Moons.
34. Reason you last cried? Sexless.
35. Last song you danced to? Jeff.

--

I guess it'd be cheating if I qualified any of those answers, however, I do have to credit Emily with her #26.


I'm listening, right now, to Lisa Loeb's Sandalwood, as featured on a CD burned for number 30 himself. The last time I saw him, we realized that the CD no longer worked, which was a bit heartbreaking. That CD, our CD, was burned as a tribute to everything we were, weren't, could and couldn't have been. I told him he must not have valued it very much to let it get scratched up like that.

He said it got ruined because he played it over and over again. He always did know the right thing to say.

"Your hand, so hot, burns a hole in my hand.
I wanted to show you."

I told him I'd burn him another one. That I didn't have a copy, per se, but that I did have a playlist of it. I'm listening to it now. Robbie Williams' If it's Hurting You.

Great song. Jenn went to England one year, one of those years where she left me all alone for Christmas break, and came back obsessed with Robbie Williams. She identified this song as being one of those that is perfect for driving down a dark road at night, and she was right, perfectly right. Now I can't hear it without picturing the exact road we were driving down when she said that; or, some road I was driving down alone when I remembered her saying that. Who knows anymore?

That summer, the song was on a playlist I had loaded onto my old MP3 player called "Infidelity", created so I, the eternal Emo, could purify and intensify the conflicted feelings I was having over cheating on Jeff with Chad. The week I was in Gloucester with Jeff and Jenn for the Saint Peter's fiesta-- and the last week of my life in which I was still immune to and unaware of the fear of having your heartbroken-- I would lay awake at night and listen the playlist, and sometimes that song over and over again.

The next one that is cued up-- randomly, not in the order the CD was actually in-- is Matchbox Twenty's Disease, which I sang last night at Karaoke. I try to skip past and, for some reason, the goddamn randomizer on WinAmp fails to work-- number 17, baby, I'll take a computer that works over this "compatibility" bullshit anyday-- so I close my eyes and click. "Name" by the Goo Goo Dolls.

This song is special to me-- there is something in the arrangement, the resonance that speaks to a part of me that other songs I love don't; the only other one that does that I can think of is Push, by Matchbox Twenty. Maybe it comes from the memories I've associated with it, listening to it over and over again in the middle of the night as Elorza and I stayed up way past our bed times for each other-- back before I knew his name was Elorza, and that was part of the reason it was special to me. "Push" was my favorite song, originally, because I associated it so completely with my favorite person, Jeremey, and as I moved away from him, the song moved with me, and became about myself. Still, if I had to pick one other person that "Push" is about for me, it's him, and if I had to pick one other person that "Name" is about, it's Elorza.

Jeremey and Elorza have proven to be the only two men in my life who have that kind of tenure, that unconditional feeling. And "Name" and "Push" are the only songs that I feel in the back of my neck when I breathe; I feel them in the notes, perhaps. I listen, misty-eyed, to our history, which is not made up of reruns as the song says.

"A tired song keeps playing on a tired radio,
And I won't no one your name.
And I won't tell them your name."



I can't write an entry about, or partially about, our CD without mentioning our song, that sacred hymn that we-- Sam and I-- listen to in silence, listen to with a reverent wordlessness meant to express everything in the world that we are when alone and lonely, everything we can't be when we are together, and together. The room, the space, the cab of his truck are silent, the holy dark was moving, too, and every breath we drew...

"It's not a cry you can hear at night,
It's not somebody whose seen the light.
It's a cold, and it's a broken hallelujah."



One of these days, I'm going to have to stop and count the alternate realities I spend the better part of my day in. One of these days, I'm going to have to commit some more time to this one, that anchors me.


On with it.

I know his job is such that now and then, he has an unannounced late night. That when these things happen, he has no real way of contacting me and letting me know. I know these nights happen periodically, and I even know that he mentioned the other day that they'd been doing some work lately that might involve one of these nights. I know this. I know this.

But the reality in my mind, as it gets farther and farther past the time he would normally get out, is not that he is at work. It was at first, then slowly the doubts crept in. A doubt at first, then a suspiscion. Eventually, a worry. Soon enough, a complete distraction.

Now, it barely even seems like a possibility that he is at work, and not banging the blonde from his past in some alleyway, thinking "god, is this what I've been missing. Now, it barely even seems like a possibility that he is not 5,000 miles away, having jumped on the private jet of his rich mistress earlier today, now lounging on a beach on some remote island in the south pacific, batting her two-inch-long labia with his tongue as she crouches over his face-- he never knew he was into freakishly disproportionate female genetalia until he met her.

