And they whirl and they twirl and they tango

Infrequently updated, uninteresting blather.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

La Muerte del Grupo

If there's one thing in this world that I'm good at, it's burning bridges. I can burn a bridge faster and more efficiently than a coked-out bipolar sociopath in the Witness Protection Program. Not that I've ever compared myself to someone with those qualifications, but I'm sure Jefe has and could vouch for me.

Why do I burn bridges when the Wisdom of Cliches would advise me not to do so? I think it's about two different things: first, protecting myself from more pain, and second, minimizing pain for the person on the other side of the bridge. You see, I recognized a while ago that I have a tendency to keep letting people back in my life who really aren't good for me, so when I break things off, I try to make sure that the damage is irreparable. Yes, I'm aware that this is crazy, but it's the way I think. And I think it makes it a lot easier for people to get over not having me in their lives anymore because I've pissed them off so much while we were parting company. Perhaps that sounds arrogant, but I like to think that someone might be sad after we've stopped being friends, and if I can alleviate that sadness by making them hate me, doesn't that make me a good person?

Well, you can guess where this one's going: I've lost yet another blog reader, and perhaps a few more. I ended a conversation with Laura the other day with the phrase, "You can now and for all of time fuck off." Not exactly the way to keep lines of communication open, I know. After a while, this direction I'm going will inevitably rid me of Tracie and Akbar, as well, and then I will have almost all of The Group out of my life forever. For those of you who don't know me that well, The Group was a bunch of people in my life freshman year, and we spent four years of college alternating between having a great time and destroying each other emotionally. The latter situation became more and more the status quo, and I've slowly but surely been burning bridges between each individual since I moved to Austin.

I'm hoping not to lose the Giles, who was not a member of the Group, but is now Laura's boyfriend and Elliot's current roommate. He doesn't strike me as a "you can't love my girlfriend, you can't love me" kind of guy, but you never know. I'm still waiting for a call back from him (ahem)...

Anyway, my advice to you all is to end relationships the right way, in lasting bitterness and painful hopelessness. Kill them dead so they can't rise again and bite you in the ass one more time. And if you lie awake at night sometimes missing them or wondering if you've done the right thing, comfort yourself with thoughts of your own death. Oops, I mean, comfort yourself with the thought that you had to move on.

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Some quotes from my life

If you want to know how surreal things are becoming these days, read the following quotations from my actual life. To protect the innocent, I will not attribute the quotes, but some of them may be obvious to those of you who know my friends/co-workers down here. I will admit that at least one of these is from me:

[Leaning over the six-month-old baby's bouncy chair]"Hi, sweetie. I'm your daddy's mistress."

"If our target audience is blond-headed second graders who lost their virginity when they were eight..."

"They'll cut open my foot, move these two bones back together, and then stick a screw in there to keep them in place."

"If the real reason you didn't make out with me is that you had to write a paper on race and ethnicity, that is sad."

"So she's a prostitute, but she won't have sex with you?"

"Yeah, meet us at our apartment complex out in the hot tub. Bring bathing suits and towels. I mean, we'll be naked, but you can wear whatever."

"There are many men who will pay excellent money for a prostitute with a PhD." (This was said by the degreed prostitute herself.)

"We had sex four and a half times!"

"You don't like Ani Difranco? You're straight."

"What is it about queers that I love so much?"

"Here's my new policy: if I like you and want to be your friend, I'm not going to sleep with you."

"We were making out and I saw his sideburns and almost puked."

"A toast! To the Finnish!"

[with complete sincerity] "After that, I moved to Florida and became a pirate for about a year."

"And then, all hail broke loose."

"This lentil soup has botulism."

"If my snoring keeps you awake, we can just make out instead."

"I'm not giving a Jello shot a blow job."

"God, I love smoking. I want to do it every day."

"See, exactly, I don't have a prostate, so it's just not the same experience for me."

"Blue clit sounds like the name of a girl punk band."

