I'm in Tahoe again, and I have become the Queen of Electrical Outlets. Seriously, this shit is easy. Once you've pinched yourself with needle-nose pliars a couple of times, hard enough to draw blood and cry at the kitchen counter (think of this like those "poise" classes a young princess must endure), you start to get it. You graduate to a debutante, playfully manipulating the wires and ultimately electrifying certain walls. Soon after, once you have done so many outlets that you can remain calm and collected in the face of stuck screws, tight spaces, and having to crawl under the bed with the dust bunnies and the spiders, you become Queen of Electrical Outlets. I have asended to my rightful place.

The Nightengales Are Singing...The Song of Breaking Up

One thing that is wrong with me on a base level is that I don't have the ability to connect what I am feeling emotionally with the events happening to me and around me. This is a problem, something deep inside me, and I need to fix it, or at least get better at managing.

The way it affects me is that I go along in life, always doing the best I can, and without too much adversity I can manage my life. I think I usually do a pretty good job with that. I have managed to overcome a lot of the damage that happened to me as a kid.

I have good friends who are smart, wise in many ways, interesting, kind, and they are good people. And they love me. I have these friends because my family has never been a means of support for me. Because of the way I grew up, people in my family are all damaged and we all suffer from feeling like losers. Some more than others. But I suffer from being told when I was a kid that I was stupid, a liar, unimportant, unlovable because of the way I behaved.

What happened to me, I think, is that I believed that. I believed I would fail, and that I would never do anything good. I have always felt like a fraud as I went along pretending that I am someone with something to offer, that what I personally value is worth caring about, and that I can be successful. Inside I am totally insecure, and I am afraid that I will be revealed as the very person I was told I would end up being, a loser. It's the voice in my head that tells me I am no good.

Over time I have learned to tell the voice in my head to shut up. I am not a liar. I am not stupid. I am not unimportant. I am not unlovable.

My friends have done that for me. I know they love me for my quirky way of looking at life. For my way of picking myself up and keeping on no matter what knocks me down, whether it's the death of my mother, having no money in college & after and no one to fall back on, the fact that my dad didn't talk to me for years and told me I was bad and only cared about myself, the way I keep trying to be a good example and a good listener for my little brother, for getting past being fired from my job and coming to California and doing better than I ever could have in Atlanta, for staying upbeat even when I'm dealing with a lot of gnarly things all at one time. For being generous with anyone who needs a helping hand. For looking for some good part in everyone, no matter what they have done in life, good or bad. But down deep I always think they give me too much credit.

When too much adversity hits me at one time, when I have trouble with money, work, home life, and relationships all at one time, that voice in my head gets mean, starts getting real hard on me. It starts to tell me that I am a loser. Fifty times a day I hear god you are stupid. You are going to fail, no doubt about it. You are failing right now. You are going to end up nowhere. You're going to lose everything you have and it's no surprise. You have never been any good. You are such a loser.

That's what has been happening with me lately. I have problems with money that have been worrying me for months, and I don't know how they are going to work themselves out. I am afraid I can't pay my mortgage and I have been buiding up credit card debt, which is a cardinal sin in the way I do things. I am afraid I made a huge mistake taking on the responsibility of the house in Tahoe and I really need to do something to make that work a little better, but it's not that simple and I feel overwhelmed.

My little brother has me worried out of my mind. He is homeless again and he is going to die. And I can't help him. I am crying uncontrollably right now. I love him so much and he is in such pain and I can't help him. He's my baby brother and he is such a sweet person, but so sick and alone and I can't help him.

These are things that are just the baseline of my worries. Normally I can handle this much adversity in my life. It's not outside the range of normal for me.

Five things happened to me last week that sent me flailing. These things don't seem very important by themselves, and normally I could just roll with it, but they ganged up on me and I reacted. I don't know if it is because I had my period and my emotions were off kilter, or because I was just at a low energy point, or if it's just a cycle of my ability to cope because I seem to get really down every three or four months. I don't know what it is, but I just know that sometimes I don't have the strength to face it all. On Friday I let it all out on Keith. He didn't react with kindness.

The relationship with Keith ended tonight and I am mortally sad. But I know I was just hanging on to the hope that my love could reach him. What I found out, what I knew was true all along, is that he is just another guy I fell in love with who could never love me.

I vow to maintain hope. I will find someone who will love me.

I think there is a nightengale outside my apartment, singing. Are there nightengales in San Francisco, or only in novels? I don't care, I think it is a good sign.

Still Trotting Along

Things that went well this weekend:

1) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We were in a theater packed with teenage girls. Who knew Johnny Depp's fan base is only 12-15 years old?

2) score on $35 bunk beds and 2 night tables for $20.

3) score on an outdoor bar + 3 bar stools from K Mart, $100

4) score on 2 new pairs of summer shoes, $60

5) score on an amazing Adidas sweatshirt, $50

6) Ability to put bunk beds and bar / bar stools together today without injury or frustration (priceless [sorry, it just worked])

Things that did not go well this weekend:

1) no email or phone call from K, so the freakout has not been acknowledged or addressed

2) still no cell phone

3) seems I made a mistake at work that will be embarrassing to reveal

Caught on television today: A champion has the mind of a protege, the mouth of a mentor, the heart of a warrior, and the hands of a servant. God help me get there?