Now, it seems the best I can really hope for is that, maybe, just maybe he was in a horrible car accident and has left me a rich widow. Though, it was probably on the way back from getting a blow job from a Belgium Supermodel who would weighs only 82 pounds if it weren't for her six ample breasts.


The phone rings. I answer.
"Hello!" He says."You coming home?" I ask.
"Yep."
"Where were you?" Can't help. Have to ask.
A slight pause-- though, not so much a "formulating my answer" kind of pause, more of an "isn't it obvious?" kind. Cocky. "At work." He says. Then, jokingly, "Where were you?"
"Here.""Suuure. I'll see you soon?"
"Yep. Better wipe the lipstick off your collar, first." I tell him, my voice all casual, self-assured.
"Mmm-hmmm. Bye."


I hope I pulled off the confident, trusting wife persona. I hope I meant some fraction of it came from somewhere genuine. I hope I really do have that woman somewhere inside me, the one that thinks of myself as too smart, beautiful and funny for him to really consider cheating on, and if does, so what, there are others waiting in line, maybe hundreds.


I hope her fifth nipple poked him in the eye. On with it.

When I was very young, my father sat me down and explained to me the best he could.

"Son," He said. "There's a secret that adults hide from kids. Always have, always will. They hide it from them because they think it's protecting them, keeping them happy. But I don't think that's true, I think it does more harm than good. So I'm going to tell you."

I leaned forward, with wide, curious eyes.

"Life is unfair." He told me. I was disappointed, because I'd heard this before, from a snarky cousin, or from a frustrated adult. He saw that I looked let down, and went on. "I know people have told you that before, and most of the time, they don't say it right. They say it like they're scolding you for being angry when something unfair happens to you, right?" I nodded. "Well, they shouldn't say it like that, but what I'm telling you isn't me scolding you. This is an important lesson, and I'll explain why. Okay?"

"Okay." I told him.

"Life is unfair. Good things happen to bad people. A person can spend their whole life doing great things, and then suddenly get very hurt or die for no good reason. And that's very sad. And it is unfair. And when anything unfair happens, little or big, it's okay to have some feelings about it, but it's also important not to let those feelings get out of control, and stop you from going on with your life. It's important that you understand, right from the start, that no matter what bad things might happen to you, no matter whose fault they are, it's your responsibility to keep trying, to keep living your life the way you want to live it, or as close to it as you can get. Because of all the bad things that can happen to person, one of the worst is to become someone who is angry at the things that are unfair, and who lets that get in the way of their life."

I nodded. I didn't quite understand, but I could tell that one day I would.

"Bad things do happen to people, but there are people who live their whole life like they're waiting for an apology from the world. And you know what? If they ever did get one, they'd find out they were no better off. Get it?"

"Sort of." I told him.

"As long as you're listening. You'll get it one day." He told me. He sighed for a minute, looking thoughtful, then looked down at me again. "I don't mean to say that you can't fight against injustice. Some injustice, you're supposed to fight against. Sometimes, when things are unfair, it's your duty to try and make them as fair as possible. But sometimes-- most of the time, even-- you have to make the decision that something that's only a little unfair isn't worth the fight. And some of the things that are the most unfair of all simply aren't guided by rules of any kind. They just happen. Those things, you just have to accept, and keep going."

"Oh." I said.



I never did thank him.


---


On with it.

It seems to me that my biggest mistake lately, and probably for the past several years, has been making the goals that I have into conditions of the happiness I supposedly aspire to. Get someone stable and satisfying in my "career". Write a book. Overcome Vaginismus. Lose ten more pounds. Get up to a respectable Standard level on DDR. These things are prerequisites to happiness. Why do I treat them like this?

Maybe the reason is this: standing from my soapbox and professing at the top of my lungs that happiness is a choice followed up with a commitment, proclaiming to all that it's your responsibility to make the most of your life, your responsibility to grab happiness and have the courage to hold on, maybe the reality of what I believe is this: there are happy people, and there are unhappy people. And one group will never really understand the other.


Sounds a bit closer to the heart of me. But I'm not going to settle on it.


Today, on my ten-minute break at work, I was thinking about how little energy I constantly have, save when I'm hopped up on diet pills, and I decided that, more likely than not, this is completely the fault of my absolutely shit diet. Lunches during most work days consist of some deep-fried chicked and a side of fries, and when I get home, I generally sit down to something microwavable. Conflicting schedules pretty much mean that Zack and I don't eat together, and when we do, it's late at night, meaning we want something quick. Meaning something hyper-processed, frozen and completley full of preservatives.

