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.
Tag: Relationships
with a girl like you
one of my coworkers, whom i’ve nicknamed HIM, recently has started speaking to me again. The reason why this is remarkable because our relationship is damn fucking weird. Shortly after he broke up with his girlfriend of several years, he started hanging out in my cube. Then we started hanging out for lunch, going to have sushi. we would email each other every day and went back and forth for awhile, even while he was dating gf #2. Then gf #2 and he broke up and he kept bugging me to go clubbing with him (like that would go over well with paul! hah!) and then gf #3 came into the picture. My birthday party was a few weeks ago, and I invited him to show. He said he was and RSVP’d that he and the gf were going to show up. They never did.
It bothered me that he didn’t show up. I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much but I think because I thought we’re being friends or starting to be friends. I feel so awkward socially sometimes and I can only attribute that to the fact that I don’t go out with Paul at all, and our social circle is short.
when we were kids
he left me when we were kids.
i was 19 and he was 21 at the time when the affair had started. mere children. shortly after i had turned 20, the man who i had thought was the one i was going to marry me, was planning on marrying someone else.
for a decade he has haunted me.
i moved as far away as possible and yet i still see him nearly everywhere i go. one day i was having lunch with a friend and I had thought I had seen him and his wife walking by us, leaving the restaurant. i was three thousand miles from home and i think this is him.
it wasn’t, obviously, he.
it wasn’t me he had wanted, it was her. it wasn’t him at the restaurant, it was someone else. but seeing or thinking i saw him was enough, if even for that briefest of seconds.
when he and i lived in the same city, i used to see him occasionally around town. driving down the street, going into clubs, seeing him in stores. he was always alone and she was never around.
when he had broken up with me, i was devastated. with him, i was everything i thought i could be. i was loved and loving. old and young. pure and a whore. he made possible everything in my heart that had know even known existed or was too scared to show. my own sensual and sexual identities were pushed forward and ripped apart when he was around.
i thought he was the one. i thought we were going to get married.
this to me was love.
it was christmas 1992. I was wearing some paisley/floral type dress i had purchased for the informal christmas party that was being held at his brothers place. i remember watching his brother and his wife and thinking ‘this is what i want. i want to marry him and bear him children and we can have this fantastic life together’. i truly believed that. i envied his brother and adored his sister- in-law. his nephews were not that much younger than we were at the time. I remember us leaving and holding the jewelry box they had given me for christmas that year. his mother had given me a ring that belonged to her mother several months prior to all of this. i think they thought that i was the one, and i wasn’t. i do not know what happened to the jewelry box. the ring i kept and have lost it along the years.
shadow boxer
I slept for nearly 12 hours last night, but I had earned it. I had taken a five hour nap Sunday afternoon and had not gone to bed until after 4am Monday morning. I managed to function on a few hours of sleep and by going to work and was thankful that I had to leave at 2pm to go see Dr. B. for more drug follow up.
She’s changed my meds again so that I’m taking 25mg of Effexor and upping the Serzone to 375mg, which is not even close to being the actual medicated dose, which is 400 or 450, I forget which.
Last night I was sitting there thinking about my friends, both online and off, and their reaction to me. Except for a few emails from a few people who read my journal, everyone else just left me alone. I had not thought of whether or not this made me sad, more than I was disappointed. But I realized, that I really am a tough person to get to know, and it’s fucking hard as hell to approach a conversation with someone who just spent eternity on writing about suicidal thoughts and cutting themselves. How the fuck do you approach that?
You can’t. Even I know that.
But it’s hard though, because I feel like I have to start from point A to start learning social niceties again from the very beginning. Somewhere, back in my past, prior to puberty I would suppose, something changed in me and that brought forth everything that has happened. But I learned that even memories can be deceiving when talking to my mom about the petite mal seizure I had when I was 3, because for nearly 20 years, I thought it was grand mal, which makes a difference.
I always remember being scared, and I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t. I remember I always had to prove myself to someone or something, to say “Hey! I’m here! Hello!” and I don’t know why I did that. I remember, silly as it seems now, when I was living in Toronto that after going to the movies with my dad to see “Pump up the Volume” that I had stood at my window looking at the Toronto skyline and talking into a mini-recorder. I am too easily influenced and some would even say I was horribly naive.
But I suppose that is part of my charm.
