Pat's Problem: The Incident

When last we met, I briefly mentioned an Incident that left me feeling bitter and angry. With a couple of weeks' distance, now, maybe I can talk about it from a relatively calm and rational perspective.

Here's what happened: I mentioned in an email to someone I know -- for maximum obscurity, let's call them Pat and avoid gender-specific pronouns -- that I'd been on a few dates with B. (This was before we decided to make it exclusive, if that matters, though I don't think it does.)

A day later, I received an email from Pat in which they said that (rephrased in my own words) a) they thought I had been making poor choices ever since Matt and I separated (that they were, in fact, embarrassed by me) and b) they recognized they couldn't control my "lifestyle" (Pat's word!), but only their reactions to my actions, and therefore c) they were no longer following me on Facebook and would appreciate it if I didn't discuss my dating life with them any more.

Now, there was a possibility that Pat would not be too happy about my dating B., for reasons that are not mine to tell, but this email felt like something much bigger than that (and illuminated something that had happened a good month earlier) -- and it completely floored me. (I believe what I said to KT about it at the time was, and I quote, "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?") Not least because I have no idea what bad choices these are that I'm apparently making, or what morally questionable "lifestyle" I'm living.

After thinking (okay, stewing and fretting) about it for a while, I came up with a few possibilities, but none of them really make me feel any better.

1. Pat feels I should wait until Matt and I are legally divorced before dating at all. This, I might point out, is merely a question of semantics, as Matt and I have made the firm decision to get a divorce. I'm not resting a lot of moral weight on a bureaucratic tick-mark, or putting my life on hold for it. (Especially since I can't seem to get a danged lawyer to call me back to arrange the divorce mediation.)
2. Pat thinks it is a mistake for me to date multiple people at a time. This seems kind of unlikely, but if this is Pat's big embarrassment, then Pat needs to take a deep breath, because dating more than one person at a time is what our grandparents did. Anyway, dating casually was a reasoned decision that I came to, with what I felt were excellent reasons behind it.
3. Pat thinks that I am (was) being sexually promiscuous in the extreme, i.e., using "dating" as a euphemism for "sleeping with" rather than the way I actually meant it, which was "meeting in a public location for a meal and/or light entertainment and (usually awkward) conversation." I expect this one is the most likely, due to my tendency to post what I assumed everyone knew were lighthearted tease posts on Facebook like, "Got a date tonight -- don't wait up!" At any rate, if this is Pat's point of pain, there's a big misunderstanding going on, because of the six or so guys I've gone on dates with in the last six months, only two ever even got a kiss out of me. But if this is it, then I'm torn between being offended Pat would think this of me and furious that they would be so judgmental over something so superficial. (This is not a contradiction. Something can be not right for me and still okay for someone else. I am constitutionally incapable of a one-night stand, but that doesn't mean I judge others for it!)

So whatever Pat's deal is, it's going to remain a problem, because there's bloody well nothing I'm going to change about my "lifestyle". (Well I've changed the bit about dating multiple people at a time, but if B. and I split up, I'll be going back to that plan, because I still think the reasons for it were strong and valid.)

And normally, I'd just say to hell with Pat and go on with my life, but it so happens that Pat is someone with whom I interact on a fairly regular basis and whose opinion is, in fact, something I value. But since they don't even want to discuss the topic any more, I can't even figure out if it's a fundamental disagreement of opinion or a misunderstanding that could be cleared up with some plain talk. (Also, the whole thing struck me as a little passive-aggressive. But I've pulled plenty of my own passive-aggressive bullshit in my life, so bitching about that would be a case of pots and kettles.)

Now it's a couple of weeks later. I'm still just as confused as I was when I first got Pat's email, but the initial wave of anger and indignation has faded. The couple of encounters I've had with Pat since then (faithfully free of dating discussion, as requested) have been even-keeled and at least superficially cordial.

So I'm beginning to regain my balance. I'm pretty happy with my life right now, after all. I debated even mentioning it here, but this blog/journal is, above all else, my own record of my life. I've gone back looking for other Incidents and been confused to find them missing, and a little sad that I couldn't even piece together what my thoughts were at the time.

