some day i will look back at this time in my life and be nostalgic for it, too. i mean, isn’t that always how it goes?
my brain has been all over the place lately and as a result i am finding it difficult to express myself.
the end. i mean, it’s the end of this for now.
pretty much don’t care about the pavement reunion now that it is nowhere close to the 90s anymore. i have seen mr. malkmus play several times and i mean oh well. does that make me weird? maybe i just don’t like reunions. that would explain why i still like yo la tengo i guess. i have seen them play about a million times since the 90s and i am pretty psyched to see them again next month.
this is an excellent song, anyhow.
what do i say about life right now?
i did go out with bachelor number two again, not knowing much more than the fact that he’s a designer with a penchant for pynchon and kundera. over coffee last week he was cute but shy, and i felt like we were just trying to out-anti-hipster each other.
on friday night we met up at potager and he brought me a deck of mexican playing cards. we drank wine at the bar and then went next door to my house, where we drank more wine and played uno on my floor. we went for a walk and ended up at his house, a huge weird place right next to the bail bond district. he made coffee and we talked for a long time, a little nervously, until it was late.
he offered to walk me home and as our feet hit the sidewalk he apologized for coming off as aloof. he said he wanted to see me again and maybe talk about having some kind of relationship, which i told him struck me as pretty direct. we talked about being shy and when we got to my house i said maybe we should kiss to see if we liked it. we did. and we did.
for some reason when i got in my bed i couldn’t go to sleep. too many thoughts swimming around in my head. from the second i walked into his house of art and artifacts, i knew everything was going to change for me, and that was a lot to process without warning.
at 8 in the morning on saturday i sent him a text message contemplating whether i should shower and pretend sleep happened or just stay in bed. he had just woken up and we decided to get breakfast, which led to a trip to the jewish bagel store in little russia and the illegal use of plastic cutlery and cafe tables at the colorado blvd. whole foods.
eventually we went back to his house and he showed me its upstairs, which i liked even better than the first level — it’s all secret nooks and strange things. and then we kissed and kissed and kissed until it got late enough that i had to go home and make myself crash if there was any way in hell i was going to be able to go to work and stay up till 4.
last night we met again. he gave me a necklace his sister made, though he didn’t tell me she made it until later. the evening involved a bike ride and drinks with a neighbor and other things that aren’t particularly interesting to recount, but eventually we got in his bed and it seemed impossible that i haven’t known him for much longer. at the same time there are a million things i want to know about him, and a million things to say, and a million kisses to kiss.
on friday when i couldn’t sleep, i thought about whether i’m ready for this. i’ve been single for a solid four months, and the situation with david is no closer to working itself out than it was in the beginning of may. in most ways, in fact, it has become more impossible. i’ve been on some dates this summer and they were basically horrible, and it’s hard to say whether it was because i wasn’t ready to move on, to be anything but single, or because the men just weren’t my type. but this interaction is clearly different, and i don’t really see the point in holding back because i had expected to mourn longer.
what i am certain about is that i have a much more clear idea of what i am looking for, who i am looking for, and how to deal with certain nuances that don’t meet my picture perfect ideal. i am pretty excited to see how this goes.
his name is ishmael.
***
my father went to the emergency room last week and went through heart surgery without telling me. rather, i called home on friday afternoon and my mom told me he was hiding it from me, but she had already told my brother earlier that day and figured i would find out anyway. this was pretty terrifying to me. i don’t know whether my dad was hiding his problems because they’re clear evidence that everything we say to him is true, or because they’re more serious than he wants us to know about.
my mom and i talked about relationships for a while and it made me realize how my parent’s courtship and marriage shaped my views about what should be. i don’t think they’re bad views, but they are particular and suddenly a lot of things made sense to me. maybe i will write more about that later. this summer i also figured out that much of my desire to have children in the next few years is a clear reaction to the fact that my parents, especially my father, were older when i was conceived. i can explain that better but i’m not ready to write about it quite yet.
so that’s kind of what’s going on in my head today.
what i have learned since the sun came up:
riding your bike home at 7 a.m. after staying up all night with the boy who will inevitably be your next boyfriend is kind of a rush.
a search for “naked russian kids boys videos online” somehow brought someone to my blog.
my cat eats crayons.
my mom thinks my zombie facebook avatar is insensitive to deformed people.
peanut butter is the most efficient calories-into-body delivery method after biking and running many miles and forgetting to eat for 16 hours.
if you don’t go to bed, you don’t really get morning breath.
gossip girl started again last night!!!
that’s pretty much it so far.
