I have a thing for reference books

I’m starting to wonder if I am going about things in the right way.

I did things pretty quick early on: I went straight from high school to college, straight from college to graduate school, mostly on the urgings of my parents--both of whom dropped out of college at least once and were concerned that if I didn’t get it all done quickly I would never finish even a single degree.

My four years of college were done at a state school fairly inexpensively--except for a semester exchange to England, which was expensive (but not something I’ll ever regret--I loved the traveling, learned a lot from it, and the study abroad was a great way to get out and do it). But my graduate degree (which I finished in 10 months because I was terrified of how much it would cost me to do in the recommended two years) cost about three times what my undergraduate degree did, and I am going to be paying back those loans for quite some time.

I think, if I had it do to over again I might not have jumped so quickly into a graduate program--with a little more looking around I probably could have found some way to not foot quite so much of the cost (I got a couple of small scholarships, but the rest of the money came in the form of loans).

When I finished my graduate program I had two months of being unemployed and worried about it during which I immediately refinanced my loans (and thank goodness I did--I managed to lock in a 2.6% interest rate for the lot of them, which dropped a full percentage point this year with my 36^th on-time payment). I went on three interviews and took the first job that was offered to me--making slightly less (before taxes even, gah) than I held in loans for the first year, and getting a 4% raise the year after to make about what I held in loans the second year.

When I got the job I had a pretty serious boyfriend who was a pretty serious waste of time. We had been together in college and somehow I never noticed that he didn’t have much of a work ethic or moral compass--we didn’t have many classes together and he was just so cute and different from me that I sort of glazed over the bad things for the first year we were together. When I went to graduate school he went to work at a private school, as a coach, and got himself fired just before the end of his first season. I was shocked and horrified, emotions that deepened when he went on to blame his behavior and sacking on everyone around him and take none of the blame for himself. We had fight after fight about petty little things that I’d never noticed before, but ultimately we managed to keep it together for the year we were apart.

Which turned out to be a mistake when I got a job and we moved in together.

We had lived together for our last year of college, so I knew what I was getting into, but I had hopes that things would be better--because we weren’t in college anymore, and I wanted to believe that we could be adults now, and clean up after ourselves among other things. Our apartment was decently sized--we got a cheap two bedroom and so had a whole room to use as “storage” --I wanted it to be an office eventually but it was really nice to just have a room to throw stuff in when I didn’t want to look at clutter. It was furnished with a combination of things we had had in college, thrift store finds and things my parents had given me. He never seemed to be able to close a cabinet door or actually throw away any of the packaging for things he ate--and he ate a lot of pre-packaged crap, all of a sudden. He would eat a bag of chips for lunch, or buy those gas station cinnamon buns and eat one for dinner and the other for dessert. I had no idea who he was. I was a vegetarian and pretty serious about health and health-conscious living--before, in college he had at least made an attempt, but now there was something seriously wrong.

While I was working my first professional post-graduate gig, he had gone back a step and gotten a job doing some seasonal work at a local ski hill. Although I wasn’t making much, he was making considerably less than I was, and he knew that his job had a definite expiration date. I started writing all the rent- and living- related checks so that he could build up a savings--only he didn’t, he just bought more crap: videogames, top shelf alcohol, pizza and other food that would be delivered, and several different controlled substances.

When I confronted him about the lack of savings--when he asked me to cover a couple of months bills it was so that he could save up and start looking at graduate school for himself--he raged at me that since I made so much more than he did (kind of an exaggeration, actually, but it was at least a steady pay check) I should be supporting him, it was only fair.

And then I kind of lost it. Even though he was still cute (though at this point a little pudgy), without the filter of college we didn’t really have all that much in common, and it occurred to me that this wasn’t really a relationship I had to be in, or wanted to be in.

I started writing lists; its what I do when I need to clear my mind and think seriously about a decision. He found one such list--I think he may have been poking through my stuff at the time, since most all of my writing was in a single notebook--and a couple of days later we had a huge fight followed by several days of tense silence and then his announcing that he was leaving me, had found a new apartment and would be gone by the end of the week.

I think he expected me to protest somehow, but I didn’t. it was a huge relief.

Then he asked if he could borrow $200 for the security deposit.

I loaned it to him--I should say gave it to him, since to date he still owes me somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 for covered rent, security deposit and a cell phone plan that included both of us.

It was quite a learning experience.

