Two weeks ago

I woke up to a grimly pleasant morning and got up thinking that despite major turmoil, I was still on an even keel, and thus was now, finally an adult. My shrink disabused me of this notion. I thought that to be grown up meant to supress despair and to never ask for help. I also thought that criticism was an acceptable part of normal discourse. Not to be overly dichotomously binary about things, but these ideas were wrong wrong wrong.

And the two weeks since have been a lot like being caught up in a tornado and getting wacked repeatedly with flying debris. Not a happy event at all, but an opportunity for growth, as my shrink might say. I’m going to be a happier, more stable person at the end of this, but getting there really sucks. I would really like just to drop down in Oz right now.

not standing alone

I wrote something a few days ago about standing alone against pain. what complete bullshit. nobody can do that. that’s why people have friends and shrinks and religion. i am not standing alone, thank god. i tried that once. it was a disaster. i don’t see the need to repeat that experience. stading alone is sort of masculinist. supporting communities is a “feminine” ideal. there’s a reason that women live longer than men.
if i can’t undo the past, at least i can learn from it.

Anger

I just got email from my (soon to be ex)mother-in-law about anger, saying I had every right to be furious about things in my life and I need to find a way to deal with it. Ok, yeah, so I’m angry. I’m angry that my mom died. I’m angry about all the shit that happened then with the insurance company and the doctors and my family. I’m angry that the anti-seizure medication they gave her was an appetite supressant when she was eating three bites of food per day and I called the doctors and they told me to give her ice cream “there’s a lot of good calories in ice cream.” and i’m angry at the indignity of it all, that they didn’t see her as a person and that all the doctors were on vacation when we needed to be meeting with them and rather than find people to fill in for them, they just made us wait even though the treatment couldn’t wait. And I’m angry that I was only 26 when she died and that I didn’t really know her and she had just barely begun to accept me and I had barely begun to accept her. And I’m angry that she didn’t accept me for so long and tried so hard to change me by being mean to me about being queer. And I’m angry at her for getting sick and I’m angry at myself and everyone around her for not noticing until it was too late and I’m angry that she died. And I’m angry that I couldn’t solve these problems. I couldn’t make things go right with my mom or with Christi.

And my anger changes absolutely nothing. My mom is still dead. Doctors are still assholes. All the stuff we never said to each other will always be unsaid. Christi is still gone. And all of this anger is just a protective shell over a whole lot of hurt. Life isn’t fair and people I love leave me.
One website says it’s very important that we express our anger and adress the cause of it, but do so with I statements. I can picture myself calling up my mom’s now-defunct insurance company (they went bankrupt while she was in hospice care) and saying, “I felt very unhappy when you refused to cover the costs of speech therapy for my mom, so she never recovered any of her speech even during the brief time that it seemed like she was improving. And I’m extremely upset that we had to threaten to sue you before you would cover raditaion therapy because I felt like you didn’t care about my mom.”
another website says not to express it, but to find the root emotion under the anger and deal with that instead, because anger is always the second emotion. Really, I just felt very frightened that she was dying, so I just need to go learn how to deal with fear and go launch into another web search.
another website says to look out for getting easily frustrated and angry in traffic or at plane delays and other bits of impatience that are signs of unresolved anger. But that stupid shit is so trivial. who cares that your plane is a few hours late when everyone who cares about you will eventually die or leave, thus stranding you entirely alone to face your own mortality? yeah, i spent six hours trying not to cry in the dallas airport. and in a hundred years, i’ll be dead. so why be mad? i wasn’t crying because my plane was late. i didn’t even fucking care until i tried to find food in the airport.
Anger seems more proactive than other negative emotions. If you put it into a binary opposition with another emotion, like sad, anger would be the more masculine one. By our patriarchial standards (which I unfortunately subscribe to), anger would win. so what? so what do i do? do i try to talk it out by explaining to my friends and posting in my blog that i’m angry? is my anger just sublimated sadness? should i take time to let myself feel anger? do i turn it in another direction by writing a loud orchestra movement with a lot of trumpet blares and tritones and minor seconds? do i try to distract myself and put it behind me?
the only thing I think I know is that I should speak and act in a loving manner to people I love. I should keep love in mind. Because one day everyone I love will leave me whether on purpose or not and they need to know in their hearts and their minds that I love them.
goddamn it

And then there were none

Christi has moved out. the walls are basically bare. she left one of her grandmother’s paintings, perhaps by accident. she also took the imac, which is hers, but i can’t see what use she might have for it, not that it matters, as it does belong to her. she left behind a little terra cotta horse that her grandmother gave her, a replica of the ones in those imperial tombs. her grandmother was one of the first american tourists allowed into china.

She said she left some stuff behind. It was too much for just one day and just one pickup truck load and just one broken heart. as hard as this is for me, it must be much harder for her. She’s doing the best she can and so am I.

There is nothing I can say that I haven’t said. There is nothing I can do that I haven’t done. I need to be quiet and give her space, which is perhaps the hardest possible thing.
I don’t want to find a new relationship, just a series of meaningless flings. I’m out of meaning to share. New love seems too hard right now. I want to simultaneously forget and remember. I want to forgive my tresspasses as I forgive those who tresspass against me. I thought a few months ago that I could get away from my problems by moving far away, but my problems were wiley and followed me. I cannot avoid the crushing pain of existance, I can just find ways to ameliorate it, to face it head on and survive, to know that I am stronger than pain and that I can stand alone and prosper and then stand with friends and be truly blessed. I have wonderful friends.

Still accepting applications

While applications are being received and processed, to date, no single candidate has been chosen and there is still time for you (yes, you) to apply. Preference will be given to applicants that actually live in California or are at least within hundreds of miles from here. All applications will be kept stricly confidential and the final candidate must agree to a non-disclosure agreement. (I know it’s hard not to kiss and tell, but such is life.)

In the beginning

I remember when I first fell in love with Christi. We were both 18 years old and freshwomen at Mills College. She was studying music and I was studying computer science. We lived down the hall from each other in Mary Morse, the freshwoman dorm. I was dating an art major who had a nice room at the very end of the hallway. In the evenings, she liked to brew a huge cup of coffee and hold court. People would come sit around her room and we would pass the big cup of coffee around. I remember the excited way that Christi would exclaim “coffee” and how she would smile and her eyes would sparkle as the cup got passed to her. She was so funny and so enchanting. I remember telling my girlfriend one night that I hoped that Christi would come over. She said, “I don’t. She drinks all the coffee!” Who could begrudge a cup of coffee to somebody’s who brown eyes percolated so happily?

Christi was facinated with sound. She would walk around tapping on things, looking for new sounds for percussion. She would tap everything, lightpoles, street signs, pieces of junk. I was facinated and I started tapping thigns too. She changed the way I looked at sound. I list John Cage as one of my major influences, but really, it was John Cage through Christi. All sorts of sounds could be beautiful and could go into music. Christi so brilliant. I was convinced that she was going to be the greatest composer who ever lived (actually, I still think this). I was following her around and telling her that I would write her biography when she was famous. I remember one time, we were in one of the three places that Mills used to dump junk and she picked up some glass object and smashed it. She was looking for glass things to break. She had been a tiny bit distracted as she was combing through the junk yard, but the glass smash focussed her attention. She said, “oh! that made a nice sound! I wonder what it was?” That was the moment I fell completely in love with her.
We weren’t dating (I thought christi was straight) but were spending all of our time together. A receptionist in the dorm told us we were like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb and Christi and I got into a very chivalrous argument about who was whom, each insisting that the other was definitely not Tweedle Dumb.
I had already declared to Christi that I was going to live with her after school. she was so beautiful. so smart. so talented. She had such a beuatiful smile. She was always smiling. she was the closest friend I had ever made. I was wondering at how strongly attached I felt to her and how it was odd that it was completely platonic.
One night, after several months of this, Christi told me she had a huge crush on me. So we started dating. she wasn’t out, so she didn’t want me to tell anyone right away, but everyone who saw my huge smile just immediately knew.
Clearly a lot has happened and changed in the nine years since then, but Christi is still the smart, enchanting, beautiful, talented person that she was then.

adventures

Christi is having a lot of exciting adventures right now and I’m happy for her. I think she thinks that being with me would mean having to give them up. And it might mean a bit of compromise on some things, but on the whole . . . we live on seperate continents. even if we were together, i couldn’t control what she did when i wasnt around. I wouldn’t want to.

So I went to have breakfast with Christi this morning. Spent the whole time trying to convince her that it would be a good idea to try to work it out. I’d been telling people that even when I did stupid things, it always seemed to me at the time to be reasonable. Well, as I sat in the restaurant, untouched food cold in front of me, manically explaining how things could be really great because we’d both learned so much, I was …um… kind of aware that i was not being reasonable or even rational. This didn’t exactly put christi at ease, or convince her. I’d think “I have to stop. maybe if i just say it a different way!”

Yeah, so she’s kind of extremely mad at me. We tried talking about my mom being sick a little bit. She said she was hurt. I didn’t come back with “my mom died!” which was my previous responce. I said that I was sorry I had been so angry, etc. She explained that, no, she was hurt because my mom had died, as in, it was really hard for her.
I blinked a bit. It surprised me to hear her say it. But I don’t know if it was a wow-she-was-upset-about-that-too kind of surprise or a that’s-really-not-what-i-expected-her-to-say kind of surprise. I mean, I got kind of caught up in my own devastating loss of my mom and wasn’t really foccussing on how it was affecting other people. On the one hand. On the other hand, of course it’s obvious that it would have upset Christi. She knew my mom for 7 years and they loved each other. I don’t think I would have failed to notice that, but I dunno. I feel very confused right now. And my memory from times of stress is all jumbled and unclear. This morning is jumbled. A year ago is more jumbled.
Christi really does not want to work it out and I need to accept that. Just because I think we could and should is not going to change her mind, no matter how I say it or how many times. Harping on it for over an hour is just going to make her not want to talk to me at all.
I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

I need very much to have a tumultuous, reboundy-type affair. Now accepting applications. I’m in California till the 22nd. Why not have some short-term drama?