Freak

I freaked out today. Seriously, everything just got weird and I became convinced that it was all wrong. My dog was sick, I swear to god he almost didn't make it back up the hill this morning when we went down for coffee. He wouldn't eat and he didn't eat last night, so I took him to the vet. Turns out Charlie is dehydrated, and after thinking about it I realized I haven't been giving him enough water on our trips back and forth to Tahoe. I feel like shit. I made my dog sick.

I also lost my cell phone. Could be any one of the hundred places I went today. Problem is I need it for work and I don't know how to check the voice mail because I never wrote down the number to call. Idiot!

Not content to have just 2 things going wrong in my life, on the way out of town I stopped by K's place unannounced because I was pissed at him for not calling and I think I was going to yell at him. Some friend of his opened the door and I knew it was his friend Andy because I recognized him from his role on Animal Cops SF, but I didn't acknowledge that and K didn't introduce us, and it only added to my tendency to freak out. So when I saw KI just said I was there to 'get my stuff,' which is a weird thing to say to him. I got my bra from Tuesday night and a Flaming Lips video I left there a couple of weeks ago. He got my things and I freaking left. Total freak-out. Very weird. I sent him an email tonight when I got to Tahoe, explaining all the many things going wrong and affecting my ability to REMAIN CALM. I'm not sure what will happen from here.

Freaking out sucks, does it happen to you?

Bars On My Windows? That Is What I Call A GOOD IDEA

Just watching "American Justice" on TV. It's about a guy who crawled in to a woman's apartment through a tiny shower window and he was waiting in her bathroom when she came in the door. He raped and killed her. That's chilling.

The windows in the front of my flat are as flimsy as can be, and I think they need some decorative bars installed and FAST.

He's Just Not That Into You

A full month has gone by since my last post. The summer is half over and I have been LAME when it comes to this blog thing. So to make up for it, here is a long one about:

The relationship. Still on. Surprisingly, we are getting along well, but only because I have internalized the ability to REMAIN CALM. K tells me he is not boyfriend material, but he wants me to be his girlfriend. (?) My strategy is to remain calm while he acts out all of his bad-boy behavior, which manifests itself regularly. Am I wrong to think that his last relationship, which ended more than 8 years ago, has made him unable to trust in a new relationship? He's 36 and has not had a girlfriend since. I can't figure out how come he was able to get my number, call me for a date, and ultimately begin a relationship, but freak out entirely a couple months later when the relationship moves to a sexual one. He was the model guy until we got that far, called regularly, arranged dates, dropped off little cards with sweet messages, gave me plenty of attention. Since then he has pulled away from me every time we seem to connect.

For instance, we get together and have a great dinner, he plays some new music, we watch a video of a Japanese punk band, show each other our punk-rock dance styles and fall over laughing. We go to bed and in the heat of the moment he looks at me and says "God I'm lucky."

Then I don't hear from him for 10 days. When I do talk to him, I employ my strategy and remain calm, whereas before I would have started harassing him by phone and email at day 3, obsessing about it completely by day 7, and would have broken up with him on day 10.

This time, when he calls on day 10, he doesn't mention the fact that so much time has passed. What he does is talk with me for a couple of hours, sharing his thoughts about life strategies. And I think this is significant, because the guy has so many walls built around his inner thoughts and experiences.

He tells me something about a girl he knew, a younger sister of one of his childhood friends, and how another friend ended up dating her in high school. How it's strange for the guy to ask her out because they had all grown up together. I tease him about it, saying I detect some lingering regrets on his part, and I immediately sense the door closing on the discussion. He is so sensitive, seems to be afraid of rebuke on a personal level. I know the last relationship ended with the girl breaking up with him, telling him he will never be anything but a loser. And in his words, humiliating him in front of all of their friends. I know he ended his friendships with all of the people they knew together, despite the value of those friendships to him. And he's never let them back into his life, although some of them keep trying as much as 8 years later. Afraid of rebuke on a personal level? What do you think?

My remaining calm about the phone calls, or lack of phone calls, doesn't make sense to my friends. EVERY ONE of them brings up the book "He's Just Not That Into You." I read it, and it made sense to me at the time. I talked to K about it and he said if I believe that, I am generalizing about men in a way that is just small-minded. I think he's right. So does my therapist, if that means anything. If a guy behaves some way, you can't look at a book and divine the motivation behind the behavior. Maybe he has a reason why he is not calling, and it has nothing to do with how he feels about the girl.

I think about a personal example, a guy I was dating when I was only about 24. I was broke at the time. Couldn't pay my rent. And this guy was great -- fun to be with, seemed to like me a lot. He would take me out, pay for everything, every time. And I couldn't take it, I felt like a loser. I didn't know how to handle the relationship, didn't have the skills to confront the topic with him, didn't know what to do. So you know what I did? I pulled away from him and eventually broke up with him. It's not that I didn't like him -- I DID! But I had my own personal problems and a complete lack of relationship skills, so that's how that happened.

I think K doesn't call for similar reasons (even though I don't know yet what they are). But I have faith that he cares about me. Deeply. And so I plan to remain calm for as long as it takes for him to trust me, however long it takes.