When I was getting ready for work yesterday, I realized that I didn’t want to have a kid now because the state of my relationship or my age, but I didn’t want to have a kid now because of the state of my mental relationship with myself. I did not want to put my child through the BS I am going through simply because that to me would be cruel punishment and the cycle would start all over again. I couldn’t let that happen. I realized that my relationship with Paul wasn’t the problem but it proved to myself I had to be somewhere, inside of me, in a grounded place before I could move on to the next phase in my life. I cannot be angry that if it takes me forever and a day to finish school or if I’m 35 when I have my first kid. I just want to be secure in myself and financially before I bring a brat into this world.
Andrew said recently that out of those he knew, i was one of the few (including himself) that he could imagine not getting married or having a child. I suppose I did agree with him that the idea did seem ludicrous at the time, but, the thing is, I do want a child. I want a little girl, and genetically, if the patterns in the family keep on trucking, the first child I have will be a girl and there is an 80% chance that she’ll have brown hair and brown eyes, and basically look like me as I looked like my mother and my mother looked like my grandmother and so on and so forth. I have dreamed, for a very long time, that this child would not grow up in the kind of life I did and all my mistakes would be rendered negative simply by her birth. I almost feel, amusingly enough, that this child would be the second coming to me.
I’ve been at a crossroads for a few years now in my life and I’ve been coasting. I know this. But I did make a lot of changes by getting my ass out of Michigan and out of San Francisco and moving on with my life. Emotionally though, I feel like I’m still in the same place where I was when I had left Michigan nearly five years ago, but I know I have grown and it’s just in minute ways but I have grown. I do not feel almost 30. I look at successful women in their 40s and 50s and realize that I do have a long life ahead of me. I look at my mother as a supporter and a figure of hope because she did go through a lot of fucking shit and she’s still surviving (and even talking about dating again! woo!). But the ties that bind us also seem to gag us and I need to start taking small steps to make that work.
Right now, Dr. B. thinks (and I agree) that I need to work on inner self first before making any major changes in my life and I agree. Some of the stuff seems to work like taking classes online and putting together small goals but I cannot do everything at once nor should I be expected to. But I do have to prioritize and figure out which way to go first.
With that, I bid you a good morning and a happy day.
Lisa
drugco
It’s 3:15am Monday morning, and like all good boys and girls, I should be in bed sleeping. Instead, I stayed awake fretting over the slight idea that my electricity was going to be cut off tomorrow (it’s not) and the added fact that I had a five hour nap lasting until 8pm this evening also did not help.
I’m still struggling with the fact of the amount of drugs I’m taking on a daily basis. Dr. B. says we have to work on my issues one at a time and she’s adding bipolar/manic depressiveness or ADD/ADDH to the mix because apparently while both are similar, I also exhibit symptoms of ADD/ADDH but apparently some of the underlying issues with learning disorders also clearly show to be like bipolar as well. Like how Anthrax has “flu like symptoms.” Bad connotation but you get the point.
I remember, five or six years ago when our GP put me on Prozac and I woke up every morning with suicidal thoughts. Apparently, I am one of the very few that had that kind of side affect happen to them. I think Dr. B. mentioned that Lithium and it’s derivatives are the same way, but the point is to remember it’s the medication and not how you truly feel, which is also my strong point. I’m too fucking stubborn to die. I take my anger out in other obtuse ways, like chopping off my hair (I did mention that I used to pull my hair out in huge clumps when I was pissed back in the day, didn’t i?), dying my hair, getting pierced/tattooed and shopping. When I’m angry, I spend money. heh. Yet I still look at my bookshelf and think I don’t own enough books. I cleaned off my desk while I was getting bills together this morning and found a book I had purchased over a month ago and forgot about.
I keep straying from the point.
So about five or six years ago, GP puts me on Prozac and i felt like a zombie. I did not feel like “me,” i felt like someone who wasn’t me but was sharing my body. I did not know who that person was, but it was pissing me off. I did not feel the highs or the lows like I was used to and that angered me. I wanted to feel the highs and the lows, but that would require me to be off drugs and it seemed everyone wanted me to be on drugs.
It was then and there that I swore that I would use holistics, therapy or other ways to control the body chemistry and not use artificial means. But after having panic attack after panic attack for months in the summer of 2000 and feeling like you were dying will change that in you.
Dr. B. asked me why I was so defensive. heh. I spilled out words to her about growing up in my family and school and what i was like. I was always effing alone when I was growing up. That’s how i felt. I didn’t have many friends and I didn’t have very man confidences. There was me, my books and reading.
