memory lane

October was a freaky month.
>my mother was on suicide watch, i didn’t see the shrink, i got promoted, my brother racked up a few bills, paul started a new job at AOL, Wednesday got bigger, an uncle died, I went to a spa, kethcame to visit.
That is stuff I can remember.
i should have been recording this, i should have been writing this done, but i wasn’t and i didn’t. but it’s a free country and i was getting sick of people emailing me and calling me asking me if i were alive or not, and i am; so i finally sat down and finished this damn thing.
one note on the design, if it looks even vaguely familiar, it was one of the first “professional” designs i had done by a friend of mine nearly two years ago. i realized it looked much better than anything i had done recently and so i modified it and threw it up. tada. aren’t you glad you waited? i also gave up on blogger. it was pissing me off.
rituals
every Friday night, paul, moe and I head to Logan’s Steakhouse. It has become such a ritual, that we even have our regular waitress, whom knows all of our orders and doesn’t bother bringing us menus anymore. We adore her so much, for her birthday, we tipped her 150 bucks. This is how loyal we are to this joint.
Moe ditched us last night and went out to see Circque de Sole with another friend so we got a few other people to come hang out with us. We should have known it was bad when our waitress wasn’t working, the soccer moms had taken over and the wait was nearly 1.5 hours to grab a table. Since we were all planning on seeing Bedazzled after dinner, we decided to take a stroll over to Barnes and Noble to look around.
I knew Moe should have come with us.
As soon as we walked in, I did a double take to to my right and saw someone who looked suspiciously like my ex, Alan. If you would have told me that nearly 10 years after we had started dating I would be having panic attacks about seeing him still and convincing myself he was still the one, in every day reality i would be laughing in your face. When the truth hits the fan, I was hiding behind the audio books watching this guy like some stalker, peering over the racks looking to see if it was him or not.
What was it that caught me off guard? The way he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.
I’m not kidding.
I wish it were something that would have been more pronounced, like actually looking like him or something else other than flipping this wallet out of his back pocket, but it wasn’t.
That disturbs me.
What is even more disturbing is that I’ve been having slideshows in my head of previous exes in the last decade since I met Alan before this encounter last night. I had a dream last weekend that one of my best friends Josh ended up with me and cheated on me with some girl I knew back from when I was working in San Fran. I’ve been having quick flashes at the weirdest times of guys I’ve dated seriously (and not so seriously) of smells, instances, little things that are reminders of my time with them.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that after all this time I would be over Alan? Why does he keep holding a strange hold over my life.
I’ve been down this route before. i talked about it a couple of years ago when I had thought i had seen Alan at a restaurant Michael and i had gone to.
so realistically, the chances of Alan moving from mi->ca->va the same times i have are very slim to none.
i know this.
but that doesn’t stop the heart beating wildly and the thoughts going crazy in my head when i thought i saw him.
I’m going home to Michigan in December to see my mom and touch base. paul thinks I’m crazy for feeling like i do because this is the here and now — but the really scary part is, i used to think the last 10 years of my life meant something — and i wonder if all this time if i kept myself in some sort of blanket and protection about Alan and i’s breakup — if it was all just one delusion set upon by me?
wouldn’t that be a fucking bitch.
x0x0x0x
lisa

