Weary
It's been a long time since I thought I was somehow perfect. Even when my opinion of myself was at it's highest, I doubt I projected much in the way of positive self image. I suspect that image has been steadily tarnishing since the implosion of my first relationship; 20 years is a long time to rehash a single failure, especially when it's the first one. Pretty much everyone is given to the mistakes the first time they do anything. Sometimes you learn on the fly and sometimes you find you just have to start over.
Anyway, the list I was reading reminded me that I'm still something of a split decision when it comes to relationship material. I have a steady, well paying job, but I'm overwhelmingly lazy in other parts of my life. I have a lot of interests, but none that I'm particularly passionate about or pursue with any amount of dedication. I value intelligence, compassion and creativity, but I'm also grotesquely shallow. There's a number of different things I'd like to do with what's left of my life, but I've got no real ambition, no impetus to even get started, much less realize those goals.
Given the state of my life, I often find myself wondering if it's worth the effort to start over. I suspect I'm already more than half done with my life and I've settled into a pretty deep rut of complacency over the years. I find I have less and less energy to push my boundaries, to generate the energy to try to overcome my own weaknesses and basically to heave myself out of this cyclic trench I've dug for myself.
There's plenty of things I'd like to do that might help press me out of my routine: I'd like to stop working my day job (using the term loosely) and write full time for a while, just to see if I could do it; I'd like to travel a bit, see how the experience hits me after being stationary for so long; I'd like to indulge my other creative urges a bit more, go back to the piano again, maybe try sketching again like I did in high school; I'd actually like to change my day job to something that maybe doesn't have the same amount of presumed stability, but provides a greater sense of accomplishment.
The problem is most of those endeavors require money I don't have to spare or energy I don't have at all. As it stands right now, after I get off of work I barely have the energy to make it upstairs to bed; sometimes I just sack out right on my couch. I'm exhausted...by a life that barely has anything in it.
How am I expected to rise to the challenge of the more active life I desire?
There was a time when I was a stalker. This was well before the time the term ‘stalker’ really developed the meaning it has today; indeed, this was even at an age when my sort of single-minded attachment to women with no interest in me was just considered the norm, particularly for socially inept fellows like myself. This was also a time long before you could do web searches to find out where people lived, discover their phone number, rack up dozens of pictures of them off of social media sites, all that jazz that’s so in vogue with stalking these days.
I will now say, in my own defense, that I was not a good stalker. I genuinely *sucked* at even the few stalking tactics that were available to a pining pissant at the time. I was (and frankly still am) so afraid of actually getting the attention of the females I desired that I was never willing to take the kinds of risks that would have been required to be a truly gifted stalker. I did my best to establish where the objects of my interests lived and made attempts at being where they might be to spend time in their presence…but frankly, I was just too timid to make it work.
I realize in retrospect that this was a good thing for my future; if I’d been more aggressive or daring, there could have been consequences far reaching into my life. As time goes on, though, I realize that while I never harmed anyone with my ‘stalking-lite’ technique, I never really learned anything from it either, never matured or evolved past the mindset from which my stalker-ish tendencies sprang. I still don’t know how to get the attention of a woman I find attractive; I still don’t know how to talk to a woman I find attractive if she happens to show me some unsolicited attention; and I still follow many of the same habits I had when I was younger. Although I don’t ride by houses on a tenspeed anymore or try to get assigned projects and/or classes with the women I’m infatuated with, I still find myself habitually going to places where I know women I’m attracted to happen to work. I don’t know if it’s prudence or laziness that constricts my activities…and I don’t much care.
I don’t know where I was going with this, to be honest. Just sort of thinking in print, trying to unravel an idea that’s been curling around my brain since this morning. I was making an effort to write while at Starbucks; both of the women I like most there were working and I thought about my motivations for going there on a regular basis. While it’s true I like Starbucks chai and that pretty much all of the staff there know and talk to me in a friendly manner, I also recall that the reason I first started going there regularly was because of Devin behind the counter. I thought of her as “The Goddess with the Golden Eyes”, because for some reason when I first saw her, I remembered her as having, well, golden yellow eyes (which turned out to be not true; still unsure of where that impression came from). When Amanda, a previous crush from the defunct Borders, also started working there…well, I was locked in. It was local, had two pretty young women behind the counter and it had good chai. There was no other place for me.
The pathetic part about this is both of them have long-standing relationships that seem entirely contented and both are at least 10 years younger than me. For some people, neither of these facts would matter, but both matter to me, in varying degrees. I’ll admite the latter doesn’t matter all that much to me…but the former is very important. I intentionally ruined one relationship in my lifetime and that fact disgusts me. There’s plenty of reasons that I’m disgusted with myself as a person, but this is one of the few that directly impacted other people. Although that story seemed to have a happy ending of sorts at the other end of the line, I’ve never quite managed to reconcile how the whole thing came to pass. The very idea of being the catalyst for the dissolution of another relationship nauseates me with horror.