Even just a cursory look at the diet and nutrition section of our store leaves one confused as to what it is they really need; futher research, and you'll end up snorting oreos from the stress of it all. These days, we really are suffering from an information overload, with everyone's professional opinion just as credible and incredible as everyone else's; this is especially true of issues of the body. The more I know about these things, the more I realize: I know nothing.

In a situation where you can't tell up from down, left from right, progesterone from testosterone, it's best to go back to the basics. I made of list of what kind of foods I need to be focused on getting more of: Calcium, lean protein, Iron and Omega 3's. Then I followed up with a list of foods I need to work on getting significantly less of, which basically boils down to highly processed foods, and foods that are deep-fried.

So.

This, I guess, leaves me starving, and desperately in need of a trip to the grocery store...well, and a whole new lifestyle really. If I'm going to commit to ditching the microwavebles, that requires learning how to cook, and keeping the kitchen clean enough to do so, which is really going to cut into my watching-and-rewatching-episodes-of-the-Gilmore-Girls-and-Scrubs time. I'll have to keep our George Forman Knock-off grill clean. I'll have to keep lean, uncooked meats in the refridgerator for easy access. Have to find some sort of healthy marinade I can live with.

This is all scary stuff. And not stuff that's particularly interesting to read about.


The stuff I want to be writing about lately is stuff I can't be writing about, stuff I think about writing, and then re-think-- things have been weird lately, in regards to privacy and consequences and all that stuff. You'll have to excuse me if what I post, for a while, tends to be a little less hard-hitting, or more of the fiction variety.


Blah. More when I can figure out just exactly what it is.

On with it.

The party on Friday was going perfectly. A lot of happy, liquored up people, laughing, getting along, and he-- the one she had invited to come in from Chicago-- was making a great impression. When he got up to do his Karaoke song, her coworker leaned over to her, "Where'd you find this one?" He said, pointing to her best friend with a grin on his face.

"On the internet." She smiled.

"Really?"

"Yeah. We started talking when we were fourteen, and just never stopped. We've only seen each other four times in person, but we've kept it going. Eight years."

The singing out-of-towner sent a meaningful glance over from the floor in the midst of his song, and her head swelled with happiness. Her coworker looked at her and smiled. "A success story."

"Indeed." She smiled back.

Back at the table, he talked intelligently about music to the others, coached her through her first tequila shot and cheered her through her second and third. He argued with her coworker-- the birthday boy-- when he tried to buy his own drinks, and got along swimmingly with her husband. Another round of shots, and she was feeling comfortable and contended, forgetting the inhibitions that would normally leave her sitting quietly at the table. Her husband was delighted to see her enjoying herself so much, knowing the sickening blasé she felt in her daily life. Everyone-- everyone-- was having a good time. The best she could remember having in months, really.

A woman will waste a lifetime trying to recreate one moment; one of those was about to happen to her again. Sometime in all the light-hearted joviality, she stood up too fast, lost her balance, and fell into his lap. He caught her, and they all laughed at her tipsiness, and it was all completely innocent. Without meaning to, she had to tell herself, his hands lingered on her for one moment too long-- one on her side, the other on the silk of her skirt, moving slightly on her thigh-- he hadn't meant it, wouldn't have under the best of circumstances, and certainly not within two feet of her husband and everyone; she knew that, and all too quickly, she was on her feet. It was innocent, thoughtless, and gone. It was delicious.

The next night, she couldn't stop thinking about it, and she stopped on her way home from work to pick up a bottle of tequila. That was when the trouble started.

---

I don't understand why I seem to be the only person on the goddamned earth with the kinds of feelings that I have. When you get down to the deep and honest version of me, I'm just...god, I'm just not very nice. Perhaps in the basest versions of ourselves, we're all selfish, whining ids, and what makes us a good person or not is how much courtesy, dignity and distance we put between that pure asshole force and our day-to-day selves. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself. But I'll tell you this much: I've never really gotten over anyone I've been in love with. I don't really want anyone who's ever been in love with me to move on. As much as I value witty, fun conversation, there's an enormous part of me that just wants to talk about feelings, specifically feelings that apply to the two people involved in the conversation, and when those conversations happen-- say, in a drunken state of anger and sadness- I find it endlessly satisfying, no matter how uncomfortable it is for the other party. That is, unless the other party is my husband: in this case, I tell him I want to know about his feelings, beg and pine for it and act like the absence of it is ruining our relationship, but should he get drunk enough to actually say anything, it fucking haunts me, and I can't get over it. And I haven't distanced myself from my id enough to not throw that in his face.