So rest assured, O Internet, that I'm not letting this affect me too much. It made me angry for a while, and it stung. And then I gave it some serious thought and decided that I feel pretty good about most of the choices I've made, and that Pat's problem, whatever it is, is only really a problem for Pat.

Stay tuned for another blog post, shorter but happier, in which my daughter is, provably, my daughter.

Social-ism

My weekend: let me tell you it.

Friday, I left work at noon (god, I love working part-time -- even when it's just one day every two weeks, or a couple of half-days, it's nice to have that flexibility!). I went home and ate lunch and changed clothes, and then I stopped at the storage unit to empty out the last couple of things, and then I went down to my parents' house.

I sat and talked with my folks for a little while, and then Dad and I went up into the attic. The mess he'd recruited me to clean up was way smaller than I'd expected -- really, it took less than half an hour to clean all the spilled insulation up off the floor and put it back in the attic, and half that time was spent climbing up and down the ladder. (Er, I'm using "attic" a couple of different ways, there, aren't I? There's an unfinished room over the garage that gets used for storage; and then over that, there's the space between the ceiling and the roof that's nothing but lumber and insulation. You can probably figure out from context which one I'm referring to at any particular moment, because "room-over-the-garage" is a little too unwieldy.)

I did most of the work, but Dad helped around the edges. Which is fine, because a) like I said, it wasn't that big of a job anyway; and b) I wasn't going to let my nearly 70-year-old father climb a ladder carrying a bucket to dump spilled insulation back into the attic; and c) doing this job was the price Dad had claimed for my storing stuff in their space.

And it turned out that when he'd said "rearrange things to make room", he hadn't meant we were going to actually clean the attic/storage area. He'd just meant that the enormous ex-pingpong table they have up there had been moved away from the window so the workmen could get to the attic, and we had to put it back. Which was also not that big a job; it's just that the table is like ten feet long and it's not so much a table as it is a couple of boards loosely attached to some legs, so it can't just be pushed or it will all come crashing down (along with all the Christmas wrapping and decorations stacked on top of it). So we had to get on either end and pick the whole mess up and scoot it back over to the wall. And then re-align the legs, because they hadn't really wanted to move. Took less than five minutes, but it was not a job a single person could have done, and my mom definitely couldn't have lifted one end of the table with the arthritis in her shoulder.

So I'm glad to have helped, and as a bonus, my Christmas tree and yard reindeer have a dry, relatively spider-free place to live for the ten and a half months of the year they're not decorating my house.

Then I changed back into shorts and a t-shirt and sat talking to my parents until dinnertime, and then they invited me to stick around for pizza, and how was I going to turn that down? So I had pizza with my folks, and headed home not long after that.

***

Saturday: I paid some bills and ran some errands. The only one worth mentioning was when I went into the storage unit office to close it down: the lady behind the counter looked up the unit number, then said, "What's the name?" and I told her Matt's name, because he's the one who set it up. She looked at me and said, "Are you his mother?"

Oh, yes she did.

(To be fair... this is a college town, and school just started back up, and I am, in fact, old enough to have a kid in college who would keep his stuff in a storage unit over the summer. But still!)

We got it worked out, and she said that technically I couldn't close the account because Matt hadn't put my name on it, but the act of cleaning it out and removing the lock was sufficient to do the job anyway, so she'd make a note of it on her evening rounds and it would get closed. Which is all I wanted, really.

***

Saturday afternoon, I had a ticket to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the community theater that's right by our house. (Really. Less than half a mile. I walked there, even in a skirt.) When I got there, I discovered my friend Caren sitting right next to me! But then we realized she'd read her tickets wrong and was in row G instead of row C. Alas. But the woman who took her place was really nice and friendly anyway, and we chatted a little before the show started. (Lookit me, bein' all social!)

