goblinbox

In which I talk about really old stuff.

The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

But.

When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.

Flash back a couple of years:

The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.

Flash forward five years:

After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.

None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.

What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.

Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.

Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.

There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.

There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.

That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.

No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.

I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.

The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.

Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.

The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.

I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I’m not looking, oh HELL no I’m not, but if I were looking there’d be a pretty stringent list.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s what my standard looks like these days (this applies only to mates, and not any other type of relationship):

1. You must not be a goddamned stoner.
2. You must not be an alcoholic.
3. You must not be currently or recently addicted to speed, pills, coke, heroin, or any other street, pharma, or pseudo-pharma drugs.
4. You must be a devotee, preferably of Amma’s.
5. You must not be a slob at home, at work, or in your car.
6. You must not watch more than five hours of television per week on average.
7. You must have a few hobbies or directions of study that interest you so deeply that you occasionally wander off and immerse yourself in them.
8. You must have a broad command of grammar and be able to spell.
9. It would really help if you were a ‘roo.
10. If you smoke cigarettes, it’s less than half a pack a day and you’re thinking about quitting.
11. Your glass is half-full.
12. You must respect the place you live in enough to clean and repair it as needed without being told by an outside source that it needs to be done.
13. You must not be co-dependent or passive-aggressive.
14. You must not be fundamentally angry.
15. You must know or be willing to learn enough about music and computers and my other interests to nod at the right places when I talk about them.
16. You must support yourself financially.
17. You must love to travel and be well-traveled.
18. You must be essentially good-natured.
19. You must not be obsessed with material possessions – actually, you shouldn’t be obsessed with anything.
20. You must be tolerant.
21. You must be contemplative by nature.
22. You must be reasonably healthy and take a certain amount of care of your person.
23. You must consider compassion to be one of your basic personality traits.
24. You must be vegetarian, or very close to it.
25. You must be very, very intelligent.
26. You must read. A lot.
27. You must never have been routinely cruel to persons or animals and you must not be so now.
28. It would really help if you’re not a morning person, but if you are be mellow about it.
29. You must not blame the shape or condition of your life on anyone but yourself.
30. You must be funny, and laugh a lot.

I’m made in such a way that I would genuinely rather be single than put up with things I’ve come to know that I hate: like stoners, for instance. Dear God, if I never find myself attracted to another goddamned pothead I’ll consider it a miracle. (Fat chance, though. Why are so many interesting men hell-bent on retarding themselves with endless bong hits? And DON’T let me hear again that “at least pot’s natural.” Whatever, you dumb stoner. Crude oil’s natural, too, but I don’t see you smoking that. And no, I don’t agree that everybody would be better off if they’d just get stoned, and how utterly unique of you to say so.)

And slobs: Christ! I cannot figure out what makes an adult person want to live like a pig! Pick it up, wash it, and put it away already. Messy rooms smell bad. Your mother doesn’t live here. Whoever let you think that masculinity was synonymous with slovenliness totally did you a disservice.

And unhealth: if there’s something wrong with your body, adjust your lifestyle. Continuing to party like it’s 1999 and eating crap food because you “don’t like vegetables” is suicide, so why not just save us all some time and fucking shoot yourself and quit with the trying to get laid already? What makes you think you have anything to offer if you can’t put your own house in order? And what sort of grown man is too much of a pussy to lay off the fast food? Hello! Are you twelve or what?

I particularly dislike listening to someone say mean shit about people because it’s exhausting to be around. We all have bad days, sure, and I’m all for a good venting session, but if you’re negative and mean all the time I just plain old don’t want to hear it. Your attitude is your problem, not mine.

I’m no longer interested in non-devotees, either, let alone atheists. Clearly I’m too intelligent to believe in the Sistine Chapel ceiling version of god so quit assuming that I do. My philosophy is fundamental to me and I really don’t want to have to hide it, nor do I want to explain it in endless detail. It’d be so much easier if it was understood implicitly.

As much as I wish I could let it go, bad spelling and grammar drive me batshit. I’ve always thought people who sucked at English would at least be good at math, but while probably sixty percent of my lovers couldn’t spell ‘thorough’ if they tried, I have yet to bed a mathematician. Go figure.

