Where do we go from here?

It is finally cold and it is finally snowing. It’s hard to explain how this effects me. I might even dare to say, I’m perky. In fact, after going to yoga, I came to an independently owned coffee shop, drinking loose leaf tea and working on my blog. The fact that I am not disgusted by myself at how enormously pretentious this all seems just goes to show how good my mood actually is.

Another aspect that is putting me into a good mood is the fact that I have been at least 3 places today, and my car still lays dormant behind my apartment building. You might how I work Far, Far Away from where I live. The fact of the matter is there is just no good way to get There from Here, and I frequently end up in the traffic doldrums.  Now I haven’t actually done the math, but I’m willing to say 23.4% of my time is spent in my car, so any day I don’t have to start my car is a GOOD day.

After work one day, I was meeting someone for dinner in a part of town that I don’t go to very often. So, true enough I asked my GPS to get me there. About half way through the trip, is the snarly hell that is the Cross Town Highway, Garmin asked me if I would like to switch to pedestrian mode.  When your GPS asks you something like that on your way home from work, you really start to look at the life choices you’ve made that have lead you to where you are today.

And I decided that I have been pretty unhappy for sometime, and need to make some changes. So after a lot of careful thought and self reflection, I came to a choice on that drive home: I need to break up with Garmin.

Oh, sure, our relationship started out great. He got to know my favorite places, and where all my friends were. He even full of great ideas, able to suggest restaurants to try, always had an idea of where to go.  It seemed like he really understood me, and for whatever else, I could always depend on him to get me home.

But eventually, I began to see the other sides of him. We’d go downtown, and suddenly he wouldn’t know what to do. He’d start behaving irrationally, and seem to not know where he was.

As time wears on,  the little things I used to think were so endearing have really started to grate at me. I realized the way he would so jokingly keep trying to get back on the route he had chosen is not a joke at all. But it is actually a chauvinistic attempt to belittle any choice I make. After a while that environment becomes toxic..

What is worse than how he treats me is how I treat him. I become verbally abusive, calling him names and making threats. I don’t like being that person.

When it comes down to it, Garmin takes me places where I don’t want to be, in a way I don’t want to get there. I have to go through shady areas of town, or reroute from traffic into worse traffic, or wants me to turn left on a busy intersection.

Now, I’m not above admitting that sometimes I doubt Garmin, and don’t listen to him when I should have. But I can apologize. He never does when he is wrong though. It’s like he’s a machine, for Christ’s sake.

But when it comes right down to it, the magic has faded, and I just don’t respect how he makes decisions. And can you really sustain a relationship when you feel that way?

Plus, I think I am starting to have feelings for someone else. Now I’m not saying I am ready to jump into anything serious with my iPhone right away. I do need some time to heal. Just the fact that I’m thinking about another GPS means that this relationship just isn’t working, and I need to get to a healthier place.

Maybe Siri knows how to get there….

I'll show you an ass

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the dangerous nature of assumptions. We can assume all sorts of things about the people and things around us. Sometimes our assumptions might be based on past experience, but they are still based out of ignorance.  When we assume about the people and places around us, we miss the opportunity to see things as they are. And if you assume, you could end up not only offending someone, but also making a fool out of yourself, and looking like an ass because you're carrying an apple core around in a bank because you assumed there would garbage can near the door.

An Idealized Map

NB: Canada does not exist because it's 1:15 and I've wasted too much time in photoshop tonight.

surly mermaid

I started typing that I miss winter. But that is far from the truth. I miss the varying fall colors and how pretty winter can be... before it just isn't. I miss hot beverages and down comforters and snowflakes. Sure, Texas can bedazzle the biggest fake tree I have ever seen with millions of twinkly lights. And because it isn't 50 below zero people can actually enjoy it. But photographs like these aren't happening in Texas any time soon. It is a Minnesota thing.




The photography is all by Elena Stanton. I would love to claim that her amazing artistic talent runs in the family, but I am an artistic dunce and can't take a good pic to save my life. But being able to see the winter without being in the winter makes me finally love it.

I have no friends, but I get a lot of mail.

Most of the time I have trouble coming up with an opening line.

Bea and I had something that teetered on the edge of another argument, and despite some hurtful name calling, I compared myself to a Nazi before it could drastically escalate into another 4-day event, effectively ending the argument.  We spent the rest of the day spamming The Management's Facebook about leggings and our wedding music. We did pretty well, but there's still needs to be some more Murder Ballads in there. Only a few people get to see how Bea and I interact quite as much as the Management. In fact, I'm willing to say that the only person who really gets to see us in our full glory is our mail men. We send each other some weird ass shit.  I don't want to go too much into our old timey correspondence, for fear of taking the fore- out of Bea's -shadowing.

Hey, speaking of mail, I got some mail today. (Transitions are for chumps). Half of it was complete shit.  That half was people kindly informing me that since I've recently risen above the poverty line, I have to give them money if I want to keep living in light. And at this time of year there is only about 37.45 minutes of sunlight, so I need electricity.