What else? The more hurt that I experience at the hands at those closest to me-- normally my fault, normally something I prod at and provoke-- the more I distance myself from people who I could potentially care about, which as far as I'm concerned, is wise. What's not wise about it is that the ensuing absence of those other people makes me feel more alone, and I open myself up wider to the people closest to me, which leaves me open for more hurt, and drives me to ask for it more loudly, and they get disgusted with me, and I get disgusted with myself, and that speeds the cycle-- eventually, I'm quite sure I'll have no one. Being sure of this, by the way, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lower my self-esteem, the lower the reality, as, the way it is right now, I function around the average person only with the help of a veneer of confidence that is purely false; around people I trust, that veneer falls off, leaving me naked and completely unable to act comfortable in my own skin, completely unable to believe that anyone could accept my flaws as they see them before me.

God, it's such a bitch, and I can go on. All I really know is this, and I've been on both sides of this lately, so take it to heart: it's your responsibility to fight to be happy, because your sadness makes the people who really care about you feel inadequate.

If you were at my house this weekend, my id spoiled a lot of the time I could have spent fucking treasuring having you here. In defense of myself, of a part of myself that this part doesn't really even believe deserves defense, the stress about work, the sadness about my grandmother (who is dying, for the record), the daily strife of vaginismus and the particularly poignant feelings of self-doubt over my apperance have all been wearing on my last nerve lately; a nerve that burst into a bloody menstrual meltdown right about the time your plane touched ground. I wish to hell I'd been able to spend less time fearing the way I'd feel when the one thing I'd been looking forward to-- you-- was gone.

But it was one of the best times of my life, despite everything. I don't know if I told you that, and it deserves to be said one more time that your willingness to cross mountains and rivers and valleys when I need you-- when I need you-- means everything to me.

I love you so goddamned much.

On with it.

"It's not what you thought
When you first began it.
You got what you want,
Now you can hardly stand it, though.
By now you know.

It's not going to stop.
It's not going to stop.
It's not going to stop,
Till you wise up."
~Aimee Mann, Wise Up

Only one thing I know for sure: I am one goddamned ridiculous waste of human life.


On with it.

Recently, I've been thinking about the men in my life-- the ones that have gone, the few that remain. The bridges I've burned recently, and the bridges I've burned very recently, in a self-inflicted drunken stupor designed to break through my inhibitions and loosen the stranglehold that my insecurity has gained over my true feelings.

Linda's life lessons learned the hard way number 467: You never appreciate a stranglehold until you're crying at a moniter at three in the morning, typing violently to two seperate people that they never cared about you, those bastards.

Clearly, things have been rocky between me and certain people-- particularly, with the guy I've felt the closest too as of late, Elorza. Our conversations lately, drunken and sober alike, have alerted me to the fact that I've become too focused on him, missing him like crazy, calling him in desperation whenever something goes wrong, giving a level of caring I simply can't ask to have reciprocated, not anymore, not at this distance.

Tonight, after my workout, I started working on the song I intend to perform at two of my coworker's Karaoke birthday, and somewhere in the midst of it, I slipped into a fantasy involving my performing a duet with my hypothetical perfect best friend. An imaginary man that I who's attributes I will now discuss at length. First of all, I should qualify the male thing: I value my friendships with females just as much as I do those with males, but it's very simply two different roles-- the male best friend, the female best friend. These two people have never had very much overlap. But before we spend all our time apologizing for that, we'll move on to the meat of this entry, which is piecing together my favorite things about the other men in my life to create him, perfect platonic partner-in-crime extraordinaire. This theoretical Karaoke partner would have to have the following:

• Casey's intelligence and quick-thinking wit. And his surprising, if seldom witnessed, capacity for empathy.
• Chad's superb listening skills and incredible kindness.
• Dan's enthusiasm, for his music and my writing, and, occasionally, for crazy silly bullshit questions like "Who would win? A Ninja, or a pirate?"
• Jeff's willingness to make an ass of himself, and his appreciation for private jokes.
• Jeremey's singular knowledge of the inner-workings of crippling insecurity, and his sense of humor, and his ability to leave fucking wonderful answering machine messages.
• Mike's dependability.
• Sam's sense of adventure-- his genuine willingness to get in a car in the middle of the night and drive to New York, or whever, while others just talk about it. The side of himself he shows when we sit together and listen to "Hallelujah", that soft quality of his voice when we both know how much we mean to each other.
• Elorza's egotistical humility-- the effort he puts into crazy arguments about insanely idealistic principles. The fact that he has, so recently that I cannot yet let go of the dizzying gratitude of it, saved me from myself. The way he never lets me feel like a burden on him.