I don’t like TV. There are shows on TV that I enjoy, yes, but overall TV is crass and evil and fills your head with shit. It is a waste of time. While I’ve been known to veg in front of the glass teat myself, it’s a diversion for me and not a lifestyle. TV makes you complacent, stupid, and greedy, and while it does so it systematically makes you think you’re cleverer than you really are while simultaneously undermining your self-confidence. Fuck TV. People who watch too much TV are voluntarily crippling themselves.

I’ve tried to be tolerant of FODA, too, but I’m going to just come on out and admit for the first time anywhere that it grosses me out to taste meat in someone’s mouth or smell it in their sweat. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten meat myself that I can no longer perceive it as food: to me, it’s the dead body of a living creature that you just chewed up and swallowed because you’re, well, most likely thoughtless or greedy. Meat-eating is as disturbing to me as eating human flesh would be to you, actually. I just don’t say much about it because I know how statistically insignificant I am in this culture of rampant meat-eating.

Of course, I stink like cigarette smoke, so, yes, I’ll just shut the fuck up now, but the majority of my lovers have been smokers so the comparison isn’t equal.

Oh, and you should have already figured out that you need to have a job. If you’re still working on that one, fine, take your time, but I don’t wanna watch. I’m not a freeloader and no man has ever supported me; the reverse should be true for you. I’ll pay my way, you pay yours, okay?

And please, know what you need to be happy. Don’t expect me to know, because I’m not you. Have your own interests and pursuits and hobbies, and get your various needs met through them on your own. People without interests are both creepy and impossible to satisfy. And please note that buying things then abandoning them untouched in the shed does not qualify as a bona fide hobby.

I don’t care if you’re competitive and aggressive, just don’t take it to the point that you really believe that compassion is for weaklings. That’s just stupid. Compassion is fundamental – I am That, Thou art That, and all of This is That – so man up and volunteer already…

Uh, yeah. I could go on for hours, but I’ll just quit now. Don’t I just sound like a card-carrying bitch? I really do, don’t I.

The good news is that I’m quite prepared to die single, because the bad news is that I obviously will.

Oh, well. Someone has to be the childless old maid in the family, I guess.

In which I share a copy of a letter I’ve written.

Teh BF reminded me the other day that I’m still not legally divorced.

Which got me to thinking about The Ex and all the other stuff he hasn’t dealt with that I’ve been waiting on him to deal with. So I wrote a little letter, and it goes like this:

Dear [The Ex],

Hello! Apparently I no longer have your phone number. For that reason I’m resorting to sending you an old-fashioned letter, because I need to go over a few things with you.

First, can you please send my Brownie camera? I don’t mean to nag, but it’s been a year. Please? I really want it.

Second, didn’t you say that you were going to file for divorce? Did you ever do anything about that? Are you going to?

Thirdly, when we were in Indianapolis and I signed that Cingular contract, you and [our friend] swore you’d do right by me no matter what. Well, it’s not your fault the way Indianapolis turned out, of course, but its been three years and that account is still in my name and it’s still in collections:

CINGULAR WIR…
2612 N Roa…
Attn Cr Bur…
Johnson City, T…
(888) 383-2…

Can you pay off your DirectTV account too? It’s also in my name and in collections:

Aid Associa…
370 7th Av…
New York, NY 100…
(212) 330-9…

Please understand that I’m paying off our four defaulted credit cards ($8444), the judgment against my checking account ($1000), and our defaulted U.S. Cellular bill ($626), all of which were our bills and which I’m not asking you to deal with at all, and I signed a quit-claim deed on the farm. Please get these two handled as soon as you can? Thanks.

I hope you get this letter; I have no idea if you’re in Iowa or still out in Wyoming! Hope you’re enjoying springtime, wherever you are. Give my love to Shiva.

When I finished writing this little missive, I had my co-worker Left Coast Girlie proof it for tone. After she was done reading, I said, “Is it bitchy?” and she replied, “No, not at all. It sounds like you’re trying really hard not to be a bitch!”

Which was exactly the tone I was trying to strike!