Anyhow, when I got that first job, our “plan” was that I would work at it for three years--long enough for that interest rate to drop, and for the two of us to save some money (I have a feeling he still hasn’t saved any money, but I haven’t talked to him in something more than two years at this point--mutual friends say he just had to drop out of graduate school because he owed the school too much money) and then I would quit, or take a leave of absence if they would let me, and we would travel for a year. Because I loved to travel, and he had never been out of the country. With our break up I decided I still wanted to stick to the plan--that I would work for three years, save as much as I could, and then take off for a year of well-deserved rest and travel.

But then I started actively hating my job. I didn’t really realize right off that I was being taken advantage of--I was working 6 days most weeks, sometimes until midnight or one in the morning, I was the office “snow policy” because when the breakup had happened I had left the 2 bedroom apartment behind for one that was ¼ of a mile from my job. After a couple of months of keeping this schedule I started to sort of look around and realize I’d put myself in a hell of a position. So I started using my late-night stints at work to look for new opportunities. I found one and applied for it, but when I did my second interview (the first was a phone interview, so I didn’t get to see the place until the second time around) I realized that the office culture was much like the place I was already working, so I decided to stick it out.

Then, as often happens, I met a guy. A good one this time: he was a vegetarian, health conscious, interested in a lot of the same things I was: organic agriculture, sustainability, zombie movies and post-apocalyptic fiction. And he was working in a similar field…two states away.

We started spending the weekends I wasn’t working together, and I started looking for jobs in the same state he was in.

I found one, and when I interviewed, mid-way through my second year at my first job, I discovered that it was perfect. So much more laid back, so much more time-flexible, so much better paid. I interviewed three times and then the manager called to tell me they had decided to go with someone else.

I was heartbroken. I called the boy and sobbed. He tried to consol me, wrote a very nice email about how he planned to be with me a long time--even though I was still two states away--and that he had started looking at jobs in my state as well.

It was so sweet and gave me renewed hope.

Then two days later the manager called again, to ask me if I might still be interested in the job. Something had happened with the first choice candidate, and she said if I didn’t take it they were going to re-open the search and get a new batch of applicants. I accepted on the spot.

I let my old manager know he was about to be my old manager and he took it really well and gave me a really decent time table for the transition.

I didn’t take any time off between jobs, I finished on a Friday, moved over the weekend and started the new one on Monday. And it was good. The people were nice, the pay was decent and the hours were fantastic.

It occurred to me at this point that I wasn’t going to be able to stick to my timetable: it would be almost impossible--I liked it and I had only just started. I couldn’t give it up after only a year, it just seemed unthinkable.

Plus it felt a little like things falling into place: a great guy, a great job, a great new apartment, though not with the guy--we had agreed that that was too far too fast--but everything was pointing toward our continuing to be serious, moving toward having a future together.

But then of course, nothing ever stays that way for long.

The boy in question has let me know he is planning on moving on--going to New Zealand for awhile, then traveling around a bit after that possibly. He’s not sure when he is coming back so he thinks we should break things off. He thinks we’re in different places right now: that I am settled and have a career, and that he just wants to travel for awhile.

I want to scream and shake him sometimes.

But part of it is right, I have sort of fallen into a career--and I’m wondering--am I going to feel like I’ve been trapped here? Am I going to regret not chucking it all and seeing the world while I’m still in my 20s and all my joints work properly?

Its just hard to know right now.