bodice rippers

brian and i had been walking around bNn tonight (last night?) when i confessed my passion for bodice rippers. jackie collins, judith krantz — the whole strong woman whose been beaten, raped, damn near mutilated but by the time she’s 30 she’s the owner of her own successful company, beautiful, thin and perfect to the bone. And, you can’t forget, that in the end, she always gets her man.
i think those damn things are probably part of my problem. though i haven’t admittedly picked up a good old fashioned bodice ripper in ages (though jackie collins has released a few new books and i’m trying really hard not to read them), it brought to mind tonight after having sex with paul, part of my problem.
you see, i’m a reader. a voracious one at that. some freaky guy in texas has been keeping a book list since he was like four (there is of course the obvious link but i can’t find it now). and most of what i read, obviously has impact on my thoughts and feelings. and i’ll read anything, that i will, being the book whore that i am. i’ve already finished harry potter and the sorcerers stone and have books 2 and 3 on order with amazon. books by f scott fitzgerald, terry pratchett, and a biography on cleopatra sit on my bedstand (amongst others).
this all has to play about my idea about love and romance.
of fucking course (you knew this was going to be cliched didn’t you?)
i’ve always had this ideal — this man, who would come and take my blues away (like calgon — but with a penis). and every man i have ever dated and met has always lived short of that ideal because DING DIN GDING he doesn’t really exist. but he’s safe enough to make real and happy because then no one can touch me.
except for paul.
paul is a lot of wonderful things. pauls is also a lot of nasty things just as i am full of wonderful things as well as some very horrid things. for the last few days i’ve been in a snitch about something. there is no rhyme or reason to what i’ve been being in a snitch about just that I have been and that is important to this dialogue.
paul once said it would probably would have been better if i had a guy that was just a dog. because then that way everyone would be happy and i would stop bitching.
which is to say, that i say i want one thing and expect something else entirely.
(and this would suffice to say go on with the rant on why i generally hate the female species but i won’t go there).
I keep forgetting that relationships take work. and they take time to mature. i’m not talking about the passion here (insert oblig REM reference), i’m talking about understanding, love, friendship, and trust. Most, with me, does not come easy. YOU HAVE TO EARN IT BABY!
So yeah, i totally hate our media. i keep thinking of the “friends” episode where monica proposes to chandler, and i’m thinking “why don’t I have that?” and then it takes a ton of bricks to realize that i do have that. Pauls not fucking perfect. Well, neither am I. but together, we are perfect.
We have our bad days and we have our good days. and some days are better than others. But the thing is, we want to make this work. We want to make this relationship — really last and not be a flash in the pan of lust and hot sexors every night. And that some days I’m gonna want to either love him to pieces or rip his penis off and other days he’s going to want to chop my tits off.
BUT THAT IS US.
I mean, that is us, in a nutshell. because we are a real couple with real feelings, everything gets amplified. this isn’t something that is going to be solved on page 10 and our relationship isn’t going to end when the sweeps are over.
and that my friends, is what i can’t gel in my betty paige looking head.
like most people in america, i’m deathly afraid of commitment. but i’m also deathly afraid of being alone with 10 cats. i’m afraid of making the wrong decisions, the wrong choices and the wrong everything. i want my life to be a bodice ripper where everything gets worked out and my whole world will be boxed up neat and clean and set off by page 300. but real life isn’t like that. and that’s what i need to learn. that paul isn’t some schelp that i can abuse/use and that i’m not some sextoy for him to abuse/use. and we are both slowly coming to terms that that is what the problem is and that is what is making it scary and wonderful all at the same time.
because we are willing to make a stand with ourselves and willing to say hey, we love each other. this is going to work.
there are a million and one reasons why i love paul. and the best one i can think of that describes how i feel is that when my face is smushed up against his chest, THAT is home. it’s not the things around us or where we live or where we stand geographically to each other. it’s how i feel when he’s wrapped around me at night. what keeps me sane, through all my turbulent moods especially when it comes to men and relationships, is how paul treated me when my father died. his love and his understanding was what i would have wanted IDEALLY that having it happen was a dream come true.
the bottom line is, most people don’t know how to make a relationship work. because it’s hard. because it requires you to care about someone else and to provide for that person and frankly, i don’t think most people, hell adults, can make that kind of relationship work.
If i were to choose any one couple that best suited paul and i, i would have to say he was my rhett butler to my scarlett o’hara. but to those of you who are hip to GWTW, you know that Rhett leaves her at the end of the book. WRONG! In the sequel Scarlett, she does get her man.
Like me. 🙂

not justin

to “not justin”:
i don’t know who you are — but you are giving me the willies. please stop attempting contact with me and please stop sending emails telling me i’ve dumped my dream guy. the past is over and done with and i’m very much in love with paul.
thank you and have a nice day.
fsck me
my plates came in.
i’m so surprised that the state of virginia allowed me to have the plate “FSCK ME”. There were bets going around due to the fact that a friend of ours who wanted “FSCK” was denied due to it’s implications (supposedly). I am now a “Linux Pronstar”. bow down before me for i give good head.
make it stop
i don’t know what it has been lately, but i’ve been feeling like two separate people are living inside of my body. the other day i got so angry on the way home from work that if someone was in the car with me (which they weren’t), i would have killed them. i don’t know why i was angry or why i would have killed them but the rage in my head is driving me insane. now i’m not talking about just straight off pms, this is much much worse. i have had to start taking walking breaks at work because when i get an email from a customer that sounds scratching (even if it really wasn’t), i have to walk away from the situation to see if i am feeling any better.
chances are, i am and i do. but that doesn’t stop making it less scary. i’m not quite sure what i’m going to do now — i’m thinking it’s the new birth control pills but it may not be. but they found me to be healthy.
supposedly.
back to square one.
x0x0x0x
lisa

bare feet

have this passion for not having bare feet. which is strange because there was a time not so long ago that i could stand to have anything on my feet, cloth or leather wise. maybe i’ve always been paranoid about the fact that i have butt ugly feet or that i have cracked dry skin from said adventures. regardless, now i’m on this whole “feet can’t touch the ground kick” and i had slid off the fuzzy purple slippers and felt the carpet below. it was so…
soft.
the cure is blaring into my ears via my headphones, paul’s happily watching rasslin and i’m so relaxed that i’m about to fall asleep.
which i will as paul and i were up all night fucking and talking. so i only got about 2 hours of sleep 🙂
night.