Paul was pretty adamant about me going on lithium because he said it was addictive and that he had family members who could not get off of the drug. I asked Dr. B. about it and she said that lithium was not addictive and that really, none of my meds were except klonopin. Even then, because while i have an addictive personality, I’m so afraid of being strung out on drugs or alcohol, I refuse to put myself in that situation. I hardly every drink — last time I had beer was on 9/11/2001 and prior to that was Paul’s 21st birthday. I cannot even remember the last time I did illicit drugs. It does nothing for me. Growing up in an alcoholic family will do that to you, either you become this almost fanatic about alcohol and drugs or you succumb and do it yourself. I choose not to succumb and kept my mouth away from alcoholic pleasures for quite a long time. I won’t say I don’t drink, as I’ve been known to imbibe in a few yummy alcohol laden treats a few times in my life, but I don’t use alcohol as a crutch. Never could get over some of the taste and the smell of whiskey always reminds me of my dad. I never could date anyone who liked drinking whiskey and coke, because that to me along with a few other smells reminds me too much of my father.
I’m still fucking angry at him dying on me. I’m still pissed at my mom. Dr. B. says that I need to let the hurt go and I was almost shouting “I want to! I JUST DO NOT KNOW HOW!”
I don’t know how.
Wish I did.
x0x0x
lisa
about a girl
i was crying this morning while i was making coffee.
Considering that i had scratched and punched Paul on Saturday, that is somewhat of an improvement.
let me backtrack:
For the last few weeks, mentally, something had not been going right inside my head. I started coming home from work, eating dinner and almost promptly going to bed. Stuff like school, writing, NaNoWriMo, my journal, etc all went out the window. I felt like I was being dragged down into this cesspit of despair but nothing externally had changed. Paul and i were still, well Paul and I, my mother still hadn’t gotten her SSI yet and I was still supporting her and everything else gosh darn remained the same.
But then stupid little incidents started setting me off. Customers who were dumber than a box of rocks (nothing new, however, I seemed to be taking a new path on how to deal with them which wasn’t good), people on mailing lists I would blow up on and use this foul language that bothered even me. The woman who ran me off the side of the road on Saturday, every little slight against me sent me into this fury that pissed me off so much I was shaking physically. I was/am spinning out of control and I do not know how to stop it.
On Saturday, I was sitting at my computer all nonchalant like when Paul asked me to fix the printer. He was prepping the list for us to go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner and I just blew up at him. My movement was so fluid, that I had no time to think or to react. I got up, and started punching and scratching Paul. I threatened to stab him with something. All the while he is looking at me like “What the fuck are you doing?” I started screaming at him about why couldn’t he fix the printer himself and i tried to force open said printer when he started yelling at me I was doing it all wrong. Once I got the printer opened, I took the color cartridge out of its place and shook it all over him, leaving drops of blue and red ink on his white T-shirt. I just did not give a flying fuck. At some point, I went and laid down, to help calm down, and that did not seem to help either. All I kept thinking about was sliding a knife down my arm vertically and just fucking ending it all. Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck my mother and my family, fuck work and most especially fuck Paul.
But I didn’t grab a knife, I just laid down and slept for a few hours hoping that the monsters would go away.
They of course, did not.
Sunday morning, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and went to the massage therapist. All the work my chiropractor had done on me for the last year had gone to hell in a handbasket as all the pain i started suffering came rushing back within the last month or so. I can’t sleep, I’m angsty and i feel like stabbing someone. really. Charisma (yes, really, that is her name) started working on me and i felt myself tense up and eventually relax. By the time I had left her an hour later, my body was like rubber. However, later on that day, I was back to being pent up, angsty, angry Lisa. Nothing was working. Not massage, not going to the chiropractor, not drugs, not relaxing, nothing. zip. nada.
I’ve never thought of myself as a cutter and have prided myself on being ‘too smart’ to follow through with cutting myself or attempting suicide, but, I’m telling you, the idea felt warm and safe in my head Saturday and this morning, the fact that all this frustration and anger came welling to the top, I’m this close to wanting to hurt myself. I’m literally hanging on by a thread.
in over a year of being with my therapist, not once can i honestly say that i wanted to hurt myself until recently. Oh, i had bouts when on new drugs that the idea seemed to be golden, but, i rationally knew it was the drugs not how i felt consciously. My family, genetically, seems to dispel drugs like there is no tomorrow. My mother had been on various anti-whatevers for the last year and she would get to the point where she would be okay, she would be almost maniac but not quiet and then BOOM, she would fall. With me, it is almost the same. Prozac, paxil, Effexor, zolotf, now Serzone all seem to have the same effects one me — fine for awhile, then the drug does not work anymore. I’m tired of feeling out of control and like my life is spinning 180 degrees. I fought so fucking hard to not be where I was five years ago only to find that it seems worthless. I feel worthless and I feel like my life is not worth it.
