Que Sera, Sera.

I was invited to a Christmas party that I'm not going to go to.  I planned on it, but I didn't have the motivation to go.  Being with people is exhausting.  I went to a Christmas lunch yesterday, too many expectations to eat food, to talk to people about nothing.  I don't really want to do it again tonight.  So I stayed home and watched Trains, Planes & Automobiles and The Star Wars Holiday Special.

I spent Sunday regaining the closets.  My closet space is, oddly, tripled due to closet space that was going entirely unused.  I like that when I make a mess, or stop a project in the middle, it doesn't get worse without my knowledge.

I don't think I was intended to live with other humans.

I want next year to be over.  2016 is a test year, a waste of time to set a benchmark.  I keep doing things I probably shouldn't, justifying them as a change I'll make when I find out what things look like.  They look like you spending money you don't quite know that you have on the grounds that you don't know what the year looks like, yet.  I mean, I *have* it, I just don't know if it would have been better spent some other way yet.

No.  I'm spending money on things that make me happy.  What's it for if not for that?

I just want to make it through to May.  In May, I'll see what I know.

And It Started to Rain in Southern California

I'm working fifty hour weeks and devoting my weekends to working more than that.  Or being sick.  I think I'm almost over the I'm-pretty-sure-it-was-bronchitis I've had for a month.  I haven't done laundry in 3 weeks.  I struggle to get to the grocery store regularly when it's open.  

The new schedule is totally screwing with my ability to maintain a schedule.  

I want to disappear over Christmas.  I'm torn between a desire to just stay in bed with the dog and to run away.  

How do people do it?  Presumably they don't do it alone.  

Which is a dumb thing to say because this is the exact same time every year that I determine I can't cope and I want a stage manager to run my life.  Which of course indicates that if I want an impartial task master to get shit done, that person is me and I need to stop being so neurotic about it.  

I'm going to lose a friend this year.  She wants me to direct a piece she's animating.  She and I have done group projects in school, but never for school.  She's many things, sensitive and smart and very very concerned with doing things right, well, and on time.  I get along very well with people who also have time management problems.  And I know she has a benevolent need to do me a favor, so she wants to pay me.  

I've known her since I was 12, and I know we've had at least four major disagreements I didn't know were happening until she decided I hated her.  It's worrying. That's more arguments than I've ever had with anyone other than a family member or authority figure.  

Christmas is next week.  I keep trying not to pay attention.  I keep seeing Facebook posts from friends who aren't feeling Christmasy because it's a temperate climate and this year it's been 50 degrees.  They have no idea how Christmasy it is.  I'm dying on the hill in the War on Christmas at work.  

I don't really care, but I decided I wasn't going to be bullied in to it through guilt, etc just to put that out there as a personality trait, because it exists.  

And maybe I'll survive through the year.  

What's Next

I keep reminding myself I don't need to look for a job anymore.  It became part of my routine, as soon as I run out of things to do online, start looking for a job.  

And, now that I'm there, I don't really have any goals.  I have immediate goals, but they're all working themselves out- filling out paperwork for various things, finagling my schedule to let me do the things I want to do, working on the divorce, all stuff that's going to happen, slowly, eventually and without my really needing to do anything.  

Many of the biggest things that have happened to me aren't things I anticipated five years ago.  I found a list I made in 2009, and I discover that I was incredibly bored and unmotivated, because everything on that list I haven't done is trying some kind of dumb activity in some kind of generic self improvement.  Keep bees.  Seriously.  

So what have I done?  I went to Canada.  I directed a musical.  I stage managed a major college choir concert.  I've devised weird theatre.  I've taught technical theatre to kids.  I've written.  I've struggled to save my marriage and let it go.  I took an aerial class.  I lost 30 pounds.  And most of that's been in the last two or three years, because 2009 and 2010 were sort of bad years for me.  It's when my marriage ended, I just didn't know it yet.  

Mostly, I want to discover if I can live on my own.  I know I can, but I think I want to take a couple years and just be me.  I'm pretty sure a couple years is probably going to turn in to the rest of my life.  That's not being down on myself, that's just speaking realistically.  I don't think I want to give another person as much as I gave my husband, and I don't think I'm willing to have a relationship where I'm not willing to give someone that much.  