walk around walk around

So. Yeah.
Had kind of a busy day yesterday, and obviously didn't get as much accomplished as I wanted to (for instance: no writing). But it was a pretty good day, all told: I managed to get up early (!! shock of shocks!!) for the first time in a couple of weeks and feel fairly motivated in the morning. I had a big presentation deal at work which went sort of haywire at t minus 2 hrs to lift off and caused a lot of running around and panicking, leaving me with massive amounts of adrenaline that stopped me from eating anything yesterday afternoon even though there was lunch at the presentation and my actual active piece of it only lasted through the first ten minutes. So that meant I went to the gym when I got home from work (after going to the city library to pick up shameful genre fiction that I will read in the seclusion of my quiet bedroom and nowhere else) and talked my gym buddy into trying this with me, which I am very excited about (I went the whole deal: I weighed, measured and photographed my "before" self in preparation for the slick new me. Friend thinks I am hilarious and ridiculous, and so far I can't say she is wrong, but I want to gauge and mark and track my progress. Here's hoping for progress!!)
Can you ever tell who you are going to end up friends with, or keeping in touch with? I never can. I think it is very possible that I just do not interact well or keep in touch well or something like that, and so possibly I am the only person who looks back at the last five or ten years and goes "my god: where did my peeps go? And who the hell are you?" I mean, there are people that I have kept in touch with and kept up with who are wonderful and fine and great and then there are people that I've had halfhearted online relationships with who, when we get together it bounces back into fullness and the friendship is totally alive and wonderful and you promise yourself no more dry spells but it never quiet works out. Then there are the folks that once upon a time you were inseparable for months or years at a time and now you just wonder "what happened?"
I bring this up in part because gym buddy is someone I knew in high school. She was Ms. Valedictorian, Ms. I-am-morally-and-intellectually-superior, and occasionally Ms. stick-so-far-up-my-ass-its-in my-brain-stem, back then. So I can't say I considered us close friends--we were both in the accelerated classes together, did the occasional project together, for a little while drama geek-ettes together, but not exactly confidants or pals or anything. But we kept in touch. Through her Ivy league education and my parallel state school stint. My graduate degree and the disintegration of my college romance , her quick marriage and drawn out divorce in (of all places) West Virginia. And now we're living in the same area code again, and we've started going to the gym.
Really, she asked if she might use me for my gym membership: she doesn't want to fork over the cash for one of her own, and one of the perks of my job is access to the gym for free--and I am allowed guests, which I had mentioned to her at some point.
But in a larger way, too, it is odd that of the people I knew in high school somehow I have hung on to gym buddy. I have a roommate right now whom I also went to high school with--but that makes more sense, because we also went to elementary school together, and played soccer together even before that. I have known that girl forever, and she is one of the ones that even though we might go a year or more without speaking, when we do talk it all comes back: the shared past, the quirk factories that are our brains, the camaraderie. I'm really glad that things sort of fell together the way that they did (it started out with a blind "hey does anyone know of a decent apartment for the summer...looking to sublet" that she sent to probably three dozen people and I just happened to be going out of town for a month, so she sublet from me and then one of my roommates moved home and she took his room and has been around ever since. fortuitous). I'm lucky to have both of them around (separately however--they do not and have not ever gotten along, which I remember well from high school) its just such an interesting thing, the way the universe works out sometimes.

and she was

Home. Is where I want to be, lift me up and turn me round.

I listened to Talking Heads on the way in to work today, and it was so good--something to lift your spirits and make you think of things differently.

And then, of course, because this is a shitty year, I got pulled over.

I wasn’t speeding even! I learned my lesson last year, and got my one warning ticket. This time I got pulled over by an Officer Flint who meant business.

And he had noticed what I had been warned about--an expired inspection sticker.

It wasn’t my car, it was The Boy’s, and I should have known better I guess--I just figured that even though you imagine the worst happening, it doesn’t mean its going to happen that way. Only this time it did.

To the tune of $133. This is so not my year.

its not really a big deal. not really. just another setback. who would even notice, honestly? lately life is cluttered with them.
i'm trying to brush it off, let it go, get on with things.
so far, as you can see, that is working beautifully.
i did go to a really interesting lecture on happiness and coping mechanisms: apparently you can divide the world up into two kinds of people (can't you always?) one is strategically pessimistic (i.e. stressy about major/minor life events) the other strategically optimistic (i.e. totally laid back when it comes to the big &little stuff). and the woman giving this talk had done lots of different trials to try and make the stressy ones less stressy about things, and in the end it turns out: if the person is of such an inclination as to need to stress (imagine every possible worst circumstance, over plan and over prepare et cetera and so forth ) then even if you calm them down with soothing music or menial distracting tasks they will do poorly at whatever test you set them to because their physiology says they need to be stressing. i thought it was pretty interesting and telling--at the end she recommended ways to deal with each type (if you come from the other) and i loved that the main one for the strategic pessimist (which, hello, yours truly most likely falls into were the world to be divided as such) was give them more information so they can plan their doomsday scenerios in detail. yes please, i like my details. and i can also recognise that i have a habit of giving other people way too much information if they ask me for information (not in a TMI way--i do not share the gross minutiae of my life, but if you ask me for an article on lime disease you're likely to get three articles, a book chapter and a relevant web site).
Also today i ate lots of cookies and read about weight loss---hahahaha. i'll admit myself intrigued by this body for life thing which is similar and yet different from the fit for life thing i toyed with this summer. anyway all of my races are over for the season so perhaps i will make an attempt to shed the fluff instead of bulking up for the winter like i normally do.

soft shoe

Okay so I suck. When I am not making some inane attempt, I am generally cracking wise to all and sundry, thinking I should really be writing this shit down because I am secretly brilliant. And then I go to write it down and the Big Fat Sads hit me and all I can write about is how some stupid guy is leaving me and blah blah blah. For chrissakes--do you think I’m going to get over this anytime soon? I hate the Big Fat Sads. I used to indulge in them a fair amount as a teenager--I was anti-color in clothing (shades were fine: black, white and grey. No color though. Not on my watch) and would have been wearing the big black eye makeup and such were it not for the fact that I grew up in rural Maine and I never learned how to put on makeup at all (seriously--I am a no-makeup person. I had friends who tried to teach me in college, but they would put it on and 15 minutes later I would have smeared it off--I’m really bad at most of the grown-up-girl-stuff). And I thought sad was probably the best of all the emotions. I was always sad about something.

