Everything In Between

I have been struggling with motivation woes once again. It is pretty annoying, actually, that most of the times when I have an opportunity to do something I would ordinarily really enjoy working on the main thing holding me back is me. Frankly, that’s just unacceptable but I’ve yet to find a workable solution for this monstrosity of a problem.

Fights with Danica Continue

Danica and I have been fighting somewhat frequently over the past few days. I fault myself for it just as much as I cite her (possibly unconsciousness) instigations. I have asked her not to talk on the phone with Randy when I can’t get away from it (i.e. whenever we’re both in the apartment) and if she should talk to him online I have asked her not to tell me about it. Most recent fights started because he or something to do him was the subject of conversation.

I don’t even know if they are fights so much as just frustrating arguments. When she tells me something like how she “prefers” to communicate with the minimal amount of words as possible pretty much across the board, I get frustrated because it was that mentality, incongruent with several other supposed principles or goals that she holds, that caused our break up. I keep thinking (and occasionally saying) “And how’s that working out for you?” with the obvious implication being that it doesn’t, and that it should probably be obvious by now.

But it is utterly useless, I know, to even attempt such arguments. For one reason or another, and probably more than a single one, she is unwilling to accept what I say and in all fairness I am unwilling to accept what she says. We keep butting heads and the only thing we do is feed our mutual frustration with the other. I think that by now we are both looking forward to when she will move out.

Side Notes on Moving Out

Things have been slow going in her quest for a new apartment. She has decided that Randy’s apartment is the perfect one for her (or is at least in the perfect location), and since he is moving out she has been hopeful that she can get the apartment. Of course, it has taken until yesterday for her to get the realtor’s number, and she has still made no phone call to either her mother or the realtor regarding her specific intentions to move in there.

Nevertheless, regardless of what happens, the locks are being changed on March 30^th and she will not be given an extra key. One already broke, but my landlord has not called me back about fixing the door. I will have to call back again, and then again, and then probably yet again.

Going to the Gym

One of the reasons I have not been writing as much lately is because I am tired and (get this) able to sleep full nights these days. When my brother came home over Presidents’ Day weekend I started going with him to the gym. He showed me how to use the erg machine (the one that simulates rowing) and I’ve been keeping a pretty consistent routine with that.

After the work out, we go to eat. In the evening, I am so tired that I have managed to sleep eight hour nights or longer. I’ve been shooting for sleeping between eight and ten hours because that’s the window in which your body can recover from the previous day’s work out, or so I’m told.

Getting out to the gym is a bigger hassle than I would have liked. I have to take the subway downtown because there is no New York Sports Club in my neighborhood. Also, the membership is crazy expensive. I don’t yet feel like it’s worth the money, but I am willing to give it some time. Their stupid ten day trial is not a reasonable timeframe with which to judge the effectiveness of a gym anyway, so I’ve resigned to paying through the nose for the time being.

All Comes Back to Money and Motivation

Of course, that means I’m pretty strapped for cash, or will be when all the bills roll on in. I just recently paid my first (prorated) Verizon telephone bill for my new landline. I am thinking about cutting off long-distance service, since I don’t really use that often anyway.

The only thing to do, then, is make more money. That’s where it all comes back to motivation. The programming job I got that I’m having trouble getting started with is a small project to build an extranet for a company’s promotional sales so that communication between folks in radically disperate timezones will be eased.

The trouble with this project for me right now is that it is not directly in my field of expertise. I can do it, but instead of feeling motivated I feel overwhelmed and outclassed. If this were a CSS project or some other web front-end work, I don’t think I’d feel this way, but it is instead mostly a back-end programming job that I simply haven’t the guts to tackle right now.

Things to Do

• Buy a Squash racquet in preparation for playing Squash on, hopefully, a regular basis.
• Call my dentist to proceed with the tooth implant appraisal. (Fuck, it’s past four. I guess this will have to wait until tomorrow. Again.)
• Get the programming job started, at the very least.
• If not, then at least work on Maymay Media’s web site, which for now is actually front-end only.
• If all else fails, I should have gone to the gym today, but it is already five o’clock and I don’t think I’ll realistically make it out.
• Try not to mope for the rest of the day.

I feel stupid, and weak.

