Running to stand still

This week has been mostly an experience of mounting frustration and exhaustion, punctuated by the occasional moment of being-social but also by too many late-night meals and possibly too much wine. I can't quite identify the source of this being-out-of-sorts. I mean, yes, my mind has been running over the same track regardless of what I try to think about--I set out to read Wordsworth or bring The Life of Charlotte Bronte on the train, and what I do instead is try to turn my experiences with The Lawyer and K into Moth-style stories that I will never actually tell.

Lea, whom I have known since my back-in-the-day Moth internship, got the 30-second version of 2007 last night and commented that I could have done the entire "Love Hurts" story slam on my own, but she also said something more important, which is that I must have a lot to process and this, implicitly, is why I wouldn't have put my name in the hat even if I had shown up more than three minutes before they got started. None of my stories have particularly good endings right now--and this is one of the reasons why I'm committed to blogging as a form of digitally thinking out loud--but in a way that is open-ended, sometimes fluctuating, and sort of generally dispersed--this time around I'm giving up all pretense of creating something stable.

Nevertheless (and this is something that I've always been susceptible to in my experience with the Moth), listening to other people's stories always throws me back on myself. And so, the morning after the Slam, I think my way through the Lawyer story on the train and I think I'm almost there. I have my opening: "2007 was the worst year of my life, until I met E---. On our first date we went to the Astoria Beer Garden and I found out that I couldn't actually drink two pitchers of beer." And the ending will have me going over the Manhattan Bridge at 8:30 on a Friday morning in January and looking up and realizing that not only could I see his building from the train, it was really, really, really prominent. And I will talk about how I'd always worried that this was going to be the case after he dumped me, but I was okay with it that morning--I was just glad that I didn't know it was there before that day. This probably doesn't make sense and I don't really want to take the time to work it out here right now, but the overall idea is that this is someone who made me really happy and confident and then provoked something in my life that was kind of disastrous, but I'm okay with it now and trying to take the good things. Except that the last part isn't entirely true yet and I can't tell this story until it is.

The other story I keep running over in my head is the one with K, based on a conversation we had in the library on Sunday. There is part of me that's really not on board with considering him a friend, a part that still feels angry and wronged. But I wasn't going to talk about it in the library when I only had 45 minutes to finish and print my talk. And he thinks he's 95 percent sure why I'm mad, but I'm not sure he's right and even if he is, there's still 5 percent that needs to be said. So the other story could, provisionally, be called "Why I'm Still Mad at You." I don't have this one fully worked out--the shortish version is on my other blog, but the more I thikn about it, the more I feel like it was unfair of him to pull that whole "I'm not even sure you like me" move--he could have at least had the decency to let me keep my defenses up if he was going to abandon me that completely.

I found myself starting to get choked up about this yesterday and I simply had to tell myself that I have not ever cried because of K and I sure as hell am not going to start now.

Yet, while I realize the limits of taking a handful of interactions with a married guy 20 years older than me as representative of the rest of my emotional and sexual life (not that I'm having either one right now), I can't quite not think that the moment when I tell a guy I like him is not inherently the moment of disaster for me. This is a possible construction of what happened with The Professor, who I don't think about much anymore except when Our Mutual Friend shares his interactions under the well-meaning but misguided belief that I care. It didn't help anything with the Lawyer, either. And I'm not even going to go into what I suffered from my ex-boyfriend because I loved him. And this idea--the disasters that come from opening myself to someone even a little bit, and the related issue of my sort of startling inability to be attracted to people who like me first (the Mutual Friend being an excellent case in point here)...well, it gets your day off to a bad start even before you leave your sauna-like apartment (seriously, I woke up four times last night because it was so fucking hot) into the damp and disgusting weather.

But I'm not sure any of these things are more than symptoms. I am not taking certain forms of solitude well--I can work a couple of grueling days, but without the ability to really relax with anyone who cares, without really being able to share burdens--I'm just so tired. And most of the time I kind of want to cry but not for reasons I could articulate. Like today on my way out of the Planned Parenthood--it was particularly slow today, and Gaskell is really not thrilling enough to make the time pass quickly--I was there for two stupid hours for something that took less than ten minutes and I suppose I should be happy that the HIV test came back negative (this was not the main reason why I was there, nor was I actually worried, but still) and that I will probably only have to come back once more to finish taking care of the thing I was there for (seventh time's the charm, I hope, but I feel like they should give me a frequent flyer card at this point), but it was all I could do not to start crying in one of the offices and save it for Bleecker Street and the D train to midtown instead.

I only needed a couple minutes--I'm not going to walk into school discomposed, which is one reason I'm at the library now--I need to stay here and get work done. Going home would only mean a nap, probably some self-loathing when I saw how long the nap would take, and possibly passing out from heatstroke--my radiators are shooting this wall of heat across the whole place. Instead, I will stay here and try to work on some course prep so all I have to do for the kids this weekend is read their drafts. What I really want to do is stop the clock for a couple of days and just watch TV and sleep. But I can't do that. I am, however, planning a version of that for tomorrow night.

I think one thing that bothers me is that even while I'm not dating and am doing so at least partially by choice (having to do with my workload, time committments, emotional fragility, and that stupid medical problem), I can't let myself "go" in a way that would make me undatable forever. So I have to keep going to the gym even when I'm depressed because I know I gained weight over December / January that I haven't lost yet (I mean, let's face it, my main exercise came from sex), that I can't become a full blown alcoholic (in part because that makes you fat--my vanity is often in conflict with my malaise in this way), that I essentially can't become more scary than I apparently already am, that I can't become angry, that I can't lose social skills. And so on. One of the things I don't like about not having sex at the moment is that at some point it's going to be so long that the next time is going to become Important. And I really don't want that--that's too much of a recipe for getting crushed all over again.

I didn't really want to go over all this now. It's not an entirely good use of my library time. But, with no one at home to wait for me, I can stay here until 11 tonight if I want. (It just gets into that "eating dinner at midnight" pattern again--and I know that's bad, bad, bad.) None of this makes me want to prep a grammar lesson any more than I do. What I think is that I'll start with about an hour of Wordsworth, maybe think a bit more about Villette, then get to the prep. Villette, incidentally, may become somewhat important for the paper I'm giving in a couple of months. There's a lot of live burial in there towards the end. Which is essentially what I'm going to do starting....now.