5 Stages of Something or Another

So here I am, 28 days after my last entry. What has changed you ask? The short answer? Plenty. The long answer? Well that's coming up. Now before I carry on, I think I need to make a disclaimer here and warn you that there is a high possibility that this post might end up being one of my epic rants. I will try not let my inner ranter unleash hell but it's going to be tough considering how much I want to vent, combined with the fact that I am listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk whilst I write this.

Spooner and I have officially crashed and banged into nothingness. No wait, let me say that again. He crashed and banged into nothingness. I was just a bewildered bystander at the wayside. What happened? Nothing much really. One conversation set events in motion and things fell apart. It was the 12th of December and he had come home from football and was wasting away on the sofa. Now, I had known about the Phuket trip for a month by then and he still had not breathed a word about it to me. I was a bit, no, VERY sick of biting my tongue and the white knuckles that came with feigning ignorance by that point so I decided to bite the bullet and ask the pertinent question, "What are you doing for Christmas?"

If I had to describe the next few minutes of conversation that ensued after I asked that question, I'd ask you to picture a deck of falling cards in slow motion. Against all odds, he did not lie to me. I was bracing myself for a complex series of lies. Fuck, part of me wishes he HAD lied because things would have so much simpler to deal with. But he didn't. Damn the man. Instead, the next 5 minutes of conversation or should I say, interrogation that was carried out was akin to pulling teeth. The result? I took my bags and walked out of the apartment. The clincher? He did absolutelyfuckingnothing to stop me.

The following week saw a series of emails being dished out by both parties. Welcome to the modern world of dating and relationships. We don't even bother talking in person anymore. We bloody email. Let me get to the forgone conclusion then, we split up (over email, no less!), because his royal highness said, I quote, "I'm sorry, I'm messed up about this and I don't know what to think or do...One minute I want to carry on and the next I am reluctant...The last thing I want to do is mess you around so best we call it a day..."

Well that says bloody a lot doesn't it?

Firstly, I thought I was the female in that relationship. Apparently, I got it wrong. How does one person spend 4 months going out with another person and then SUDDENLY realize that they didn't know what they wanted? Pardon me for saying this, but was it that time of the month for him where his hormones were all totally whack?

Maybe I should also add that prior to that parting statement, he had accused me (yes, accused), of being insecure, clingy and demanding for commitment. I will now swear upon every hair on my head that every accusation he made was utterly baseless and total bullshit. I countered the arguments in my usual eloquent and succinct manner only to have ALL of it ignored. The man was grappling at invisible straws. Oh yes sireee, he was.

I didn't put up a fight. I may have initially but I lost steam because the more he dragged it out, the more apparent it became that all my efforts were pointless. Here was a man who claimed that he had not met someone he liked as much as he liked me in years. And here is the same man saying he doesn't know what he wants.

Truth be told, I completely disagree with the "I don't know what I want" excuse. It's such a lousy cop out. I know what he wants. I know EXACTLY what he wants because he wrote it down, clear as day, in an email to a strange girl he was getting to know a long time ago. Oh yes, I have literal evidence. In that email, he clearly stated that he wanted to settle down and start a family and that the hard part was finding someone worth the while to do that with. He then also proceeded to say that he understood that it got harder as one got older but that he was not going to impose any deadlines on himself.

Let me just sidetrack here a little and say that this is the type of man my father would have HATED with a vengeance. The indecisive, procrastinating, floater. It's like an annoying turd that refuses to get flushed down the toilet. I suppose this also explains why my little brother has taken a particularly aggravated stance towards Spooner's behaviour and actions (or lack of). The men in my house have always been extremely well-principled and this behaviour is not just frowned upon. It's simply not allowed. Why? No matter how you argue your point, procrastinating, especially when another person's feelings are involved, is never justified. In short, my brother would gladly sock Spooner in the face about a dozen times right now and then proceed to kick the shit out of him if he could.

Whilst having the regular Tuesday beerage with my colleagues last night, one of them mentioned that statistics have shown that most break-ups occur during the year-end holiday period and that one should technically go through the 5 stages of grief as detailed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross from her book, 'On Death and Dying'.