It's important for me to be clear that my mind reels, even as a I write this, with a list of the things about these people that my ideal best friend could not have, but that's not really the spirit of this post. Each and everyone of those people has faults that I am glaringly aware of: some I have accepted, some, I continue to forge useless battles against. Still, it's undeniable that I love them all, though that probably comes as news to a few of them. (It should be said that there are qualities of people I've met and come to respect or care about more recently that belong on the list, that had to be left off so that I could make that blanket "love" statement, which I feel needed to be said. However, without having lifted the following people to an L-word status, and with no intention to, I find myself more and more drawn to Scott's good-hearted personability, (s) Bill M's confident but unobtrusive charm, and (m) Bill M's endless patience and uncanny knowledge of the Gilmore Girls.)

While I'm able to point out the very seperate things I love about each of these people, any one of them can tell you that the amount of overlap for the things I feel for them is nauseatingly large. I got into putting in terms of music, earlier: My residual feelings for Casey can best be summed up in Fiona Apple's "Shadowboxer", a song I first fell in love with while I was going through a rocky patch with Chad. Last summer, I made a mix CD for Sam, which included Matchbox Twenty's "Disease", a song I have, in the past, associated heavily with Jeremey, "Name" by the Goo Goo Dolls, which I used to listen to every time a conversation between Elorza and I got deep, and "The Weakness in Me", another one that conjures memories of Chad. "Caramel", by Suzanne Vega, and also on the CD, was completely about Sam until a conversation between Elorza and I the other night had me playing it on repeat. And Sondre Lerche's "Things you Call Fate", well, that's a little bit of all of them.

A lot of overlap with each other-- suprisingly little overlap with the conspicuously unmentioned man in my life, the man in my life, really. Zack is the only person in my life with a balance of all the desirable characteristics that condusive to being able to spend my whole life with him, on a full-time basis. So, what if this hypothetical man did exist, this collaboration of all the other loves of my life? What would be there, then, to elevate Zack to the soul-strung status at which he now resides? The easiest answer is simply this his Zackness, the ineffable quality that makes him him, and makes me in love with him. Put more eloquently, by Justin Huntly McCarthy:

"If you were to die to-morrow, I might tell you this much to-night. A woman may love a man because he is brave, or because he is comely,or because he is wise, or gentle-- for a thousand thousand reasons. But the best of all reasons for a woman loving a man is just because she loves him, without rhyme and without reason, because heaven wills it, because earth fulfils it, because his hand is of the right size to hold her heart in its hollow."
~Excerpt from If I Were King

Zack has his own music, too. Our song, "Moon River", and, as mentioned a few posts ago, Death Cab's "I Will Follow You into the Dark". But in this same vein, of love for love's sake, I'd say "It Had To Be You" is also quite appropriate.


Zack can't be my best friend, though, except in that saccharin "giving lip service to your husband at in an award-acceptance speech" sort of way. He can't fake quick-witted intellect, doesn't have that drive for adventure, and his listening skills are sub-part. And, worst of all, he'd never do Karaoke with me. And that's what this is really all about.

FieryGwenivere: if we were going to do a duet for karaoke, what would it be?
xKxOx: hah, that's a good question
xKxOx: i'm a huge fan of ain't no mountain high enough, but that's way too cliche for me
xKxOx: i dunno tho, i've never been vury good at picking karaoke songs
FieryGwenivere: I was so thinking about that earlier, Ain't No Mountain High Enough
FieryGwenivere: Like, that was the one I would have chosen
FieryGwenivere: That or "Something Stupid"
FieryGwenivere: but you wrote me that e-mail all those years ago about how you were listening to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", and suddenly you couldn't bear to leave me as upset as I was when I ended our conversation. It was the first e-mail you ever wrote me, actually
xKxOx: oh yea?
xKxOx: i don't remember much, but that's always been a pretty prominent song for me, despite it's popularity
xKxOx: i dunno what somethign stupid is tho
FieryGwenivere: Heh.
FieryGwenivere: The title line just fucking fits us, that's all
xKxOx: hahaha. I can run wit dat
FieryGwenivere: "Then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like 'I love you'."
xKxOx: that is pretty perfect
xKxOx: kind of
FieryGwenivere: Plus, in the episode of the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob marries Selma (Patty?), they totally do a duet of it at Karaoke
xKxOx: haha, hehehe, i like that
FieryGwenivere: :-) I do, too.
FieryGwenivere: But here's the critical question
FieryGwenivere: Would you ever actually sing a Karaoke duet with me?
xKxOx: I'm selma, no question. hah!
xKxOx: you kidding, i do anything like that
xKxOx: dance in front of a crowd alone
.xKxOx: sing at the top of my lungs despite my horrible voice
FieryGwenivere: :-) Ah, dip
xKxOx: i'm all about that



Then again, maybe I've just misjudged the situation.