Filed under: dear diary | Tags: i'd like to fly but my wings have been so denied
dudes at the halfway house next door are having a weirdly touching alice in chains sing-a-long on the porch.
wow.
well,
that was unexpected. i feel like i just walked into a new denver.
i still don’t know what is up with this website, but whenever i happen to click on it, i feel like my fortune is being told.
4:49 a.m., can’t sleep. really missing evan at this moment. even gonzo seems to want him back in my bed.
a polaroid evan took of me during the first week of his stay, right before i barfed at the zoo:
another he took when we went to the mountains last week:
i recently learned that there is some iphone camera setting that allows you to take polaroid-esque pictures. this annoyed me for some reason.
Filed under: dear diary | Tags: where love that traveled far had found me
i can’t stop listening to erlend oye stuff lately, especially this and this
…
and this.
in other news, my mom gave me advice on how to use the internet yesterday.
Filed under: dear diary | Tags: well i thought it was already as heavy as can be
about a year ago, i was running or maybe walking in the general direction of the cherry creek mall. i don’t really remember what i was doing, just that i hadn’t been here long and that i was making an effort to explore the city without a car. it was raining a little bit, like it always was when i first moved here.
just as i reached the intersection of university and 1st, a crazy old woman approached me and started babbling as we waited for the light to change. there was something about winter coats on sale and how i should buy one. whatever she told me made me think she thought i was a teenage runaway.
as we started to cross the street, she flipped out and went off on me. she said, “oh you think you’re cinderella, you think someone’s going to come and save you.” i maybe said something rude in response as i ran off. i was offended because i realized for a second that she might be right.
still, i didn’t think much about that interaction until months later, when david and i broke up and i felt completely out of sorts in this city. i had always painted a picture of my cross-country move as an act of independence, a spontaneous uprooting of a life that was no longer making me happy. but seeing how things played out, i started to wonder if i was just jumping from one pot into another, thinking david could rescue me from myself. i realized how much i leaned on him, and how little my life existed outside of greektown, the yoga studio and our bed.
meanwhile, i stopped working at greektown, stopped doing yoga, and moved back into my apartment. the distraction of finding my way in denver, getting used to a new job, picking up running again, all of these new routines — they actually kept me feeling pretty happy with the way my life was playing out. but i still wanted to get back together with david, and the feeling haunted me all the time.
at some point toward the end of the summer, reality set in and my feelings started to change. coincidentally or not, it was around the time i felt completely settled in. i thought for a second that i had finally started to appreciate true independence, but then all of my late summer guests departed. i was craving a little solitude, but now i can feeling my cinderella complex rearing its ugly head again.
i just don’t know who can save me, besides myself, and that’s a lot of work.
david and i are still interacting sort of, but it’s become a bad habit, something i have to hide from my friends and even my parents. the latter is a big deal because my parents have a tendency to love my ex-boyfriends. my father was thrilled when i told him evan was visiting, and my mother practically encouraged me to bone zach when we were in portland for my brother’s graduation. news that i stayed with john while visiting d.c. was met with similar approval. but at the very mention of david’s name, my parents start talking to me like i am a kid who isn’t allowed to date yet.
it’s a mess.
i would say at this point that i have moved on but not really enough that i am over david. rather, i am over him but not enough to be into anyone else. david mentioned to me today that someone told me i have an okcupid profile, which annoyed me because i don’t like being spied on. but it was kind of funny because i was actually supposed to have an internet date tonight. i’ve had that thing since the days of zach, but i updated it on a whim while i was in d.c., and john and i had fun making fun of all the lame guys who wrote me for a couple days. since then, i have oddly used it mostly as a way to communicate with zach, who is perhaps my highest match on the entire site. i’ve also sort of made it a justification for being down on men, because the picture it paints of my potential dating pool in denver is not pretty.
recently, however, i was contacted by two moderately interesting people, and we have been talking a little. i was going to see one of them tonight and i still might see the other tomorrow. unfortunately for bachelor number one, i had a little anxiety attack about the lack of depth to our interactions, and i sent him an awkward email to cancel. from a brief meeting over coffee the other day, the second candidate seems a little more intellectually acute, but perhaps a little too annoying hipster for my taste.
sometimes it’s hard to tell if i’m still too damaged to date or if i’m just ridiculously picky these days. what i want is some amalgam of all my ex-boyfriends: the romance and whimsy of my relationship with evan, the particular and somewhat deranged rapport i had with zach, the mutual sense of alienation/aesthetics (and morning coffee) with john, the plans i made with david.
it would probably be easier on the east coast (like, hello, if this guy lived in denver and was five years younger…). at least i have gonzo/garbanzo the fuckhead cat. he won’t let me have gentlemen callers, anyway.
