Christmas spirit

I promised to be more cheerful and watching White Christmas always does that for me this time of year. I'm notoriously picky about my Christmas favorites. A Christmas Story? Meh. It's a Wonderful Life? Lies. But I love me some White Christmas.Vera Ellen was my style icon growing up.

Goals

A recent comment (from this post) inspired me to talk a little bit about my post-breakup goals: 

Anonymous said...

If you get lucky enough to snag another guy, stop acting crazy. Don't do drugs, and give a lot of head. You might want to lose a little weight too. Walking a lot will make the depression go away.

While I know this commenter is just being an total asshole, he/she raises some excellent points. I've been working on getting my head on straight and the best way to do that is to set some goals. Spending more time exercising is one of them. Over the past five years I went from vegan to vegetarian to mostly-vegetarian-plus-some-poultry, and it's amazing how the pounds have added up. Really, they're probably mostly cheese pounds. (I went for SIX YEARS without it!) A daily walk or some yoga/Pilates won't just get me back into my size smalls, but will improve my overall mood. I used to be a fanatic about exercising. It's just a matter of getting back into that mindset.

Another important goal on my list is to get more involved. I'd love to start volunteering on a regular basis and now I have the time to do it. So I'm going to make it a New Year's resolution, and start sending out resumes. I'm super excited about this already!

As for not doing drugs and giving more head...you're an asshole, anonymous commenter, but we've already established that. I would absolutely be "lucky" to "snag" another guy. I'd consider myself exceptionally lucky to find love again, and that guy will be exceptionally lucky, too. If you'd like to stop hiding behind the internet and share some more of your kind advice, feel free to email me at leigh.cummings@gmail.com.

Solitaire

This is the first time I’ve ever really lived by myself, which is odd because I’ve always felt like a very independent person. But now I’m realizing that I’m kind of a baby about certain things. In the wee morning hours today, I either woke up and saw a bug on my quilt or DREAMED that I saw a bug on my quilt and shot out of bed like whoa. I spent the next twenty minutes whimpering, shaking my quilt, and wondering if there was ever a bug in the first place. And hating myself for being so easily unsettled. If I had a boyfriend or a roommate, this wouldn’t have even been an issue. When someone else is there, the bugs (real or imagined) are way less intimidating. 

It makes me wonder if I’m cut out for this solitary existence. Don’t get me wrong, I love having alone time but not 24/7. I miss being able to turn to someone and say, “Hey, you-know-who’s acting CRAZY again,” or, “A Doctor Who movie!?! I don’t know how I feel about this!” I miss having a constant sounding board, whether romantic or platonic. My girl friends are stepping up to the plate in amazing ways to fill the void but they aren’t physically next to me, sharing a home. There’s just nothing that compares to that.   

I’ve always been a nester. I love the idea of creating a safe space with someone and having it be, “us against the world.” I know that one day I will have that again, but its absence today is a bummer. I want someone to come and give me a hug and tell me they’ll keep an eye out for that scary bug, even if it was never really there.

Can't cry anymore!

We’ve all been in a place where we’re kind of on the verge of tears at all times. I’ve called that place home for the past, oh, six months. SIX MONTHS. Six months of shedding tears at the drop of a hat, for no logical reason. It’s gone on so long that it’s become normal and that is depressing (or is it “depression.” Probably a little of both.) I’m kind of sick of my emotions being so close to the surface but am not sure what to do…other than to just wait it out. How does one deal with a volume of grief that just seems to grow? Right now I’m trying to immerse myself in it by reading novels that deal with loss or sadness. My thinking is that maybe revelling in it will help, in a Zen way. You know, “BE the sadness.”

What would you do?

Oh, the guilt.