My eyes are welling up with tears again, like they have been for the last few weeks or so. Everything, everything is setting me off. I feel so fucking helpless, because i AM seeing a therapist, i AM taking anti-whatever drugs, i AM going to a chiropractor, i AM seeing a massage therapist. NOTHING IS WORKING. I’m so fucking pissed because I’m doing all the ‘right’ things, and yet i feel I’m back where i started over a year ago. That fuels my anger even more and i want to hurt myself or someone around me.
I just got done making breakfast as I decided it was in the best interest that I not go in today. I’m lucky, in that, half my department is fucking loony toons and that they know my history that I can call in ‘sick’ and tell them really why i was ‘sick’.
I sat there chopping up onions and green peppers thinking I can make this omelette (which, I of course burn) and the thought of slicing my skin is still there. I watch the omelette burn and I have this special omelette pan in which when I flipped it over, a plastic part of the pan starts burning stinking up my kitchen. I toss the whole mess into a regular frying pan and end up making scrambled eggs with potatoes, onions, and green peppers.
My life could be described just like that: it’s a mess so i transfer it over to something else. I’m tired, oh so tired of fighting to stay alive. I keep myself in check all these years, busting my ass to do the right things, and to make up for all the things i feel I’ve done to slight people and myself and I can not catch up. I just can’t do it anymore.
For a long time, I wanted to be crazy, like really crazy , mental hospital crazy, but my mom’s experience this summer showed that what i saw in movies and what was real were wildly different things. I still want to be crazy, I feel worthless enough because I cannot accomplish anything feasible. Everything feels like this huge burden that I cannot even begin to touch.
You’re a child, and you are told from day one that you are special and worthwhile and bright and gifted. You are told you can do anything you want, that the world is your oyster and you cannot fail at anything.
Then the chemistry changes and at the age of nine you are seeing a therapist because “you’ve been a bad girl,” and your mother keeps yelling at you how everything is your fault, and you are grounded not for days or weeks but for months and years. You run and escape into books and feel paranoid. You feel like everyone is out to get you and you can’t understand why at the age of 9,10,11 why you don’t have friends like other people have friends. You’ve spent so much of your young life being grounded that you miss out on birthday parties and events with other kids. You don’t have friends. The people who say there are your friends only use you because you are stupid enough or naive enough to think they like you. But they don’t, not really. Kids are cruel creatures.
So you grow up, your family moves, and you start a new school where no one knows you. You think that you can be anything you want to be, but your attempts at making friends is feeble and you spend most of your lunch periods reading or writing, always alone. Your 13. Your body changes and you suddenly develop breasts and lose some of the baby fat, and suddenly guys want to date you. You still feel like this insecure be-speckled person you were when you were nine and 10. Fat, worthless, pointless. You don’t know what changed but now people want to be your friend, but they are they wrong type of friends. They are the ‘bad kids’, but you don’t care because someone finally pays attention to you and you feel happy because now you have ‘friends’, and that’s all you wanted. Everything becomes this big blur as you enter high school and everyone leaves you alone because they either don’t know you or assume you are a transferring senior when really you’re just a 5’10 150lb freshman. You still think you were so fat. Then you go on the special school trip where your class of AP students travel to Kentucky. You get lured into and locked into a cabin with the swim team where they get this bright idea to gang rape you. You fight and claw and run screaming into the bathroom and a friend saves you. But no one is told. Not the parents, not the guardians, no one. You sit through the going away party glaring at the boys who had tried to harm you and they act nothing is going on. Back to school, everything changes and suddenly rumors are spreading and the same boys who grabbed you are leering at you and making comments. Kids are so cruel, they didn’t mean it.
You start getting older, 14, 15 and things remain the same. You now feel like two people instead of one. One who doesn’t give a fuck and the one who does. She (me/i/her) still hangs out with the ‘bad kids’ and the other half goes and starts studying for the LSAT. The two worlds cannot reconcile themselves and the fighting at home becomes worse and your mother keeps taking you to separate therapists where you confess just what an awful child you are. You start a new habit of breaking things. You get angry and start breaking anything made of china or glass. Your friends get used to it and you laugh it off and your mother gets angry for breaking all the dish ware in the house. You had as a child taken a point of where you used to sew your fingers together with needle and thread, through the upper layers of your skin. You would sew and sew and then rip it out gingerly and start over again. You used to pull huge clumps of hair out. At 16,17 and 18, nothing has changed. You lose your virginity to someone you don’t love only to have him dump you four days later for a whore. You sleep with whoever and you don’t care, thinking your this badass who can deal with it and you know they are jerks and won’t call you again. You spend a lot of time hiding under your desk when on the phone, as if the wrath of your family is just that bad, but your family consists of a younger brother and a mother and how can it be so bad?