It’s so very much like The Ex to not, in a year, have managed to do a simple thing like ship me my camera. He said he’d do it, but of course he didn’t. He also said he’d serve me divorce papers, but of course he hasn’t. He also promised he’d deal with the Indianapolis cell phone fiasco, but that never happened either.

Hmm. I wonder whatever possessed me to leave such a wonderfully pro-active person?

Honestly, it should be water under the bridge by now but I’m still pissed off. I spent nearly eight years running that man’s life for him while he sat on the couch, and I will probably end up paying not most but all of the bills we racked up together AND filing for (and paying for) the divorce because he’ll just… never get around to it.

I keep hoping he’ll surprise me.

I remember him telling me way back in the day, before he proposed, that marriage was a good deal for women and a shit one for men; well, I’m here to tell you that my marriage cost me eight years of my life and somewhere around fifty thousand dollars, and his got him waited on hand and foot and netted him 27 acres with a house and a barn and sure he’s got a mortgage, but he’s also got equity. Which I don’t have.

All of which is why the following is still my favorite joke:

Q. Why does divorce cost so much?
A. Because it’s worth it!

In which I feel a little stupid.

On my wedding day, my mother said, “He’ll make a good first husband.” I scowled at her before I laughed, but she was, of course, totally right. He did make a good first husband. Our breakup has been so smooth, really, considering how terribly it could have gone.

Last night after dinner, I drove out to the farm and got a load of stuff out of The Ex’s house. He helped me pack and load, and further offered to drive a truckload of my furniture into town and help me get it up the stairs into my room. And after we got the jeep loaded, we sat and had a nice chat.

I was driving homeward an hour later, the jeep redolent with the smell of incense, the sun setting fantastically in pinks, oranges, and purples, the humid air blowing.

I brought only one box inside the house with me when I got home – my puja stuff – because my shit is so utterly filthy that AmmZon would absolutely have kittens if I brought it inside the way it is. It’s been stored in an empty room for a year, but in order for you to visualize how utterly dirty, dusty, and cobwebby it is you’d do better to understand that it had been stored, unboxed, in a barn for a year. Everything is covered in dust, cobwebs, and pet hair (and when I say ‘covered,’ I mean there’s an eighth of an inch of dust on every single surface). Everything has to be at the very least wiped off, if not actually washed before it can be used again.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I’m quite recovered from my melancholy.

I’ve known for awhile that The Ex has himself a new squeeze, though folks have been trying to hide it from me. (No need to, I’m glad to hear it.) I’ve put a few clues together from various things I was told at the party and things I’ve picked up since, and quite frankly I begin to suspect that The Ex wasn’t the architect of his domestic changes after all.

The bastard’s good, he really is! Gets his women to do his housework for him. But if it’s true that the woman’s the one doing the work, and I don’t know that it is, it certainly erases any ache I may have indulged in.

Last night I spoke with Gorgeous on the phone. She’s trying to convince me to come to Hawaii for a very extended visit, or to stay. She says there are people who need their houses occupied to protect belongings and discourage squatters, so rent’s no issue. She tells me about the weather, the fruit growing freely everywhere, the job market, the community, and the natural beauty. “I need my sisters here!” she exclaims. She’s also lost probably 50 pounds and probably looks like she did the last time she lived in Hawaii, which was, to coin a phrase, fucking HOT.

We also talked about break ups – she and Rockstar were together as long as The Ex and I were – specifically about how sometimes you just get into a funk and remember the benefits, willfully forgetting how much they really cost. Ah, the things we pine for… Snuggling, a warm body, someone to carry your groceries, watching movies together at home, talking at night in the dark.

I wasn’t having it, though. “Yeah, it’s normal to feel a little tender about it, but the fact is that he drove you nuts,” I said. She said, “Damn, Mush. I said I was feeling sappy.” So I told her about seeing the old farmhouse and how it felt to see nearly all traces of my living there are gone. She reminded me that there was nothing wrong with feeling all phases of the pendulum swing, from anger to longing. It’s true that there’s nothing wrong with feeling all of it… as long as we remember not to act on them without due consideration.

It was a good talk. I do love that woman. I’m interested in visiting Hawaii, of course, but I think if I were going to save up enough money to leave town for a month I’d probably rather go to the City than another small town, even if it is tropical.