Yesterday, I woke up late at night unable to sleep. After some time awake, I managed to get back to bed at about 9 AM. I slept until around 2 o’clock in the afternoon yesterday, which is when I heard Danica moving about the apartment.

We talked a lot, mostly quietly and without anger. Eventually, she started asking me to reconisder. That is, to reconsider ending the relationship. Her face when I said no broke my heart ten times over what I’d already been feeling.

For hours, she cried, and I could not keep my own composure at times either. There were few hugs at first, but later I tried to lighten the mood somewhat by ushering us to the kitchen to have a bite to eat. I offered to make her some food but she declined. We nibbled on a plate of leftovers together. Things were beginning to seem okay…that is, the mood wasn’t so bad anymore, even though the situation was the same.

But then, more crying, more begging. She was sobbing inconsolably, so I asked if she wanted to lie down. She said yes, so I held her as she walked to our bed. There, she sat with tissues in hand still crying. So I placed a hand on her back and lay next to her. I was exhausted, too. Finally she calmed a bit and lay down. I held her.

Then, she kissed me. I gasped a bit, asked why she did that. She said she needed to do that before she left. (She was planning on spending the night at Randy’s because she couldn’t bear to be here.) Then she kissed my neck, and my earlobe, and my cheek, etc. I admit that I wanted her very much. I didn’t want to want her, but I did.

When she kissed me again, I started crying and pulled away, and she tried to calm me. Before long, she had undone my pants and was giving me a blowjob. I tried to pull away from her twice, asking why she was doing this. She didn’t answer, and before long I just gave in. She climbed on top of me and we had sex.

Of course, afterwards when she was preparing to go again, I felt like an idiot because I could feel my heart ripping in two again. I knew the moment we were done that I had put myself in a lose-lose situation. I couldn’t really bear being home alone and I couldn’t continue to be with her.

Much, much discussion ensued with lots and lots of uncontrollable sobbing fits. Mostly me this time. She told me a bit about why she was unhappy when she was in the relationship with me: she felt that she wasn’t getting enough credit for getting the job she has so she can pay rent to live with me. She said she’d been trying very hard and just felt uncredited. She felt I’d been dismissing her. She said that she was uncertain of my commitment to her; that’s why she kept asking about marriage. She said she didn’t know where this relationship was going, or what we were doing together.

I bawled and kept saying, “Why didn’t you tell me,” and “You never told me,” and, “I didn’t know,” and “I tried talking to you so many times” between all the tears. I swear I thought my chest would split right then and there.

She kept asking me to reconsider the break up every so often, starting with words like, “If it’s too hard….” These just sent me into more crying fits where I would not be able to speak intelligibly. She pointed out that it would probably be detrimental to the relationship if she left for Randy’s that night. That is, that the break up felt pretty final if she would go, but that if she would stay then I had possibly reconsidered. She didn’t say it quite like that, but the net effect felt very much like, “I know you’re in pain: tell me to stay and I’ll stay and console you and you’ll feel better. Tell me to go, and I guess we’re definitely over.” And, I admit, I wanted her to stay very badly. I was just so…weak.

Finally she mentioned, before I had said anything deterministic, that she would still want to see other people if we were back together. I asked her why she wanted to be seeing other people. She told me that it was for a reason she mentioned much earlier in the night: she needed change and newness and she wanted to know “what it’s like to know people“ fully. In other words, how they fuck.

That’s when I stopped crying so hard. I started asking her a lot of questions, mostly because my brain was fried and I just wanted to understand what she was saying and see if I could make sense of all the contradictions. I know she didn’t mean to do it on purpose (well, I hope she didn’t), but I felt utterly manipulated. I was afraid that all of this, all of tonight’s “truthfulness” was simply this moment’s truth and wouldn’t be the next moment’s truth.

I regretted having sex with her even more. I felt pity for her, not cruel judgment or a mean-spirited, derisive arrogance, but sadness that she was so desperate not to lose me and yet so unable to change the very things in her that consistently made her push me away. Especially since she seemed to know exactly what those were in some moments. Sadly, in others, that awareness would slip from her mind like a leaf flowing down a river.

When she went to the bathroom, I finally got up off the sofa where I was laying in a fetal position. I waited for her to finish and then went to the bathroom myself. I kept telling her I was tired, that I needed to sleep.