On with it.

"Well, hellhounds on your tail now, once again, Boy.
It's groping on your leg until it sleeps.
The emptiness will fill your heart with sorrow.
'Cause it's not what you make, it's what you leave."


In these words from the song "Misery", Green Day demonstrates an unsettlingly insightful knowledge of one of those fundamental truths of life that so many people lose sight of: too often, the circumstances of your life will not be driven by the effort you put in, day after day, to foster relationships, shape careers, and make what you want of your life. Too often, they will be determined by the moments where you think, feel, or pretend that these things aren't important to you.

Take a relationship that's had it's ups and downs, one that has proven it can weather frustration, anger and sorrow. But sprinkle in a dash of indignation, and you have a recipe for disaster. Take a lifelong goal, one that's driven you around every curve of your life, and see what happens when you let go of the wheel.

Take a friendship, one that's seen better days. Two people. A connection. Maybe one or both of them has gotten off the track. Maybe one of them seems to have stopped trying to find it again. And maybe the other says some things that she can't frankly remember whether or not she was right to say.


What he needs to understand is the way it feels to watch from the sidelines as something you care about lets go. What he needs to understand is that not putting forth that effort is like spitting in her face, telling her that something she loves isn't worth his time.


"Tough Love" is kind of the ugly stepchild of love. It's underappreciated, it looks different, and people act like it's not even a part of the family. There's this criteria to love that we, the media-minded, have put in play. It's gotta be soft yet supportive. It's gotta be intense but joyful. It's gotta be Barbie Dreamhouse pink and in frilly cursive lettering. It's gotta be a hallmark card or a teddy bear or a hug.

Whatever it is, it's certainly got nothing to do with concepts like "the truth hurts" or "it takes someone who cares about you to tell you what you don't want to hear." It's not about making someone take their medicine when they're sick, even if it tastes bad; making them clean up a mess when it's theirs. It's about politely ignoring someone's faults, even if they're more like fault lines. Whatever it is, it's definitely can't be looking someone straight in the eye and telling them they not only can do better, it's their responsibility to.


"Step one, you say 'We need to talk.'
He walks; you say 'Sit down. It's just a talk.'
He smiles politely back at you,
You stare politely right on through.
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame.
You begin to wonder why you came."


Later, if she is alone, she will wonder about all the things she was supposed to understand: how much he was hurting, how lost he felt. She'll have plenty of time to think about all the years between them and plenty of reminders in case she's not inclined: christmas songs they used to dance in the street to; phrases they used to use with each other over and over again, movies they watch, plans they made. Promises they made. She'll have plenty of time to think about those, and, without him there to force her to be defensive, she'll wonder. How much of what she said was below the belt, how much of what she did was in his best interest. How much of what she felt was really about him.

She won't have answers. Without him there, all she has is the questions.


"Where did I go wrong?
I lost a friend somewhere along in the bitterness."


There are no answers, probably, just a hundred different sides to the story and too many feelings too remember. His, hers, the poor unwanted stepchild's, and the seemingly absent viewpoint of Hallmark card love. In the end, there are only two things floating around her mind at night, when she's alone, that really ring true. It was both of our responsibility to do better. And this, this is what happens if you go too long letting yourself believe you don't care.


"I would have stayed up with you all night,
Had I known how to save a life."
~The Fray, How to Save a Life

On with it.

You know what can be a pain in the ass about bearing it all in a public forum? The bearing it all in a public forum part.

Five and a half years, I have been blogging here, and I've had to learn hard lessons about what is and is not a wise thing to assign your name to on world wide web. Because it's called "world wide" for a reason.

