I never really started “checking in” and now it looks like I’ve missed my chance. Wouldn’t want to look even remotely out of date, after all.
No, the video is not really related in any way, but for some reason I think of that clip every time I see the “checking in” link on Facebook, and it also reinforces my assertion that there really is a Simpsons reference for every occasion.
My ambivalence toward Facebook is rather well-known but I don’t really believe that people who use it are less intelligent than other people. In fact, many of the most intelligent people I know post very intelligent comments there. The only reason I’m linking to this post is that it makes me happy to see the author using the wonderfully cromulent word “dullards”. It’s one of my favorites and I think it should be used often, if not necessarily about people who use Facebook.
For some reason, there’s been more social networking stuff than usual in my “work” feed lately…
For better or worse, I’ve always been a solo act. That’s my nature, and it took an extremely special exception to induce a temporary deviation from that state. It seems unlikely to me that there will be a repeat anytime in the foreseeable future. Hence my (very polite) rebuff to a (very well-meaning) coworker who suggested I start dating and sampling all that exciting gay nightlife in Winston-Salem.
As far as I can tell, the sum total of Winston-Salem’s “exciting gay nightlife” consists of one big disco that doubles as a venue for drag shows on Friday nights. In short, it’s every Southern ghetto queer bar I ever hated in my twenties and thirties all wrapped up in a package that fills me with nothing but fatigue and a sense of impending doom now that I’m in my forties. Having spent a supremely miserable couple of hours in a smaller version of the same bar about six months ago, I can tell you that this scene appeals to me only slightly more than that vacation in Libya I’ve been dreaming of for so long.
I’m a little torn right now. I’ve never in my life felt as alone as I do right now. I have some very good friends in my life and they’ve been a really big help to me in the past few months. But they’re not here. There’s no one here to listen to me talk about my insecurities, my regrets, and just how shitty I feel about everything that’s going on in my life right now–and it’s not just the breakup. No hugs, no crying on anyone’s shoulder, almost no human contact at all. I speak to my parents and my coworkers all the time, but only in the most superficial way (see first paragraph above) and always through my brave, happy face. In fact, I haven’t even told my parents about Mark and me yet, for a number of reasons. And yes, I understand that I boxed myself into this isolated little corner.
To be honest, a big part of me sort of wants to be alone right now. It’s hard work talking about this stuff and it also opens me up to having to listen to other people’s stuff. And I need to feel a little self-absorbed right now. But yeah, I need to build some local friendships.
The last thing I need in my life right now, though, is to be hanging around late at night in some wretched queer bar of the damned, sipping a Coke, choking on bad cologne smells, and listening to some of the worst music ever recorded.
What I probably need even less than that is to be “dating”. I never enjoyed that when I was voluntarily single and I don’t imagine I’d find it any more appealing now that I’m involuntarily so.
Not, mind you, that I expect to be fielding many offers to begin with…
Looks like Mark and I may not own a house in Pittsburgh much longer. We put it on the market last week pretty much two years to the day after we closed on it. There was an offer today that seems promising.
So that’s that, I guess.
When you are depressed, you don’t feel like doing things. When you don’t do things, it makes you depressed.
Bad weekend. The breakup is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Worse than the cancer. Aside from the sadness and the broken dreams and the realization that the rest of my life isn’t going to play out as I’d expected, there’s an incredible hit to the self-esteem and self-confidence. When you’ve essentially been dumped after ten years, no matter how amicably, there’s no amount of reassurance that can make you stop asking yourself “what the fuck is wrong me that made him need so badly to get rid of me?”
Add to that the fact that the second worst thing that’s ever happened to me has begun to transpire just as I’m dealing with thing number one and you have my current really bad state of mind. The “Mom with dementia” thing. This will eventually have a bigger and longer term impact than thing number one.
I could have dealt with either of these things individually. I could have coped. But both at once is just too fucking much. I feel hopeless, and I find that I don’t have anything to look forward to but misery for the next few years. And I’ll be experiencing it all alone.
Shrink? Anti-depressants don’t seem appropriate.
Help keep me focused and keep after me to keep on living my life. I used the cancer and the year of unemployment in Charlotte as a catalyst to chnage my life. I hope I can do it again.
Since there haven’t been nearly enough major changes in my life lately, I decided that major changes in my computing environment were in order as well: installing an OS upgrade, reviving the G5 as a audio/video import station, and migrating to a new MobileMe account (divorce, y’know?).