Here are the 5 supposed stages:

1. Denial - The "No, not me" stage.
This stage is filled with disbelief in denial. If your partner asked for a break-up you think he/she will change their mind.

2. Anger/Resentment - The "Why me" stage.
Anger at the situation, your partner and others are common. You are angry with the other person for causing the situation and for causing you pain.

3. Bargaining - The "If you do this, I'll do that" stage.
You try to negotiate to change the situation. You might approach your partner who is asking for the break-up and say "If you'll stay I'll change".

4. Depression - The "It's really happened" stage.
You realize the situation isn't going to change. The break-up happened and there is nothing to bring the other person back. Acknowledgment of the situation often brings depression. This could be a quiet, withdrawn time as you soak in the situation.

5. Acceptance - The "This is what happened" stage.
Though you haven't forgotten what happened you are able to begin to move forward.

Let me just state for the record that psychologists collectively agree that one does not have to experience all 5 stages in the set order. I suppose this makes sense considering how you are more likely to 'bargain' with the other party whilst in the midst of breaking-up. In my case, denial, depression and bargaining have all come to pass. I am hovering between anger/resentment and acceptance. I am angry because I feel like a complete idiot for trusting that goon and being totally blind-sided by well, a number of things that I think I should keep private. I am also angry because Spooner has acted like a spineless git throughout the whole thing.

Well, here's to moving on then. To better times, better people and better days ahead. And if ever dares to come back and say, "Let's try again", there's no guarantee that I won't lunge forward and slap him. And he still needs to return my stuff. Dammit. And to quote one of my favourite bands,

I'm another ex-girlfriend on your list
But I should have thought of that before we kissed
No Doubt - Ex-girlfriend

The Lit Connection

This the book I am reading right now and while prepping myself for another tedious and emotionally retarded day this morning, I came across an absolute jewel of a paragraph within the book. It pretty much sums up my thoughts, sentiments and attitude towards a particular English person right now and I am stoked at the idea of it coming from another Englishman, Stephen Fry.

Fry is quoting E M Forster in order to express his thoughts on the typical middle-class Englishmen who attends public school and thereafter is unleashed into the world of adulthood to torment the 'lesser mortals'. Fry's own opinion at the very end is so fucking perfect that I could weep with joy.

Excerpt:

This is how Forster finishes.

... the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface - self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

I hope and believe myself that in the next twenty years [this was written in 1920] we shall see a great change, and the national character will alter into something which is less unique but more loveable. The supremacy of the middle-classes us probably ending. What new element the working classes will introduce one cannot say, but at all events they will not have been educated at public schools...

The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, fot the shrinkage of the globe is throwing us into one another's arms. To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution - notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

Fry's response to this is as follows:

Well, have we seen 'a great change'? Has the supremacy of the middle-classes ended? In a pig's arse has it ended. Even today, mutatis mutandis, the character of the English is defined by the character of its (still rising) middle-classes and even today, the character of those middle-classes is defined by the character of the (still disproportionately) poweful public-school product. The schools of course have changed, to the extent that public schoolboys wear baseball caps and expensive Nike footwear, listen to rap music, raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences in that bizarre Australian Question Intonation picked up from the TV soaps, and say 'Cool' and 'Slamming' a lot. That is nauseating certainly, embarrassing obviously, but fundamentally it alters nothing. No one can seriously suggest that the average English public schoolboy emerges from his school with a South Central Los Angeles sensibility, or the outlook, soul and character of an unemployed working-class spot welder. The body is probably even better developed, the brain is fairly developed but the heart just as undeveloped.

Thank you, oh thank you Stephen Fry for so eloquently putting into words all that I stupidly struggle to express. I heart you.

Man Overboard

If I ever get to meet God or whichever chief kahuna who runs the earth operations, I'd request for a do-over and ask to be sent back down as a man. Not just any man. I don't want to be sent back as a wee babe of a boy and have to go through the horrors of puberty and learning why there is a rush of blood to a certain appendage on really cold days. I'd like to come back as a grown male between the ages of 32 to 39, preferably single, preferably with a decent job and not living with my mother and preferably pumped full of idiotic testosterone.