penderbrook ho’

today was damn strange.
first derrick calls up and wants to go to 7-11, which ended up with us going to tower records (i’ve dropped more money at tower than i would care to think about), 7-11, subway, gas station, 7-11 again. Yes, we went to two separate 7-11s. Why you may ask? BECAUSE THE FIRST ONE DIDNT HAVE COKE SLURPEES! i mean, coke slurpee is the STAPLE of my diet. and how could they NOT carry it? It’s like when dayan and i were driving from Atlanta on route 58 cross the bottom of Virginia and saw a 7-11 beckoning in the distance. We were both craving slurpees like a mofo, had to pee and i was running out of smokes. And you know what? The damn store was CLOSED! Dan was lucky enough to be a guy and take a whiz behind the garbage cans, but, i had to wait till i got to our destination. and it was raining. did i mention that part?
i need to stop with the non-sequiturness (if there is such a word).
[I had tried to convince Derrick that I needed to go to Safeway, but that was a no go.]
Later on in the evening, Corey IM’s me and says that he needs motivation for him to go shopping. I said sure. I wanted out of the house. It was beautiful today (damn 82 degrees out while it was snowing last weekend) and I wanted to pick up a few things I couldn’t get earlier. That was another trip where i came lugging more crap upstairs (flowerflowerflowers) for Paul to make dinner.
I was beginning to feel like the standoff girlfriend: someone that single guys want to do stuff with without having a real girlfriend (i mean, paul supplies all my needs. heh) so they don’t have to do anything special. It was just funny to me (i guess you had to be there) that i could get anyone to go to the store with me other than Paul.
morning of the 17th
it’s somewhat early morning of the 17th and after sleeping for only about three hours (if that!), i’m finding that i’m not all that tired. i had just gotten out of the shower and had some extra time so update we go.
i loved last night.
after everyone had left, and i was getting frustrated trying to work out more stuff (verbosity, another journal i’m doing a kick off, another project, paul’s taxes, etc.); paul and i had hit the sack at around 3am. paul was laying in bed while i was folding laundry and putting it away when paul asked me “why do you act different around me than you do when you are alone?” i didn’t know what he had meant, honestly (though i did have some vague idea) and asked him to explain. he said that i had two routines: pauly routine (when i’m around him) and lisa routine (when i’m with other people or when i’m alone). he said it was like this fine line that i cross when i’m around him that provoked me to eat, walk, read and do different things than when i was alone. i had never really thought that i was actually changing myself when i was around him but after he gave a few specific examples, i could see how he could see that.
after folding his tshirts and putting them away, i climbed into bed and we talked until nearly dawn about me, our relationship, compromise, and other fun stuff. i love it when we talk like this. i know paul’s big worry is that i don’t open up to him (and this is true as i’ve realised with him that i guard myself well) and that all the things that make life enjoyable between two people i was missing out on. i could see his point and felt something click inside. for you see, as much as paul and i banter and argue (and people fear it when we get angry with each other — really), i can’t imagine opening up to everyone else but him. it’s strange for me to think, that we are going to get married and that i’ll soon meet his parents. the big deal when i’m around him, and the part that he maybe doesn’t understand, is that i feel incredible vulnerable when we are together. since we live and play together, i can see why in a way i was feeling so depressed in the last few weeks. the reality that this is coming true keeps smacking me in the face and instead of enjoying the time i have with him, i’m making myself more miserable in the process with thoughts and ideas that don’t really belong here. there is no way i would give paul up. it’s just not happening.
i realize now that one of the things that i as a person have to work on is joining the two routines together and making them one. i had explained to paul last night that one of the nicknames i had acquired in high school was “chameleon” due to the fact that i could blend in and change without seeming phoney. it was not something that i did consciously, it just happened. paul pointed it out more so when he noticed that my musical tastes had changed from more indie/industrial to power pop (which, in my behalf isn’t true. the eels, lincoln, belle and sebastian, also guster tend to fall into the indie range than power pop, but i’m sure dayan would disagree). i had argued that Travis sounded much like radiohead and echo and the bunnymen than power pop.
moving right along with the point here, love takes work. i don’t know who cooked up the idea that love was everything roses and easy to understand and simple, but it’s not. it takes work for two people to make an honest go of a relationship and figure out what they want from each other. i expressed a lot of fears last night to him, concerns and worries that came from both sides about where this relationship is going that i hadn’t felt like discussing with him until he brought up. i know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that paul is the one for me. it’s just a hard fact to swallow (though when he had said this, i mentioned coyly that he wasn’t hard to swallow).
waiting for bob
on that note, my friend doug does the writing for a really good comic called waiting for bob. they did a poll last week on what was the worse thing about the 80s and i got mentioned on their front page for my email that stated “everything about the 80’s ruled. you are all smoking crack”.
doug and i want to know if anyone has made it over from WFB to me, so if you have, can you drop me an email and let us know.
and one final note:
the most popular place on my site is the pr0n section.
damn pervs.
x00x0x0x
lisa

