The Truth Behind Why this Shit isn't Funny anymore

While in real life I am still mildly amusing, the truth is that the person behind the Heather curtain has been in a bit of an existentialist funk lately. That's right -- you KNOW things are fucked up bad when Heather uses the word existentialist in a sentence.

Here's why. I cannot for the life of me seem to figure out what is the point. Can you? And if so, can you tell me? Because whenever I really really sit and think about it, no matter how hard I try or what angle I approach it from -- I just don't get it. I wake up every day and I go to my job and I spin in that little circle and then I go take my classes and spin in those little circles and in between I have relationships with Scott and my friends and my parents and so forth. What is the point??

I met Scott and my friends and I love all of them and think they are wonderful and they think I'm wonderful and we laugh and we cry and we talk and we don't talk and we argue and we don't. But I could have lived two blocks over and I may not have met ANY of these people, it may have been an ENTIRELY different set of people and I would have a similarly happy or unhappy life as the case may be. And let's just say that there IS some driving reason behind WHY I met this particular set of people and why they met me -- so what? In the end, does it really matter? In the end, we're just going to die anyways and then whatever happens to us -- happens.

And does anything happen? Or is it just that we are so friggin' arrogant that we can't fathom the concept that we are no more eternal than the dust we supposedly came from?

I'm frankly not sure if this is PMS or fears about the future or what, but I just can't shake these thoughts. And it's not even like I'm depressed about it, though I daresay someone would argue with that. I don't feel depressed -- and I've been depressed before, I have some idea what it's like. I'm just in a funk.

Maybe it's all this philosophy crap. Perhaps learning about the nature of knowledge is not exactly uplifting. Frankly, I miss being flaky and not thinking about stuff. I remember when I used to be around people when they were talking about these grand epistemological views and someone would inevitably excitedly blurt "OH, I think about that ALL the time." and I would think that not only had I NEVER thought about whatever it was, it never would have even occurred to me to think about it.

How do you know that you don't know indeed.

I'm off to self-medicate with more chocolate covered pretzels.

How did Thursday get here?


I can only vaguely recall a time when I could blog daily. Or even think about blogging daily. Wow.

Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion that you are really just a hamster running around in God's wheel? I do.

That for me is about as close as I get to religion.

Seriously though, sometimes I just run and run and run and nothing ever seems to get accomplished.

Throw some cheese in here, man.

You ever beat yourself up for procrastinating and get so used to beating yourself up that you start to enjoy the sick feeling you get from hating yourself for something that is SO preventable??

Yeah, me neither.

But, if I did... Just supposing. This would definitely be high time. I think I need to have parents on full-time duty again. For example, when the wedding invitations came, they gave me a ration of shit that I would NEVER get them sent out on time because I always procrastinate on everything and there's just no way I could handle all that in the correct time frame.

Yeah? Fuck you fucker. They'll be done with time to spare just to prove to them that they can be!

That's what I need. Someone telling me matter-of-factly that I can't do something. It wasn't so much that they were rude or anything, they were just so certain that I couldn't do it that it has been my driiving goal to prove them wrong. I sure wish that they would matter-of-factly tell me that there is no way I can ever get even a C in this Communication class so I could make sure I worked hard enough to prove them wrong.

Why can't I just do things? Why do I need these BIZARRE head games to get them done?? Who can I blame for THAT?

Man, I think Scott is right -- I DO make things too hard. Sometimes.

Easter

I'm not what anyone would call a Christian and so Easter is an odd time of year for me. It's very specific to the Christians, unlike Christmas which has been bastardized into being everyone's holiday. People wish me a happy Easter and I accept and wish it back, like it means anything to me at all.

Sometimes I think I agree with George on Seinfeld -- we need Festivus. A holiday for the rest of us.

I think the closest thing non-religious people get is their own birthdays and frankly, that just seems so self-serving even to me.

In other news, I went on a shopping binge yesterday while my fiance was on a drinking binge. I got the expected drunk call and wound up going to pick him up from his location after midnight.

It always fills me with mixed emotions when he has one of these drinking with the boys days. For one thing, it's VERY rare that it happens anymore and he looks upon it with an excitement I can only compare to little kids at Christmas time. As the week leads up to the event, the palpitations about the amount of alcohol that he will consume fills the room. One of the emotions that I go through is jealousy. I wish I had someone to go and spend the day just drinking and acting stupid with. I wish I had the stamina to drink and be stupid all day. I had a few days like that in my past and I've always looked at them fondly. But, now the thought of it just has visions of toilet bowls dancing in my head.

Also, I'm a drunk that needs a lot of validation and support. I will get too drunk or too sloppy or too needy or whathaveyou and need babysitting that will range from quite a lot to mild supervision. This is not Scott's strong suit. Not to say he's not willing to help me out when I'm at that level, but he definitely doesn't enjoy it. I wouldn't say that I enjoy the caretaking side of it either, but it's different. When he's drunk, his defenses are way down and he will usually allow me to take care of him in ways that he normally throws up walls about. I like that part of it a lot. I guess it's nice to be openly needed once in a while.

Which is interesting, because one of the reasons that he really doesn't enjoy the "caretaking" side of being the sober one in that situation is because he's had bad experiences with past drunk girlfriends. Tell ME about that -- I was married to someone who was drunk a fair amount of time and hence, another of the mixed emotions in the works. I try not to hold that against Scott, but I know that it comes out in passive-aggressive ways when I least expect it. It's not his fault that just the mere idea of being around a man that is that drunk harkens back truly dark times in my life and I try to not tie in the two. After all, for Scott a day drinking with the boys is an occasion to be lauded because of its rareness, but that guy I was married to -- it was just another Tuesday night. (Or Wednesday or Sunday.)

