Best Line

"*insert name here* you are such a joke, Mickey Mouse has a picture of you on his watch."

Absolutely roaring.

One Fish, Two Fish

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Thesis Update: I believe I am a bit beyond the halfway point for the redo of the data. (But I have had to put a lot aside due to crappy data. I will have to tackle that at the end.)

Letter to DCS

Dear DCS,

I wrote this over and over and over again in my head last night, and this morning I can’t come up with a single elegant turn of phrase, poignant sentence at all. I went through the engagement pictures and cried; I went through the graduation pictures (that I never got) in my head and cried. I went through the pictures of us doing things that I never let you take because the camera makes me uncomfortable, and I cried.

DCS, I have let you treat me like garbage for six months. I have been patient, long suffering and every other adjective straight out of Corinthians 13. I simply cannot continue our relationship this way. I cannot be putting everything in and not getting anything out. I have let you string me along. And I have lied to myself.

“He is just having trouble transitioning. He is just lashing out at the one thing that he is secure enough in his life to take his problems and frustrations out on. It is like an anorexic; except it is our relationship that he feels he has control over, not food. I know how much he loves me and I will be here for him while he needs this. I will give him my unconditional and endless love and that will pull him through this time.” That is the ridiculous story I have trumped up for you and I have told myself and everyone that has encouraged me that I am worth more than this. I fabricated this lie to tell myself to comfort me because you keep on hurting me.

I understand doubts and finding ones way and all that, but I never thought you and I were mutually exclusive of finding oneself. I never turned you out when I looked for my path.

Everyday I rush to the post, to the email to see if there is a blast from the past style note, a love letter, a sign that things are on. I check your AIM profile to see if you have put in a note like Heather and James had. “My girlfriend is the most AMAZING person!!!! I am CRAZY about Heather!!!!” You won’t even acknowledge the stupid facebook boyfriend link. Every weekend I wait on tenterhooks, just KNOWING that you will appear, like I have for you when you needed that. I have my cell on me like a growth, waiting for your calls. Waiting for you to call me, to verbally throw yourself prostrate before me, having realized the enormity of losing an “us” life, and you beg my forgiveness. Sincere reflection and apology. And I will say, “Oh sweetpea, forgive? There is nothing to forgive now, I love you too. With my whole heart and life, I love you.” A call that I will hear sincere love and it will be backed up with action that makes the words believable. “I love you, come home this weekend. Bring some stuff so we can make this our place.”

Almost every time you do call though, it isn’t that. It is you reasserting that you don’t want me in your life, and therefore don’t want me. How many times and in how many different ways do I need to hear that before I get the message? It turns me cold and abrupt. If you really loved me like you say you do, if you really wanted that life together like you say you do, you wouldn’t treat me like this, it wouldn’t be a multi-month decision making process. It isn’t out of the ordinary for a woman to want to be the first priority to the man that says he loves her or want to be treated like a princess by that man.

You know you never ask me things. I want to know your dreams, what drives you, but you never return the question. I beg you to let me know what I can do to help you regain your footing, your happiness, but you never assk how you can contribute to mine.

I am very concerned that you have this fantasy that if we are meant to be together you can treat me worse than a dog and that later everything will be peaches. I believe that we are meant to be together, but I don’t do the let’s get back together later. I have learned that. If you can treat me in such a manner that I leave, you could do it again in the future and that isn’t something to put myself through again.

I didn’t have to leave you to know I love you. I loved you from the start.

DCS, I cannot be this person anymore. This heartbroken, soul shattered remnant of who I used to be. I am a wraith floating through my own life, broken by you. I need to search for the pieces of my dignity. I need to find where I misplaced my spine. I need to gather the pieces of my life that don’t have you in it and try to cobble a new life out of these. The very thought of that makes me nauseous. I can feel the loss of unborn (and dead) children with you, I can see the Springfield home evaporate, the downtown apartment made into a bachelor pad, and I feel your long cool fingers slip out of my grasp. Hand holding no more.

You say that this person is who you must be right now, but at what cost DCS?

There is no time to dawdle. Ask me not to go. Be sincere. Be the man you want to be. Be the man you see having that life together with me. Come see me. Write me love letters. Invite me home. Pursue. Genuine. Apologize. Realize how close you came to losing me and everything about a life together with us. Be the romantic. Let us plan grad school and work and life and adventure and love together. Let me love you with my whole heart. Love me with your whole heart. Be the man of my today and future, not just my past. Let me be your future.

