I Give Myself Very Good Advice, But I Very Seldom Follow It

It turns out that 9 years of being told you're not very good at a variety of intimate behaviour and that your spouse has no interest in performing a variety of sex acts you might be interested in is really going to land a blow on your self esteem.  It's not kindness, strength or love to determine that they must be right and you need to change or constantly accommodate their needs at the expense of your own simply because they have more sexual experience than you do, even though they don't seem to want to change the limited variety and frequency of any intimate contact.

Especially when, after six years of marriage, you find out that the person in question had spent the last three years actively seeking sex with sex workers and strangers of both genders, and had done the same thing without telling you throughout the period prior to your marriage.  He quit for the first three years of marriage, and that's when he stopped wanting anything to do with you, either.  That's really not a thing you should feel bad about.  You probably shouldn't spend a further two years thinking about how you can change this, because you can't.

Or so I would tell myself if I were giving myself advice.

I'm afraid to go forward.  I'm just as afraid now as I was when I was 19, wondering whether I was doing things because I liked them, or if I was doing them to get them out of the way.  I still wonder whether love is Stockholm Syndrome, or if I've just been doing it wrong.  I use that phrase slightly hyperbolic-ally, but I wonder.  I don't know what it's like to be actually attracted to an obtainable person, it's a thing I learned to do in the case of an individual who pretty much used and betrayed me throughout our entire relationship.  I would say a real person, but I had an enormous crush on an upperclassman in high school.  He graduated and came out in college.

So I ask myself, what am I doing wrong?  How do I go forward in relationships with anyone when I barely know what I want or like in another person, and am terrified of settling and re-arranging all my expectations in a different way simply because another opportunity might come along?

I have some very good male friends.  I don't want to sleep with any of them.  But I'm to the point where I don't know that I want to sleep with anyone that I don't know and trust as well as I know these men.

So maybe physical relationships are not for me.

After All, What Are Birthdays?

I wonder when I will be interested in celebrations again.

Four years ago, I decorated a Christmas tree by myself and I thought, "why am I doing all this work if I'm the only one who cares?"  

So I stopped.  When I was a kid, I had a vision of Christmas the way I wanted it, with people I genuinely liked.  As I got older, I realised Christmas was a family holiday, and people were going to spend it with their relatives.  

I spent a few years trying to find a holiday that people didn't have, so that I could have one.  I invited people to International Talk Like a Pirate Day celebrations for years, but no one ever came.  At the end, I started watching Groundhog Day every February 2nd and The Star Wars Holiday special on Life Day, November 17th, because maybe I could have a holiday just for me and that would be enough.  This year, I missed both.  

When I once announced my intentions to happily never celebrate anything again, a couple of very Catholic friends came down on me.  Ritual and tradition and family are very important to them- they actively celebrate stuff on the liturgical calendar that pretty much no one else does, because the two of them like it, and they like doing these things for their little boy, too.  

And that's all it takes- you have to have someone to do it with, or for, and I don't.  

If Woman Can Survive

From my horoscope: "Now would be an excellent time to brainstorm about the life you want to be living in 2020 and 2025. It's also a perfect moment to outline a master plan for the next ten years, and commit to it."

It reminded me mostly that, 9 years ago, I have no idea what I was doing.  I also know exactly what I was doing.  I was planning a wedding and trying to convince my husband to decide on graduate school, or not, or to find a job, or not.  In many ways, it was the worst year of my life.  I was incredibly unhappy; I hated wedding planning, I hated the stress of having to plan an event to meet the demands of people who weren't me.  I didn't have the balls to say no.  I hated arguing constantly with the guy I loved over stuff that, in the long run, didn't matter, except from the perspective where it wasn't what I wanted to do, and he didn't have an opinion because he had whatever opinion he was told to have.

I won't do that again.

It was a time in my life where nothing I wanted to do or thought about doing was as important as what someone else wanted, which was a convenient excuse to avoid thinking about what I did want to do.  Or, rather, the only thing I wanted to do was be married, and if I wanted to do that, it meant changing the plan.

So maybe I should ask myself, what life do I want to be living?

For the longest time, since some time after high school, when I think of the future, the picture in my head (it's odd, I process thought in words, but they're punctuated with images I don't create like the narration) is of me sitting in a room on the 3rd or 4th floor looking out a white painted open window on to a blue afternoon sky.  I get the impression there's a city out there.  Maybe the ocean.

It used to be standing at the bottom of a bluff looking up a rocky cliff covered in trees and greenery.  It was night time, and at the top of the cliff was a low, brown house with the lights burning yellow inside.  You could see through the huge picture windows.

I don't know what either of them mean.  I don't know why they changed.

I suspect the first is possibilities; all I have to do is look out the window and see what's out there.  The second one is probably maturity, looking up towards home and responsibility and the night is dark and there are obstacles.  In the first one, the only obstacle is me.

I thought of Siddhartha today for the first time in a long time.  This probably means I should read it again.

And what do I want?  Not love this time.  Knowledge I'll get whether I want it or not.  Wealth?  Unlikely.  Power?  Not really.  The only useful thing to do with power is to relinquish it.  Respect.  I think that's the one.

And where do I want to be in 6 years?  I'll be 36.  I want to be able to travel if I want to.  In 10 years, I will be 40.  I want to be asked to make art; I don't want to struggle to convince people I should be allowed an opportunity.

Of course, I've said I want to be Dave Sim.  To be Dave, I have to be crazier, and I have to do it on my own.  I'm not sure if that's a viable 6 year plan.  Of course, Dave started on his path to crazy much younger.  He was 21 when he started writing Cerebus, but he was 35 when he leapt from the sane train and started Mothers & Daughters.  So.

