Campfyre Stories

Chaos:  Hey, are you on your computer?
Fyre:  No.  Why?  What’s up?
Chaos:  Well, I was going to ask you a kind of a weird favor.
Fyre:  Go ahead and ask anyway.  It’s not hard to log on.
Chaos:  Well, I was just going to ask you to look up the phone number for [a pizza place].
Fyre:  Um.  I do have a phone book.
Chaos:  Oh, right on, can you look up the phone number for me?
Fyre:  [Finds number]  You know, it’s been years since I’ve looked up anything in a phone book.
Chaos:  Heh.  Yeah.  You should blog about this.

Fin.

Though it’s still very cold, it has, for the moment, stopped being that bitter, biting, ridiculous cold that is worse than I have ever experienced.  People who don’t live in the Northeast don’t seem to comprehend how different (and in a very bad way) this winter is from winters past.  Frankly, I don’t know how to phrase it to make it understood.  You just kind of have to feel it for yourself, but this is not normal.

Or, it wasn’t normal.  It feels normal and even "right" now.  And everybody is in consensus.  Even people who really enjoy winter and winter sports and spend their winter outside aren’t doing nearly as much of that because of how amazingly unpleasant it has been. 

But now we’re back to cold, but tolerable.  Back to what we generally expect from a Northeastern winter.  So I’m making the effort.

My tax return came, so Spawn and I each ordered a pair of custom Chucks.  We went shopping and bought an Xbox 360 and a couple of other needed things.  I did a HUGE grocery shopping and find that there is so much food in the house that I can’t decide what I want to eat when I’m hungry.  As a result, I’m not eating right.  I’m so overwhelmed that I just don’t eat.  That’s not right…

Sunday I went to a music show and intended to take Spawn to see Coraline (since I bought the book for him several years back and he’s the only other person I know who’s read it), but I was burning out, so we put it off for this week.  He left to spend the week with his girlfriend in Westchester yesterday, and I went to a hockey game, out to dinner and then played Cruis’n Exotica in a barcade with my buddies until we ran out of free money.

I have the next two days free, but then I have plans on Thursday, Friday and at least one day this weekend (TBD).  I’m making the effort, and I’m making it, partially despite the cold, but in large part because it’s not doing the miserable, wretched weather that has caused me to hibernate.

I’m making the effort.

So I saw the movie.  It started really strong, but degraded into obvious stereotypes by the end of the movie.  Without giving anything away, I was really disappointed in the reinforcement of stereotypes that I find, not necessarily negative, but unrealistic for sure.  I had higher hopes for a fictional movie based on a self-help book.  I should have known better, knowing it was a romantic comedy.

So I bought the book.  I entered into a pact with Princess to read it and pass it on to another single girl.  I don’t really feel the need to own relationship self-help books.  Anyway, I bought it on Friday and tore right through it.  I have to say, that book was depressingly obvious.  Not in a bad way, but in the sense that women need to be told things that ought to be simple and ought to be common sense.  If the guy isn’t calling, he doesn’t *really* like you.  If he’s treating you badly, it’s not really love.  The excuses we make for the bad men in our lives are optimistic bullshit.

Well fucking DUH.

Except that we need to be told this.  We desperately need to be told this.  We need to unlearn all the optimistic bullshit that we’ve learned and believed because it makes us feel better.  Better about who we are inside, better about our chances to find someone eventually, better about being rejected, BETTER… 

The problem I have here is that I shouldn’t have to read this in a damned relationship self-help book.  I shouldn’t be inspired to learn these things from having seen a romantic fucking comedy.  These are things that we women should be saying to each other.  But it’s just not that simple.  It’s not simple to pine in loneliness or to look in the mirror and wonder why you’re not attracting the types of guys who treat us badly, or at least not as well as we should be treated.  We shouldn’t be wasting our time picking apart the things that might, possibly be wrong with US.  We should be looking for happy relationships, not "settling" for something less because, even if it doesn’t make us happy, at least it makes us feel less alone in the night.

The fuck?  I had to learn this from a ROMANTIC COMEDY?  This is common sense knowledge.  Reading that goddamned book I kept saying "Yep.  That makes sense."  and "Hmmm…  that should be obvious."  WHY IS IT NOT OBVIOUS?