Love,
Kc

There is no hero left in him, no boldness, no courage. All that remains of a man I fell in love with is a rude, depressed, angry shell. What happens to do this? Is the DCS I know held hostage in a dark closet in his mind somewhere? How do I deal with the statements of "I want to be together with you", "I don't want you out of my life", "you are my future" and this treatment from him?

How easy it is to say, "Oh Kc, just concentrate on yourself now. Let him go." I wish it were so easy. I wish I was one of those people that could say "I wouldn't trade all this pain for never having had to be with him." Because I would. If I could see the now, four years ago, I would have not allowed him to convince me to be together.

I think that this is really it.
How can I let go of someone who is everything to me?
How can I not call?

How do I do this?

Smurple

It is funny how in this "enlightened" time, we all know intellectually what to do, how to act, what to value. We all say things like "I am worth more than that." "I deserve better." "No one should ever treat me like that or make me feel that way." But you know then comes that crappy emotional side which is the wallowing "that girl." I am amazed and horrified that I have somehow cultured within myself, "that girl." (that being said, I also know that I can't expunge her quite yet.)

"That girl" is the one that writes this page and surfaces once a week in DCS calls, but for the most part, it is the regular Kc that goes about the pressing on in life.

I am very glad to have been able to study here on the island because it is a great location for what I do and VJ's right - the seclusion allows for a more intense dedication and concentration, but "that girl" has to get home. I am very lucky and pleased about my great house and where I live, but "that girl" is definitely hung up on the lack of a bathtub, the sewage in the streets, the lack of hard cider .

Trust me I want to pull "that girl" out behind the house and beat her up too, but then again, sometimes, it is nice to let "that girl" have her way.

It is like a shameful weakness that I have that I want this grand romance, a sweeping love affair, one that sets sail ships and epic poems are written about - but really - what budding scientist can talk like that? That is almost like it would negate any serious work I have or will do.

Mleh.

I celebrate my birthday, may half birthday and now...my decimal birthday!

Next Major Decimal Birthday is my10000th day on Sunday, May 07, 2006

If I want a freaking tiara...

Please remember, dear gentle reader, that this is my space to expunge my mental carousel.



My non-internet life is filled with thesis work from waking to sleeping, with a small chunk of time to talk to DCS or write this journal, or even hell, think of something besides freaking fish. So I think it is safe to reassure you that I am being productive. As for making myself "better," that is very difficult to do when I am in a place where I no longer care to be. And I am tired of making the best of the situation. That is what I do, I slather a sorority girl smile on, and press on. But you know what? Screw that right now. There is no way to make myeslf better when one has no tools to do so.

Better:
"Rough day, I just need to sink into that bubble bath tonight with a cider and relax." - no bathtub, no hard cider on the island

"I'll just pop out and do some retail therapy." - town is 45 minutes away and there is no retail therapy on a grad student budget.

"What I need is a quiet space to meditate." - there is no such thing as quiet here.

These are the normal pick me up type activities, but are unavailable here to do. So all my time is spent of the thesis. Wait, I went to the movies once this month. And felt too guilty for not working on my data the whole time.

Obviously I am taking care of what I can take care (i.e. thesis) and trying my damnedest to not spend too much time wallowing, however, if I want to use this forum as my space to admit my insecurities, fears, sadness, hopes, - I will. I am sure it is easy to sit in your ivory tower and call my grief and uncertainty "self-imposed suffering", I know because I have been guilty of the same, but you know - I don't see it as self-imposed. I see this simply as my space to distill my thoughts, fears etc. into a more concise thought.

And if I have aspirations for a tiara to wear when I am feeling sad and let down and hopeless, then I reckon that is ok too.

How to delight me

Realize that you have been a jerk and that my own life (in terms of thesis) is crap right now and decide that this would be an appropriate time to go from "I miss you, and I love you and I only see you in my future" to effing princess treatment and true shame and forgiveness asking for the behavior you have been doing, which you will stop at this time too.

Is it too much to ask for princess in return for months of stomaching this vulgarly high level of CRAP from you?

Maybe even a public declaration of my endless tolerance and patience and how you don't deserve that or me, but, pheew what a girl I am that I give it to you anyway.

Too bad he doesn't read this.

I just want to be treated like a princess. I feel like I have REALLY earned it. (sigh)

Anyone got a tiara I could borrow to wear to my pity party?