Anyone who was seriously into you, and I mean seriously into you, leaves because they can’t deal with the mania and the depression that follows. Sometimes you forget to eat and when you do eat, you gain weight. Except now you are cycling, between the mania and the depression. You move again and again with your mother and move to Toronto when your 18, only to find that the lessons you had learned as a child are still with you. You come back having only made a few friends, didn’t leave the house and nothing changed for you. It was still the same.
Then it cycles faster.
And as you get older, you notice that the so-called ‘adults’ you are supposed to be, still have the same tenacity as the children you knew. No one is interested in being ‘real’ or friends with you, they would rather lie, cheat and steal. Instead of hair pulling or sewing, you cry and don’t leave your room for days. Friends call and want to go out, and you have panic attacks thinking about leaving the house. Then a few days later everything is ‘fine’ and you pretend nothing happens.
Your world has become disjointed and you tell yourself you’ll pull out of this bullshit and move on. But you can’t reconcile the differences between reality and fantasy. Reality is much too fucking painful to deal with. Either that or your sense of reality is too fucking painful. You don’t see happiness or warmth in anything, it’s all gray and dark and dismal.
Memories keep shooting up to the forefront and you still cry. You cry when your mother left you with cast up to your thigh on the Christmas you were 22 and your 16 year old brother was with you to help you use the port-a-potty because you could not walk the 50′ to the bathroom. Your brother helps you up the stairs and you really bathe for the first time in a week and your next door neighbors come over on Christmas day and help you hobble over to their house for dinner. THEN the police show up at your door because your father is worried you were being mistreated (22, no phone in the house, no food and your mother and her husband are gone for the holidays). The following Christmas your mother gives you a bottle of washer fluid for your car, and you sit there crying. Your brother and you start a tradition where you go to blockbuster and grab burger king for dinner. You hate Christmas and all the fake cheer that is associated with it.
Now you are 29. Next year you’ll be 30. All through the years you’ve kept a pretty good handle on the monsters. You’ve kept them at bay and worked to not let them interfere with your life on day to day basis, but you know that is a lie of sorts. If you really kept them at bay, you would not be suffering this pseudo-breakdown you are today. You feel embarrassed and guilty for bringing it up, and the non-stop headaches you have lately does not dissipate with bringing all this information forward.
Part of you, a good chunk of you, has given up. It’s easier to automate your life and work on that than to work on what’s really bothering you, but even you don’t know what’s bothering you anymore. Everything seems so trivial and of a lesser extent than when you make it real. But if there were true, there would be no fucking reason why you would be fucking crying at Harry Potter or any other movie that shows some sort of goodness to the heart.
The other part of you, albeit seemingly feeling small and unimportant is hanging on for dear life. Sheer will is keeping you together as your body is trained to handle certain things, but, sheer will is losing out fairly quickly. Rationally you know that you won’t necessarily do anything to harm yourself, but that is fast running low against the monster that wants to hurt you.
The irony of the saying “god only gives you what you can handle” which has been drilled in your head since your Catholic school days is fast losing its hilarity.
———–
I’ve got a 3:30pm appointment today with my shrink.
x0x0x
lisa
heroin is so passe
i swear, i must have ADD or ADHD or something. I got up at 4am to upgrade a customers bandwidth and thought to myself “Self! You have about 3 hours to work on email/website before you need to get ready to go to the therapists. Use that time wisely grasshoppa!” I responded back “Your right, I’ve been so busy lately that i haven’t had a chance to get caught up on the website or do email or anything”.
So I had these grandiose plans to do an entry this morning and god damnit, I WILL! I can type fast (80wpm) and hopefully I can get this done before I jet out of here before we er I go to the shrinks.