I mean, for me, it IS obvious, and I think that in a lot of ways, this is the sort of thing that’s keeping me from really putting myself out there.  I don’t want to run the risk of being rejected time after time or worse, finding myself in a "he’s just not that into me" relationship and not being strong enough to realize it, or to be so hopeful or blinded that I make bullshit excuses that are reinforced by my well-meaning friends.

So I’ve read this book and I’ll pass it to Princess next.  Then we’ll send it off to Girl with strict instructions to read it and pass it on.  NO ONE needs to be reminded of this lesson by a goddamned book.  Maybe we need to read the harsh reality of our created relationship bullshit from a book, but the reminders should come from each other.  We NEED to absorb this information, even if we shouldn’t need to be told it in the first place.

But the reality is that I do need to be told, and, apparently from a book.  A book that I bought because I saw a romantic fucking comedy based on it.  But I don’t need to be told twice.  Not by a book.  I may need to be reminded, but I don’t need the whole lesson again.

At least, I sure as hell hope I don’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friends and relationships.  Not just the ones I have, but the lack of new friends and relationships in my life the past few years, and also thinking on a broader scale about friendships in general and how they work.

I have never been much of a joiner.  I don’t really affiliate with clubs or groups or even labels.  I’ve never been one to have a "circle" of friends, but the vast majority of my friends do.

You probably know how it works.  Hell, you probably experience it first hand, since people like me who are outside the circles are few and far between.  A group of people come together because of shared interest or experience.  Sometimes they are very young when it happens.  They all know each other and when someone in that circle makes a new friend, they bring him or her into the circle, widening it.  Sometimes people leave, sometimes new people stumble upon it, but it becomes almost a living thing.  The individuals are varying degrees of close with each other, but there is always that feeling of belonging.

I know this because every now and again, I’ll find myself on the fringes of such a circle.

But I never get all the way in.  I am both picky and diverse in my friends and my friendships.  I have friends who walk all different paths in life, who have all different world views.  There’s no one thing that I have in common with all, or even a majority of my friends, save that we tend to eschew the mainstream.  Further, nearly all my friends belong to a social circle, but they don’t all belong to the same one.

It was the same in high school.  I had a decent number of friends, people I could count on or whose company I enjoyed, but they were all from different circles or, at that time, cliques.  I wasn’t.  I didn’t fit any of the available molds.  But my friends mostly got along with each other.  Still do.  These people who choose to relate, primarily, to people they’ve already established as "one of them", they do find the similarities with the few from other circles that I am friends with.

I don’t really know what it is.  That spark of whatever that attracts me to a person is often evident within many people in their circle, but for whatever reason, I just can’t get comfortable in a circle.  I step in, take a good look around, pinpoint the few I want to have a relationship with and slip back away out of the circle.

I have come to the conclusion that this is why my parties fail.  Simply because I don’t have enough of those smaller niche circles to give people a place to build up their comfort.

Personally, I do best in the one-on-one situations.  I don’t ever feel like I’ve really gotten to know someone until we’ve talked one-on-one long enough to figure each other out.  Maybe that’s why I don’t really get involved in the circles, because there are too many people I can’t get the one-on-one chance with.  I wouldn’t say that I write them off, but I can’t bring myself to invest the time, energy and effort into the larger groups of people.

Where is this coming from?  I don’t know.  Winter has got me down.  It’s also got me stir crazy.  I’m really feeling a desire to get out and meet new people, to go and DO SOMETHING, but it’s still so cold and windy that I can’t really do it to the extent I know I need to.  There’s also some measure of not wanting to have to try to penetrate yet another circle to try to find that one or two new people I can really relate to and have fun with.

I have to make myself do it  It’s not any dissatisfaction with the friends I have, but a lot of people have moved away in the past year or two, or have otherwise mostly disappeared from my life (some by choice, some just naturally).  I’m feeling in a real rut with my social life and I need to shake things up somehow.  I’m just waiting for the weather to not be obnoxious so that I can push myself to find those new and different things and people.

We’ll see what spring brings.