So I think I may have wasted all my sad back then. Or possibly the summer after my freshman year in college, when I indulged in clinical depression (don’t worry, I think it was mostly situational) for a couple of months. So now I am all “sad sad sad” flailing myself around and then in mid-flail I suddenly realize how ridiculous I am and how stupid it all is: to be sad over a boy? Wtf? Okay so he is leaving me, okay so it isn’t going to work out in typical fairytale fashion. Did I really think I was that person? I mean, yeah today I wore khakis to work, but I am generally just about a half-step above streetcrazy as far as appearance goes, so how in the hell did I expect to “normalize” and participate in the mating games of civilized society anyway? Because that’s the thing: he totally made me feel like we were doing the “normal” thing, that there was a flow and we were following it, that everything was as it seemed and that that was a good thing. And so I’m all romanticizing life and imagining continuing normalcy and it turns out I was some sort of diversionary tactic prior to his world tour. Shit. And its one of those things that starts to freak you out, not in and of itself, but because you’ve been building your little romanticized worldview and as it gets pulled down around your ankles you suddenly realize that its cold out there without it and you can’t figure out how to keep warm anymore.

It reminds me, very pointedly of the most worrying part of my ramble around Europe in college--my aunt and uncle came to visit me in England, and we palled around for a weekend--did all the expensive London stuff I couldn’t afford to do on my own, went to visit some friends of theirs in Kent, that sort of thing, and then the time came for us to go our separate ways--and I had been traveling for over two months already at that point--I knew my deal, knew what I was doing and how to go about it, but when I left them at the train station I was suddenly terrified and uncertain about anything and everything--I felt abandoned and alone, because I’d been a kid again--a part of a group, a follower--for that whole weekend, and then I was jumping back into being in charge of myself again and it felt so totally foreign in that moment I wasn’t sure I could do it. But of course I did: when you haven’t got any other options it makes things pretty easy I’ve found. You do something because you have to and its just that simple. Which is where I am right now I guess. He is leaving me and I am all wrapped up in my Big Fat Sad but I’ll get over it because I have to: I just don’t have that kind of tragedy in me anymore. And I never did learn the proper way to do that eye makeup (I would still like to learn that I think--I do think it is fabulous still, to this day).

slack attack

Okay so I totally slacked off this weekend on the writing side of things: I lounged on Saturday--well, I did the bare minimum necessary to keep up; the usual round of bank-post office-bookstore (okay so usually that’s grocery store, but I had paperbacks to get rid of and there was a Nor’easter going on so I needed new reading material). And then I made a bunch of stuff out of apples (I had a shopping bag full of apples in the basement that was about to be unusable, so I made applesauce and apple dumplings and finished them off).

I did a fair amount of laying around feeling sorry for myself, which isn’t really a good thing. I had a ticket to go to an event at the Expo--a sort of showcase of locally brewed beers that had sounded good at one point, and at the last minute (Saturday afternoon, for an event that was Saturday night) I decided I really didn’t feel like going and looked on Craigslist to see if I could get rid of it--and I did manage to make a little profit above getting my money back, which was something anyway.

Obviously I need a specific time dedicated to this little practice if I want it to continue, but I am (as always) having trouble setting aside the time or finding the time to set aside or whatever else I can blame it on.

And now I am kind of “eh” on it, because I haven’t done anything in two days--so why start now, right?

Heh. Yeah, I’m in trouble.

There has got to be something I can do to get this under control, right? It doesn’t seem like anything is totally under my control lately: my boyfriend is leaving me (breaking up with me) to go be Mr. Adventure because a) it “doesn’t seem fair” to him for me to wait around and b) he is not sure he will still want to be with me when he gets back. And its horrible, terrible awful because I loved him before but now I am all hyped on his unavailability on top of everything else and so angry that he is doing this to me: that he can’t see any other future for us than breaking up, that he can’t love me enough to try and make a long distance relationship work for the time he is gone when I am having trouble figuring out what a future without him is going to look like. I feel helpless and tragic and hate it. But I can’t seem to hate him, which is a bad thing. Since he is in the process of getting ready to leave me--cut me out of his life, replace me with something and someone new and all that jazz. Bastard.