So news news news first:
Paul and I went to the couple therapist a few weeks back and that went okay. I came out of it sounding like a bitch on wheels and he sounded like a monster. I suppose that’s normal for couple therapy. I’ve never been with another person before, so this should be interesting. I think he and I are both afraid of the outcome because we’ve both been pretty passe about going back. But I’m determined to keep my end of the bargain and make us go to get our issues resolved for I am NOT marrying him or committing any further till I feel comfortable doing so. Our fighting has toned down quite a bit but to me, the issues don’t feel so resolved. I still have a lot on my mind but since we are at the point where the arguments become almost moot and I feel like we are spinning our wheels. He IS trying to make things better and I feel so am I, but we’ll see. We have another appointment tomorrow morning.
Work has been driving me nuts — and I asked for it since I was bored so I can’t complain. I’m in the process of re-writing some of our documentation for procedures since some of it is sorely out of date and it was pissing me off. I’ve also started a new project which requires me to carry a pager — starting November 1st I will be the “after-hours scheduled on-call person”. What this means, in short, is that if a customer wants to do a cut over or dns change or whatever after hours, the engineer asks his backup, if the backup declines, than he asks the group. If no one picks it up, I will. I am hoping to do this to defer the cost of my dsl (hahahah — fuckers won’t get me my t1 😮 ) and to help out cos I like doing that kind of stuff. I will be enforcing this like a sunofabitch because we have few engineers who will tell a customer “oh, just call in and someone will do this for you after hours” and this totally pisses me off to no end because it creates false expectations and we have strict after hours procedures since our install department is only open until 7pm EST. So yah, I’ll be doing that. For being on-call (sorta) they usually will install a t1 as “incentive” however since WCOM is being cheap fuckers, this is not happening in my case AND i have dsl (1.5down/384up). BUT! I don’t have static ips, I can’t do my own dns and I can’t get the business dsl from Verizon as they don’t offer static ips ANYWAY (and I’m ohh so close to the CO 😮 ). UUNet does NOT partner with Verizon so basically I carry a pager and they pay for existing dsl line and I can VPN to our network if I so choose.
Also, there was talking of finally giving me a raise in status to level 3 engineer — which means jack to you but it means a new pay for me. BUT since the damn hiring freeze, I’m not getting it and probably won’t get it till when the hiring freeze is over. fuckers.
School is also kicking my ass. I was slacking on the reading assignments for it and I was five weeks behind. But I started hitting the books right after I got home and have caught myself up. I have a paper due this weekend which I will be working on tonight or this weekend (he’s giving us a three day lap to turn it in). I’m taking ONE class right now, but I’m also taking a mid-semester class that starts this week and I’ve already started reading for that class — have to so I won’t fall so far behind.
All of my school work thus far is on-line via UMUC which offers online degrees in various subjects INCLUDING English — hot damn. I might finally get my BA/BS (they keep switching it at UMUC) at one point in my life.
My brother Jeff is trying out for the Grand Rapids Hoops a CBA/IBL professional basketball team this week. There are currently 10 spots open and I’m really confident that he’ll make it. You can read all about the Hoops on their website and cheer my brother on. Plus the mofo will finally start paying me back for all the freaking money I loaned him in the last few years.
November is gonna keep me really busy as I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. In short, the contest is to write a novel (50k words or more) from 11/1/2001 till 11/30/2001. I can see this is already going to take up the bulk of my time and I’m really excited as the very very very few times I’ve tried my hand at writing fiction, I’ve basically, well, sucked. But I’ve been sitting here drawing out plots and story lines and fleshing out the characters. The point is about quantity not quality but hey, i know this is not going to be the ‘Great American Novel’ that I wanted but fuck, it’ll be under my belt.
Because of this, you can watch my progress at NanNoNuts, which is a blog a few of us are using for support/etc during the writing process. I don’t know, honestly, how much time I’ll have to devote to the journal during the month of November, so at least you’ve been warned 🙂 I want to do more chronicling of what I’ll be doing during that time period, but we will see.
Lets see, what else. I’ll be heading back to MI in November for a few days to spend with my mom in Port Huron. I found out that the house I grew up in is for sale — don’t know the price but my mom said if saw the house I’d cry. We got the house in the late 1950’s and sold it in 1985 when we moved from Port Huron to Grand Rapids. One day I’ll write about it and I’ll include pictures of then and now. I’m afraid as my aunt Roberta said that the house is in total ruin. ugh.