Doesn't my life sound interesting? It's so interesting that now I need to go take a nap.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

The Lowlights of My Life

After Elliot and I broke up, I tried to decide if it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I don't know if any of you have ever tried to pinpoint the absolute worst moment of your life, but it's actually more fun than you'd think. For some of you, it may be very easy to pick the one that stands out the most; for me, it took a lot of thought. Since I'm in a sick and twisted mood right now, I think I'll list some of the candidates:

1. When I was 17, I had surgery that left me with three scars in my lower navel region. Waking up from the surgery, I promptly proceeded to dry heave from the anesthesia, and it made me feel like my surgery scars were going to burst open. That is not a good feeling. I had doctors and nurses all around me, and my mother was there as well, and they finally convinced me to take a suppository. That's right, a fun pill that goes up your butt because you can't ingest anything at the moment. The condition that required the surgery was the most emotionally painful thing I had experienced up to that point, and in that moment when it merged with physical pain, I finally understood what the Christian conception of Hell was probably like.

2. One of the incidents surrounding the Elliot breakup, of course, but I don't know which one to pick as the worst of this subset. It might have simply been finding out about it, but I think the unimaginably horrific conversation I had with Laura while she was helping me find Elliot that night might be the winner.

3. When I first moved to Austin, I was completely alone on my birthday. I had no friends, Elliot was traveling, and my family let me know that helping me move to Austin was the only birthday gift I was getting. Kyle and I were arguing at the time, and I told him that I was severely depressed and terrified (lots of stuff was going on then). I begged him to talk to me and be there for me even though he was angry with me. He refused. There have been few moments in my life where my spirit has been that completely broken. We haven't spoken since.

This is fun so far, huh?

4. My roommate freshman year and very dear friend, Jaime, tried to kill herself one night and had to go to the hospital. When I came back to OU from Tulsa the next day, I found her on her bed with her arms wrapped up. That moment was horrifying enough, but it got worse quickly. Her bandages needed to be replaced, and guess who had the first aid kit? I wrapped up her oozing, mangled arms with white gauze before I helped her back into bed. I then walked numbly into the next room with and held our suitemate Amy while she sobbed. Yeah, that was a bad, bad day.

5. I'll stop with this one, since this entry is depressing anyway and I think this story might take the big prize for worst moment of my life. I won't go into all the history, but suffice to say when I lived with Courtney and Claire, we had a lot of roommate troubles near the end. Claire and I had become very close friends while we lived alone, but when Courtney moved back in, we started growing apart. I was in complete denial about it and had been for months; instead of dealing with it, I had started trying to become Super Roommate--cleaning, running errands, buying Court and Claire gifts, etc. I was so nervous and frazzled, however, that I just fucked up at every turn. I would try to do something nice, and it would end in disaster, which would then only strengthen my resolve to try harder, and so on and so forth. One day I actually snapped and went into a full-on panic attack, but even that day I didn't realize why it had happened. Finally, it was near the end of the semester and I went out drinking with Lee, Ingrid, and Stacy. When Lee drove me home at 2:00am, I was drunker than I have ever been in my entire life. He got me in the door and left, and I immediately fell down on the floor and couldn't get back up. The whole room was spinning and I felt terrifyingly alone. I started calling for Claire, Claire, Claire. Both she and Courtney came out and seemed annoyed, which was ironic considering all the insane, vomit-spewing, apartment-destroying pyrotechnics the two of them always pulled after a night of imbibing Muskrat's patented Long Island Iced Teas. I asked for water, and they put a glass in front of me and went back down the hall without a word. I tried to drink the water, but it just wasn't happening. I called for Claire again and she came out alone. At this point, I rose up to my hands and knees and began the most god awful, soul-shaking, gut-wrenching, hysterical weeping that I have ever experienced or seen anyone else experience. I could actually feel myself sobbing in every cell of my body; I was choking, gasping, hiccupping, pleading, wailing like you can only do when alcohol has removed every last inhibition and modicum of restraint you have. As I gripped the rug with my hands and rocked back and forth like the perfect picture of a mental patient, I begged her over and over just to like me again, please be my friend, don't hate me anymore. I literally prostrated myself in front of her and cried that I would do anything, be anything, say anything she wanted if only we could go back to the way things were before. After what seemed like an eternity, my tears dried up and she helped me into bed. The look on her face that night will always be with me; it was the same look my father gave me at the airport when I was 9 years old, just before he had to leave our family to go work in California for another six months. It said, I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do now, so you'll have to do the rest of this alone. I think this has to be the saddest, most pathetic moment of my life; at least it seems so at the moment.