The show was... well, as Caren said when we were talking afterward -- not as bad as we'd feared, not as good as we'd hoped. The guy playing Judas was really good, but their choice for Jesus was... Okay, look. Jesus should be in his 30s, and for this particular show at least, he should be world-weary and tortured. The actor they had playing him was maybe in his 20s. Maybe. And they put sparkly pink lipstick on him. Add to that his short, slightly poofy hairstyle, and he looked more like Justin Bieber than Jesus. He was a pretty decent singer (though he didn't quite bring the pathos to the music) but a mediocre actor, and... honestly, if I'd been directing, I'd have switched the actors for Jesus and Peter.

But all in all, I'm glad I went, and I'll be checking out some other plays as the season runs along. (I do need to remember that the stage is MUCH closer to the seats than the diagram on the website suggests, and to pick something a little further back next time.)

***

Saturday evening, I did something completely and astonishingly out of character for me.

I went to a meetup of board gamers. I voluntarily walked into room full of people that I had never met before. And talked to them. And played games. And joked around, and...

As if it wasn't crazy enough for me to walk into a room of strangers and swallow my fears and be social, I brought my Cards Against Humanity deck. Including the brand-new, still-in-the-cellophane second expansion. And suggested we play a hand or three. With seven strangers. At that point, we'd played a couple of other quick-spin games, but I figured... what better way to break the ice? I mean, either they'd be utterly horrified and I'd know this wasn't the group for me, or they'd love it and I'd feel more comfortable actually being, you know, me. (Or a mix. You know. Everyone's different.)

But it turned out really well! We only played three rounds, because it's a slowish game and there were a million others to try. But no one seemed actively disgusted (well, many people were actively disgusted by individual cards, but in the best kind of "oh, that's so foul it has to be the winner!" way) and everyone had fun with it.

There was a ton of food there -- stew and fruit and cookie and ice cream -- and so I ate (the stew was amazing, once I'd come down from the meeting-new-people nausea) and played... I don't remember, at least five or six different games, over about five hours. We had to vacate the clubhouse at 10, but the sponsoring guy was all about moving the party to his place and continuing. I couldn't quite bring myself to walk into a near-stranger's house at 10 at night, so I went on home at that point, but the whole thing was just amazing.

If you're not an introvert, it's probably not weird for you to just introduce yourself to people. You probably don't dump hours of energy into trying to figure out what to talk about that won't sound self-centered or potentially offensive or horribly inane. You probably don't feel like throwing up as you wonder whether people are only talking to you to be polite while wishing you'd just go away. But that's pretty much my entire social experience. If I haven't known someone for a long time -- I mean, years -- then I am pretty much always wondering if they're just tolerating me. That niggling doubt doesn't disappear until that person actively seeks out my company... and if they don't initiate contact for a while, the doubt comes back.

But my situation now is completely flopped. If I'm going to have a social life, I'm going to have to swallow the social anxiety and the nausea and get out there and meet people.

A bad first experience would have turned me off to the whole idea. So I'm relieved -- intensely relieved -- that this meetup was so good, that these people were so friendly and actively inclusive. That I wasn't an unusual person -- I wasn't the only girl, nor the oldest, nor the youngest, nor even the fattest. I fell into the middle of the group in nearly every possible classification, and that was comforting in and of itself. It not only made for a fun evening, but it will (hopefully) make it easier for me to do something like it again. Or at least, not harder.

*** 

As for Sunday... Sunday I mostly stayed home. Being social and meeting people was good and awesome and fun, but I am still an introvert, and being social is something I need to recover from, even if it's good. So I stayed in. I tried a recipe I'd been meaning to try, I read a ridiculous number of comics, I organized my closet a little, I planned some decor changes for the dining room, I  played doofy computer games, I watched Leverage. I rested and I processed.

And that was good, too.

The Grey Light

My therapist said something to me yesterday -- actually something that someone had said to her twenty-five years ago, when she was a newly-divorced woman of 40 (and so in a situation similar to mine) -- that touched a nerve.

