Both sides now.

Today, I spent the last twenty minutes of the workday (no I don't get paid and yes it's for school but dammit, it's a workday) putting my reporting skills to good use by Facebook stalking a guy I've randomly run into four times since early December:

1. Met him on the night I went to hear my guitar teacher's band with Bluetooth. He's the guy with whom I shouted "Sweet Child O' Mine" over the expensive cover band.
2. He recognized me when I went to see the free student union movie last Thursday. We both got there really early. I was wearing the same purple sweater, he said hi, and my brain did that thing where it goes "hm I think maybe yes oh yeah hi!" in rapid clicks of recognition.
3. He was in one of the student film thingies in the running for last Friday's finale. I saw him there in his mock trial suit because that's where he was headed right afterward.
4. This morning at the Statehouse I saw him as I was picking my coins and cell phone and j-school DSL out of one of those dog bowls they put through the metal detector in the lobby. We were both working, and we both smiled and exchanged pleasantries. He looks nice in a suit. 

Facebooked the friend we both have in common --> looked up the school's mock trial team --> got his full name --> found him on Facebook using cross-references --> sent a friend request referencing our coincidental meetings to identify myself. Also used a smiley at the end. Friend request accepted.
He might even be single.
AND HE LIKES TOP GEAR. SCORE. Can I call this one Hamster?

Mike called Suitemate and told her he just wants to be friends.
The three of us went to see The King's Speech this evening. He drove us in his old white Cutlass that shudders every time he revvs it. I sat in back but I got to hold his sword the whole time because it was back there too.
That sounds really dirty the more I say it: "I got to hold his sword."
But they argued. Like, for real. As in, he would start teasing her and she'd get defensive and all of a sudden it'd turn into a real argument. "Kids, don't make me turn this [student union, field trip] around." I actually SAID that MORE THAN ONCE.
She froze him out the whole way home so I blathered on about my possible article on our city's public transportation and made Mike talk about the science and engineering career fair until we got back and she hugged him and I punched him on the shoulder and then a few minutes later he texted me to ask if he should call her tonight or tomorrow and I told him to get it over with and ten minutes after that she came into the computer lab and cried on my shoulder and he texted me about how that was done, then and she sobbed about wanting her mother and having a dual pity party with Clingy and ice cream and chick flicks this weekend.
Hugs, people. Lots and lots of hugs.

Hell with my other weekend plans.

I loved your class, Dr. T.

This entry is also called YOU People Figure It Out; I've Got Editors to Deal With. With Which to Deal. Whatever. I Don't Care Who Goes to the Free Movie.

On a sidenote...you know, I really don't have it in me right now.
I want ice cream. In celebration of tangible proof that my diaphragm works. Gross? No. Life-affirming. And across the street, so I will need a jacket.

"It's like we're spelunking instead of reporting." I helped Procrastination Guy file his bio copy correctly in Word today. It's probably the most competant I'll feel all semester.

The future of my futures.

On the future that could have been:
I can't help thinking that if I hadn't broken up with BF, I'd still have access to hot shower water.
On the very near future:
"Hey, Miss Insomnia, are you insomnia'd now?"
On my future career:
Apparently a short story about a suicidal superhero is heavy stuff. But do they like it?

On my other future career:
Maybe they'll delay the governor inuaguration, too. This is South Carolina; NOBODY can handle snow even when it doesn't stick, and this shit's been hanging out since Sunday.
No, I don't have anything better to do than sit on my student email and refresh it for a couple hours to see what my terrifyingly competent professor (so described because it's also terrifying how competent he expects us to be) comes up with in the way of online meetings and/or "Guys, just read the syllabus and schedule. That should bring you up to date. Fresh batteries for your interviewing recorders tomorrow and fresh buttons for your interview pants, okay?"
Except watch the new episode of Greek, but I can do both at the same time.

