One is silver, the other gold

Dear Internet,
Here is how it begins:
I was working on updating the Caravaggio Project and I was having difficulty remembering if I had been to a particular museum when I was in Rome in ’05. Since I, thankfully, have been cross-posting content over to Livejournal since 2001, I no longer have to depend on my often wrong memory.
As I read through the archives, what piqued my interest in this research was not necessarily finding a definitive answer to my question1, but that many of the people who were commenting on my posts at the time. I either lost contact with them over the years or the relationships had shifted in focus; where we may have once been super close and were now mere Facebook friends who wished each other “Happy Birthday!,” every year not because we genuinely remembered but because Facebook told us.
Continue reading “One is silver, the other gold”

the freshmen

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about life and what not. More so than usual, as it were. Basically thinking where I’m going to go once I leave Paul and what direction my life will be heading at that time. i have been sitting on the fence watching both sides and I’m not quite sure which way to lean, if any.
several themes have been swimming in my head, such as friendship and how to be good. both have been ping ponging against my head like there is no tomorrow. i need to deconstruct.
m. and i got into a disagreement if you will, this week and our relationship is now considerably strained. it seems that no matter what i say, it comes out all wrong to him. at least that is what i think.
coupled with my own lovely sense of paranoia, i am probably making it into a much major deal than i thought or think it is. the bottom line is, we are not speaking to each other right now and it hurts. i have thought back and recognized times when there were weeks/months when we didn’t speak to each other. the difference being that you sometimes don’t know what you have until it’s almost gone and then it wasn’t almost gone and now i feel like it is, I realized that he was a better friend than I gave credit for. He’s not an angel by any chance and I’ll mention that in a second but still, he’s one of my closest friends and I’d hate to lose him over something that could be worked out. i think.
the second incident this week was when b. said something she shouldn’t have in public. she, in short, inferred i was sleeping or wanting to sleep or want to start an affair with a mutual friend. now, she will tell you that she is not inferring anything, other than she thinks it’s “odd” that i want to spend time with said friend. What she failed to do was put together how it was circumstantial evidence. such as, said friend and i hung out together a few weeks back because b. and her bf went to dinner without us and we both had made plans with them. Mutual friend and i got together a few days later as he had left some stuff at our house. I also invited mutual friend to dinner a few times as well as to go back up to Baltimore with me to see more of the Inner Harbor. I’m such a little heathen!
I plainly, really, do not like people who sit there and run their mouths and think it’s okay, especially when it’s inferring shit that isn’t happening just because they think it’s “odd”. It down right angers me. Paul is a very temperamental guy and gets blown out of shape if the wind blows wrong, so saying crap like this in front of him isn’t doing anyone any good.
In short, please don’t spread my bidness around if you don’t know all the facts. I tried to communicate to her how I didn’t appreciate what she was saying. She said she didn’t start it, i did by mentioning i asked him to lunch. See, personally, I don’t make the correlation between how asking someone to lunch = hot sex. But apparently it does somewhere somehow. At any rate, she then started jumping down my throat about something that didn’t have anything to do with me. When I mentioned to her that this has nothing to do with me, she got huffed and said how i should care if i care about j (her boyfriend). This woman is all over the damn place. The amazing thing is that everyone but her and her bf see how her words were wrong. Whatever. I told her bottom line is we will agree to disagree and she invited me to tell her what she did was wrong — but at this point I don’t think it matters.
Since bad things come in threes, the final thing was at work. Apparently my next up level manager is either having issues with me or something else is going on, i have zero clue. The reason I am saying this is because she called me into her office with my immediate supervisor (which I found out later that she was not supposed to) and started comparing me to co-workers who no longer work there, which was an insult to me. I got miffed because not only did she remove my team lead status, but my new backup is not up to par technically. She said that she did it for my backup to have a bar to reach to, i blanched. I don’t buy this BS any longer. She also said my lateness is a problem — which I mentioned that there were several co-workers who repeatedly were late every day as well as those who took 2hr lunches as well as those who leave work 1/2 hour+ early. I said hey, if I’m in the wrong, fine. But i want to make sure that you are being fair across the board here. She said she’ll look into it. Right. I’m sure she will. I am not quite sure what I’m going to do about that little instance but I’ve gone and gotten counseling from non-involved persons. I guess my quandary is, why kill myself to protect myself for a job that i feel burned out by?
friends classification:
COWARDLY LION-TYPE: M. falls into this type. You know these kinds, very easy to spot. They are there through thick and thin as long as it doesn’t concern them. But when the chips really fall or you try and have some sort of substantial conversation with them, it falls fucking apart. They curl up and hide. I’ve noticed that when I push M., M. doesn’t push back. I know his issues but he seems to timid to really take charge and be there, really, as a friend. example: He offered his place to stay in case shit got bad with Paul and then reneged it. Said his sister thought it was a bad idea. Too coincidental for me, thanks. I could be reading too much into this, but hey, that’s my charm.
ME-ME’S: B. and a few other of my friends fall into this type. It is never about you, it’s about them. If you fall and break your ankle, they broke same ankle but worse. It’s competition with them. And it’s about attention gathering, and people buy into this lock stock and two broken barrels. The times I’ve watched people get suckered in to this and I just want to shake them for being silly.
Fakies: Maybe I should just walk the fence.