It’s 7am and I gotta jet.
love you,
Lisa
today and everyday
this won’t be posted on my site, and in fact, after making it plaid (and earning blog babe of the week), it’s been interesting to see that more my life becomes more complicated, the more i choose NOT to write it.
oh, it’s the twine history of mine, it is. you’ll notice (if you wish) over the last 3 years of steady journal writing, I’ve skipped over large periods when really GOOD stuff was going on — you know, the drama, the intrigue, the etc.
stuff that makes life.
what I’ve been thinking about actually, is that in the last few weeks or so, my heart has been aching. not medically but emotionally. i feel pain. pain is good, is it not? it, at least, renders us alive and verifies that we can feel. i know why i feel pain, and there are many reasons why I’ve been feeling this way but lately, it’s nothing i can talk about seeing as when i have discussed it, shit got fucked up in a major way.
looking at my life from the other side of the fence, it looks pretty damn good. I’ve got a great job (and I’ve been there two years — stable in these Internet times), i live in a great apartment, drive a brand new car, make decent money, and I’ve stated this before.
usually when writing online, i was never afraid to make it known who i was — i was me. lisa rabey. I’ve fucked up a lot, loved a lot, did a lot and was never afraid (so i thought) to show it. i wanted the attention, I’ll admit that — I’m human. Paul’s been saying this a lot. he’s been saying how much i want to be adored and appreciated and loved. I’m an exhibitionist in a very true sense of the world. i climb high, and damnit, i want you to watch me climb and if i fall, i want you to feel my pain and make me feel paid. i want to be able to have that kind of power over myself and over others. i want to control and be controlled.
I miss a lot of things. I miss Danny. I was walking around target with my neighbor Chris tonight and they have all the Halloween decorations up. He loves Halloween like Paul loves Christmas. what the fuck is it about the men that i love that love these holidays? Paul has started, since October 1st, playing Christmas music and watching Christmas movies. he says it gets him in the mood, and i say, that it drives me batty. Don’t get me wrong, i love Bing just like anyone else, but Paul takes it to a new level. I bought a T-shirt at Target that says “evil” on it. Because frankly, that’s how i feel.
i have this uncanny ability to wall myself up and for a long time i wasn’t even allowing myself to feel everyday things. i worked like a robot. this is what you get get get get get. i felt myself like a princess enclosed in a castle with the fire breathing dragon waiting outside. YOU MUST PROVE YOUR WORTHY before i will let you in.
before, I’ve said this. before everything.
the world is this mix and i used to think i was the blender. i could shake up a martini like no ones business. but it was my own special mixture. now i feel like I’ve left out a few of my own ingredients and i have to find a way to piecemeal it back together again.
hubris. i like this word.
long ago, and far away in a bedroom on Paris ave in the city of grand rapids, i still have the vivid imagery of writing in longhand with a shelf over my desk and desk light illuminating the room. flash forward a few years and I’m sitting at a desk, with the same type of wall-fabric, with a shelf over me and the desk light being the only illuminating object in the apartment. but now instead of sitting there writing with a 50 cent pen on 2 dollar notepad, I’m writing in a cracked email program on a 2000 laptop (that i have bought for 600).
i was to have grown, but i seem in many ways not to.
it was there where i wrote and it was there where i wished. it was before i met Danny. before i had gotten myself a computer. before a lot of things.
perhaps i am afraid.
i have become distracted by things that have happened while i was writing. i have often found that chain smoking creates yellow stains on the walls and water not only is a diuretic, it also cleans your face.
Today was Paul and I’s two year anniversary.
Could you tell?
lisa
alan
I found him after nearly 10 years.
Actually, it was easier than I thought it would be — Shelly has been finding people left and right on classmates.com, and I hadn’t even ever thought to check that out to see if he was listed. Oh boy, today was my lucky day.
And yes I did email him.
backstory: when i was a young lass (now that I’m old and crotchety), i met this guy, named alan, who was the airborne express delivery guy at the place I worked at. Turns out, after I had been working there for about four or five months, alan had the biggest crush on me. Everyone knew it in the store — except yours truly.
We dated and it was — to put it mildly — really intense. It was for me anyways. Alan was the guy who brought the freak out in me — and it was because of him i went and got my nose pierced. Yes, it’s true. Lisa @ 20 wasn’t as bright as Lisa at 29.
Alan and I dated for about six or seven months, and he was — simply put, my life. I lived, breathed, fucked for that man. Everything in my little world was wrapped around his happiness. Then the day after Christmas, 1991, he broke up with me.
We continued seeing each other on the side — you see, he cheated on me with his now-wife, and cheated on his now-wife with me before he got married — our ‘affair’ lasted another 6 months which lead to a blow out of me getting into fisticuffs with her at a bar shortly after my 21st birthday.
I never saw him again.