The night before last, Truck and The Ex had a huge fight. AmmZon and Truck went to the bar, then came back, and then The Ex called and hilarity ensued. I’ve never in all the years I’ve known him seen Truck so pissed off! He threw his phone at the wall, paced the house furiously, cursed and kicked and carried on. He was about to walk the 13 miles to Batavia to kick The Ex’s drunken, belligerent ass. It took both AmmZon and my efforts to talk him down. It was intense. (Two red heads in a fight? We’re all lucky the world didn’t explode.)

This evening The Ex sat on our front porch and admitted that another divorce party would kill him, since he partied so hard for this one – his celebration lasted the entire weekend – that he blacked out Monday night (apparently he hadn’t eaten, and had had only liquor all day) and he honestly doesn’t even remember what he said to make Truck so mad.

I laughed and said, “You dumb cunt, you know better than that! You’ve got to eat and sleep, not just drink!” He laughed sheepishly and darted a telling glance at Truck, who was pointing and nodding his agreement. “What she said,” he said. I think The Ex actually blushed a little.

I don’t have to worry about another divorce party myself, since I really have no intention of marrying again. I’m sure I’ll shack up eventually, ’cause I’m a slut like that, but I see no reason to get all legal about it. Everything ends, it’s the nature of the world.

In other news, we’re having a big scary thunder storm! I’m off to sit on the porch and check it out.

In which there’s a state of the union.

I remember thinking last year that my content would get really good because of my change in status. A marriage ending! Then, the dating! Moving! Starting over! Self-discovery! Introspection! I thought I’d have a lot of material.

But because everyone I know reads my blog, I left out a great deal of material because I thought it would be disrespectful. (I realized that I was the dump-er, and that anyone in the position of dump-ee is likely to dwell a little longer and be a little more sensitive, and I didn’t want to be a bitch.) I didn’t rant and rage about the aspects of the marriage that really hurt me or disgusted me or pissed me off, I didn’t do any name-calling, and I most certainly did not mention anything about those couple-few nights I didn’t make it home ’til long after the sun came up. If you catch my drift.

The 27th of May will mark our 6th wedding anniversary. It will also be our divorce party. The Ex seems, when I see him, to be not only adjusted to but okay with the end of the relationship. He’s over it, I’m over it. It’s like neither of us were really all that invested in the 8+ years we spent together. (In fact, I really can’t remember the last time I had such a boring, drama-free break up. I’m not particularly hurt or angry any more. He doesn’t seem to give a shit either way. I take it as a sign that we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. Or maybe he’s miserable but hiding it, and I’m too self-involved to notice… or too weak to carry the burden of hurting him. Who knows. But I suspect the former: the ending hasn’t been any deeper or more profound than the relationship itself.)

Truck is worried that The Ex and I will get drunk and fuck at the divorce party, but I’ve never in my life had sex when I was drunk that I wouldn’t have had while sober. And I won’t be getting drunk: I have no intention of staying over out there, and I have to drive back to town.

After the divorce party, I’ll need to get organized and actually get us divorced. I doubt he’ll ever do it – he’s still nagging me into paying the auto insurance online every month because he’s apparently incapable of buying money orders and stamps. Paperwork is not his forte. Actually, anything he can get someone else to do is not his forte.

I still don’t know what to do with my stuff. I make less than $800 a month so it seems absurd to pay for a storage unit. I think the truth is that I don’t really want any of it; there are a few things I think about, but for the most part I don’t need a bunch of shit I obviously can live without for the better part of a year.

People keep telling me I should get an apartment, that I will be wanting my own home and my own kitchen any time now. Years ago, I’d have hated using another woman’s kitchen, but after having my own for so long I’m delighted to be kitchenless: the kitchen is AmmZon’s, and we do things her way, and that suits me just fine. I don’t want the responsibility. I also don’t want to live alone. I qot quite sick enough of having my own kitchen and being lonely.

Renting a room in someone else’s house suits me perfectly these days, and since AmmZon’s about to close on the purchase of the house my rent money will probably come in handy for her. Considering how long she let me live there for free I’m more than pleased to help her out.

My life right now is really small. No career, no home of my own, no lover, no insurance or savings or anything. I live hand-to-mouth. I barely exist.