In the past five years, in no particular order:

• A post about suicide has landed me in a psych ward.
• A handful of teachers in high school knew my every mood, from my burning teen angst to my raging hormonal urges. (The humilation over these being public, I've since learned, is very much worth it to actually have them.)
• Friendships have been strained, or irrevocably broken. It was a post here that cemented Jeremey's anger for me (which originated from...a post on another blog.), the lack of recognition that has alienated close friends as well and friends who only felt that we were close, and my inability to hold back here that forever cast me as the in the irrational emo girl role. Though, to be fair, actually being an irrational emo girl didn't help that any.
• A past boyfriend found out about a lie that I had kept from him for years.
• A friend of Lucy's, with, from what I can assume, help from this blog, has cultivated a very negative opinion of me which I believe will result in the end of our relationship.
• One of Zack's best friends from high school, and, according to my hit counter, a very regular reader, has become privy to every up and down of our relationship.
• My father-in-law has taken Zack aside and let him know that he is aware that I'm bisexual. Glad I wasn't there for that conversation.
• Most recently, I've found out that Zack's...other set of parents, his mom and step dad, have now become readers, gaining "both positive and negative insight to me as a person." Oh, goody.
• The whole world has seen my most fundamental weakness, a challenge with shakes me to the core: Screwing up the use of homonyms like "there" and "their", or "write" and "right." This is not all write.
• Perhaps the greatest insult to all the injury is the countless times I've had this gem thrown at me: "I only get to know you through your blog. It's as if you're closer to that website than you are to me!"
  

In this all-too frequent situation, where someone in my life comes to me indignant, angry, or hurt, looking me in the eye and slinging the accusation that I care more about words than I do about people, that I have a deeper connection with the hundreds of pages of babble I've spit out over the years than I do to a living, breathing human being, there is only one thing I can say to them: "Well, duh."

What is it exactly that people expect? Firstly, the way you open up to a real-world person, face to face, is a completely different process. There are different vulnerabilities, different consequences. As far as I'm concerned, as far as life has consistently taught me, you have to be much more discerning in these situations. It's so easy to be misrepresented in something you want desperately not to be misrepresented in when you have to deal with the exact implications of your words on a person-to-person level. It's so easy to connect, and then fear disconnection, rejection, a breach of security; heartbreak. And, more daunting than any of this is how easy it is to sound like a complete idiot when you aren't allowed to revise. The only saving grace, really, is that you won't know whether I've fucked up the homonyms when I'm talking to you. But this is easy cancelled out by having to put up to listening to your blah-blah-blah.

Perhaps less cynically is this argument: Here, we have five and a half years of my life, of my passion, of the one thing I have consistently wanted as long as I can remember: to write with relative eloquence, with makeshift insight and the dream of depth, and being accepted for it. Whatever I cannot say to a person in life, because of social constraint, awkwardness, shame...here, I can pour it out and tell you to take it or leave it. Here, I am the master of my domain, and I what I say goes. Resultingly, what we have here is not just hundreds of thoughts, thousands of words, millions of emotions. What we have here is five and a half year's worth of me, tangibly, undeniably. What you read here is five and a half year's worth of my growth as a person, the only thing in my life that I've cared enough about to master slowly, and the slowly ripening fruit of that long-winded labor. I am a girl who thinks in metaphors, and feels in adjectives (Or better yet, when available, particularly descriptive nouns.) I maintain that there is a healthy amount of caricature in my writing, but it's a carefully honed disguise, a process that I have decided on, and that is just as telling as every ounce of sincerity; more truthful than truth, as it were.

If what you endeavor to be is closer to me than me, well, hell, go for it, you crazy bastard. But take heed of these two, equally important warnings: 1) It's not fucking pretty in here, and 2) you'll have to learn to shut the hell up.

As far as all the consequences, all the awkwardness, all the seriously uncomfortable information that I've lavished on the unsuspecting reader, well, it's worth it, I guess. The idea of all three of my in-law's reading the ins and outs of my marriage with their son (more outs than ins, if you catch my drift) makes me, well, frankly, slightly nauseous. At least they know now that their assumptions of our overnight activities early on in our relationship (too early on for me to have considered that, for the record) were wrong; I've always felt the need to correct that: I don't exactly have that "European approach" to sex (Shudder). No, your son is not pussy-whipped; on the contrary, he's stuck by my side through over three years of hellishly celebate marriage based on something different entirely, something about me as a person. What that may be, I have no fucking clue, but I get the feeling that getting into long-winded conversations with various parents about the things they've learned about him through me, via a blog that he's never more than grudgingly consented to, is not exactly going to help things.

And while whether or not he is fair game is up for debate, there's an unspoken rule here that I'm afraid I feel the need to speak: The more delicate aspects of this writing isn't up for discussion between me and my in-laws. Period. (Thanks to Chuck for abiding by this for as long as he's been reading.)