The Sound of Ultimate Suffering

What am I doing right now? Eating a bowl of plain white rice, with an enormous slab of butter and a glass of white wine for supper. After 6pm.

Warning bells would be going of for my family and DCS. White wine? But you don’t drink white wine. Carbohydrates? After noon? WHITE rice, at all? REAL butter? Who are you and what have you done with Kc? What dominant paradigm has shifted and dumped us all into this crazy alternate universe?!?!!?

Things happen in threes, right?
1= DCS
2= Bump
3= Thesis

Why is the thesis on the list, when you distinctly remember reading that I had finished the major portion of data analysis? Well, it goes like this: Now would be the appropriate time to tell me that my math for the entire matrix I have done needs to be different. yay!

"And that to do your math differently you need to access this info of KF's that, oh look she didn't do -so that needs to be done before you can get these different numbers to use to REDO all the matrix."

REDO the Matrix, you mean that ungodly uncomfortable and unwieldy data analysis I have spent the last year and a half doing? Work on frameworks? No way, now would be the time to do more of f&$%*@$ing KF's work to go back and redo my work, which he should have told me in the first place to do. Which by the way never came up in any of the meetings along the way where I queried if it was being done correctly, as I didn't want to find out at the end (oh wait kind of like I am) that something was wrong, and like I have asked for the past three meetings over the last 6 months about being able to compare the data that wasn't comparable....

"What do you mean you used this data and not that."

Well, Mr. Major Professor, you gave me the database and said - go to work. I used exactly what you gave me to do.

"Hmmm...well let me show you this other stuff. and I have maps and keys and stuff somewhere. and oh look it isn't here, so do this digitizing map crap data first."

Am I ever going to get out of here?

"No"
Dude, you are really killing my done with the matrix high.

And so if you here the sound of Ultimate Suffering, it is I. Hurry – Gather Inigo and Fezzik and come rescue me before I shove my face into the blender.

Weekend to Recharge - For Him

So I have been scarce because I had an exam this morning for my “other” graduate program. Studied all weekend with occasional breaks to do Martix! I don’t think I fared as well as I would have liked and I can’t get the fax number to work, so I can’t even submit it right now.

DCS needed a weekend to re-center and refocus and reinvigorate and all sort of other re- beginning words. This means he sequesters himself in the woods, alone and doesn’t take calls. Of course I had hoped that he would emerge epiphanized and beg me to join him for the wedding and to hurry up and get a ticket home. Needless to say that didn’t happen. I got an “I realize I have disappointed you a lot recently. You don’t deserve that. I am sorry.”

We have always been very apart on our ideas of apologies. I view apologies as a fix. Sorry means that you wouldn’t do it again given the chance or if it is still broken that you are fixing it. So to me sorry is baseless without the fix. To him? Sorry is simply the observation that he did a dick thing. No need to ameliorate the situation, just observe it.

He is simply floundering. He has been for a while. First it was fear about graduation and growing up, now it is new job and balancing all aspects of his life. Simply floundering. I fear that I am back in a situation where I am treading water for more than myself. Everyone has to swim or tread water for themselves, but sometimes we need help or we drown. Seems like I am back in the lifeguard position of keeping a face out of the water and trying to keep him from melting down. I don’t know that I am doing the best job.

He has realized that he lets himself get pulled in too many directions and doesn’t make time for himself. He doesn’t seem to get that prioritizing his life components will aid in dealing with those demands. Too much like planning. Which he is apparently against now.

I realize that I give a lot of time, energy, and consideration to my relationships with people and have an ever diminishing level of what is acceptable to receive/expect back. Suck it up, that is all they can give right now, that is all you deserve, make the best of it.

I don’t think that I will ever forgive him for uninviting me to his sister’s stupid wedding, for telling me so plainly that I am not family to him, that his family should not regard me as important to him, either. Part of me wishes that I had a capability to hurt him as much as he hurts me, to make him feel as small and value-less as he makes me feel. I wouldn’t – because that is where we differ – I wouldn’t do something knowing it would hurt him. And he can, and does. And then says sorry. Before doing it again.
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Thesis Update – Of the 4 found data sets, 3 are entered into the Matrix now and the fourth is huge. But begun. I am hoping to have this set in by the end of the weekend (the weekend that I wasn’t even supposed to be here, but stateside at the wedding with DCS.) When I get that set entered, the Matrix will be done, and I can go to the next step – the Cross-Shelf Habitat Frameworks! That step is the product. Yay! Product and bulk of my thesis in the form of appendices! If only I could get there already…