***
i played pretend bartender for half a shift at greektown on monday night. it was pretty fun and i wouldn’t mind doing it regularly if i didn’t have so much else going on. i miss doing the crossword every day, you know.
and did i tell you i got a new bike, finally? i’ve been riding the shit out of it. i got a basket too and maybe justin will install it for me this weekend. i’m going to miss the hell out of him when he goes to paris next month. maybe when he leaves i will finally ditch st. marks — it’s becoming a pathetic extension of my house, except more convenient because it’s two blocks from work and serves up an endless supply of coffee and beer. earlier tonight i realized my apartment even kind of looks the same.
louder than bombs
i woke up at 8:30 this morning to the sound of my roommate on the phone. minutes later i found out it was rip, calling to tell me that the world trade center and the pentagon had been hit with airplanes. you know when someone wakes you up with bad news, and you aren’t quite all there yet…and it casts a bad shadow on the rest of your day? well, that’s how i felt for a while.
i laid there talking to him, not wanting to be alone…so i just stayed motionless, in a daze, and we listened to the news unfold. what the hell? this isn’t supposed to happen in america. in my last entry i said that sometimes i feel like life here is a movie…because it’s so beautiful and everything is beyond my expectations. today was the exact opposite of that, and i learned that different means certainly can yield the same results…
this cannot be real. this only happens in big budget hollywood movies. but it is real…and it’s fucked up.
right now i wish i was still in high school that i had woken up at 7:00, nashville time, and arrived at school at 7:45, and that i could have found out about this with my friends around me and i could have had more people to talk to. i wish that my teachers that i knew so well and loved were here and that i could talk to them…and my parents, and my little brother. i wonder if everyone i know in new york is okay…
this afternoon things were getting better but then tonight we had a hall meeting which got me down again.
thank you adam for sending me mail.
i miss my bed and i miss my room. i miss cafe coco, i miss nashville streets. i miss harpeth hall, and all my friends now spread around the country. i miss my family, i miss my cat…i miss everything that is familiar and everyone who knows me all too well.
8:01 pm – 2001-09-11
at 4:30 this morning, the bar crowd had cleared out and three doctors came into the restaurant. one of them pulled me aside just after i dropped off their food, handed me his credit card and said he was covering the bill. and then he added, “i just want to tell you that you are so beautiful. i hope you aren’t offended by that.” and then he left me a $50 tip.
working at the kitchen is a lot different than working at greektown. there, old men (and old women) would tell me i was precious. the greeks would call me “baby” but it was just how it was.
at the kitchen sometimes i feel like i work at hooters or a strip club. there seems to be a tacit understanding that on the graveyard shift, you will use your sexuality and wholesome young girl-ness to get large tips from drunk dudes and doctors and cops who like to show off. men will stuff cash into your apron. you will wear your uniform the way we did in high school. a short skirt, loud jewelry, knee socks and pigtails, perhaps.
i am more distrustful of men these days.
five o’clock is the ideal time to do work. it’s too bad i have to go to work at 8:00 tonight, because i’m in a groove. i feel like the most coffee shop person in the coffee shop. gio hands me free coffee and i go outside to smoke an esoteric cigarette. i come inside and my fingers pitter patter on my macbook. i am wearing my reading glasses which mean i am getting old, but they do seem to prevent eyestrain. john says i am dressed up for a “day at the office.”
i wish justin was here but he left for idaho today.
evan left my bed at 7:30 this morning, leaving two mostly full cartons of cigarettes in his place (he is a scientist for philip morris international these days, ha ha). he woke me up at 6:30, crying.
i am sad he is gone but also happier. i mean not happier that he is gone but happier about life. we checked off a lot of things i should have been doing with my time this summer. went stomping around the mountains, played the slot machines at blackhawk, went to first friday and ditched out because it was kind of dumb.
