Friday, November 20, 2009

Coffee house and parking lot conversations

This post has been brewing in the background since a chat at a Dunkin’ Donuts got the idea percolating. (HA!) I just haven’t been sure where the line between real life & interweb life should be drawn. I never used to censor myself but this is a highly publicized blog and some highly personal/private stuff, so I’m going to be super vague. Sorry!

Anyhoo, a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to catch up with some old friends. Like elementary school friends. There were some things said that were interesting, but it took the general mindset of “I’m not ready to go home / I never see you / where the hell is there a 24 hour Dunkin’ Donuts?!” to really drive some things home. Sitting in the DD, my oldest and bestest friend EVAR was telling me how she doesn’t have any drama in her life. I completely (unfairly?) unloaded on her. Oh yeah. Can you say I have drama? There’s a lot of stuff going on and I’m not sure why the hell my personal life is shitting the bed the way it has been lately. It seems like I’m just struggling to deal with people and the impact (or lack thereof) they’re all having on my life.

It’s pretty weird to be me right now… I’ve always been the uber-introvert and having a small number of friends has been perfect. Suddenly, I have a large circle of friends and it’s just, well, shitting the bed is pretty descriptive.  I’m not saying that as a complaint. I’ve worked hard to get comfortable in larger groups of people and I do enjoy their company, but for every two decent people I let in, it seems that an asshole will sneak in. I blame the interwebs because I’m on so many different radar screens now because of the blog, Twitter, Facebook, social circles… It’s just not a good place for me. I’m toying with privacy measures, defriending / blocking people, but it just seems so mean. (Me. Worried about being mean. I know! STOP LAUGHING!)

There was one sentence that just stuck in my craw. “They’re just jealous of [x].” Seriously, that particular thing ain’t worth being jealous of. It’s not something I set out to do. It’s not something that I’m trying to rub in people’s faces. It’s just the way it is. All things considered? I probably would have chosen a much different direction when faced with the whole “Do I? Don’t I?” thing. Of course, life would have been different… but sometimes I wonder if it would have been better. I would love to have my cake and eat it, too but nope. I made my choice and I’ve stuck by it ever since.  (I know there are a lot of you who THINK you know what [x] is. Trust me, ya’ll are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong, wrong, WRONG.)

I’d been puzzling over my NaNoWriMo at that point, too. I knew where I wanted to go with the story. I just wasn’t sure how… art was imitating life which was imitating art, and it was just beyond weird. My male main character has been a pain since the pre-NaNo brainstorms. He just isn’t playing nice and I’m still trying to decide how to send him to the Sporky Pit of Death.  While he and I were arguing the finer points of accidental vs unplanned pregnancies (I prefer “unplanned” for a variety of reasons), why being on the road all the time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and why soulmates were a sh’load more trouble than they are worth, he said something that stuck in my craw as well.  He said, “You’re thinking too much about it. She and I, we just don’t know how to be friends anymore. But. I’m not letting her go.”  (Yes, my overactive imagination often leads me to having conversations with my NaNo characters during quiet times.) It’s helped me rewrite a particularly icky bit, but he needs to let her go, or he’s getting abducted by aliens or something. I’m running out of time and I don’t want him horking up the plot anymore.

So… I’ve had this, this, STUFF in my head and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Situation [x] is not something that can be shared with just anyone, so it just sits there but at least, now I have a way to frame a particularly hard “break-up” I’m going through - we just don’t know how to be friends anymore. We just can’t give each other what the other needs… some things are unforgivable. Some things you just can’t get past no matter how much you try to fool yourself.

Fast forward to last night.

I journeyed into Hartford - for a hockey game this time. Former BU players, John Curry and Brian (Can’t Stand Up) Strait are playing for the Baby Pens and this was their only trip up to Hartford.  I ended up going with a girl I knew in high school. We weren’t really friends, but we knew each other. We’ve (re?)connected via Facebook because we’re complete hockey nuts. Now that I’ve changed loyalties (yes, I’m a Rangers fan now… at least for as long as Matty’s there), we have a little more in common. Heading down for the game though, I really thought hockey was the only thing we had in common.

I. Was. So. Wrong.

I had made the comment a while back about how sometimes you have no idea what your friends’ boundaries are, but you can pick up on a complete stranger’s…Granted, she’s not a complete stranger to me, but it’s not like we were friends on a level that would kind of give me an idea of where her boundaries are - especially after the time that has passed since I last saw her in person.

Holy crap. For me, everything was just effortless. That doesn’t happen that often in my life. I’m not good with “new” people.

We shared. We overshared. We bonded on a level that I didn’t think I was capable of… We share some pretty intense experiences and have the same opinions about them. She and I, we exist in a whole world that other people don’t understand. It’s really a “you need to experience it” thing. We’ve been there.  We were talking about how [y] attracts [y] and that how, even when we have friends that say they ‘get’ us, we know they don’t. They just can’t. They’re not wired for it. For me, it was an unexpected Good Thing. I’m looking forward to future chats and hockey games.

I had a long drive home, made longer by freaking construction, and plenty of time to think about everything that’s been in my head for the past few weeks in addition to what had happened at the game.

While I’m not even at 50% closure on so many of the things that have been bothering me, I feel better about how things are going to work out.

Some times, the universe gives you what you need just when you really need it the most.