The male psyche has always held immense fascination for me. Not because I grew up in a house full of boys. On the contrary, I grew up in a household dominated by females with my dad and brother being the only exceptions and trust me, too much estrogen in a confined space for extended periods of time can be a diabolical thing. If you think one pms-ing female is hard to deal with, try living with 4 pms-ing females aged between 12 and 40 and you'd get a slight inkling of what it was like in my house. Given the extreme female conditions that I grew up in, boys or members of the opposite gender have always been a bit of an enigma. Thankfully I grew up and realized that there wasn't much that was enigmatic about men in general. Most of them, for lack of a better word, are twats. In any case, prior to the time where cynicism became part of life, I used to scratch my head and wonder what made males and females so different. Being the elder of two children, when my brother came along, I used to spend hours staring at him whilst he slept the sleep of the innocent or watch him play or do whatever it was that little baby boys do. Essentially this meant observing him poop, pee, puke, and wail like a banshee whenever he wanted something. I learnt very early on that this creature, my brother (whom I love very dearly even today), was a different species from me. It didn't help that my parents hammered home the point that he was a) not a toy, b) not a girl and c) not to be flung about like my little BMX training bicycle. So at the tender age of 4 I learnt a life-altering lesson. Boys are different.

Before I carry on, I think I need to clarify that I will be using the terms, 'boy', 'bloke', 'men', 'man', 'feller', 'guy', 'cockwit' and quite possibly 'fuckwit' interchangeably throughout this post to refer to the males species. So when I make reference to a 'boy', it does not meant that I specifically refer to a wee lad. What I am actually referring to is basically, that of the male gender.

And so it was that at that young, pure and impressionable age I was exposed and privy to the appalling truth that there existed in this world a species different from myself. What I did not understand or was not told is that there would be no instructions given on how to co-exist in a world with this weird species. Even worse was the fact that though I knew that the male species was appalling different, nobody could explain to me WHY this was so. And so I went out into the world and learnt many a horrific but probably necessary lesson.

I make no excuses for my relationship histories with men. To be fair, I have gone out with what I think is more than my fair share of men. I don't know what the national average is (in any case, all the women will lie in that survey for sure), but I can quite frankly tell you that I have dated and bedded enough guys to have a pretty decent understanding of how most of them work. How many exactly? I can't answer that question not because of any inhibitions but if you want the truth, I can't bloody remember. (Yes, great impressions they made, as you can tell.) If I had to give an estimate, I would say that the number is somewhere in the 20s. Now, I'm not bragging about this but I went through a slew of guys in my early 20s and honestly, a lot of it is a big blur now. Part of me wishes I could remember but there's another part that says that maybe it's better that I don't.

Having done my field research, I tend to categorize men into three groups.

1. Hopeless
2. Semi-hopeless but with potential
3. Hopeful but may drive you to the edge of the cliff as a result of sheer boredom

You know how all those newly-wed women always coo and gush about how fantastic their new husbands are? Well let me tell you that they didn't marry the perfect man. They settled for the one in category no. 3. So don't bloody believe it when they squeal, "Oooh he's just so perfect!" Sorry girls and boys, there ain't no such thing as perfect. You have a higher chance of finding a bra that fits you perfectly than a man. Show me a perfect man and I'll show you that all you really got is a fuck-nosed wanker.

Me, cynical? You've got to be kidding.

Needless to say most of the guys I've dated were hopeless from start to finish. I don't know about other women but you kinda know very early on whether a guy is worth the effort or not. The problem is that women tend to be too nice at times and always want to give the cockwit the benefit of the doubt and a few more chances than really necessary. Ironically, it is because of this very mentality that many women stop dating a guy or get dumped by a guy and then come away and tell their girlfriends in a self-righteous huff that 'He was SUCH a waste of my time.' But surely sweetheart, you must have realized this earlier when he sent you a series of texts after your first date saying you were his soulmate because you both share a great love for penne pasta?

So yes, the hopeless exist. And they exist for good reason. They provide one with the experience required to deal effectively with those that fall under category 2 and particularly category 3.

