Monthly Archives: August 2005

Advice

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Yes. I actually want advice on this one.

So I have an appointment with a therapist. If she isn’t queer, kinky, and poly… at least most of her friends are. She is actually part of “the community” (which means that part of the first session will be seeing if I can actually see her or if there is too close of a contact somewhere).

I haven’t gone to see a new therapist in a long time and the last time I did it was with a specific thing going on. I don’t feel like I know where to begin. I feel overwhelmed by the mess in my head. I need to have some way of presenting things/me to her and I am totally lost. For some reason I just don’t feel like I should begin with the standard dump about my childhood. That is part of my shit, but it isn’t really the part that is the most important right now and it totally gives the impression that I am broken nearly beyond repair. Instead I am just kind of broken. …. I feel really uncertain as to how to approach this.

Any tips, advice, or recommendations?

Hell yeah

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I’m in a really good mood. I visited relatives today and it was entirely pleasant. While I was there I got a call back from the person I would like to see as a therapist and we have an appointment for Saturday. She seems really cool and I am excited.

I’m feeling really happy today. A bit on the edgy side, but for no real reason. My goal is to make it through tonight without a single pissy exchange.

And now, for your entertainment: Go read this site about how real men should be.

Productive

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Many calls/emails sent regarding student teaching. I want to know ASAP people! Jesus. I may have to start on Monday and I don’t even know what city or what school yet. I want to scream.

Fin Aid dealt with as much as it can be. I don’t know where the money is coming from yet, but it is coming. That is some kind of comfort I suppose.

Books ordered for school and I saved $40. Yay Amazon.

A friend is giving me a modem so I don’t have to spend more money. YAY!

Claim form for PG&E filled out and in the mail.

Call out to teacher at Las Positas to find out if I can take the Spanish class I need.

Bills paid.

Email out to find out about one option for therapy. A friend is also trying to find out if another (highly suitable) person is available and someone I can see.

Kitchen clean.

Not bad for before lunch.

Oh yeah

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And I forgot to mention that when we got home late last night it was to a note on our door from PG&E. There was some sort of power fluctuation and if they fried any of our electronics, please call them and order a claim form.

FUCK. Our modem is toast. Our phones are toast. The microwave that I bought on THURSDAY. The answering machine.

Apparently everything that wasn’t plugged in via a power strip. Mother Fucker.

A new modem is going to be ~ $100. I want to cry.

Productivity in spurts.

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I was supposed to do a bunch of stuff yesterday, but scalding myself at around 11:30 ended my desire to get off my bed and instead I lay very still and cried a lot all day. (Oh. The mark on my stomach is still very red but fading. My arm looks normal. My breast is still very red and angry and unhappy looking, but it doesn’t hurt to touch it.)

So today! Today is the day. I am going to do laundry. I am going to make my whole house clean and ship-shape as we run off for several days again. Most of my house isn’t bad, but there are bits of picking up all over and floors/bathroom stuff could really use a good scrubbing. Not to mention cat care. I already paid bills this morning and have got the living room almost up to snuff.

Still debating whether I’m doing S&P tonight. If I do it won’t be for long and I may show up later. I feel like cooking tonight and stuff. 🙂 I’m just not quite at my most social right now and I am going to be in the company of minimally three people pretty much at all times until Sunday night or Monday. Oy. I think I am going to have to practice keeping my mouth shut. 🙂 Doesn’t mean I don’t like all of the people I will be seeing (ok, there is one girl but she is annoying no matter what) I will just be running on maximal people capacity for a while.

To those wonderful people I get to see this weekend that I don’t get to see much: please feel free to give hugs and snuggles and such. But if at some point I kind of go off and sit by myself it is NOT ABOUT YOU HAVING UPSET ME. Cause you rock. 🙂

Usually if one of the other Virgos posts I don’t…

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But this week:
Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof reported that the media has been as guilty of ignoring the ongoing genocide in Darfur as the Bush administration has been. In June, he said, the main TV news programs collectively ran 55 times more stories about the Michael Jackson trial than they did about East Africa’s crisis. CBS gave three minutes of coverage to Darfur in all of 2004, and NBC five minutes. As soon as you finish reading this horoscope, Virgo, I hope you will take aggressive action to avoid falling victim to equally misplaced priorities in your personal life. Don’t you dare let trivial spectacles divert you from healing the sorest spot in your world.

I feel like this actually means something to me. I ignore Rob most of the time, but I kind of feel like there is stuff I need to do to heal right now.

