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. Continue reading Oh, For Fuck's Sake →

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. Continue reading On Panic and denial. And some other stuff too. →

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. Continue reading On Relationships: Spockism →

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. Continue reading Womanly Duty →

In which it actually sucks more now than it did before.

I left because I couldn’t give him what he wanted and I couldn’t stomach another goddamned fight. A couple days later he realized I was serious, and started asking me, “So this is it? You’re done? You’re not going to try anymore, you’re just going to walk away? You’re just going to give up?”

Never mind that I tried my heart out for six years, never mind that I don’t have any tries left. Never mind that I’m sorry. Never mind his own culpability in this thing, because as far as he’s concerned I’m the one who’s leaving, I’m giving up, I’m the one who killed it. So the worst part is not that I’m poor, homeless, and heartbroken. The worst part is not that I failed as a wife, nor that I made all the mistakes I did.

The worst part is that he’s in pain and I never wanted him to be. The truth is that he doesn’t really want me, not really, what he wants is who I tried and failed to be. But his heart doesn’t know that yet, and so he’s in pain and there’s nothing I can do to fix it.

He gave me a week to get my things and my dogs off the farm, and he wants a divorce right away. He’s so angry he doesn’t seem to want to cut me any slack for the fact that I spent my last $20 buying dog food and the last of my gas driving it out there for him, or that I’m not one of those stupid bitches who wants to take half his shit, or who fucked his best friend in his own bed, or who is petty and vindictive because she feels she’s got a right to be for past harms. The fact that I have no money (with which to rent a house to put my stuff and dogs into) moves him not at all, because right now I’m nothing more than the bitch who broke his heart and left him.

I understand, I do, but it sucks.

Update: We just spoke on the phone and he said, “I read your blog, and I’m not trying to be a dick,” and I said, “I know.” Because I do know. It’s just a rotten damned situation.

In which things have changed.

Separated. I guess that’s the term.

We’ve been talking a lot since he got back from Indianapolis, and Wednesday afternoon after class it all came to a head. One of us had to leave, he said. I don’t blame him; I haven’t been giving him much of anything for quite awhile now. Not only don’t I want to, but I can’t.

So I left.

I packed an overnight bag and drove to town. No money, no job, no place to stay. I parked in the municipal lot next to 2nd Street Coffee and slouched in my seat with my sunglasses on and smoked. Nodded at a few people I knew who walked by. Felt weird and shocked and disassociated.

Finally got out of the car and walked over to the bar because I couldn’t decide what else to do.

I got shitfaced. Stayed up until two in the morning. Slept on the cramped little loveseat in Gorgeous’ basement. Woke up at eight the next morning, still drunk because I’d been drinking on an empty stomach.

Class started at nine. I sat next to him, in the spot I’d been in all week. He was pleasant. I rode with him and BoSe on the ‘field trip’ to see a building under construction. Had lunch with him at Subway.

I guess I need to find an apartment or house I can rent that takes dogs. I need to get a full-time job; there’s more data entry for me to do at WGI but there’s been no discussion about it being either permanent or full-time.

After completing this class, I could feasibly be deployed to do CAT insurance adjusting when/if Ernesto hits, but I wouldn’t be able to go because I can’t afford it. So now I’m qualified for a discipline I can’t work in because it takes money to make money.

It’s kind of freeing, really, having nothing at all.