Skew tangent... Actually it has taken me a fair amount of time to come to terms that not all men who drink will treat me badly. One of the first men I dated after my separation couldn't come to terms with how uncomfortable I was just being around Jaegermeister -- but once you associate something with having a belt wrapped around your throat and someone choking you, well... That's just a little difficult to shake. Which is what I told him, to which I was informed that if I was dumb enough to marry the guy AFTER that happened, then shame on me and I should just get over my hang-ups.

Indeed.

Needless to say, not only would Scott never say or do anything like that to me -- he's probably at his absolute nicest to me when he has been drinking too much. All the barriers are down, all the defenses. Just soft and yet strong.

Just human. And that's what I love. Men try so hard to be Superman for us and run around and leap buildings and save us from the unknown. We don't want that. We've been doing that on our forever. We really just want Clark Kent -- someone human, someone there for us, someone who needs to be appreciated and appreciates us in return.

Anyways. Some things to think about.

HP

I miss blogging. I do. I wish I had the guilt free conscience to just sit and type nonsensical crap for hours ad nauseum as I used to. I actually used to get a little chirrup of a thrill at the thought of something to blog about. I would jot notes on napkins of topics I had come up with and couldn't wait to come and post them. And wait for what my readers had to say.

And wait.

And wait some more.

The thrill is gone. And it's not even so much because I don't get the responses. For a long time it really ceased to be about that at all and became about me and just writing about whatever (almost) I wanted to.

But, now -- when the fuck do I have time for that?

Not because I'm actually doing all of the productive things I am supposed to be doing, but at the very least I think about them damned hard. A lot.

Whatever. Some things I think about though are vain things like how much I wish I could be friends with me. Not necessarily because I think that I am all that but because a lot of people seem to think I am all that and I would like to know what that is about. Am I all that? Am I really as funny as the people at work think I am?? Or have they really not met anyone like me at all?

Scott has this thing about butterflies. Like some people are just so unusual and unique and create such an impression on you that it's akin to a butterfly coming and landing on your nose. Not something that happens every day. And that's why there are people in our lives who think that they are so much closer to us than they really are. Very very few people know me as I really am, beneath the Heather P* show. They think that is me and I LIKE it like that. If you think I am 24/7 sarcastic and balls to the wall out there and crass and straight up no bullshit blunt, then you may be less inclined to waste my time with your melodrama. And that's pretty much the crux of my existence -- avoiding my own and others' melodrama like the plague that it is.

I'm not talking about real life issues in people's lives. I'm talking melodrama. If you don't know the difference, my guess is that you are probably suffering from it.

But, I digress. A LOT. Because there are people that I meet in my daily life who seem constantly amazed at the things that I say. Often, they will repeat them back to me at later times and I don't even remember saying what I said. Which is really sad because then I am laughing at my own jokes not even knowing they are mine.

I just want to be around me as an observer for one day to really know what it's like on the OUTSIDE of Heathers Head.

You know, being in a relationship is such a weird thing. Your life is connected by all these spidery threads to this other person and you have all this STUFF riding on how it's going to pan out and sometimes it is amazing and sometimes it is awful but it is seldom ever dull. (By the way, STUFF is also known as "investments" according to my Communications class.)

And the thing that never ceases to amaze me is the tiny little things that can make the ride INFINITELY better and make the big bad things seem not so bad.

Like, it turns out I'm a bit of a nag. Frankly, if you met the gene pool that I swam out of, this would come as no huge surprise. This causes some friction in our relationship. And I don't like seeing that side of myself and it just puts everything in a dim light. So, there was some clashing last weekend that caused us to need to separate geographically for a little while.

But, the night passed and the week goes by and we laugh together over the dumbest things and talk about everything and it is a wonderful thing. I know he hasn't forgotten that I am a nag and I know that I have not forgotten that he makes me feel like a nag but it just doesn't matter.

Because even after all this time and all the ups and downs, there are still times that I get the butterflies in my stomach knowing I'm going to see him soon or talk to him again or whatever. And that to me is just the coolest part of it. When I am driving in to work in the morning and I think about something that happened between us and it just makes me smile and sometimes even laugh out loud, to me -- that's what it is all about.

Bad things are going to happen. Maybe even really bad things, who knows? I hope not, everyone does. But I know that as long as we are in it together then we just can't lose.

Dumb things I enjoy... We both are addicted to the Apprentice and normally get together to watch it but circumstances this week haven't allowed that. So, during the first big commercial break, I went to call him to talk to him about something on it and his phone was busy. I thought to myself that man is so tired of talking to me that he took his friggin' phone off the hook! The nerve of him! And so on. Not two seconds later, the message indicator comes on my phone. I checked my voicemail and it was him -- bawling me out melodramatically about screening his calls and what have we come to, etc. When I called him back, I was laughing so hard I almost fell off the couch. We were trying to call each other at the EXACT same time. It's kismet. But, it's fun.

That's the thing. We just have fun. And yet, I can talk to him about the not as fun stuff too and just feel completely comfortable in every way. I think in a week when I have seen JUST how opposite the spectrum can go because of a friend's really unfortunate situation, I am more than a little appreciative of what I really do have.

I know -- gag, right? But at least my voice doesn't change octaves when I'm talking to him and that has just got to count for something!!

HP