On the future of this blog: I plan on tracking my breakup rehab, bouts of lonley bored depression, and sex life here until I get into a new Relationship. Capital R, see, to denote the smushy romantic connection the thought of which currently makes me gag and reach for a drink. I am not ready to join those ranks again. I won't be for...well, fuck knows when but it'll be awhile. 
Other people being together are so cute, though.

Random tangent time!
JAZZ MUSIC. I grasp onto you as something my ex loves but I have no idea why. I don't understand. I can't tell you apart, except when you're ragtime and then you're awesome but then you're not really jazz anymore. Otherwise, you're elevator music that makes me wonder how such a sophisticated type of music with such a complicated chord system and theoretical underpinnings can be so damn boring.
BF, together we were probably the whitest couple on the planet, but thank you for also loving hiphop (let's be honest, you had me at The Grey Album) and helping me avoid Journey as much as possible to keep my blood pressure down.

Three years.

"I don't know if I've been changed for the better
Because I knew you
I have been changed
For good."
--Wicked. A quote from our musical on our day.

I have not cried yet. I don't plan to.

Also: dude has usurped Festivus. Unsuccessfully thanks to the US Postal Service, it sounds like.
Get the fuck off my Seinfeld.

It was just getting past PG.

More random conversation bits from yesterday. My id answers in italics.

From a friend of mine who just got back from teaching English in Korea and was randomly visiting the student union before he leaves to go teach in Japan in a couple weeks:

"So I heard you dumped BF. Good for you."
Uh, thanks?
"You're too good for him."
I am? 
"I guess. I don't really know what to make of BF. He's just...BF."
Yeah, me either. You have been inside my parents' house, and now all we have in common is an ex-girlfriend.

I am a people with a Korean lesson now. 

From the former principal of my dorm, who loves BF and tolerates me because BF introduced me to them and the dorm:

"Maybe you'll get back together. It's happened once before!"
*punchsnap* FUCK OFF!

That made me so fucking angry.  Yes, in September of my sophomore year, I broke up with BF for three weeks because there was another pretty boy who wanted to kiss me and whom I wanted to kiss. It was a mistake, I made everybody including myself miserable, and I patched it up as soon as I could as well as I could.
I don't know how to make this look different. I don't know how to let people know I've grown into this decision and that it's serious and final. So instead I feel like punching an old man and breaking his cell phone so he can't make patronizing news reports to his wife while I'm standing there trying to be polite. RAGE.

At the end of a random texting conversation with Bluetooth:

Aw, and it was just getting past PG.
I don't want to talk about the non-PG parts of yourself that you shave. I don't shave there and I don't want to hear the experiences of people who do. GO TO BED.

No. The dirty talk is live-show only, folks.
Sometimes I feel like I'm handling this really well, with all the right expectations and everything, and then sometimes I feel like I'm botching it badly.

 

Play us out, fellas.

I'm going home for Thanksgiving break in a couple hours. I'm taking this cold and my Sanity Rabbit with me.

Not pictured: actual sanity. He can flip, too.

I won't have blog access, thanks to Dad's paranoia about me going anywhere except my email account on the home computer. But I'm not planning on having anything to blog about when I'm miles away from my ability to stalk or answer booty calls.

That sounds crude. I feel like I sound more flippant on this blog than I really feel. It's a defense mechanism and something I do all the time. I am most sincerely glad to be buried at home--but that's not right, either. I don't know how I feel.

It's been exactly three weeks.

Bluetooth has to return some videotapes.
Why do I know so many boys who like American Psycho so much?

The sprinklers come on at 4am.

Tuesday night I couldn't sleep. At all. It didn't even feel like my eyes were glued open against my will  or anything. I was just wide awake.
I didn't fight it for once. My roommate was up late to study but even she threw in the towel at about 2:30am, so I made a nest in the study room.

I finally got around to eating my feelings.