declined

actual statement from a bank on declining me for a credit card:
“we’ve determined that you have sufficient balances on existing revolving credit lines.”
does this make sense to anyone else?
i don’t see how a company can determine that a household with over 6 figure income feel that 1500 credit balance is “sufficient.”
i just find that to be incredibly funny.
last night, while i was beating my laptop for being such a piece of shit, paul decided to go ahead and pull up my credit report. It seems that equifax will for a low price of 8 dollars give you access to your most recent report. Checking i found that everything in the last two years was pretty darn spotless (no late 30,60 or 120 day reports, no judgements, no nothing). It was the stuff in the early 90s that’s killing me. But what was also interesting is that equifax has the wrong address, wrong birthdate, and a bunch of wrong information about me.
we had had a big discussion with friends about this on Saturday night when we were all sitting around watching kung fu madness. it seems incredulous to me (and paul and derrick and everyone else) just how hard it was to get credit these days. in the early 90s, when i was in my late teens, early 20s; you could walk into any department store and get a credit card and you were virtually on your way. Now, we are discovering with Paul, with /no credit/ file is just as bad as having bad credit. We can’t get him anything: not a gas card, department store card, hell not even a best buy card. he gets declined more often than I do. I told him what we needed to do, and what we are doing, is to get him on on the cards I have that is unsecured but has a high interest rate. he can use this card for all of his spontaneous shopping purposes (as well as finally send me flowers at work 🙂 without having to bug me about it.
i’m pretty happy with my current credit file save for the older and mis-information on it. I’ve worked my ass off to make sure that everything was set up correctly for it so that I wouldn’t have issues matters and concerns about the credit reports when i wanted something (a new car, new house, new body, whatever). my project this week is calling companies that show that i owe money and make a deal: you send me a letter stating that you will remove my bad credit statement from my record and you’ll get your money. sounds good to you? sounds good to me.
brotherly love
my brother, all 7’4 of him, will be flying into DC this upcoming it was an impromptu flight as we had been talking about him coming here for spring break, but it was all dependant if his basketball team won their last game before the playoffs. he wins, he’s got tourneyments to play in. he loses, he is coming to DC. since it was such a late date at getting him a ticket, the price was sorta high (and my brother has the misfortune to live in bfe Illinois where he’s too far to get a plane out of a major city) but well worth it in the end.
i haven’t seen him in nearly two years. i can’t wait.
this magic moment
we had a dozen people over at our house this past Saturday night for “Kung Fu Madness” in which we sat around eating Chinese food and watched bad kung fun movies. since we had stipulated that everyone be gone by 3am, we then carried the party out to denny’s where we sat talking about geeky stuff, while i read the USA Today from that weekend and party goers for Mardi Gras were stumbling in at all hours. As we got dropped off by our friends Lenny and Sunni in front of our apartment complex, paul had asked me if we had checked the mail for Saturday since we hadn’t we started walking towards the clubhouse to get said mail. Paul suddenly called out “sweetie” and as I turned around he jumped up in the air, literally clicked his heels and started singing “chim chimney” from Mary Poppins. It was then that I confirmed what I always knew: I’m going to marry this man.
I had related this to Paul last night when I was sitting here waiting for my windows laptop to stop being pissy (spent nearly 3 hours fixing various problems to get it working — don’t say a word). he looked at me like i had told him that i was insane as if that one defining moment was strangely the reason why i would marry him — and not any other particular moment. what can i say? it’s the little things that mean a lot.
this morning i woke up with him making me breakfast (which we shared while sitting in bed) and singing an elton john song as he brought it in. i giggled as he did this and look over to my left as he sits on the couch working on his laptop (his and her laptops — how wrong is that?). i love paul. i’m in love with paul. those defining moments which last mere seconds is what defines it for me.
x0x0x0x0x0x
moi