something i have realized is that i hate when colorado pretends to be cultured instead of just being colorado. give me the sundance lodge and mountain sun anytime, santa fe art district not so much.
oh who cares.
and then we starting making out, and it was actually pretty fun.
this morning was the first time in many months that i’ve come home to someone who’s been sharing my bed (incidentally we have shared more beds than i have with anyone else, by a lot for some reason). i’m gonna miss him. i already miss that.
i began writing this post on a monday night, over a week ago:
i had the day off today and i spent it alone, mostly lounging in bed, perusing various reading materials. i am working on summaries of awi quarterly articles for the annual report and realizing that this was a much quicker task when i was the one who wrote the articles in the first place. i am also starting to think that my replacement was not a very good writer. maybe that is why she got canned. i never noticed before because no one put the magazines and things online after i left. well until about a month ago anyway. they had the website redone and it does look a lot better now.
i need a lot of time by myself lately, it seems. probably has something to do with finally getting used to the single lifestyle and then having a lot of house guests and additional job responsibilities all at once. plus the internet at my apartment thing, and the getting a cat thing. and summer is almost over, you know.
i finally went outside a little after eight tonight and it was already dark. yesterday was the hottest day of summer, i hear, a record. today there was rain and it seems to have washed away some of the heat — i am at st. marks and able to drink warm coffee, though i also have a glass of ice water beside me.
what i wanted to write about is evan visiting this weekend, and how that was good for me, but now i don’t remember what i wanted to say. i don’t remember because my head is distracted by david; i guess we had plans to watch mad men together tonight / i decided it was a bad idea and didn’t show. he called and says he really wants to see me. he says tonight there was supposed to be some normalcy, and that we have not had a neutral meeting ever. well of course.
the only time i have come close to being so fucked up over a guy is during the months after i broke up with evan spontaneously on the new year’s eve a week before my 21st birthday. i don’t know why i did this. i was home during the holidays for two weeks maybe, then he flew to nashville to meet my parents for the first time. we drove to chicago to see the flaming lips play, and it was supposed to be this big fun trip. it really should have been. i found us a cheap but awesome hotel room right in the middle of things, and chicago was one of my favorite cities. charles had moved back there only a few months earlier and by visiting him i was starting to know the city as well as i know new york.
instead i think i broke up with evan like, as the show ended. maybe an hour after the clock struck midnight. breaking someone’s heart is a terrible start to a year.
but as i have spent the past several months lamenting all the fighting i did with david last spring, telling him i wanted to leave when i didn’t really mean it, i suffered through the four months or so that passed before evan and i got back together. funny enough, this is when david and i started spending time together. we had met the previous spring and didn’t really hit it off, but ran into each other at a bar during one of allison’s going-back-to-sweden send-offs. david was the one working graveyards back then, and he had to leave pretty early to make it to work by midnight. that was before the regretting of my decision had set in, and i was flirty and familiar with him.
***
what i was going to say next, i think, is that when it all played out, i couldn’t really give myself over to david emotionally because i was so torn up over evan. that spring, the night that i graduated from college, i went to denver to attend justin’s art opening with david and dave craig. afterward we went to sputnik, and eventually david dropped dave and me off at lost lake, where belle and sebastian was rumored to be making a post-show appearance.
sure enough, as soon as i walked in, i spotted evan chatting with stevie himself. i don’t know exactly what happened, but all of a sudden evan was interested in me again. we talked until he had to leave, and as i was driving home that night (the long way, down federal), i got a phone call from him. thirty minutes later i was in his bed.
a few months after that we were in switzerland.
and then we broke up, and i moved to d.c.
by the time evan and i got back together, it was only something i wanted to happen because i had invested so much emotional energy pining for him and regretting my original decision. despite the fact that i knew it was a bad idea as soon as i realized it was actually going to happen, we managed to string each other along for about eight more months — during which time we lived in four apartments (six between us if you count the ones we started in, and that’s not even including a month i spent at my parents’ house), got quasi-married so i could obtain a swiss visa, and moved to switzerland.
it’s not that we weren’t getting along, per se. it’s just that you can’t go back, most of the time. there were too many things that were awkward to talk about, that space in between the first time and the second time. it wasn’t the same.