Frankly, I like it.

In which I’m SO GLAD I’m not still with the man.

When I got home from work this evening, The Ex was sitting at the laptop in the living room. Truck was in the bathroom with the door open doing something with his face, and AmmZon was standing around. The Ex was bitching because he was trying to buy tickets online from Ticketmonster and having no luck.

Naturally, I tried to help. It’s my nature. (Having a technical problem with the Internet? Let me help! I can do it! Me, me, ME!)

I sat down in his place and ordered the tickets for him. The whole thing went smoothly and I accomplished in three minutes what he hadn’t been able to accomplish in half an hour. With her permission I used AmmZon’s account, and at his direction I set the tickets for will call because the event is this weekend. He gave AmmZon cash for the use of her credit card.

THEN he remembers that only the card holder can pick up tickets at will call. And he starts to freak out and vibe like a bastard.

And a half hour of total fucking moody bullshit ensues. Read the rest of this entry »

In which I babble on about nothing, then get down to the point, which is – and I’m sorry if it’s overly pedestrian – to thine own self be true. Or something.

I’m pretty much obsessed with my current read, Imajica. It’s occupying most of my attention. God how I love a good book. I’m in love with the mystif, Pie ‘oh’ Pah.

I haven’t failed to notice that we’ve bypassed Spring and gone straight into air-conditioning season, though.

Tonight I have to do laundry for my Vail trip, which begins right after work on Thursday. I’ll be hopping into a van with two musicians and heading Colorado-wards. We’ll be stopping after 5 or 6 hours of driving and overnighting in some random motel. Friday we’ll be picking another band member up at the airport in Denver and then continuing up to Vail. The gig itself is Saturday night. I’m wondering if there will be enough room in the van for me to bring my knitting bag.

I had an IM conversation this morning with someone about panic attacks, and then promptly started having one myself. It’s a mild one, but annoying. (They’ve been decreasing in frequency and intensity since I left The Ex, and I can now go weeks and weeks without having any symptoms at all.) I think today’s little episode is a combination of thinking about it too much and my recent fairly high caffeine intake.

I had a mini-episode yesterday or the day before that consisted of having a fleeting strange sensation in my chest followed by a whole-body heating rush of adrenaline, and then an hour or so of The Fear. As soon as I get occupied with something I forget I’m having an attack and it goes away, but when I’m sitting at a desk, hardly moving, they linger because I can keep a portion of my awareness too focused on my symptoms.

I’ll be glad to get out of town this weekend. I guess need a bit of a head change.

~+~+~
A couple of readers have mentioned in comments or emails that I haven’t posted about panic in awhile. They did the math and came up with the same thing I did: the end of the marriage appeared to correspond with the end of the panic disorder.

Well, yes and no. Mainly yes. It seems one trains the body for a new set of responses in the depths of a panic disorder, and the symptoms do linger, but I haven’t suffered the kinds of multi-hour horrors I once did. I would characterize myself these days as being pretty much panic-free. Read the rest of this entry »

In which The Ex has a great idea.

When The Ex dropped Truck off after work tonight, he said, “So I’ve been meaning to ask you something. I don’t know how you’re gonna take this, but–”

“Sure,” I said, “Go ahead.”

“Well, I’m thinking about having a big party,” he said, looking at me intently and pausing.

Uh, okay. Why would I care?

“And I thought it could be a… a divorce party,” he finished.

“Oh my God, that’s fucking brilliant!” I enthused. “People talk about having divorce parties all the time, but no one ever really does it,” I said.

He smiled. “I thought it was a good idea too. Will you help me arrange some live music?”

“Totally! Of course! Maybe the-band-that-never-gigs will want to do it,” I said.

“We got married out there and had a huge fucking party, we might as well get divorced out there too!”

“This party should be even bigger! More booze! More music!”

“Hell yeah!” he said.

So there will probably — you know how he tends to change his mind about these things — be a Big Divorce Bash out at my ex’s place next month. Everyone in the world is invited!

I really should finish moving out before then.

In which it’s not you, it’s me. I mean, it has to be, because the one constant in all my relationships has been — well — me.

I’ve been observing the relationships around me closely since I left my husband. I’ve been wondering what makes some relationships work, and others fail. I’ve been comparing my experience with what I see around me.