Yes, men who fall into category 3 exist. They are closest thing you're gonna get to Mr. Perfect by about 3 football pitches off. Why? Again this is not me being cynical for the sake of being a cynic. Throughout my dating history, I can safely say that I have come across a grand total of 2 guys who fall under category 3. One of them I knew at a young age and we had a weird online relationship that spanned several years. He was in no way, mine or a boyfriend per se. What we did have though was a surreal chemistry that kept us very close even though we were miles apart. There was no need to think too hard or compete or impress. The conversations were natural, his personality clicked with mine and we both knew that it was a strange connection to have but we never denied it either. We're still friends today even though he's married to someone else but funnily enough, I don't have a problem with that. :)

The second no. 3-esque feller is my ex-boyfriend. After 6 years of mucking around I finally met someone who, at that point in time, felt worth the effort. To be honest, I was completely skeptical about him in the initial stages but he disarmed me by simply being himself. He was honest, he made an effort and he didn't leave me paranoid and waiting for him to run off with another girl. It took all of 3 months to realize that I had fallen in love with him (and miraculously, he felt the same way too) and we spent 3.5 years together until I came to the point where I discovered that though I very much loved him, I could not be with him because I was no longer as happy and fulfilled as I should have been. Leaving him was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in all my years. I do ponder that decision from time to time and prod around my emotional landscape to see if there's any regret. Though I am sad at the fact that the relationship ended, I cannot claim to regret my decision because deep down in my heart I think I made the right move.

Damn this is a long post. Had to stop for a pee and a fag. Bugger me for being a prolific writer. Hur. Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, the semi-hopeless but with potential candidates. Personally, I think a lot of women will encounter this lot quite a fair bit. They're usually charming and seem quite harmless, though the latter part is something that can only be determined with time. The current bloke I am dating falls into this category. Yes, it's the same one that I have mentioned before. I haven't quite made up my mind about him yet and I think that sentiment is mutual.

I must say that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this one. Or at least I can't seem to find any major flaws as yet apart from the endless procrastinating and rudimentary insensitivity which seems to be rearing its ugly head more often than not. He's a man's man. You know the deal. Bros before hos and all that shit. I can deal with this although sometimes it strains the dating experience. For example, just this afternoon after convincing himself that going out to get lunch to feed his raging hangover would be a good idea, he got a phone call from a friend based overseas whilst walking up the hill back to his place. Now, I think I need to give you a bit of background here. He has/had a nightmare hangover because he was out at an Xmas party for his football club yesterday and stumbled in at 4am. I was not invited to attend this party even though I was informed about it more than a month ago. In fact, I was disallowed from attending this party. Why this is so, I have no idea. I did not bother to ask. When you get to my age, you learn to pick your fucking battles. So he enjoyed the party, came home in the wee hours of the morning, crashed in the bed next to me and stank up the whole room with alcoholic fumes emanating from his drunk body. I did the coffee run in the morning, convinced him to take a shower and we went out for lunch. Friend calls and he has a conversation that lasts about 15 minutes. Post phone call and he tells me that said friend who rang was planning to arrange a group trip with a number of other lads to watch the rugby 7s next year in Las Vegas. I know he got all excited about this over the call because he mentioned to the friend that he would have to go to the states next year and that he would love to take some time off and join in the fun. Well, that's all well and good right? Totally cool? Ha! I fucking wish.

"So my mate is planning this thing to watch the rugby 7s in Vegas next year. I have to go to the States for work anyway and I thought I might make a weekend out of it. Problem is it's in February. And your birthday is in February. Wait, what date is your birthday?"

At that very moment, I wished I was Zeus so that I could call down a mega lightning bolt that would have fried his ass on the sofa.

"I've told you when my birthday is. Several times. The last was yesterday morning." (At this point I stormed out to the balcony to have a cigarette because I didn't trust myself to not grab his head and smash it against the nearest wall.)

One would have thought he would have used the 10 minutes to good use to come up with an apology but when I returned from my fag break, he was sitting on the sofa, Blackberry poised in his hand, "What date is it? You told me February, you never mentioned the date."

For fuck's sake.