Boy-howdy, was that a long-winded way of saying that. Well, you know me. A little too well, it seems.

On with it.

"So I will find my fears and face them,Or I will cower like a dog.
I will kick and scream or kneel and plead.
I fight like hell
To hide that I've given up."
~Bright Eyes, "Another Travelling Song"

The first post of a new year. 2007. A little nervous, a little unprepared, maybe, but I'm pretty fucking happy to be out of 2006.

2006 was a year of great music. If I had to pick one artist to sum it up, I'd say Bright Eyes. Songs like "Waste of Paint" and "Take is Easy (Love Nothing)" brought me into a closer understanding of my weaknesses, and the weaknesses of those around me, and I reacted with venom that might have poisoned more than it was supposed to. Songs like "Going for the Gold" and "No Lies, Just Love" reacquainted me with the kind of hopeless pain that only a shaky voice can iterate. And I let the album "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning", with it's sentimental push towards a brighter dawn wrap up my year. Here is an album everyone should run out and buy. Here is a song that haunts you, a rhythym that drives you, a question that haunts you: "Why are you scared to dream of god// When it's salvation that you want?"

The last couple of months have slowed with the melody of "Lua", marched with the beat of "Road to Joy", and come to the realization, "We are nowhere, and it's Now."

Bright Eyes can do the music of mourning better than anyone. Bright Eyes remembers the rhythym of regret. There's poetry in pain, singing strains of sadness and sorrow. Bright Eyes is the kind of music you need, if you're about to have a year like I just had.

It was a year of great music. But it wasn't a great year.


I am making a conscious switch this year. This year, I will rise from the minor chords. I'm coming up, scratching out, fighting back. This year, I will overcome. Or it will be my last.


I am waiting for this song to come to an end. Then I will press "stop."


The music of 2007 will be provided Ani DiFranco, with maybe a little Etheridge or some classic Joni. The music of this year will be all about energy and determination, strength that only women can understand, the kind that resides, often latent, within long, lean, unassuming muscles. This is the kind of restrained power that only springs forth when cornered; a woman is a fighter of nessecity where a man is a fighter of pride.

I haven't always owned up to being a woman, but that is what I am. And that is how I will overcome.


I stumbled upon an old Ani CD that I hadn't listened to in ages the other day, put it in, and I remembered what it feels like to listen to her-- not just the slow stuff that has been in my stock of MP3's the whole time, but her spunky stuff, the gumption, the moxie; the politics and the anger, the love and the indignation. I had forgotten.

This is the year I will end my own personal battle with Vaginismus. And when that's done, or concurrently, I will fight on the front of every other woman's battle with it. This year, I will not take "no" for answer. This year, I will not let myself give it.

"My thigh have been involved in many accidents,
And now I can't get insured,
And I don't need to be lured by you.
My cunt is built like a wound that won't heal,
And now you don't have to ask,
'Cause you know how I feel."
~Out of Habit

There's a lot to say about things lately, more than I have time for. People and places. Resolutions and reservation. Music and memories; a moment, a week ago, in the cab of a truck with someone that I cared about in 2006, and the things between us that pushed us apart, us so like magnets forced to either repel or attract. The dichotomy of roles between us; two people who see the best in each other, want the best for each other, are their best when with each other, on one end. On the other, two people who can't seem to help but act in such a way that totally undermines their mutual respect. I suppose this could mean a lot of things, but for me, the only thing that resonates is a moment alone with him, listening to a song in the dark, leaning on him; his earnest request that I not avoid-- abandon, more accurately-- him in the future, and the way it looked as a I watched a single tear fall from my eye and soak into the fabric of his shirt as I apologized, promised him that I wouldn't do it again.


The way it felt, several hours later, when, with a quiet acknowledgement of the hours in between, we both knew I couldn't keep that promise.

Loving people, it's a bitch.


It was a male singer, the song we were listening to in the truck. You ever notice how women will listen to, and love, music by artists of either gender, but men almost never listen to female artists? Kudos to the Chicago Jew for loving Ani.

So, now to dive, headlong into 2007. Wish me luck.


On with it.


"Everything I do is judged,
And they mostly get it wrong, but oh well.
'Cause the bathroom mirror has not budged,
And the woman who lives there can tell
The truth from the stuff that they say.
She looks me in the eye
And says 'Would you prefer the easy way?
No? Well, okay then. Don't cry.'"
~Joyful Girl