| I'm settling in for a long night. Outside the weather is fair, clear, and crisp like the apples they graciously provide in the fruit baskets...the "call center way" of fighting obesity. Although I intentionally wore flip flops to work this afternoon when I was getting ready I know that come 2 am I'll think back on that decision and think it bad...I'll be right. Due to the increased dependance on MySpace the corperation has made the decision to ban it from access to all employees; this has severely impacted my time at work on the weekends when we're looking bleak. Normally, when it's bleak, there's another person here for converasation, card games, and general entertainment - tonight is not one of those nights. I've been keeping up on the news and, aside from the disturbing news that a friend of mine will be relocating himself to Casper later this year, it appears that my hometown is in for something of a storm. Just yesterday I was gazing out my bedroom window as the meak and scarce flakes fluttered down from the sky only to dissapear as they touched the ground; and I had a longing for lucious, fat snowflakes and below freezing temperatures...for snow drifts and high centered cars...and for spinning cookies in the mall parking lot. I missed the bitter winds and the scratching of the trees in great capacity. It doesn't snow much in these parts, and when it does it's a catastrophe. I've been boarding a couple times this year, which offers a nice snowy reprieve at the death trap also known as "Mount Hood." It's been nice, but it hasn't been enough. As I'm feeling philosophical this evening, and I feel like ranting, I would like to touch on a subject of no use. Literally, an event that happened that cannot be changed or altered and that no amount of emotional engery or time will do anything about. It seems that I have been a part of a matchmaking situation that is new grounds to me over the past couple of months, and if somehow I managed to contribute to something like this in the past - I was blissfully unaware. In early November, I found myself on one of those great dates that everyone wants to be a part of; however, it was not my great date. It was supposed to be my great date...an evening of wine and conversation with someone I was hoping to get to know very well; turns out that a dear friend of mine had happened upon an unpleasant situation in which one gets "stood up." Now, if you've ever been stood up, you know how terrible of a feeling that is. Looking at the phone hoping it will ring, waiting for an excuse - anything at all (it was my day to watch the plants grow, my phone was lost, I suddenly got a job interview in Florence and couldn't call), while your stomach sinks to your toes and you begin to question your self worth as a person. Not wanting any person to have to feel this way, I graciously extended the intvitation to join the wine and conversation hoping to smooth the evening over and salvage her self esteem. Interestingly enough, as the night progressed, I couldn't tell who's date I was on. The evening ended as we dropped her off at home and I proceeded to my house - however, this is only after plans have been made for the next day to get together again. Now when I say get together again - I don't mean me and my romantic interest...I mean all three of us. The next day rolls around and low and behold, my friend and my romantic interest have been chatting all day waiting for me to get off work...so we load up and head to Portland (feasibly to buy me a winter coat and hang out). We roll into REI where it's determined that not only am I getting a winter coat while at REI...so is she. The odd part? She was already wearing one. To my suprise another group outing is scheduled to learn the art of snowboarding. It seems that the more time I spent with my romantic interest, the more she did, and more plans were made with her as an integral part. Finally, the day is at and end and she gushes to me about how great of a guy he is, how he's perfect, and how she would totally love to have found a man like him - as he's her dream guy. This should have been taken as a more serious warning, but we all know how crazy the butterfiles of new romance make us all - and the red lights in my own life were blatantly avoided in hopes of finding "happily ever after." The more time drags on, the more time they spend together until they're making plans to go out and THEN inviting me. They're taking road trips together, they're walking the dogs, they're planning my birthday celebration - like a couple. Now this, this really begins to bother me. And, I ask them to stop - cease, desisit. Please recognize how this looks to me, I say, and please stop. They are vehemently opposed to this and insisit that I am overreacting and don't trust them. They propose that they're only friends, and shouldn't I be happy about this? They simply refused to recognize that their actions were just down right not okay. And now, the kicker. It should come as no suprise that while I was attempting to find my happily ever after things were falling apart. Perhaps I should note that him and are incompatible people, and that it wouldn't have worked out in the end. Maybe it's relevant that it's not a relationship that was healty, and that it was far too much work. I could cover all of these things in great detail and length - however I think the most important part is this: Him and I did call things quits...in an impressive conversation one seditary Monday night before Christmas. It was vulgar, and brutal - and while I've dated some pretty low life scum, I have never felt as poorly about myself as I did the night I drove away from his house the last time. I have never been treated so poorly as a woman, and I have never been degraded or torn to shreds in such a manner. But I digress, the same evening I call my longest standing friend - the friend who I was there for the night she got stood up - so did he. And although she acted in a manner in which friends act, and she said all the proper consolation words - her actions broke my heart. Although she would go on to agree that he's not a good person, that I didn't deserve that, that he's just like the asshole that broke her heart, that it's not very Christian of him to do this to me...who do you think she spent Christmas with? Thats right my friends, just days after the night of destruction she was spending Christmas with him. But wait, you say, she agreed that he was bad people - and isn't it odd that she would spend such a holidy with a bad person? Perhaps I shall clear things up by saying this - her and I were supposed to spend Christmas together. I seem to recall a saying like "Bro's before Ho's" or even "Chicks before Dicks"...and as my good friend Wes would say - situations like this are the reason those statements were created. I met her three days after I moved to Oregon. She was supposed to be one of my best friends. She was supposed to be my support system. We had worked hard on our friendship, we had been through alot, she was dear to me. She chose a boy over me, over my friendship - after admonishing that something like that would never tear us apart. She hurt me more than it hurt to have the evening of destruction. It's hard still today, when I have to come to work and see him with her cookies for his team. And the worst part of it all, is that even in the face of the cookies and the snowboarding weeked excursions they're taking - they expected me to believe that they're not interested in each other for anything more than friends. It should have been obvious day one, and it's obvious now - that "friends" is not, and has not, ever been the case. And I'm off the soap box now. |