You would think if you've been dating someone for 4 months, the least you could do is remember their birthday right? I'm not asking you to marry me. Just remember my bloody birthday! I remembered yours! ARRRRRRRRRGH. And I promise you, I have mentioned my date of birth several times.

I conceded this one. I gave him the date, watched him tap it into his Blackberry (cue more internal growling) and proceeded to ignore him by reading my book. I pointedly chose to ignore him for the next 20 minutes whilst he surfed the football highlights on his laptop. He did not even try to make oblique amends. He just squeezed my knee, stroked my leg absent-mindedly with one hand and then went, "What's wrong?" whenever he asked me something and I gave a curt retort.

Hopeless? Oh yes sir.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you, the typical category no.2 male. Nothing wrong with him. Seems normal. Stable job, okay personality, slightly weird, got loads of friends, insane interest in testosterone-filled sporting activity, a great kisser and a decent shag. The problem with this sub-species is that though they have many hopeless moments, they tend to counteract their hopelessness with actions that leave you stumped. For example, they send you really sweet text messages out of the blue, or they give you the spare key to the apartment and they are quite happy to spend their weekends with you, doing whatever the hell you want. On the contrary, they do not tell you about their holiday plans (I am IRATE about this because I cannot understand WHY he's still not telling me that he's going to be gone for Xmas and New Year's - what IS he waiting for really?), they do not remember your birthday, they do not refer to you as the 'girlfriend'. Yes, I am still just after 4 months.

All this weird behaviour leaves me bewildered and quite frankly, exhausted. On one side, I desperately want to trust him and allow myself to open myself up to him. On the other hand, all this peek-a-boo situations leave me insecure and half-hearted and to be honest, I feel like I am just waiting for him to say, "Was nice knowing you, goodbye and good luck." Please don't tell me that I need to stop looking at the glass as half empty. I'm not. What I'm saying is that I don't enjoy, don't want to be and really don't need to be mind-fucked.

So you see, I really want to get a do-over as man because I want to understand what the hell is going on in a male brain. I suppose I am prepared to be disappointed because the likelihood of anything noteworthy to be found floating in a man's brain might prove to be near impossible. However, it would still serve me well to get to know the inner mechanics of this weird species.

Plus I'd have the joy of scratching my balls every morning.

Pop Goes the Bubble

Yeah I haven't written. And it's not because I've fallen off the wagon and decided that the wayside is a comfy spot. It's more like my writing demon has been stuffed with tissues and forced to shut up. Well, not forced exactly. It's just me, myself and I who decided to exercise totalitarian control over my writing demon and pressed the mute button. Temporarily of course.

Having been an on and off blogger since the age of 18, writing has served me well. It's the one outlet I've had the chance to completely abandon myself to. Sure, during the more-angst ridden years (some may argue that the correlation between angst and age is non-existent but...), I ranted, vented and went stark raving mad on my blog(s) because I could, I wanted to and in many a frustrating moment, I had to. There was also a slightly insane foray into poetry. Let's just say that I am a dead poet's society type of poet. Hence trying to find a word to rhyme with 'bastard' at 3:28 in the morning is not exactly cathartic. I stopped the poetry but I've never really stopped writing and for the sake of my own sanity, I hope I never get to the point where I throw my pen down and call it quits.

The only issue I have with writing as the years passed is the need to censor. Ten years ago (yes, I'm not THAT young), I had no qualms about letting my emotions go into free fall on a screen or on a piece of paper. In fact, the more I did it, the more I wanted to let it all out. It got to the point of almost being addictive. Even now, as I bang out this entry, I hardly stop to think about what I'm saying. It's pure, unadulterated relief to be able to open the dam and let everything pour out through my fingertips. Fortunately for me, I am a reasonably rapid typist who employs more than two fingers.