It was getting late, just past 9 o’clock, and I remembered that she had expressed a desire to spend the night filled with distractions like pizza and movies and music with Randy earlier. I felt tired enough that I could just collapse and go to sleep, so I crawled into bed. She followed me to the bedside but didn’t join me on the mattress. I scooted myself over to her and gave her a hug. She hugged me back, and said, “Oh, Mei, what are you doing?”

I told her I was giving her a goodbye hug. I told her I wanted her to go and have her night of distractions with Randy. I wanted to go to sleep believing that she would be happy and not think of me, that she would be okay tonight.

I cried more as I told her to hurry before it was too late, to leave before the subways would start running local. I cried as I told her not to come back into the room if she heard me crying, that I would try to cry myself to sleep if I had to. She kissed me on the forehead and told me to take care of myself. I told her to do the same. I sobbed loudly as she closed the door.

Then, I fell asleep.

When I awoke for the first time, the house was quiet. I could see no light and hear no sound coming from the living room. I closed my eyes again, and fell back asleep.

When I awoke for the second time, the torturous flow of thoughts would not stop flooding my mind. They were not just thoughts about the night, but random images that had no right to invade my privacy. They finally forced me out of bed.

It was just past three o’clock in the morning when I got up. I turned on my computers and started writing an email to someone I had met in the #polyamory IRC channel on UnderNet. Most of the email reads nearly identically to this blog entry. (I copied and pasted the email to use as this entry because I am too emotionally drained to go through this night again.)

The end of the email I sent reads like this:

I decided to email you, because I want so badly to see a new message from you in my inbox. I don’t know why that is so important to me. No, maybe I do: I feel so alone and so weak. Throughout this entire letter, I have managed to maintain some composure and write, but as I type this sentence I’ve started to cry. And now I don’t know what to do.

…I can’t stop crying, and I don’t know what else to say, so I’ll just send the letter. I’m sorry for being so…I’m sorry for doing this; I don’t feel like it’s fair to ask you to keep talking with me. I don’t expect you to reply promptly or anything. You needn’t reply at all if you don’t want to.

I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’ll be okay. I’m afraid that if I see that desperate, frightened look on Danica’s face one more time, I would want to die just to stop it from ever appearing again.

Sincerely,
—Meitar

It has been happening all day; an unshakable feeling of fogginess, lack of conecntration, the inability to to clear my head or focus my eyesight. Everything seems unsteady, shaky, vulnerable to some form of toxic gas or radioactivity that would permeate everything. Dread, heavyness, and confusion have been the only certain things today.

And I don’t know why. I feel like crying as I write this.

Moments ago, my iTunes library started playing Legacy of the Wizard music clippings. That makes me miss old times. (For those interested, I found this archive of Legacy of the Wizard MIDI music files.)

Safari is still my main browser on the Mac. It has this feature which integrates it into Apple’s Address Book and provides a drop down list of all your contacts whom you have specified Web pages for.

Well, there are very few people in my address book without web pages of some kind. Most of them are old diaries or LiveJournals. As a result, there is a long list of long-gone friends who still write in their blogs. I spent the better half of this hour randomly jumping from one contact’s page to another, just to see what they looked like.

My ex-girlfriend hasn’t written on her LiveJournal for at least 6 months. Another girl I knew who used to go to college with her has, but sporadically. A friend of mine who I never talk to anymore (she became a mother) hasn’t written in over a year. Yet another friend, a fellow bipolar whom I used to speak to for hours at a time over the phone late at night hasn’t either. Most people haven’t. Some folks have decided to keep their journals “friends only” which effectively means I can’t see them. Strange since, at one point in time, I was considered a friend.

It’s just a night of old memories. There are only a handful of people in my address book whom I still talk to.

Bedroom Full of Restless Nights

Earlier tonight, Danica and I were cuddling. I kissed her, and she seemed like she was getting into it. Before long, however, she just told me to stop for some reason which she mumbled under her breath and I couldn’t discern. I couldn’t get her to repeat it either, so I left her be. I’m probably getting tired now, but I can’t bring myself to climb into bed with her and fall asleep. Restless, I guess. No, actually, I feel rejected.

I don’t know how long its been since we’ve been truly, closely intimate. The last time we tried was more than a week ago on Monday night. I had planned to go out to Columbia University to see now-ancient acquaintences. She had initiated sex not long before I needed to get ready to go. By the time I should have been out of the house, it was over because things turned sour for some inexplicable reason and she had curtly asked me to leave her alone. I felt so hurt that I got extremely angry, and we fought for a while that night.