Excerpt from email I sent to Jenna at about 12:30am yesterday morning:

Gah, I'm crawling out of my fucking skin. I can't take this. I want to grab Mike's face and yell "DO YOU LIKE ME AS MORE THAN A FRIEND, YES OR NO?" and make him say one or the other so I can KNOW.
That doesn't mean we have to do anything about it. I just want to know how to interpret all this shit that may or may not mean anything different now that we're both single and that is at present the mental equivalent of banging my head against the desk.
I asked him to go see Inception at the RuHo on Friday, because it's free and we see the good ones when we can and I thought the walk back to his car (a shitty white Cutlass that always takes two or three turnovers to actually start--oh, God. I'm mythologizing his car. MAYDAY, Jenna.) I could ask him exactly that. He said "Maybe. Can I get back to you?" Sometimes he goes home for the weekend; maybe he was freaked out by Thursday. WHAT DOES IT MEAN??
But I can't even ask, however innocuous I want to sound, because it will always sound like I'm gunning for him. And now he's invited my suite mate, whom it turns out we both know (and I hate. There. I said it. I hate her. She has no sense of social clues whatsoever, and every time I use our shared bathroom I can hear her yapping loudly about nothing). I found out through the suite mate.
I. don't. want. to care. This feels like detox sounds, all twitchy and anxious and meanwhile I can barely look at BF's Facebook feed because it sounds so cheerful and it makes me feel like an awful person but I want to know he's as unhappy as I am so I can recognize that we actually MEANT something to each other once upon a week ago.

FUCK FUCK FUCK *bambambam*
*Breathe*

Things got better. After I decided to just stay up all night, after I finished off a jar of ranch dip with Food Lion brand tortilla chips, after I read about Mr. Rochester's secret lunatic wife (and really, how easy does the damn fool give up the ghost, as it were, after he's just straight up asked?), I did get sleepy, so I eased into my dark quiet dorm room and bed and slept for about four hours.

Yesterday I was euphoric for a couple hours in the afternoon. Yeah. Euphoric. I said it. On the way to Pysch 101 the world seemed kind and full of possibilities. I was also listening to the Killers' Hot Fuss and rediscovering why I still love that album.

This is/was my first relationship. I should mention that. I've stopped hanging out with people--friends--before but not with someone I've loved and been best friends with and know how his morning face looks for three years. Oh.

Introduction

Hi. My name's Mel, and I broke up with my boyfriend of 2.85 years this past Tuesday.

 

From my dorm's computer lab.

It's been wretched, and I want to write about it, in which "it" = the process of becoming unglued from almost three years of my life and most of my college experience. I want to write about pushing through this mass of depression and uncertainty. I want to write about being on my own. I want to write about why I did it, because frankly, right now I'm not even sure myself.

The actual relationship is still too raw for me to talk about today (personal barometer: I'm still sobbing when I hear Paul Westerberg's "Born for Me"). I hate reading about other people's nonfiction relationships, anyway, because when you're in one it sounds and feels completely unique, but it's not. There's nothing wrong with that; it just bores people who are outside the chosen circle.

I'm writing a day-by-day survivor log. Follow along to make sure I don't drown myself in unsolicited advice, schoolwork, or diet soda/alcoholic hybrids.

Day 1: Tuesday
THE Tuesday. It hurt a fuckton. I didn't have classes because it's Election Day. After getting back to my dorm from my boyfriend's place with a glaze of snot and sweat and sleep slicked over my face and hair, I sit in the computer lab, change my Facebook status, click on my email's refresh button like a rat on a random ratio lever (thanks, Psych 101, for teaching me a more depressingly useful metaphor). When I manage to go across the street to the Student Union for lunch, a lunch lady who always recognizes me and says hi asks me about my man. That's what she says. "How's your man?" I hoist a smile that crumples rapidly as I pay and go cry into the chicken wrap I didn't really want.
I go upstairs to do my fundraiser week show on the college radio station. I get to play blues for two hours straight. I only hear about half of it.
I call my parents. Nervous as hell. I break down as soon as my mom answers. She thinks she has to say all this elaborate stuff to make me feel better but I just want to hear her say she's sorry for me. She does; I ignore most of the other stuff, especially about how this might not be permanent. Yeah, Mom. Maybe we will, I say automatically, fretting string in the hole in my jeans.
Get back to my dorm, keep refreshing BF's Facebook page to see if he's changed his status yet. Field a text from my friend Mike, an email from my distance writing friend Jenna, a couple sad faces on my Facebook relationship status. Refresh. Refresh. Nothing. My eyeballs hurt.
At 9pm, I call BF, choke into his voicemail that I miss him, then call two more times over the next 20 minutes. Feel vaguely proud of myself for being able to stop after that.