Alas, having grown older, I've come to value my privacy even more. I am, by nature a quiet creature. I hate loud noises, I hate loud people and I just hate situations where the ambient sound around me does not allow me to hear my own thoughts. Having said that, this means that I'm a quiet individual who prefers to keep a lot to myself. You could say that I live pretty much in my head. Those who know me in person would probably beg to differ. I'm quite well known for spouting my mouth and being generally sociable. This is not something I disagree with. I like being around people. People interest me. I like to be able to have a conversation and learn new things about people and expand my myopic view about well, everything. However, just because one is a sociable, it does not mean that the individual will necessarily be open about themselves. You can be very sociable and put entire groups of people at ease in any social situation without having to reveal fuck all about yourself what you're feeling or thinking. Don't believe me? Try it out at the next party you attend. Start a conversation with a couple of people. Ask questions. Talk about the latest video your friend posted on Facebook. Drive the conversation and then note how many things you actually reveal about yourself. You'd be surprised at just how little you give away. Not recommended for narcissists though.

In any case, I've been silent for a while not because I haven't got anything to say but more like I'm trying to figure out where the boundaries are. There's a lot of stuff floating around my head which is slowly driving me crazy but because I am now a responsible adult (fml!) I have come to realize that I can't always be spilling all as and when I want to, even though at times, I truly and desperately want to. You could say it's about like dating in your late twenties (oh yes, I speaketh from that fucked-up thing called experience). The older you get, the harder it becomes to meet new people that you actually want to go out with. And if that weren't bad enough, when you finally meet someone and start dating you run into a whole gamut of nightmares that make Freddy Kruegar seem like something from The Muppets. Let's face it. Dating becomes an uphill battle the older you get. There's enough emotional baggage on both sides to fill up and entire cargo plane and because of all that excess shit lying around, people have a tendency to develop weird trust issues. You just don't find yourself wanting to open up another adult. Weirdly enough, it's a bit reminiscent of being a teenager when you were pimply, and your raging hormones got the better of you. At least back then you knew for sure that you simply don't open up to adults. Because they are spawn of Satan. Well no, not really. More like, because adults just didn't 'get it' and by default, you didn't trust them because trusting them was akin to dropping yourself into a giant vat of boiling oil. Fast forward 15 years and into the dating world and you're confronted with the same effing beast from hell. Oh hello, we meet again, but this time I'm disguised as this thing you silly humans love to call 'trust'. And yeah, I'm as shitty as you remembered me to be.


Can you tell that I'm having a trust crisis?

I take no pleasure in saying this but trust is the be all and end all of most relationships. Unless you lied to your parents. Then yeah, they'll be disappointed but hey, they're your parents. You could be a child molester, a terrorist or Mel Raido from He Kills Coppers and they'd still bloody forgive you and trust you because you're their offspring. Unfortunately in most other human-human relationships, trust is a foundation ingredient and if it's laid too thin in the early stages, you are bound to realize at some point that the ground beneath your feet is shifting and you're falling off a precipice and about to hit your head. Hard.

The thing with the trust demon is that it doesn't work alone. It's got a band of mini horrors that it runs around with. Paranoia, lies, loaded questions, evasive answers and several other minions muck about at the trust demon's beck and call. At any point in time you've got about three of these little devils hanging around making you feel like total shit with the trust demon sitting on an armchair, sipping on a Mount Gay mojito and pulling the strings that make you want to go insane.

But let's not just blame the bloody demons. Let's allocate some blame to the damned humans themselves. The world would be a much easier and nicer place to live in if we all just opened up to people and were honest with each other. But that's a bit like asking for the sun to shine out of your arse so it rarely happens and you end up second-guessing, mistrusting and if you're really lucky, fucking up a really good thing. (Note: Fuck-up can be due to false accusation OR being lied to the face. Prior tests have revealed that the lying-to-the-face phenomenon tends to top the charts with a ratio of 10:2.)

Unfortunately, the trust demon usually cannot be banished by one person alone. The pesky thing requires combined efforts which means that all parties involved need to sit down with equal resolve and send it packing back to hell. But for this to take place, all parties first need to be aware that a trust issue exists. If one party or (several parties) are not privy to the existence of the issue then you might as well stab yourself with a fucking spoon because nothing, and I mean this in all seriousness, nothing is more frustrating that having a totally oblivious party.

Well, I suppose I could play the oblivious card too. For how long? No clue but being oblivious seems to be an easy option compared to all the others. Time for a fag, a decent coffee and most of all, time to give the cosmos the finger.