And yesterday, I decided to move my office into the basement. It has several advantages. First, it makes the old office upstairs “show” a lot better (assuming we ever have another showing). Second, the basement (being a basement) is much cooler. Third, I feel a little more comfortable spreading out and working on things down there; I get to feel like I have one spot in the house where I can actually live without feeling like it has to be perpetually “staged”. I guess the stairs provide a little extra exercise, too.
And yes, that’s pretty much all the insight I’m going to provide into my personal life today.
I have a free on-demand cable channel that broadcasts Jewish and Israeli films and other features.
Other discoveries while exploring the “upper end” of the cable box:
I’m back from two nights in Charleston, where I attended a conference, ate well, slept less well, sweated perspired and looked at lots of old and mildewed buildings. I also spent a few hours adjacent to what seemed to be a vaguely flirtatious he-librarian. My ego being somewhat battered and bruised of late, I was rather pleasantly surprised by even the suggestion of someone showing some actual interest, even if I really wasn’t all that interested in return. He made a nice fourth for dinner anyway.
Oh yeah. I also went to Stuckey’s–a real one, not one that’s just a shelf in a truck stop. That and maybe the scallops and grits were the real highlights of this trip, I think. I need to take a better one very soon.
A fair question, I guess, since I’ve really not posted anything of substance in quite a while.
All in all, I’m doing OK. And I mean that. The past two four eight months have been absolute hell, even though I’ve tried to minimize this for public consumption because (a) no one wants to read about me curled in the fetal position on the sofa crying like a baby and (b) I perhaps didn’t want to show much weakness publicly in my compromised state. Mind you, this is not all about the breakup. A lot of it is about the breakup, but not all of it. There has been some other pretty nasty family-related stuff going on in my life for the past month or two as well, so there’s been plenty of suckage to keep me occupied, thanks.
None of this has seemed really appropriate fodder for the website because it’s personal and would require a higher level of sharing than I’m really comfortable with these days. I also wanted to avoid any possibility of passive-aggressive “communication by website” as I realized damned near anything I said could easily come across as either whiny or accusatory, neither of which I really wanted. Talking too much about other stuff would minimize how much of my life has been consumed by all of this, and talking endlessly about my troubles would have emphasized it too much and also would have made for a really unpleasant website. So I pretty much just shut up about everything. Even to my friends and family, which was probably a mistake.
And now? I wouldn’t say I’m in the best of shape, but it’s getting better.
With respect to the breakup, I’m at least coping. I had no illusions that there would be a reconciliation and I concurred completely that we’d reached the end of the line, but there was a long period of mourning for the loss of what once was and for the future I’d hoped we had together. And I’m still in the middle of that. It’s hard not to keep asking myself what the hell is wrong with me and what I might have done differently to keep this from happening. But I’m starting to realize that there’s not really anything wrong with me and that whatever either of us could have done differently is a moot point because whatever it might have been, neither of us did it and it’s too late now anyway. Yes, I think it was a big waste that probably didn’t have to happen, but I can think that for the rest of my life and it won’t change a damned thing.
The family issue (it involves an aging parent) will become a bigger and bigger part of my life in the coming years and that’s what I really fear right now. I could have dealt with either of these things individually, but having them both hit simultaneously has been overwhelming. I essentially lost my two closest family members over the course of just a few weeks, although neither of them is really completely gone. Each is just sort of transforming into a very different individual than the one I’ve known and loved for years, necessitating a significantly altered means of relating to them, and in some ways denying me two sources of support I could really use right now.
I’m learning that staying very busy works for me because it keeps me from thinking about things that suck. I’m not 100% sure this is the most healthy way of dealing with all this. I wonder if maybe I’m avoiding important issues I should be thinking about. But it’s the approach that’s working for me right now and is generally keeping me from “going fetal” on a daily basis as I was doing for a while there.
I’m probably never going to really go into specifics about a lot of this here on the site, although there are a few cloaked posts I may make public someday. But I am going to try to write more and self-censor less in the coming weeks. Rather than sharing nothing and doing the bare “put on a brave face” minimum as I’ve been doing lately, I’ll try to share both some of the happy and some of the sad. I’m still sad a lot. And occasionally just plain devoid of emotion. But I’m at least relatively happy more often now too.