30.  Neil Gaiman was writing Dream Country.  John Lennon was in post-Beatles primal therapy.  Tina Fey was head writer for SNL.  Lucy Maud Montgomery was caring for her grandmother in Cavendish, writing short stories and beginning work on Anne of Green Gables.  There are worse options, I suppose.

I Only Dance in My Dreams

I dreamt last night that I met a very nice man named George.  I liked him.  We danced.  I do not dance in real life, but it sometimes appears in dreams as an ideal experience, probably signifying a level of comfort with the situation I don't have in life.  

I only dance in my dreams.  What a phrase.  

George and I were dancing, in the middle of a shopping mall food court in New Orleans.  Because I've never been to Louisiana, but I suspect it's a little bit like a 90s food court- pastels and trees and nice, but outdated and crowded with people you only see when you go to a food court.  We won an appearance on some movie, or something, for looking natural and dancing well.  

After this, it became increasingly apparent that George was the man who is going to be my ex-husband in disguise.  Through an elaborate ruse, he decided to attempt to win me back, and it was working.  The dream broke down from there and before I woke up, I was attempting to convince a society of warrior princesses to join me on some kind of crusade.  

I woke up and remembered how nice George was, and then who he really was.  Thank you, brain, your extended metaphor is not lost on me.  

Reason #4768 I'm Not a Feminist

One of the few promises I've kept to myself since I was a kid was never to wear makeup (I make exceptions for stage makeup, but it's still an incredibly rare experience).  This one is easy to keep because I don't like the feel of it.  I also don't wear bug screen or sunscreen or lotion, which will probably kill me one day, but until then I'll be happy.  And then I'll be dead.  

I've read a handful of articles lately about women talking about going makeup free, and how that's empowering, and valuable and I think, really?  

Not wearing underwear can be empowering if it's a change.  That's the difference.  It's just a change, and your perception of yourself regarding that change.  I don't feel more empowered or secure or whatever because I don't wear make-up because I never did.  The opposite is more likely- I have small eyes set beneath a heavy brow and bad skin- these are the two basic things makeup does, even out the skin and highlight the eyes.  I'm sure if I started wearing it on a regular basis, more people would think I was not unattractive, which would probably change my life in subtle ways and then possibly my perception of myself.  Only I don't really care, and I cannot stand the feel of the stuff, so it's not worth the effort to me.  These articles leave out the fact that the make-up is not the vehicle for change- wearing or not wearing make-up is not *inherently* linked to perception.  It's your choices and personal risks that make-up your self worth.  

Make-up your self worth.  See what I did there?  

I wish these articles instead urged people -not just women, people- to experiment in their lives and find out if the routines they've established are the life they want to live, and whether change might not be a better option.  But, I suppose that's not a headline for an article in Glamour or what people expect a celebrity to tell them when that celebrity is not fulfilling traditional celebrity roles.  

Reaching Near Good

Last night, I put heavier blankets on the bed and was warm for the first night in about two months.

So of course I dreamt I was engaged to Benedict Cumberbatch, but he'd been deceived into thinking he was in love with someone else and Martin Freeman and I had to track him down and make him remember me.

I haven't even seen any Sherlock since series three came out, which I've not watched past the first episode because I kind of loved and hated it.  It felt like it was pandering, and while I enjoyed being pandered to, I didn't really like knowing that I felt like I was being pandered to.

There's a joke about Chinese bears to be made here, but I don't know what it is.  

This morning, I thought nothing of the dream, but learned this afternoon that Benedict Cumberbatch had, indeed, gotten engaged to someone who wasn't me.  I'm waiting for Martin Freeman to show up.

There's an old trope that comes up about women in power, and how for one week a month you can't trust their decisions, and this joke, or whatever it is, really tends to make women angry because they claim it's not true.  I'd love to know how they do it.  I'm incapable of rational thought about four days every month, and I know exactly why.  Before I was on birth control, I thought maybe this was just a coincidence, because the correlation wasn't clear, but now that I know exactly what day of the week I am going to be irrationally angry, and when I'm going to be ludicrously restless, and which days I'm going to feel like crap (that would be now), I'm glad that I'm not in any position of real power, because warring nations would just sit there with the calendar and say, "Yes, yes, we'll just wait until Thursday."

Though really, I never have gotten the hang of Thursdays.

You know that moment where you could make a Middlemarch joke, and you realise that pretty much no one would get it even if you explained it?

I'm always surprised to discover that Douglas Adams and George Eliot overlap in my mind in quite the way they do.

One Small Fraction of the Main Attraction

Working on what was supposed to be a very short story that I was just going to rattle off in one stream-of-conscious draft and post.  It keeps getting longer.  And it turned into a period piece almost from the first sentence, so it requires more attention than brain spew.

The story is based on someone explaining that a corpse has more right to bodily autonomy than a pregnant woman.  Which set several thoughts in motion that I can pretty much never actually share with anyone who will ever be a parent, or has wanted to be a parent, or briefly thought they were a parent.  Because that's the kind of sick cookie I am.

I will probably never finish it.  It was meant to be horrifying, and it's only mildly weird, with all of the strange things hinted at and never actually revealed, as yet.  However, it's coming in at just over 2500 words, so, for the two days I've invested, I'm only 800-odd words from daily goal if I were working on a National Novel Writing Month novel, which I'm not.

I dreamt last night of catching the attention of a French puppet master who looked like Rene Auberjonois and lusted madly for me.  If that's symbolism, I don't want to know for what.