Anyway, my point is that I’m still stalking, in perhaps the laziest fashion possible. The real reason I keep going to Starbucks is to spend time in the presence of two attractive young women who I know will never look at me as more than a regular and slightly overly-friendly customer.
At nearly forty years of age, it’s kind of sad to recognize that socially you never became more than the fourteen year old boy who spent his time watching the pretty girls from the shadows.
Devious Journal Entry
There was a time when I was a stalker. This was well before the time the term ‘stalker’ really developed the meaning it has today; indeed, this was even at an age when my sort of single-minded attachment to women with no interest in me was just considered the norm, particularly for socially inept fellows like myself. This was also a time long before you could do web searches to find out where people lived, discover their phone number, rack up dozens of pictures of them off of social media sites, all that jazz that’s so in vogue with stalking these days.
I will now say, in my own defense, that I was not a good stalker. I genuinely *sucked* at even the few stalking tactics that were available to a pining pissant at the time. I was (and frankly still am) so afraid of actually getting the attention of the females I desired that I was never willing to take the kinds of risks that would have been required to be a truly gifted stalker. I did my best to establish where the objects of my interests lived and made attempts at being where they might be to spend time in their presence…but frankly, I was just too timid to make it work.
I realize in retrospect that this was a good thing for my future; if I’d been more aggressive or daring, there could have been consequences far reaching into my life. As time goes on, though, I realize that while I never harmed anyone with my ‘stalking-lite’ technique, I never really learned anything from it either, never matured or evolved past the mindset from which my stalker-ish tendencies sprang. I still don’t know how to get the attention of a woman I find attractive; I still don’t know how to talk to a woman I find attractive if she happens to show me some unsolicited attention; and I still follow many of the same habits I had when I was younger. Although I don’t ride by houses on a tenspeed anymore or try to get assigned projects and/or classes with the women I’m infatuated with, I still find myself habitually going to places where I know women I’m attracted to happen to work. I don’t know if it’s prudence or laziness that constricts my activities…and I don’t much care.
I don’t know where I was going with this, to be honest. Just sort of thinking in print, trying to unravel an idea that’s been curling around my brain since this morning. I was making an effort to write while at Starbucks; both of the women I like most there were working and I thought about my motivations for going there on a regular basis. While it’s true I like Starbucks chai and that pretty much all of the staff there know and talk to me in a friendly manner, I also recall that the reason I first started going there regularly was because of Devin behind the counter. I thought of her as “The Goddess with the Golden Eyes”, because for some reason when I first saw her, I remembered her as having, well, golden yellow eyes (which turned out to be not true; still unsure of where that impression came from). When Amanda, a previous crush from the defunct Borders, also started working there…well, I was locked in. It was local, had two pretty young women behind the counter and it had good chai. There was no other place for me.
The pathetic part about this is both of them have long-standing relationships that seem entirely contented and both are at least 10 years younger than me. For some people, neither of these facts would matter, but both matter to me, in varying degrees. I’ll admite the latter doesn’t matter all that much to me…but the former is very important. I intentionally ruined one relationship in my lifetime and that fact disgusts me. There’s plenty of reasons that I’m disgusted with myself as a person, but this is one of the few that directly impacted other people. Although that story seemed to have a happy ending of sorts at the other end of the line, I’ve never quite managed to reconcile how the whole thing came to pass. The very idea of being the catalyst for the dissolution of another relationship nauseates me with horror.
Anyway, my point is that I’m still stalking, in perhaps the laziest fashion possible. The real reason I keep going to Starbucks is to spend time in the presence of two attractive young women who I know will never look at me as more than a regular and slightly overly-friendly customer.
At nearly forty years of age, it’s kind of sad to recognize that socially you never became more than the fourteen year old boy who spent his time watching the pretty girls from the shadows.
As Time Goes By
I've been watching "As Time Goes By" on YouTube for most of the day, sort of full-belly wallowing in poorly aligned sense of nostalgia. For those who may not know, the show is a British romantic sit-com staring Dame Judy Dench and Geoffrey Palmer as a romantic couple, separated in the midst of their youthful love affair back in the '50s who unexpectedly find each other again in the early 90′s and end up rekindling their lost love. Many aspects of the show are now pretty well dated, but the human interactions are still largely apt.
What I expect fascinates me about the show is how it manages to encompass my past, present and future, my sadness, my hope and my fear.
