All Right

It's been interesting to track where my own money goes.  Now that I've been paying for my own expenses, I can start to extrapolate what I'm spending.  I discover that I'm about in line with what percentage of your total budget something is supposed to cost.  There are some things I can't do anything about, but when I blow them up for an expected income, they fall right within those percentages again.

I've been very, very worried about whether or not I'm a bad spender or not.  I don't know, but I've always taken the blame for monetary shortcomings in the marriage, even when I knew where the money was going, I determined that I should have wanted to go out to eat less, or not bought the clothes I needed, and I find that's really not the case and that, mostly I don't spend too poorly.

I was offered a full time job.  With benefits.  For more money than I've ever seen.  I can't quite work out how that happened, but now that it has, I'll be able to move forward.  I'll be able to do what I wanted to do 7 years ago when I moved here- live.  I won't be doing it in the arts, though, not full time.  I tried it, and it's not possible to do it that way alone.  So, for now, I'll do this.  And maybe I'll find out that it's where I want to be for a little while before it makes me go back, or maybe I'll find out I'm a sell-out, or maybe I'll figure out a way to do both.  I'm not leaving.  I keep the little theatre and the education and will still be able to volunteer, so maybe I'll be in a place to do more volunteer work for a while and save up to do something else.

It's funny how everything can change in one moment.

How Dare You Come to Me Now When I Am This?

I think I was in college before I saw The Last Unicorn all the way through.  I read the book for the first time last year and just finished re-reading it for a second time.  I completely missed Schmendrick and Molly Grue's relationship the first time.  I barely noticed it this time until the very end, when I thought, "wait," and had to go back and search for proof that this was there the whole time.  It was.

I used to consume love stories with such wanting, watching Nightmare Before Christmas and reading Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby and all the bildungsroman love stories set before the 1930s.  And then -I don't know when- they stopped working.  I assumed because I was happy in love and didn't need to want it.

They're working again.  Which proves I may be human after all.

Of course I want what I can't have.  Or, rather, what I can't find; what I gave up looking for and came to regret that I never found it.

Which might be poetic except that I keep refining what that is.

ಠ_ಠ

I've started catfishing the man I was married to.  I tried it once before, posing as a guy and didn't get anywhere.  I had an opportunity to try it again and decided to be a woman.

He talks to her.  He does a lot of things with her that he never did with me.  Sexting being one of them.  He signed up for the service hoping to hook up with people, clearly.  I don't know how well that worked out, but I talked him in to sexting.  He's pretty bad at it, but so is she, since she's limited to text speak.  Since she knows he's new to this, she asks about his previous relationships.  He mostly lies, but when it comes to me, he tells her the truth.

Why did he start sleeping around?  Because I didn't shave.

Now, from my perspective, I did.  Usually when I was under the impression that I was going to get anything out of the deal, but I never did, because what I was actually expected to do was wax.  Everything.  Did he *ever* say this to me?  Nope.

So, in conjunction with that, I've started talking with other guys, and because, "describe your butthole," is never part of the conversation, I do pretty well.  The guys mostly don't.  There's not a lot of mutual communication, which is fine if that's not what I'm looking for, but when there isn't, I get bored.

Because the Internet is a rabbit hole, this particular exercise has sent me down new ones- websites made up entirely of amateur guys.  I feel sorry for about half the guys there, not due to their personal endowment or lack of it, usually, but for their poor photography skills and lack of personal confidence.  I'm thinking, "get out of your bathroom and figure out how this works- you're trying to be sexy, very little about this is sexy."

But here's the reason I feel sorry for me.  I'm seeing a lot of trimmed hair.  A lot.  This was something I had requested once, and was told that guys did not do this, he would not do this, it didn't matter what I wanted.  So many times it never mattered what I wanted.

I've been looking back wondering what I did wrong, and what I did wrong was being a human being not a porn star, or a hooker.  I hate that I missed out on potentially years of satisfying, interesting, varied physical relationships possibly with vastly different body types and interests all because I didn't have the knowledge or experience (in spite of all the Googling) to do anything but take him at his word.

Or maybe this is what I had to learn in the order I had to learn it.