She has become increasingly enamored with a male co-worker, a shy and dorky musician who’s a freshman at NYU. I don’t know if it’s even been a week, but it seems as if she can’t stop talking about him. This isn’t new. There have been at least 3 others, over the course of our relationship, whom she has talked to with such fervor and frequency.

I feel more like the gay friend than the bi boyfriend these days. While there are short moments every other day or so of closeness, when I feel like her partner again, much of the time I feel as though I’m back to being a roommate, which is the term she had used to describe me to a guy she met via Friendster. That pissed me off back then, too. Though my moods may be making me biased, right now I’m having trouble remembering the last time I recieved an unsolicited “I love you” from her. I feel like the nights these days do not belong to me and her anymore. They belong to her and her fantasies about her infatuations.

The other day she made clear to me for the first time that she is most interested in having a relationship with another person together with us. That is, not just a relationship involving herself and another guy, but have that relationship involve me as well in a triad of sorts. That was something I was happy to hear about becuase of the implications of involvement and of consideration that dynamic necessitates. I don’t know how realistic a situation like that really is, but I do believe her when she says that’s her ideal and I know it would be a situation I would be infinitely more comfortable with than a situation where she has an external relationship which doesn’t involve me at all.

However, I have this gnawing concern that what she really means to do is meet someone else who she really likes and, regardless of how I feel about it, get involved with that guy. Like I said, I do believe she’d like me to like him too, and for him to like me so that there is mutually shared affection. In a way, I feel like the girl who’s boyfriend says, “Wouldn’t it be great if we met another girl and you two liked each other and the three of us could all be together?” Well, yes, I suppose it would, but my fear is that should she actually find someone she likes and the situation is one where a love connection can be made (they live nearby, there’s no age gap, there’s mutul attraction—these are the things that have been missing from the previous men she’s become infatuated with)…that if a love connection could be made, consideration for me and my feelings will be easily disregarded in favor of whimsical and lusty impulse.

During a moment of anger (or sadness? Frustration?) Danica asked me today what I have to offer her in this relationship. It was the fourth time I can recall such a direct question assessing my worth. My answer: “I do not need to sell myself to you. You will be with me if you want to be, and you will not—rather, you should not—be with me if you don’t want to. That’s not for me to decide. It’s you’re choice. It’s always been your choice. I love you, and I want to be with you.”

I guess in short my fear can be summed up in the following sentences. I am afraid that she will enter into a relationship that is not for the benefit of everyone. At Saints’ Alp Teahouse earlier, Danica finished reading one of the polyamory links I wrote about the other day. She pointed out this passage to me:

Another good way not to make a poly relationship work is to browbeat your partner, or coerce your partner into accepting it. Poly relationships don’t work if one of the people involved only grudgingly accepts it; it has to be for the benefit of everyone.

I am thinking about printing that out and gluing it to the wall.

I am also considering making this entry private, viewable only by me. I want to tell Danica all these things, but I am afraid that she will not hear them as merely concerns, but as some form of “sword of Damacles” and unfair judgements. There is probably a point where too much honesty and directness is not a good thing—and I am notoriously direct.

It’s winter now. It’s getting cold out there. Even though I’ve closed the window and no matter how deeply I bury myself in the covers, right now I’m still cold in here, too.

I guess if you can read this, then the entry is public.

This morning, after getting myself out of bed I vacuumed the kitchen floor and the area around the bed. It’s quite remarkable how much that improves my quality of life. The only reason I didn’t do it sooner was because it seemed like an impossible task. In reality, it took two minutes.

Becky wrote about this just the other day, too. I read her entry and despite the fact that she made other observations, that’s what stuck in my mind.

I did laundry today, too. That was helpful and not as hard as I seem to remember.

Without a doubt, the most obvious explanation as to why I’ve actually managed to do these things today is the fact that I feel somewhat better about Danica and about our relationship. That probably needs a lot of explaining. (Oh well.) I think that I was able to get across more of how I feel and why I feel the way I do. Ironically, it was in the form of sad emotional outbursts (and I stress sad, not argumentative) but it seems like those are more effective sometimes.

Now, out to coffee.