Ever since I first started getting back into the series, when I rediscovered PBS Brit-com nights, I've developed a sort of kinship with Geoffrey Palmer's Lionel Hardcastle. He's dour, snarky and ill-equipt to suffer fools, even ones he actually needs to get along with (i.e. his publisher, the much younger, vaguely misogynistic and presumably "hip" Alistair Deacon). Although this re-connection would have begun when I was only in my late 20′s, I'd already developed much of his intrinsic annoyance with humanity and I suspect some of his bluntly honest wit has wormed its way into my disposition.
Perhaps I find it so easy to put myself into Lionel's position has less to do with his attitude, however, than the circumstances of under which he reconnects with his former love, Judi Dench's Jean Pargetter. Lionel's history, after losing touch with Jean when he left for Korea, seems one less intentionally chosen, rather determined by passive acceptance of whatever lot life threw at him, at least until he stumbles across Jean again. Their initial stages of rekindling their paused romance is often fraught with regrets, a long litany of "What if's" and "If only's", something I'm all too familiar with these days. Over time, he got busy with the business of living in the now, only looking back to reminisce, rather than to pine for yesterday and what might have been.
This is a trick I've not yet mastered.
Somehow, Jean and Lionel's love affair both inspires me and terrifies me. If I am to find love again, I don't want to have to wait until I'm in my fifties to do it. I already feel extraordinarily old and it doesn't much help that all the women who turn my head now start at an age where I'm actually old enough to be their father and go up from there…but generally not nearly to my own age. Lionel had a brief spat of this in the very beginning of the series when Jean's daughter Judy took a shine to him before Jean and Lionel reconnected officially, the primary differences being that 1) Judy was a definitely interested party and 2) while Lionel was intrigued and flattered, the most direct interest from Judy came after he ascertained who her mother was and he found himself inclined to rebuff her advances. To date, none of the women I've had an interest in have given any indication of reciprocation.
Which, all told, is probably all for the better since I wouldn't know what to do if any had.
There is an insidious sort of hope intrinsic in the show that makes it hard to just dismiss. What with Lionel and Jean, Lionel's father Rocky newlywed to wife Madge, Judy and Alistair and even Jean's personal secretery and her copper boyfriend Harry, the sheer amount of mildly dysfunctional romanticism set to understated comedy rampant in the show inspires a certain amount of optimism in the viewer, even for some as stubbornly pessimistic as I am. I don't know what it's going to take for me to reconcile the life I rode hard into a wall and left a smoldering wreck with the kind of life I'd like to be living, but "As Time Goes By" provides just enough inspiration to convince me to press on. there are no guarantees that "it gets better", no matter what anyone says…
But likewise, that doesn't mean it can't.
Superficially Moral
I. Don't. Give. A. Fuck.
Does it torment me to no end, knowing that I'll never attain that elusive relationship that I long for? Course it does. But this is what you get when you mix romantic idealism and physical shallowness in a single man...frankly, a mess of ill-founded expectations and an unwillingness to compromise poorly realized principles. Mix and match as one sees fit.
How does this break down, one may wonder (or not, as the case may be, but I'm ranting, so I feel the need to explain regardless)? It's remarkably simple, really. Although what the women I find attractive look like can vary quite widely in appearance, most will be readily identifiable as well above the 'league' of which my own appearance would give ready access to without a shining personality, hugely stuffed wallet or obscenely bulging trouser line (depending on each particular woman's peculiar bent). Based largely on the attitudes of the years in which I was raised and the literature I was prone to reading at the time, we find the combination that leads to my grossly inordinate sense of self-worth and, subsequently, entitlement to a beautiful, genius and compassionate significant other who would supposedly see past my selfish, conceited nature and love me for the person I never bothered to become.
Then we come to the other half of the dysfunctional spectrum, wherein the expectation people have that if you can't get what you want, you have to 'settle' or 'lower you standards'. This, and I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, is complete fucking bollocks. Who, in their right mind, wants to spend their entire life with some one who A) you settled for and as a result you spend the remainder of your life gazing longingly at more attractive people, consequently making the person you ARE with feel like second-hand shit or, possibly worse yet B) you know settled for YOU, who is constantly chafing against the boundaries of a relationship, incessantly looking for something 'better', which is undeniably unlikely to come along but they still retain that irrational and frankly hurtful sense of hope.
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Am I totally mad or am I making a valid point here. Part of the reason I felt the need to lay this out here is because...I'm honestly not certain. Maybe it's a sense of self-destructive derangement that causes me to think in these terms, but this rant best illustrates how I justify the lonely sort of existence I've taken upon myself.
It really boils down to this, I suppose: both too moral and too shallow to 'settle'.
How's that for a paradox.