It might surprise you to know that I'm actually in a great mood today. Why I chose to write about this stuff is unclear to me, but it felt right. Hope you like Schadenfreude.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Grrrreat.

So I guess I'll need to end this blog, much to my disappointment. I'm having several people checking the blog from Austin IP addresses, and that's the last thing in the world I want. The whole point of this thing was to let my friends in other parts of the country/world know what was going on with me in Austin. It is not meant to be something that people down here look at or know anything about. Z told me that she found it once and hasn't looked at it since, but the temptation has got to be strong to go back again. If I found someone's blog and they didn't know, I would never tell them. I'd just keep checking it to see what they said about me. But then again, I'm a horrible person.

I don't know what to do. I guess I could get a livejournal and go friends only, but I hate livejournal. I love my site here, my pretty background dots, my life story over the months I've lived here, my pictures. But I can't talk about anything that really matters to me if I'm always afraid that the wrong person will see it. At that point, you just end up blogging about how tired you are or how bored, work, what you saw on TV, random thoughts that you have (which can be good, but only to a certain point), and so on. That's not what I want to do. I like sharing personal things about my life with my friends, and I like being able to do it without 20 individual phone calls and emails a week. Apparently, this is too much to ask. As they say, if you don't want someone to know about it, don't write it down.

This may or not be my last posting then. I'll let you all know what I end up doing.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

My plastic heart cannot love

Muskrat's Dating Tip of the Day: When you tell someone you're not looking for a relationship, you just want to date, and they tell you, "Let's just play it by ear," that is the moment you run away. That person wants a relationship and thinks that the solution is to wait around long enough until you come around. Bad, bad, bad.

Bonus Dating Tip: Chill out and don't overestimate what you mean to someone. Physical stuff does not imply emotional connection, so just appreciate what you have for what it is. You don't always have to worry that whomever you're involved with is expecting an emotional commitment from you, or even wants it at all, ever. Avoid the appearance of arrogance by not assuming that someone who wants your body wants your heart, as well.

I'm learning oh so much these days, don't you think? My current aversion to romantic and emotional connection with dating partners (and the subsequent disasters it causes) is actually nudging me towards a certain relationship in which lack of love and commitment would be a prerequisite for that relationship's existence. I don't know if I should go there, but it may be just what the doctor ordered. I'll let you know after Wednesday night.

In other news, I'm considering a move to New York City after July. Z just got into Brooklyn Law School, and we've discussed my getting a job there and being her roomie. I've always wanted to live there, and why not when I've got a year to kill before grad school? Then, if I get into NYU (which won't happen), I'll have residency. I'm also considering applying to the University of Toronto Comparative Literature department; I could be a Canadian! It's so exciting that I have no idea what's going to happen after AmeriCorps. I'm not even that nervous about it.

In other news, tomorrow night I'm going to see Anea and Sarah for dinner, and then I'm meeting J and Fructose at Emo's to see Patton Oswalt (kick-ass comedian). Weekend plans are shaping up for good times with Liz and Starr up in Round Rock, and hopefully a rehearsal of our new band formed at work. We've got:

J: Rhythm guitar
M: Lead guitar
Muskrat: Vox
D: Keys

You'll notice I'm the only one without an instrument. Maybe I'll call Elliot and ask to borrow his mandolin. Er...maybe not.

Enjoy your spring break, all. I wish I still had one.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Blame it All on Yourself

I'll give you ten bucks if you can guess who this song reminds me of. Download it immediately and listen to it; I'm sure you'll figure it out sooner or later:

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she's always a woman to me

She can lead you to love
She can take you or leave you
She can ask for the truth
But she'll never believe you
And she'll take what you give her as long as it's free
She steals like a thief
But she's always a woman to me

Oh, she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants
She's ahead of her time
Oh, and she never gives out
And she never gives in
She just changes her mind

She will promise you more
Than the Garden of Eden
Then she'll carelessly cut you
And laugh while you're bleedin'
But she'll bring out the best
And the worst you can be
Blame it all on yourself
Cause she's always a woman to me

Oh, she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants
She's ahead of her time
Oh, and she never gives out
And she never gives in
She just changes her mind

She is frequently kind
And she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
But she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me

Tuesday, March 01, 2005