And I’ve been wondering if I’m deeply flawed, or too judgmental, or too distant, or if my expectations are wholly and utterly unreasonable.

You see, I’ve been accused of being chilly, dispassionate, distant, or standoffish more times than I can count; every relationship I’ve ever been in has failed; and I find that being around couples lately can drive me bat shit.

It all drives a girl to introspection. Read the rest of this entry »

In which I party myself into the ground! (Eh, like THAT’S news.)

This morning I emailed a bunch of cell phone pics to my Flickr account, only discover that one cannot send an email to Flickr with more than one image attached. Ergo, each of the six images that actually made it to the target web site represents four to six more that did not make it. What a pain in the arse it is, to get one’s photos off of one’s cell phone!

The party was fun. A bunch of women stood around in the high school parking lot introducing themselves to one another until the bus arrived. (AmmZon had to speak with the driver three times before he found us. Eek.)

We all piled onto the bus, decorated it with blown-up copies of the bride’s yearbook pictures, and started drinking immediately. (The hostess had put mixed drinks into water bottles, and brought coolers full of them. Brilliant!)

We picked the bride up at her house, then went on a tour of her life. Some of the girls put on wigs and did skits at various locations — one skit involved the bride’s sister in the role of the bride and Amazon Blonde [the original one, not my roommate] as herself, reenacting their meeting, which apparently occurred while the bride lay on the sidewalk in front of Wolfgang’s place, drunk, and said to the approaching Amazon, “Hey, I know you! We fucked the same guy.” After that vignette we piled back on the bus. We stopped at the hotel bar and more women joined us. We visited various landmarks important in the bride’s formative years, including: a couple of fields, Wal*Mart, the golf club, that huge ugly mansion with the bowling lanes downstairs and the caves over the pool, and the street in front of a few houses her boyfriends used to live in. The bride got properly shit faced. A fabulous time was had by all, and I remember remarking several times that the bride has KILLER friends, and also that there were a lot of really nice boobs on the bus. (Seriously. The majority of her friends have remarkable racks. Go figure — her own are freakin’ gravity-proof themselves.) Read the rest of this entry »

In which I ponder marriage, sex, duty, and who may have a right to my body.

One of the big problems in my marriage, particularly at the end, was sex. It all seemed terribly complex at the time, with all the love and hurt and rejection on both sides, but in the end the problem can be stated very simply: he wanted more sex than he got.

My husband used to tell me that he “never got laid any more,” a statement that made me so angry — because I was deliberately and acutely conscientious about making sure he never went without, even to the extent of frequently and cheerfully having sex I didn’t want to have — that I actually kept a calendar in order to prove that he did.

Sucks, don’t it, how what starts out as a source of intimacy and bonding can become its own polar opposite?

Anyway, point is, I’ve been contemplating this issue for quite awhile now. Lately I’ve discussed this topic in depth with a few couples, and based on what I’ve experienced and observed and been told, I’ve come to what I feel is an important conclusion for myself:

I should never marry, because I am not willing to owe sex to anyone.

Yeah, whoa is right. A lot of you would might compelled to jump on that and say, “You never owe anyone sex, not even when you’re married!” Just let me unpack this so you can see how I got here.

Women sometimes lose libido for a extended periods of time. This seems to be fairly common.

I had no sex drive for nearly two years, due to various factors. It was not intentional. It was not my fault. It just happened. At the beginning, it was just a state of being. By the time my libido returned, I’d been nagged for sex for so long that I continued to say no just to be a bitch. It hadn’t been my fault in the first place, and he’d punished me for it anyway, so I was punishing him back. (Yeah, I’m mature like that.)

The math is that males are fertile all of the time and females are only fertile for three days per cycle. Assuming a 30-day cycle, the male-to-female fertility ratio is about ten to one. Ten to one! If you compound this cruel joke with the fact that women are several orders of magnitude more hormonally complex than men (and are therefore more likely to suffer failures), and then you mix in hormone-altering things like birth control pills, pregnancies, and plain old-fashioned stress, well, then, suddenly it begins to seem that periods of libidolessness are a natural occurrence in females. Read the rest of this entry »