Except I wasn't entirely sure why it touched a nerve. As supportive statements go, it was pretty standard: "You are a smart, strong, capable woman. You make good choices, and you will continue to make good choices. Sometimes, you'll make a choice that turns out to be bad, and you'll learn from it and move on."

This morning, Alex woke me up around 4am to let me know he'd overflowed his pullup. Again. (Note to self: need to make sure he's not sneaking drinks after dinner, and also verify he's going to the potty before bed.) I got him changed and re-settled and back to bed, then went back to bed myself.

But -- as seems to be the usual lately, once I was up, I couldn't go back to sleep. I tried for a while, and then I just lay there, thinking about the music that's been resonating with me lately. "Off the Hook" by the Barenaked Ladies, in particular, has been stuck in my head for a good week. And I thought about the writing assignment the therapist had given me and wondered if maybe I could use all that resonant music to at least kick it off (getting started is one of the hardest parts, so having a theme or a starting point is useful). And I started sort of head-writing what I would say about "Off the Hook".

He could get away with murder one
and you would clean the smoking gun
With every crime
you bought each line

That's the thing that bothers me most, I thought, laying there in that dim, grey light of pre-dawn. Not what happened, but how I willingly blinded myself to it.

I feel so stupid, I thought. I feel so foolish.

It was a mistake to stay quiet for so long, I thought.

You will make mistakes, said another voice. It's okay. Everyone makes mistakes.

And then there were tears, and an epiphany: This is what I keep falling apart over, in different incarnations, over and over. Allowing myself to make mistakes. Admitting -- not that I screwed up, because I did, and I can own that -- but that it's not the end of the world, and that it's okay to learn from my mistakes and forgive myself for them.

I know now, what the first step of my path to me is: to forgive myself for my mistakes, for failing to acknowledge and act during our years of drawing apart, and for allowing myself to hear what I wanted to hear instead of what was actually being said. I'm not sure how, because those feel like huge failures, but at least I can see the way forward, even if it's covered in brambles and mist.

So the pain is a little fresher this morning, but it feels cleaner, like a newly cleansed wound. I expect it will need to be cleansed again, but at least it feels like healing.

Sorry for dumping all this maundering on you, but I've been awake since 4am.

Disappearing

I've never liked being in the car. When I was a kid, it was a kind of torture to go visit my mom's relatives, because they all lived about two hundred miles away in North Carolina, which meant four hours in a car. Even when my parents broke the trip up for us by stopping halfway for a meal, I hated it. Friends would tell me about family trips where they were in the car for whole days at a time, and all I could do was marvel at the imagined torture of it.

It got a little better when I got old enough to drive, but I still don't much care for it. My friend Karen drives down to this area from New York at least twice a year, and I can't even comprehend being willing to do that. Any trip that's going to take more than four hours to drive, I want to know what my flight options are. I waffled on taking my first real job because the commute was going to be more than half an hour.

That one has come back to haunt me, because now every morning, I'm in the car for the better part of an hour, driving Alex up to daycare and then driving Penny back down to her school before I go to work. It's not my favorite part of the day, but I've mostly made my peace with it. The kids have learned that I'm not terribly communicative when I'm driving, and they largely talk to each other, and Penny brings a book to read after we've dropped Alex off. Once I'm alone in the car, I switch the radio from music to comedy.

So I cope.

And yet, a few times a year, I see something that makes it worth it. A couple of years back, I saw fog lifting from a freshly-plowed field; the mist hung thick and swirly in the air at a level four feet off the ground, the early sunlight making it sparkle. I'd never seen anything quite like it before, and I've never seen it since.

This morning, there was a thick fog hanging over the swamp -- and only over the swamp, glued there like cotton balls. As I was coming back that way after taking Alex to daycare, I was approaching the bridge down a slight incline, and the fog was still there, tall enough to swallow the trees and everything else on the far side of the bridge. For just a brief moment, it looked like I was about to drive off the end of the world and into oblivion.

As I reached the bridge and my visibility extended, the illusion expanded, and it seemed that the rest of the world was being created at that moment, simply because I was ready to pass through the barrier. (At the time, it was a profound and almost spiritual image. Only now, as I try to put it in words, do I realize that it sounds like crossing zones in a video game. Blame my inadequate wordsmithing, and not the experience itself.)

