There are many things in this photo, none of them snow.
Had a visit from my friend Duncan this weekend. Actually, I’m still having it but he’s off at a Super Bowl party, and as I’ve probably said before, I don’t follow baseball. So I’ve spent my leisurely Sunday afternoon eating leftover Chinese food from Sampan and obtaining long out of print music here, including two things I’ve been seeking for a really long time.
Maybe a bit of cafeteria tonight followed by the final proofreading of my grant application (which is now finished, by the way). After that, Ellery Queen or Dragnet, methinks.
This is the first actual weekend I’ve had in quite a while. They’re nice, huh?
By some strange miracle, I seem to be considerably healthier today than I was at my physical six months ago. I’ve lost weight, my “good” cholesterol is up (my “bad” is always low anyway) and I’ve backtracked quite a bit on that road to diabetes, heart disease, and all sorts of other nasty things. I’m kind of amazed, considering how rough the past few months have been for me personally and how–until a few weeks ago when I finally got my head out of my ass–I was basically using comfort food and lethargy to treat the symptoms.
So can I lose fifty pounds this year? What say ye?
Other stuff:
- Mark arrives for a quick visit tomorrow. It will be the first time we’ve seen each other since December and I am much looking forward to it.
- The oldest supermarket in Charlotte is about to be torn down. I’m a little depressed about that, but I’d be more depressed if there were a little more of the original buidling left to begin with.
- In case you care what I’ve been doing at work lately, here are two samples. They’re part of a bigger project I’m working on that’s still in beta (and not finished).
- I actually had occasion to bring my Zip drive to work (and even to use it) last week as well. That was fun.
- There’s something else big that’s supposed to make up this last bullet point, but I don’t remember what it is.
I can’t help thinking that it probably doesn’t bode well for the Triad that there was only about 20% population growth here over the past ten years. By way of comparison, Wake County, where Raleigh is located, has added the equivalent of the entire population of Greensboro since 2000. Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, has added almost the entire population of Winston-Salem to its headcount in the same period of time.
Interestingly, the really big growth was in Fayetteville, where Fort Bragg is actually one of the nicer neighborhoods. So I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
Unrelated: happy birthday to the Pasadena Freeway.
My attention span, that is. During and after grad school, I feared I was losing the ability to read books for pleasure (I may even have written about this, but I can’t be bothered to look). I seem to have regained it in the past few months, though, and I’ve actually killed off three books in the last two weeks. This can only be a good thing.
This one, spotted in the “new arrivals” section at work is strangely tempting:
Speaking of random photos, look over to the right. There’s a new feature here (OK, on flickr, really) that I’m calling Dailystream. It’s pretty much a “photo a day” kind of thing, which is not really innovative or exciting at all, except to me because this time I’m doing it rather than someone else.
Trust me. You don’t want to read anything I’d have to say right now anyway.
I’ll try to keep Dailystream running so you’ll know I’m alive and still have a functioning camera.
Thing that doesn’t make me happy: spending hours cleaning and scrubbing the house for a Sunday open house that’s attended by exactly one person (and my real estate agent suspects he was a curious neighbor rather than a buyer).
I need this house to be sold. Soon. It’s such a great house and I used to love it so. Part of me still loves it. But the the thirty-mile commute is only going to become more and more of a problem. Worse still, the place is just too big, too expensive, and too maintenance-intensive for me to handle all by myself. Factor in the fact that I’m a little depressed every time I walk in the door these days and you’ll maybe understand how the house I loved has become something of a giant albatross.
As many of you may have deduced, yer humble host is single again after nine and a half years. Mark and I decided a little over two weeks ago that it was time to call it quits. There’s no animosity between us. We love and care about each other and we’ll always consider each other “family.” It’s just that we’ve grown in very different directions over the past few years, and we’ve developed very different views of what we want out of life. Eventually we hit a point where we realized that the incompatibility–and the lack of communication about it–had more or less strangled our relationship. That’s the short version. There’s a longer version, but it has the same basic plot and the same exact ending and I’m not going to share it here.
It would be an understatement to say that this is the single most painful thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. I’ve shed more tears than I knew I was capable of producing. It doesn’t get much sadder than realizing that you’re not going to spend the rest of your life with the person you’d planned on spending it with. The way I’d envisioned the next phase of my life has been drastically altered just when I was expecting to be happy and excited about how successfully I’d “reinvented” myself in the past few years. This has magnified every little insecurity I’ve ever had about myself–I have a lot of them, thanks–and it makes the standard midlife crisis look like a fucking walk in the park.
However, I’ve finally arrived at a point where I’m managing (with some exceptions) not to wallow in it. That’s significant for me. I have a history of being fairly self-indulgent in my depressions and I’m not going to let it happen this time. I can’t let it happen this time, because a depression of this magnitude might break me if I let it take hold. Fortunately, I have my work to focus on now; I love it and frankly it’s really sort of all I have right now. And I think that may be what ends up saving me. Anyway, I’m going to live. I’ve not yet managed anything resembling optimism about the future, but I think I may arrive at “neutral” one of these days.
So anyway, if you know someone who needs a really nice house in Winston-Salem, I’m willing to make a deal. You get a free home warranty and I get to maintain my sanity. No pressure, though.
A little addendum: I apologize for this mass announcement. I haven’t talked with many people about this, because frankly it’s not a terribly pleasant thing to repeat over and over again. I appreciate your support but this is personal and not really subject to public comment. Thanks to all of you for being here for me, even though I may not really want to talk about it that much for now. And thanks to Mark for nine of the happiest years of my life. I never thought I wanted a relationship like this, but I’m damned glad I had it, even if it didn’t end up lasting forever as we’d hoped.
I’d never been to Morehead City before yesterday. I’ve been there now. I see no compelling reason to return.
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…