Last night I cornered Puppy and told him how very upset I am about his inability to compromise. He just doesn’t seem to be able to. He either entirely gives in to appease me or he gets his back up and won’t move. I told him I don’t want either end of this crap. I really really don’t want to deal with him vascilating between the two extremes. I don’t know how I can make this situation any better or any easier for either of us. I am trying to think of the issues that exist in our relationship. We are both very sensitive to being teased and yet we both spend a lot of time teasing. This isn’t a great situation. We are trying to figure out how to understand the teasing as non-hurtful. Every time I am in any kind of a bad mood he is convinced it is all his fault and that I am about to walk out and this escalates any irritability on my end because he gets somewhat dramatic. And I get into bad moods pretty easily: sleep deprivation, hunger, being too hot, not feeling well…. Any can cause me to be really pissy and grumpy. ARGH! I think we need to work on the expression, “Are you mad at me or near me.” Because as soon as someone says this to me (and I have a few friends trained) I realize what I am doing and mellow out conisderably almost instantly.

Compromises we have to work on:
I am moody. It is just kind of unavoidable. I have tried and tried and tried meds to deal with this and I haven’t been successful yet. I will probably try again when I have insurance again because I would like to be less psycho. I get unreasonably angry about simple things and I am very demanding and attention needy. I know these things aren’t easy for him.
He is forgetful and lazy. To the degree that both cause actual problems in my life. If he was only influencing himself it would be a different story. He is very unyielding about difficult issues and continues to push far past where it is ok with me to do so.

I really don’t think either side is any easier or harder than the other, just very different. *sigh* Everything in this relationship is kind of on turbo drive. I kind of feel like we skipped the honeymoon phase (or at least had a very short one) because we are both very conscious of wanting long-term stuff and we want to get started on that sooner than later. The next six months are going to be very telling. We are almost at six months. He commented that he has never had this much trouble learning to communicate with a partner before. I counter that he has never really learned to communicate with a partner before. He believed he knew what was necessary to keep his wife happy, but he also threw down about things and wouldn’t compromise and she left him because of it. I wonder what he has learned from this? He told me last night that there are going to be things that he won’t ever compromise about but he couldn’t come up with examples. That scares the hell out of me.

I {heart} Noah

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He says lots of things to me that make me think. He gives me possibilities and ideas about meeting in the middle on issues that I don’t think up on my own. Then I tell my Puppy. This leads to really good conversations. Really, really, really good conversations.

Then there is massively hot sex.

Noah. I love you.

woof

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And that is a deadpan, non-emotive woof. I am freakin exhausted. I slept for a couple of hours tonight and I still hurt from exhaustion. I actually got an almost-normal amount of sleep this weekend so I’m not completely sure why I am this tired.

I had quite the weekend. I went down to Santa Cruz with my nephew for the beach burn. During the weekend he did something stupid (he is 15 after all) and I said, “Good going genius.” For the rest of the weekend everyone there called him Genius and it was put on his name tag. He told me he likes it and wants it to stick as his nickname. Odd boy. He was surprised at my ability to track exactly how much alcohol and pot he did over the weekend. I kept telling him, “Dude–these are my friends. Of course they will rat on you.” He stayed at a moderate level though and given that his mother is ok with him using both substances, I kept my mouth shut. I did ask him to stop mid-way through Friday night because I felt he was at the limit of what he should do in a night and he stuck with my recommendation. I was glad. It was interesting taking him down there because he got to see examples of people who use responsibly and people who use irresponsibly and it was kind of cool to see the dichotomy up close. He also handled the sexual innuendo pretty well and told me that the party will be a whole lot more fun when he is over 18 and the girls don’t avoid him like the plague. I can see that….

I learned some lessons this weekend that I have learned before so I feel like a schmuck for not having actually absorbed them before. I don’t like loud, large, anonymous parties. I just don’t. I don’t have fun; I don’t feel safe; I don’t relax. So why do I go to them? I think I believe that they should be fun, or maybe I believe that since I am so much of an extrovert that I must like large parties… right? Well I just don’t. I hate them. And loud music makes my stomach hurt and I get grumpy. I need to not go to them anymore. It isn’t that I am a stick-in-the-mud, I just prefer smaller gatherings.