But, luckily, I got something else. Bea has been sending me postcards, and here's a sample of what's been coming in my post.

There is a signature on each one. This one is located above the silky smooth caramel of her sun kissed thigh.

Franco is clearly a man who understands women. More on that later.

I've been mostly dead all day.

I'm so glad Bea posted. I was afraid she was never going to post, and we might have to have a confrontation about it. Bea and I having an confrontation is like watching a blind, three legged dog chase cars. We have no business doing it, and its both pathetically feeble, and hilarious to watch.

Bea was right. I did take my own advice last night, and contrary to my normal M.O. partook in the New Year's Festivities with the Management. And by that I mean, there was a lot whiskey.  When midnight struck I was outside, wrapped in my Snuggie brushing snow off a car.  This was pretty much the ideal way to ring in the new year in my opinion. (As a side story: I fell down on the stairs into the bushes. Now from this, you might assume I was falling down drunk. I am not sure if that's the case, because as point of fact, I am just really clumsy. I am not sure how I should tell the story later, as I can never tell what I should be more embarrassed about, that I drank so much that I lose my balance, or that, in all sobriety, I simply fall down a lot.)

Consequently, I spent the majority of today in bed, alternating between sleeping and watching old episodes of King of the Hill. This is not much different than how I was planning to spend my day anyway, with the exception of getting my laundry done. And let's be honest about this, there was only  30-60 chance I was actually going to get that done.  The more I explore the option, alcoholism doesn't seem like it would disrupt my life style all that much.

The worst question I ever get asked is "So what you'd do today?" If I were answer that question honestly and frankly it would be something along the lines of "I watched 7 episodes of One Tree Hill, because I'm curious as to how much bullshit TV I can handle before my brain explodes, while Bea and I texted 93 times.* Oh, and I ate a bunch of cheese."  Since I can't really say that to people without having to answer some heavy questions about my fundamental word view, I usually just say "Oh, nothing too exciting". A lot of my conversations are spent trying to frame my life in a way that seems like its interesting enough where people don't become overly concerned about my anti-social tendencies but aren't interested enough to have any sort of follow up questions. It's really hard to appear to be an open book, and simultaneously be pathologically secretive about how you actually conduct your affairs.

Bea might have to overcome her own disinterest in her life to be able to blog, but I am having trouble overcoming my own self conditioned behavior, which makes me panic at the thought of confessing all the weird as shit I do. I mean, I live alone for a reason here. There's something oddly titillating about all this honesty.

So, even though it's midnight, I am going to wall paper my entry way with the trashy romance novel style post cards and eat some cheese before I go to bed.












*This is a real statistic.

LIFE IS PAIN, HIGHNESS

From the sound of things Honey went ahead and took her own advice last night. And it is probably about time I took her advice to me as well, “just POST already.” She has been terribly disappointed in me and I’ve been spanking myself with episodes of One Tree Hill in an attempt to atone. But even I don’t deserve that and my Netflix queue keeps insisting that, due to my past preferences, I need to watch Apocalypse Now and Toddlers in Tiaras ASAP. RESET. So here goes.

Since the beginning of time I have begun every essay or paper I have written or any correspondence I write with an apology. “Sorry I know this isn’t any good, I’ll do better next time,” “I accidentally took too much excederin and then wrote this letter with my left hand, sorry.” This honestly isn’t caused by gratuitous self-deprecation on my part, I swear. Sorry if it comes off like that. I don’t really have the problem of under appreciating myself. It is that I feel the need to acknowledge that I am not living up to my full potential so that “they” know that I know that this tripe isn’t the best I can do.

I have touched on this before several times but here it is again - Honey and I share the characteristic of being kind of unemotional about things. And when we try to explain to someone what we mean when we say we are robots, we run into the problem of trying to convey “I just don’t care about people’s problems and feelings… but I care about yours.” I can imagine that never seems genuine. The reality is that I think most problems people have could be solved by being less self indulgent and just change it already instead of complaining about it. Now that is obviously not universally applicable and most people aren’t me so I hold them to lower standards anyway. And I totally do care about YOUR feelings, with all the others I was just pretending, but never with you. But as I have mentioned before, I have very little regard for my feelings as well. Usually I ignore them and wait for them to pass.

The combination of these two character nuances makes posting on a blog really, really, difficult for me. It never really crosses my mind to call up a friend or whatever and catch up and, like, list things that happened in my life, or feelings I had, or thoughts or whatever. As you can imagine, conversations with me are completely one-sided. There is a lot of deflection and me awkwardly saying “oh nothing, what else is new with you.” Not because I have nothing going on, but because the last thing I want to do is listen to myself blather on about it. I usually get bored halfway through a sentence and abort the mission entirely. When I ask myself “do I really need to say this out loud" the answer is rarely "yes." Writing blog posts requires more commitment than that, so I’ve been avoiding it. But I am getting the apologies out of the way now and hopefully we can work through my inadequacies together.

Next up, I expound on how to stalk someone the right way.