2003-08-13

2003-08-13 - 11:35 a.m.

Oh god. I'm cruising through the day today, doing all right, and then suddenly something hits me, a memory, and I feel like I'm going to be sick. The humiliation just washes over me, and I don't know how to make it stop. Could somebody somewhere please send me some good energy? My best friends are battling, I've been dumped by somebody great, and I'm still hurting from J. I've been dealing with this stuff for almost a year, and every time I get a handle on it, it comes back in spades.

2003-08-13 - 9:53 a.m.

I'm writing from inside a training class, designed to bring me further up to speed on the university's ancient and hideously patched human resources database. Every time I work with this piece of junk, I'm further horrified at what passes for record keeping. Don't even get me started on how old and useless the database is. It automatically purges anything 5 years or older, which means you have to have a sense of humor when using the "history" queries. It spews out random error messages when you're updating - which everyone tells me to ignore. Um, ignoring error messages really isn't my style, ok? No, usually I go into the code, rewrite it and make the stupid thing WORK. Grr. At any rate, I'm thoroughly bored.

I've udpated the Musts in a small way below, to more accurately reflect what I read. Ator always makes me think and laugh. Adrift in Japan is devBear's story of moving to Sapporo with her husbard. URLDJ is a random sampling of pieces from a bunch of bright, incisive web readers. Use the links below right; I'm not feeling that html friendly.

So I was talking to a divorced friend the other night. I don't know much about his marriage other than it ended because she was sleeping with his best friend, and knowing that, I'm not going to quiz him. He's a good guy, if a little shell-shocked. (Who can blame him?) And we started talking about sex. (Okay, we were drinking. So shoot me.) It turns out this guy, who is attractive in his own distinct way and *very* gentle, has been nookie-free for two years. Since I was swimming in four Citron and tonics and self-pity, my initial reaction was to check him out and think, hey, let's go. Yeah, right. That's not me, not him, and the words never made it out of my brain and over the uvula. Instead, I gave him a big hug and said, "Honey, it's going to work out. The right one will show up eventually." Then I bought him a beer.

I pulled Tarot in the Celtic Cross last night, which I do only about once a season.* One of the recurrent themes was authenticity - living according to your beliefs. Well, one of my strongly held beliefs is that we *have* to take risks to reap any kind of reward. As I lay in bed last night, thinking about the Tarot results, I realized that there had been huge risks inherent in the gent who signed me off. I won't go into them in detail, but we both knew it was unlikely to work. But in a certain way, we've still succeeded. Having developed a solid friendship - which we do have, thank god - has already beaten every odd and is a reward in itself for having been brave. Yes, I'm still full of regret and hurting. It's not often I meet somebody and have this connection. But I get to keep some of the good parts, and that's going to have to be enough. I'm trying to see his friendship as a gift. And even more, I'm trying to take my own advice that somebody good will come along eventually. In the meantime, I've got friends and family, knitting that's spilling over the stash basket, and a good number of Giants and A's games on local TV. It'll do for now.


*For those who don't know, I do *not* take Tarot that seriously. I'm always looking for ways to reframe life's challenges, and if something as easy as a set of 78 cards helps me think about a problem in a different way, I'm all for it.

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