Puppy and I had a couple of blow-ups and two long and hard discussions. There are things in this relationship that are very hard for me. We really do have trouble communicating. He pointed out that a big part of our problem is that we are too much alike. We are both extremely sensitive and emotional. We both take teasing too seriously and get upset and we both feed off of one another’s upset. ugh. It is like he is a cross between Noah and Tom. He has many of the qualities that I loved so much about Tom, but he wants to process… a lot… Yeah. That is straight up Noah territory. Ostensibly this should be the best of both worlds… if we can figure one another out… I’m scared because I want to run more than I have wanted to run in a very long time. This relationship is absolutely terrifying to me on a basic level and I can’t entirely figure out why.

Nightmare

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I was a teenager again and I was going to a new high school. Little Thea showed me around. Everyone in my life was there and teenagers again. Rebecca looked damn skinny. Everyone smiled at me very benevolently, but I was being shy and wandering around alone.

Eventually I was standing at the end of a long hallway of lockers and I saw four people standing in a line. Someone standing in front of them shot all of them then ran away. I ran towards them as fast as I could. Each person was shot twice, once in the chest and once kind of in the hip. Neither wound was fatal. I tried to help one person and then started screaming for help. I turned around when I heard snarling. The “person” who had shot them looked like a zombie and told me to leave or I would join them. He started dragging them one by one towards the parking lot.

I woke up crying.

I don’t understand.

Brain dump

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My cat is here now. Yay!

My eyes hurt like crazy from all the chlorine today. I am sore from swimming for hours on end. I tremendously enjoyed the time spent with my niece and nephew and even their friend though he can be trying at times. I need to find a way to spend more time with them on a consistent people because while my back was turned they became very cool people. Raging Waters is apparently way fun.

It was really good to have bonding time with blood relatives today. I am so very strange about blood relations. I am really glad that I can be the aunt to them that I don’t have. I love them and accept them no matter what kind of quirks they have or how annoying they are or whether or not they keep their mouths shut when the topic of family secrets come up. I hug them and cheer them on and tell them I am proud of them. Even when I am stretching it a little, the looks on their faces makes it worth it.

I’m really really happy.

Question answered.

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This was not actually asked anonymously, so I am tailoring the answer. However, there are chunks of the answer that apply to many people so I’m putting the answer basically publicly.

I know that you & I didn’t really get along for a few years. To be honest, I’m not sure what the reason was at the beginning….but I know I did contribute to stirring the pot over time.

Anyways….I’ve been curious for months now….what made you decide to treat me as a friend?

First off, people often attribute my behavior to me not liking them. No really, I am much more self-centered than that. I am moody and a pain in the ass and that filters into most of my interactions and it often leads people to thinking that I dislike them when I don’t.

Secondly, I am not consistent in how I get to know people. I tend to make snap judgments but I will sometimes change my mind over time. It is rare that I will dislike someone strongly and get over that; it does happen though. Look at Miss Jenny. I hated her guts for the first year I knew her and eventually we got past that. As I get older I am trying to be more reserved with people early on until I build enough of a knowledge base of someone to draw conclusions. Unfortunately I am still impulsive. Most of the time what I do is I take a look at the veneer of a person and think it is pretty nifty and then I get to know them better and I lose respect. There are a lot of things that I am judgmental about; there are also many things that I am tolerant of that other people aren’t.

I notice that many of my relationships (the best ones anyway) go through a lot of growing pains. I’m a shit and prickly and hard to get along with. If I am dealing with someone else who also has a strong personality *cough* then there are often clashes for quite a while. Eventually I notice, “Hey! This person may not be the easiest person to get along with 100% of the time, but they are consistent (a huge thing for me) and honest (another huge thing) and forthright (alright, we have a winner) so I guess I better get the stick out of my ass about being irritable and recognize that they have some of the biggest positives that I respect.”

I will also be perfectly honest and say that there are many people out there that I may like and respect and think fairly highly of, but I will never be close friends with. I am getting better at recognizing that I may think someone is really an amazing person, but they have some personaility quirk that means I really shouldn’t spend much time with them or I will get really sick of them really fast. Frankly, complaining about the same problem(s) for years is one of them. You may be great in every other way, but if I am judgmental about something you do often then it is best that I keep you at arms length. That wasy we preserve the level of friendly behavior that is optimal.

In this specific case though what happened is that she is a woman of strong personality and probably there was something early on that set me off. I am pretty bad about holding grudges if I get a negative impression. Over the course of the nearly five years I have known her I have seen that she does conduct herself in a consistent and respectable way. I have noticed that despite my first impression in some areas, she holds many of the same values that I do in specific ways that matter to me. So I did my best at pulling the stick out of my ass. I guess she noticed. 🙂