evan was my first real boyfriend, and it was quite serious, in that way that the academic lifestyle fosters intense relationships. we were stuck on the same campus all day and had a lot of time to spend together. and we were innocent as hell, with no ideas about what a relationship should and shouldn’t be. when we broke up the first time, i thought i would be damaged forever. when we broke up the second time, i just took an eight-hour plane ride and spent a week in new york decompressing with the aid of cigarettes, bagels, and giant ice-filled cups of diet coke. after that, i was okay.
when david and i broke up, i was nearly half a decade removed from being damaged about evan. and yet there was that feeling again, except this time it was a million times worse, because i was convinced david was the only person i would ever want to marry. (and fuck, look at me now, i’m diving into my late twenties and all alone. blah blah blah.)
***
the reason i didn’t get to say that, or anything i plan on writing next, is because first i started chatting with justin, and then it was late so i left. except instead of going home i went to david’s house, and i spent the night — and the next night as well. it was the first time since we broke up that made me think getting back together was a possibility (and by that i mean something he was amenable to, not necessarily something that would work out or be a good idea).
i worked during the rest of the week, and we didn’t talk much, giving me time to question myself and over-think the things i was thinking. by the time friday night arrived, we were able to see each other again, and i told him some things. they didn’t come out as sensical as it sounded in my head, or to anyone else with whom i have discussed the situation, but essentially the point is this: i know i said terrible things to david when we were fighting. i know i made him feel terrible, and i know the way we fought throughout our entire relationship was something that needed to change. i have known these things, rather, been willing to admit them, since the week before we broke up, when i wrote him a very long letter saying as much. i also understand the way he felt when he decided he couldn’t be with me, but that decision means that i cannot be with him now, or ever.
it might be different if we had not already made plans to spend the rest of our lives together. i don’t know. all i know is that i can’t shake that feeling of abandonment, and that i can’t properly explain to him the way i felt when i was being terrible to him in the first place. i never wanted to leave him, and i never wanted any other version of him than the one i already had. i just wanted him to take my opinions into account, and when i felt like he wasn’t, it made me insecure and even more pushy. and then my stubbornness kicked in. i just couldn’t make it stop, until one day, mid-sun salutation, i realized i was doing exactly what my nutritionist pointed out when i was first trying to get over my food issues: harming my quality of life through same methods by which i trying to improve it. except in this case it wasn’t just my quality of life — it was a person, two people, and our relationship together.
maybe it was too late by then. i still think we could have worked it out at that point. but i am certain that it is over now. additional events this summer, things i probably won’t be able to write about until i am truly “over” david, further cemented my sense of insecurity about his capacity for relating to me emotionally in the way that a life partner should.
this is veering into logorrhea territory, but i’ve had other thoughts since then. evan came back from the mountains and is staying with me again. i am amazed at how well we get along, and how much fun it is to be around him even with the romantic aspect removed. we’ve spent a lot of time with old friends, and it reminded me that i have not always been one to become a hermit when i enter a relationship. i sense that behavior started when i was dating zach, mostly because i didn’t know anyone else in d.c., and he didn’t really have friends back then.
david frequently commented that i was more introverted than him, and it became somewhat of a problem toward the end. i have come to realize this summer that i am not very introverted at all. while i enjoy spending time alone and have no trouble filling up my time without other people around, i do prefer to be in the company of others. i meet people easily, and as soon as i made the effort this summer, i acquired a lot of friends. but what happens eventually is that i feel like i am spreading myself thin, trying to be social with too many people. so i pick the one i like best and i give our relationship my best effort.
it just so happened that david was the one i liked best in a time when i was also making a major life transition. and our year together happened to intersect with that moment in peoples’ lives when it is suddenly normal to be thinking about getting married and having children and making the sort of plans that have permanent consequences.
that doesn’t make it any easier for me to deal with emotionally right now, but it does keep me from thinking we could salvage anything by getting back together, or that we should just because i spent so much time wanting to be with him, because he is “the one” or something.
i’m glad evan is here. it has been nice to just have someone around, someone to sleep in my bed and have galaxie 500 sing-a-longs with me, to sneak booze into the movie theater and talk about old times. i know i’m not ready to start seeing anyone any time soon, but i can already sense that i will be okay, and that some day i will be able to do those things with someone new.
my next post is going to be about plans and goals. i have some, these days.