Alan, heh, I’m laughing now when i think about it, was the end all be all of existence for quite a few years. Last time I saw him was in 1993, and I didn’t date anyone again until 1995. I cried, bled, screamed and tore up because of that man.
See, I don’t know if Alan’s recollection of me is the same of what I have of him. This didn’t actually dawn on me until tonight when I dropped the email to him — thinking maybe i didn’t make that big of impact on him as he did on me. I’m trying not to let wishful thinking get in the way of memory. I remember the really stupid shit — the times when I was strong and I told him to fuck off and he’d show up at my house and we’d fuck for hours. What was it about me that drove him to her? Why wasn’t I good enough for him? All these questions have been burned in my memory — hell, Danny and I talked about this when I was in Grand Rapids. We were discussing about Danny’s reunion and I said “I have no idea what I would do if I ran into Alan again” — and I didn’t. I still don’t. Why does it matter — now, after all these years?
It shouldn’t, right? I mean, my god, look at how my life has changed — look at how much I’ve changed, look at what I’ve accomplished and done with my life with very little to build on.
According to his bio, he’s in the naval reserve now. He’s clean cut and changed — just as I have changed.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if he does respond to me or not — maybe it just matters that I made the first step to getting closure — and maybe he never realized how much he is part of my commitment issues — if only he had been honest.
I’m throwing blame on him, and it’s true. I never could stand for lying cheating and being dishonorable — and he was all three — but that memory, that memory we all carry of our first big love that burns into our hearts and changes us. That memory which we think is buried deep inside us isn’t — it’s always on the surface waiting to get out.
x0x0x
lisa
electric fried eel
Tonight I met my friend Mark, one of my oldest on-line friends, in person.
Mark and I have had our ups/downs in the last five+ years we have known each other. I met him shortly after he got married to now when he is going through a divorce. He’s seen me move from Michigan to California to Virginia. We’ve had our fights and our moments of closeness. Tonight, unplanned, we decided to hook up.
I am, very very comfortable, with meeting people I have first met on- line. A good chunk of the relationships and friendships I have know is due to the Internet (including my fly-by-the-seats experiences and also thanks in part how i got my job). I wasn’t nervous. As stated, I’m very comfortable with meeting people I know on-line. It is, simply put, a further extension of myself by greeting them in person. I told Mark that I would hug him when I see him (typically, i come from a very demonstrative family. i am so surprised that i have yet to get a “sexual harassment” filed on me at work for how friendly we are to each other). A few hours later after work (with him getting lost on 495 — damn beltway), he ding donged my doorbell and there he was!
I hugged him and Paul was being a bitch and didn’t want to meet him, we grabbed my purse and took off for Best Buy.
It turns out Mark has never sat in a Saturn before AND he’s never been to Starbucks! So, i devirginized him in two separate things tonight.
He and I sat outside of Starbucks (which was next door to best buy. I got the “Hannibal” dvd and the dvd of “Memento” — a movie I’ve been dying to see) and drank our coffee and talked. It was such a peaceful night — the air was a tad crisp (perfect for wearing my new cords), the sky was really clear and we laughed at all the idiots passing us by and i tickled him for good measure. Mark smelled great and I was happy to have met him. He looked so angelic compared to the previous pics i saw with all of his piercings. Mark also has a few tattoos and we talked about ink and life and relationships. I had a really good time.
Prior to all of this, I had asked Paul if we had any plans for tonight and he had said no. So when I told him not only was I going to meet mark, but that I wanted him to meet him, he went into bitch-mode and threatened to deck Mark. I told Paul, bluntly, that I had a right to go out with friends and that if i was having an affair with Mark, I would not tolerate this super possessive attitude Paul has been showing of late and he could either accept the fact I was going out or he could be a little bitch. Paul choose to be a little bitch. It was not 10 minutes after our conversation this afternoon in which I told him this (and he had told me we had no plans for tonight), that he asked what time everyone was meeting up for the weekly game of pool at Breakers. I wanted to kill him.
My assertiveness to be ‘me’ and not Paul’s latchkey seems to be working. We talked tonight and decided not to have sex anymore unless we truly wanted to be together — and not have sex for the sake of sex. He wanted to get to know me better and become friends again. I really really appreciate this sentiment and am willing to give it ago because I can admire that he said this to me. I know we have a lot to work out on, and I remain firm though in my decision to start having a life outside my relationship with Paul and if he chooses to come with me on my decisions, than we will be so much the better as a couple.
But no guarantees and no promises of tomorrow. We just have to live our life day by day and see what happens.
x0x0x
lisa