Day 2: The First Full Day
Excerpt from email I wrote to Jenna yesterday (Wednesday, November 3)

Today's been just weird. I woke up feeling actually happy. Good sleep + comfy bed + Jane Eyre. Then in the shower I started feeling absolutely wretched, and after morning sociology I cried a little in the women's room. A lady in the stall next to me asked what was wrong and I told her and she gave me advice. While we were still in our seperate stalls. She told me it may seem like the end of the world, but it's not, and "everything except homicide and suicide you can get over." Profundity in unexpected places.
Then when I went to the student union to get lunch, I ran into a guy I know from robotics (the annoying, crazy, loudly competent computer programmer). He acted all paternal (dude's 18...no, 19. Sophomore.) and gave me a hug (I ended up with my head sort of jammed into his armpit and all it smelled like was fabric).
And I need to ask BF the administrative password to one of the dorm lab computers so I can install a slidshow program to get a reporting project done for tomorrow. My laptop crapped out on me over the summer. I also have to give him back his Nikon D60.
I think I'm going to email my professor about an extension so I can beg someone else's laptop sometime before Tuesday.
Tomorrow I'm having dinner with my friend Mike, the guy I've wanted to jump for about 14 months now and have not. I won't tomorrow, at least not for real, but I miss touching already. Not even sex; sex was sort of tangibly related but too often made me worry if I/we was/were doing it right. I just miss being able to lean on someone, or touch an arm with mine, or put my head on a chest or shoulder in a careless familiar way. We watched a video in Psych 101 about baby monkeys clinging to a synthetic furry mom model, and that choked me up because it reminded me of BF's chest hair.

Damn you, Psych 101.
More parental calls--one of each. Bewildered but supportive. Me and my dad are getting so much better at talking to each other.
More Internet browsing and crying until I look like I've been smoking weed all day. I haven't, and never will. Hyperlinks are my drug of choice.

Day 3: Today and So Far
Invited insomnia to snuggle with me about 2am, because it was just standing there staring at me and I figured I might as well make a friend of it.
"Remember, God loves you," in an email from my dad. I'm an atheist. He is not. I appreciate his thought but smell a lecture coming on (it smells like laminated pine).
Went to a pre-scheduled biofeedback appointment at the student mental health center. Learned what I'm calling The Extreminties Boogie to increase circulation and how to breathe from the diaphragm so my heart doesn't feel so much like a jackrabbit's.

That Big Dark Shaggy Beast Called the Future:
I'm meeting Mike for dinner at 7pm. Reckless decisions may or may not be made.


Reading: Jane Eyre by Charolette Bronte
Listening to: Nothing while I'm writing, but I was listening to the AV Club podcast, and I want to listen to the Black Keys.

I still have his camera.

I still have his camera--his Nikon D60, to be exact. The one I borrowed two weeks ago for various reporting class projects (there are always at least two going on at once, because That's The Real World according to my professor) and love like my own child. The one that he never uses anymore, and the one that I had in my dorm room when I broke up with him in his car.

I don't know how to give it back if he doesn't answer Facebook or phone messages from me anymore. Keep trying until my name/voice doesn't stab him in the heart and leave it bleeding on his Mac's keyboard? That shit's aluminum; it'll wipe right off, I swear--I just want to give you back your $500 investment in your art, I swear--I'm harmless, I swear--

No. No, I'm not harmless. I wanted to be so badly. It didn't work.