Having grown up very very Catholic, I feel a crushing amount of guilt on a daily basis: guilt for the way I look, the way I (sometimes) act, the way that I’ve dealt with certain situations. The list goes on and on. Is it just me or is guilt the most counterproductive of all emotions? I mean, sure, if you do a bad thing intentionally, you should feel bad…but if it comes from simply being yourself, that isn’t healthy. I have guilt down to a tragic science. One of my goals for this year – the last of my twenties – is to minimize unreasonable bad feelings. I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems like that can be accomplished in a few steps:

1.       Acknowledge the guilt
2.       Identify its source
3.       Calmy and firmly release yourself from it.

There’s something effective in just saying out loud, “I am no longer going to feel guilt over this.” It might not disappear immediately, but you’re starting to reprogram your brain to respond to more positive commands. Like training a dog. Guilt is bad. No guilt is a treat. (Just as long as I don’t start rewarding myself with actual treats, like candy or something. That’ll mean weight gain and SURPRISE! Guilt.)

I look back at my relationship with my ex and am consumed with remorse for a lot of different things. I feel shitty for having dragged us both through the mud. I feel like a fool for having ignored things that didn’t sit right with me, things that I can’t believe I didn’t identify as red flags. I feel like a jerk for having taken my friends and family along for the ride on the emotional roller coaster (even though I’m sure they didn’t mind…much.) In general I feel like I did just about everything wrong, right up to this very day. I’m missing him and missing our connection, and am not sure how to go about handling it. 

GUILT. 

There’s either a giant glass of wine or an hour on the stair-stepper in my future. Maybe both at the same time. Mmmmm…and I refuse to feel guilty about that.

Komplete Kraziness

Most people are probably rolling their eyes and shrugging at this whole Kardashian/Humphries divorce debacle, but it kind of pisses me off. I may not be entirely sure about marriage for myself, but I believe in the sanctity on marriage and that it shouldn’t be, for lack of a better term, pissed on. And the fact that she made a statement saying that it was a “difficult decision?” Give me a break. A difficult decision is not made this quickly. The entire marriage only lasted 72 days (after they started dating in December of 2010, which means they haven’t even been together for a whole year.) This is craziness! When my now-ex and I decided to end our relationship, it definitely was not something we took lightly. We worked hard to try to salvage things, probably for about a year. Longer than the Ks were even together!

I just don’t get it. Here are my personal “rules” for marriage (and commitment in general.) They are simple:

·         If you’re not 150% sure about someone, you shouldn’t marry them.
·         Once you’re married you should try like hell to make it work.

The end.

An embarassment of...embarassments.

This post has nothing to do with romantic or platonic relationships, but rather what a freaking spaz I am. I really should be followed around by a camera crew, because at least once a day I act like an ass, say something completely insane, or physically fall down.

A few days ago I was walking towards my house and saw my landlady on the front stoop, doing some transplanting of her potted flowers. Her back was to me so I said, “Hi [Landlady]!” then I took a breath and as I did, I snorted so loud and long that it reverberated off the cobblestone street and the buildings around us. The snort hung in the air like a cloud of gnats before moving away down the street at about 1/100^th the speed of sound.  She was gracious enough to pretend that I hadn’t just made a sound like a human jackhammer, god love her.

There’s a woman I work with who lives close to me and from time to time she’ll offer me a ride home. When she pulled over to the bus stop yesterday afternoon I ran up to the car, thrilled that I would escape public transportation. But as I opened the door I could hear her groan and say, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh no,” under her breath. She was pulling over for someone else, and obviously didn’t want me tagging along. It doesn’t appear that she likes me too much, either, so that was even more embarassing. Probably because I said something 100% off the wall to her during one ride. She was telling me that both of her kids were asking for laptops: her son wanted one for graduation and her younger daughter wanted one just because. In my head I thought, “A laptop for graduation makes sense, but the daughter’s request is a bit too much for no occasion.” Of course, what came out of my mouth was, “Shouldn’t he get something…more…for graduating?” In the intonation of C. Bing, could I be any more presumptuous? It’s not even what I meant! I’ve been kicking myself for that one ever since.

And just to round things out, this morning the wind blew my skirt up above my waist while I stood waiting for the bus (with several other people.) Good morning, CDTA riders! I’m going to crawl under a rock and die now.