I wondered, as I pushed through the fog, what would happen if it was a barrier -- or a portal. Would I find myself lost in a featureless grey space? Pass through into a world that, in fact, hadn't existed in the moments before I entered it? Would I disappear entirely from this world, or would another me from another world enter at the same moment I left and take up my life where I left off?

Maybe I am in another world now. Maybe I drove through that portal and am now in a new world, taking the place of the me that was here yesterday. Maybe I'll say something to someone later that's not quite right, and the person I'm talking to will pause for a moment and give me an odd look, and wonder what's happened to me.

How about it, blog readers? Am I a traveler in an alternate dimension (or from your perspective, a traveler from an alternate dimension?) I must say, though -- if that's the case, alternate-world me doesn't do a very good job at keeping up with her paperwork.

Ribbit.

I frequently encounter words about how your mood is -- partly, if not entirely -- under your own control. You can choose to make the best of a situation, or you can choose to wallow in the bad stuff.

And that's true... up to a point. And when I say "up to a point," I'm not referring to the serious chemical imbalance that has as its primary symptom a profound and unmanageable depression. That is way beyond the point at which you begin to lose control over your mood.

No, I'm talking about the point that's right at the edge. When the day started out just fine but then you got smacked upside the head with a flurry of frustrating/annoying/upsetting things, and now you're straddling the fence that divides a good day from a bad one. Now you have to make that choice between saying, "What a crappy morning. That's not very auspicious for the rest of my day, is it?" or saying, "Well, now I've eaten my frog and it can only get better from here, right?"

Unfortunately, knowing which choice you should make there is not the same as making it. If it was easy to push yourself into a positive outlook when you're balanced on that cusp then there wouldn't be dozens -- make that hundreds -- of self-help books on the subject. Sometimes, teetering on the edge of the cliff, you need someone to grab your hand or throw you a rope.

...Boy, that was a crappy morning. Someone pass me the BBQ sauce for this frog.

Dream Discussions and Warren Ellis

I had a dream this morning. I was with a whole bunch of friends, sitting around someone's living room and talking. The first thing I noticed is that they were all real-life people, which I don't see much of in my dreams. The next thing I noticed is that these were all friends who I especially admire for their intellect, people who make me feel, at best, haphazardly and inadequately educated. People that I love to hang out with, when I get the chance, because even their random conversation is informative and fascinating.

And we were really talking -- not just telling stories and bullshitting, but earnestly and seriously discussing things and dissecting their meanings and searching for the pearls of truth scattered amongst the swine of belief and interpretation. We didn't all agree on every point, but it was exactly the kind of passionate but respectful discussion that I love to be part of, even peripherally.

Just before I woke up, I was making a point about how nearly every culture in the world has some variant on the Golden Rule. And what did it mean -- what truths could be extracted from that fact? Was there, in fact, a universal morality?

And now I'm wondering: why am I dreaming about intellectual discussions of morality? Am I starving for intellectual stimulation? Missing those pre-child days when deep discussions might indeed erupt at any gathering? Do I long to expand my education? Am I working toward an inward examination of morality and spirituality?

It's a conundrum, but it does seem, oddly, to have stimulated my thought processes. As I was driving to work after dropping the kids off to school this morning, I actually started composing a discussion of Warren Ellis as an author and a philosopher, trying to get at the theme that runs straight through his work that I've enjoyed the most -- Transmetropolitan and Preacher and The Authority and FreakAngels -- and that a mind capable of holding onto that theme is almost certainly not really as cynical as the angry and acerbic front he projects. Or at least, that it it capable of that cynicism, but it is also equally capable of a matching and balancing optimism.

That's about as far as I got with it -- it's a short drive from Penny's school to my office -- but I really wanted to put it down, because it's not often that I consider these kinds of things anymore, and I miss it. But I couldn't just suddenly throw it out there without telling you about the dream, because I think it's relevant.