And somehow I keep trying to find the funny--find some other stuff to hold my attention and help me deal and instead I keep coming back to this: I can’t understand why he doesn’t love me. What is wrong with me? It’s a horrible place to be and I can’t seem to get out of it.

down down down into the cake of eternal glory

Doorways archways, openings. These things give an idea of movement, of natural forward progression that I can almost feel. I will move beyond this: I will get out of this room safely and easily and move into the light space outside that opening.

Only not today. There is a drag on my movement today, a mental pause that precludes movement and may in fact make it impossible.

I don’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, be with anyone.

I don’t want to have to explain.

I feel so unlovable, so bereft, so alone. You would think I had been abandoned already, only it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it is the worse for all that: to see and to know that there is a person who claims to love you, only not enough. Not enough to stay, not enough to even make an attempt at keeping in touch at backing up what he says: if he loves me then how can he just be leaving? He can’t prove he loves me because he doesn’t. it’s the only conclusion I can come to. The only way it makes sense.

How do I prove so unworthy? How can I still be alive and be so unloved? What did I do wrong?

I want to cultivate a broad sense of the ridiculous, if only to attempt to keep a flame of humor alive in my skull. The darkness is blinding, isolating. I don’t want to know or speak to anyone. But maybe I can look, maybe image can sustain me.

There is a man outside striding around in the parking lot wearing a tall chef’s hat. It’s a peculiar thing to see, and he looks quite proud, I imagine him listing his credentials in his head as he walks, shoulders squared to some imagined chef’s convention or get together at 10am on a Friday morning.
And this makes me smile. I personally would love to have the nickname “Tripsy McStumble” for my very own some days.

I am, sadly, coming to the realization that I am rather accident prone. I’ve gone decades without knowing this, but it seems that lately whatever it is that can happen in a bad-news-bears fashion, it happens to me: a broken wrist, a fender-bender, a slip on the stairs, a fractured heart and ego, a spilt bowl of batter for cake or banana bread or pancakes. I don’t know how it happens, or why, but it just seems to keep happening to me.

I’m trying not to dwell on it, I really am, but it keeps coming up.

Despair just keeps finding me--I am trying to see the good, the absurd the life around me, but my mind just wants to go back to bed and listen to Tool for the rest of the day.

I really thought I could be more upbeat than this. This is not really turning out the way I had planned at all.

Such is life, as my father would say

I guess it can't all be fun and games, but why does that part have to come first?

Day one. Start at the beginning.

There is no beginning. This is an obvious middle, or even potentially an ending, for some things. But it’s the first day of a new month. That is new, that is beginning-like. So that’s where we are.

I want to get up early but I can’t seem to actually do it. I have this idea that waking early is a morally responsible thing to do, that it is the kind of thing that will eventually turn me into a good person.

I want to be a good person.

But I can’t seem to get up early. My alarm goes off three times and then I lay there and think about how much sick time I have, or think about how much financial responsibility it will take to put me into the independently wealthy category of life.

It is going to take a very long time, and is a depressing thing to think about first thing in the morning.

These are my personal roadblocks. I seem to be totally unmotivated from the get go, from the beginning. This beginning, this first day.

Add to this a need and craving for human comfort and you have someone ready to slide into sloth, to climb under the covers of cozy mediocrity and rest on the laurels of work already done and hide her head in the pillow of self aggrandizement until late afternoon or middle life.

But there is a seed of me, a piece of me, that rebels. That begs for difference, for change, for progress. For writing. And getting up early in the morning.

So I set my alarms, all three, require wakefulness even if I cannot require uprightness first thing in the morning, and I hope that it will engender other things, other changes, other pieces of potential motivation.

I can only hope.

Its November first, and things haven’t changed very much so far. I was late for work this morning, I did not get up early and write or run first thing like I had hoped to do last night, but I am writing now, and I’m out at the desk which is a new something as well.

Little changes, baby steps. Maybe tomorrow I will make it in on time. Maybe tonight I’ll go running.

He’s still coming over tonight. He’s still leaving me in December. He’s still going down to Boston to visit an ex (roommate of mine, old fling of his. She is married. They are friends. We are friends. This should be fine. Why isn’t it fine?) tomorrow. Too much of me is still emotionally tied to him. Too much of what he does still matters, still hurts. I had a fond few minutes the other day, when I had partially gotten over my anger at his sudden need to see her, where I daydreamed that he was going down to see her so they could go ring shopping. So he could say “surprise! I am not really leaving you to go adventuring, instead I have decided I do really care about you and want to spend my life with you!” this is sad and delusional I know, and also is not happening. I do not live in a romantic comedy. Sometimes I may wish I did, but I do not. The best I can hope for is that the movie of my life isn’t a tragedy, as much as I don’t want to get out of bed some days.