That's, like, a perfect explanation of why I'm not a good actor.  I know acting requires giving that much, but I don't want to open myself that much to anybody.  

Except I probably will.  Someday.  

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.

See What a Piece of Eggshell I Have Found You

In an academic sense, I know a lot about sex. Strangely enough, my introduction was through a biography of The Beatles checked out from my middle school library, because it contained a word that three years of sex ed hadn't introduced: orgasm, which was apparently something that girls suffered from at Beatles concerts. I remember standing at the big dictionary the school library had nailed down to an enormous podium and being totally unable to work out what the definition was.

So I went home, and checked out Grolier's multimedia encyclopedia. That opened up an entire web of vocabulary that was entirely new to me, and I read about the Kinsey reports and Masters and Johnson and connected things up with a host of jokes that had never really made any sense from a score of British comedies and Monty Python sketches. At 12, I had a useful working vocabulary to describe a lot of things I had not yet experienced.

By the time I did have sex, I knew a lot about sexual practices I had no interest in, and not very much about what I was interested in. I knew I didn't like any of my boyfriend's porn, and he had so much of it that I assumed that was pretty much what was out there in terms of hardcore porn, not just the realm of "I take off my robe and wizard hat," and comics about furries or Arthur Dent and Fenchurch flying that I was familiar with. So I accepted that this was what it was like and there wasn't much out there for me. Because I was strange; I'd never so much as kissed anyone until I was 19, and reader, I foolishly married him. 

And now, I'm ostensibly single. I spent some time being weirded out by OKCupid, but all that did was confirm that, um, nope, I don't even want to meet any of those people.

Casual sex has never been a thing I've done. It's not really a thing I'm interested in.

But, I've spent a year filling in gaps I should have filled in sometime in the last decade. I still know a lot, academically speaking. I can discuss at length the various pros and cons of top of the line sex toys that I've never even seen in a shop, never mind used. I can talk about consent and individual sexual response and how the biologically female brain and body react to sexual stimuli, and I've read about a lot of kinks I'm still not in to.

When I was 13, the year after the dictionary and the encyclopedia clued me in on a vast universe, I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all the way through for the third time. I believe I mentioned Arthur and Fenchurch? I would go on to read The Catcher in the Rye and Lolita. Eventually, I discovered erotic literature and fan fiction and have always preferred it to visuals, but most of it is poorly written. Even published erotic fiction is pretty bad, probably because it all describes in lurid detail things I can imagine just as well without the description.

It is stupidly easy to get me off. Under extreme circumstances, I can almost manage without any physical stimulation whatsoever. Maybe because I was a 13 year old American trying to figure out what on earth Marks and Spencer made and what exactly was happening in the skies over Islington and what that had to do with The Beatles effect on teenage girls in the 60s, and succeeded in working it out. I've always had an extremely accessible imagination, so it doesn't take much.

One of the many, many things I'd always wanted to do and never had the opportunity for was sexting. Not photos, just text, words inside my brain from someone as interested in me as I was in them and channelling all the things I'd read. Now, it probably would have helped if the person I wanted to try it with was at least interested in literacy, but, I thought, it doesn't matter, I could make it work. It never came to pass.

It's the one thing I've tried this past year. I've been really worried that I am not inventive enough or knowledgeable enough or good enough to have sex with- the one person I have had sex with told me often enough that I wasn't very good at it. I'm learning to remind myself that he defined good sex as the kind where he laid there and did nothing. So. But I still worry.

Except that the couple of times I've wound up in a chat room with people who are there specifically to do exactly what we're there to do, it's been disappointing. Serves its purpose.

I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends through Facebook. (There is a parallel here, I swear there is.) I started a game with actors, hoping that it would be a lot of improvisation and good role playing and make for a good performance. It's slow to get going. The other game is mostly with non-actors, and they're not really great at role playing. It's OK, but, not my expectation; they're not really rising to the occasion or doing or being anything terribly detailed or interesting.

Exactly the same thing. The goals are not the same thing at all, but, there's a real lack of urgency or drive present in both. If actual sex isn't any better than what I've experienced in real life, or online, and is pretty much like lukewarm D&D roleplaying, I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble.