Processing in process

What some take for magic at first glance
Is just sleight-of-hand depending on what you believe
Something gets lost when you translate
It’s hard to keep straight

Perspective is everything 
–Aimee Mann/Invisible Ink

  

There are times when there is a shit ton of stuff going on, and I just have to take a step back and breathe. As proud as I am of my ability to multitask, that ability really doesn’t apply to anything involving emotions and feelings. 

Damn it. 

Meeting people and trying to make connections is one of those things that is inherently feely, and I am just not cut out for serial dating and all of the figuring out of emotions that goes with it. I am cut out for either sleeping around without any sort of emotional connection or dating one person at a time with a full complement of them. It’s too hard to focus on multiples. 

And then, on a more prosaic/practical note–Wordpress has updated their blogging client and I can’t figure out why certain things are happening when I write. There is a visual wsywig editor that is inserting random formatting for no apparent reason. So if all of my future blogs are highlighted in gray. Well. I have no idea why. 

Sorry. 

I’ll try to figure out the html, but I just went out with someone I am pretty sure is gay. Who talked of nothing but parrots and RC planes. I am not sure I have enough mental force to troubleshoot html at this point.   

Where was I?

Right. Processing all of this.

Maybe I should read a book. Give my brain a rest. Think about poutine, back bacon and Inigo Montoya. I can figure out why the two guys I kind of thought were interested have totally disappeared but the guy with the parrot fetish is totally into me. 

Back soon. 

               

 

In which a Canadian warrior monk proposes to me on OKCupid

Sometimes things just happen.

This morning, as I drank my coffee before work, I checked my messages on OKCupid. There was a charming one from a guy in Victoria BC. He dug my fondness for ellipses, and my taste in books.

Canada is across the international dating line from Oregon, so normally I would have responded with something like “thanks, but no thanks,” but he seemed sweet and funny.  We started talking. About books. About how he used to be a paramedic, but now he does healing stuff like acupressure. About my having entirely too many imaginary boyfriends. About having Vancouver Island towed to the Oregon coast so we could have pizza together. We each ordered books that the other recommended.

Then he fired me for not liking the one episode of “the IT Crowd” I’ve ever seen. It’s a serious offense to some people. I responded by firing him for never having seen “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Firefly.”

Then he proposed to me for having good grammar. Like you do.

At one point, he said that he’s a monk. A warrior monk. Well, that’s not something you hear everyday, so I didn’t quite know what to say.
I hope I didn’t accidentally say anything awful. It’s not like there’s a graceful way to recover from saying something like “are you kidding? Like in the show Kung Fu?” He could have been joking, but I don’t know. I liked the idea. It’s way more bad ass than being an accountant, and if it’s real..well..I guess I just really like the idea of there being such a thing.

It’s not often that you meet someone (even virtually) who maybe helps keep the world turning a bit.

 So now I have to look into this whole warrior monk thing. He says there are only a few of them in the world and their function is to collectively protect the balance of energy through meditation. And possibly the martial arts. Which is interesting but I have no idea how that would work. Or if he was just kidding. Or what would happen to all that xi if they missed a day. So I think I need to do some Googling. 

We sort of skipped right on past it, anyway.

He wondered if he should rescind his proposal until he knows for a fact that I am not a dude. I guess that means I won’t really be officially engaged until we get Vancouver Island towed to Oregon. What? I’m not driving all the way to Victoria! And what do you mean there is no way anyone is going to tow Vancouver Island down here?

People are interesting, don’t you think?

I’ve never been almost engaged to a stranger before, let alone a Canadian.

A warrior? That might be too much to hope for. I don’t think I’m the the type of person who attracts warriors…

And if I’d been more interested in being practical and less interested in seeing how someone thinks, the whole conversation would never have happened. Which would have been a pity.

Running into an ex

The other day I ran into ex #2 at a car dealership as I was getting my car serviced. It was awkward. It was like talking to a stranger. I couldn’t imagine that this was someone I once had a bond with. It brought up a lot of feelings, but mostly I felt guilty. It took me a while to work through why.

I went for a long walk when I got home (after a stop for French fries) and thought about it. He is a nice man, but very conventional. When we met, I was trying to be normal too. I didn’t mean to trick him. I really wanted to BE the normal person I was pretending to be. Was it dishonest? Yes. Not intentionally, or rather not maliciously. I was lying to myself, too. I thought being a fundamentally different person was going to be good for me. I thought there was something radically wrong about who I really was, so by extension I thought being different would be an improvement.

I was so, so wrong about that. He was the one who paid for it, maybe even more than I did. I paid for it with about 80 pounds. I paid for it in unhappiness. Never getting a look of comprehension if I said what I was really thinking, or tried to talk about the book I was reading. Listening to the music I love when he wasn’t home because he didn’t like that “weird, angry music.” Never watching a film more intellectually complex than “Ghostbusters” because he liked things he didn’t have to think about too much.

He was a kind, funny man…but not intellectually oriented. Not stupid, but he didn’t think thinking too much is good for a person. He was practical and hard working. He didn’t ever believe me when I said I didn’t want to have children because married people have children. That is just a given.

If motivation and intention count, then I didn’t do anything wrong…but they do. Don’t they?

Eventually, it felt like I was dying. The inside me, not my physical body. I originally wrote “only the inside me” but that is even more important than the outside, isn’t it? I was trying to kill that person anyway, so why did it make me so unhappy?

Because there wasn’t anything there. If I shut down my real self, I didn’t really have a new and improved normal self to replace me with. There was nothing. It turns out that being nothing feels pretty awful.

And the emergency pit stop at Mickey D’s for emotion killing fries shows that I still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with things. Oh, I did eventually–but couldn’t I have skipped the binge eating and gone straight for the healthy activity instead? My head knows that is the better response when I have an emotional overload.

Too bad my emotions don’t let my head talk much sometimes…

Keep working on it, right?

Right.