I've been talking on the phone with the woman on match.com who's into anime and other geeky things (I forget whether I've mentioned her before). We've had some pretty good conversations so far (which she says is an a priori requirement of hers. I do so like a woman who says a priori), but we haven't met yet because she's married to her pager. She's a techie, and apparently she's on call every day for most of the summer because of server migrations that her firm is doing; in theory, it's not her job description, but in practice... well, I certainly have been there and done that. So far, though, I've managed to get by without being tethered by a beeper; cell phone, yes, pager, no. You have to take your little victories where you find them.
Anyway, I have hopes for this one. I try not to get them too high, since we haven't met face-to-face, but how can I not be intrigued by a girl who when I first called her was busy setting up the PS2 and floorpad controller that she bought specifically to play Dance Dance Revolution? For now I just have to be patient and wait for her time to free up a bit....
It's late, and I don't really have time or energy to really explore this, but I want to get something down, and maybe come back to it later.
Yesterday I listened to K sob into the phone for a couple hours about her breakup with J, and I made various soothing noises, but what was running through my head was this increasingly sarcastic commentary. She say's she still loves J, and she doesn't want him to leave, but when she tells me what she's been saying to him, I'm left wondering what the hell is she thinking? Over and over again, all she apparently tells him is along the lines of "How could you do this to me? How could you do this after eighteen years? Do you know that this is going to do to A (their nine-year old son)? You promised you'd never leave me! You said you love me! How can you hurt me this way? You say that we'll have to sell the house, but it's the only house that A has ever lived in--how can you do this to him? How can you be such a shit? Our anniversary is next week, you bastard, how can you be so hateful and cruel? It's not fair!" And variations on this theme. Understand, this is what she tells me their conversations are like (although it's a bit of a jumble as to what is reportage and what is editorializing). J has kept mum about it, because we agreed that it wasn't fair to drag me into the middle of things. So, okay, she's angry, and I won't say she doesn't have the right, but...but...
Does she really think this is the way to persuade him to give it another chance? I mean, maybe I'm a cold fish, and maybe I shouldn't even be thinking in such a manipulative way, but I can't help but feel that if your goal is to reestablish your relationship and put your household back onto some semblance of the track it was on before you can't possibly think that this mixture of guilt and invective is going to work...can you? Not against someone who has a reasonable amount of self-esteem and who's already had enough and left, anyway. Right, wrong, who cares? It's counterproductive Gah.
Notably absent from these conversations with K is any sense from her of what things she might be willing to change, or to compromise on. She talks about the relationship being worth fighting for, but the fight she seems to envision leads to his unconditional surrender. It's like J's feelings don't even count, or maybe don't even exist except as some kind of abberation he has to get over for the sake of her and the kid. If she can just make him feel bad enough, he'll come back and everything can be like it was before. At this point, I think J feels that whatever compromise she might offer on the things that they disagree about would be too little, too late, but I'm struck by the fact that she doesn't even seem to consider that there might be things to compromise on. I mean, I know what the major sticking points in their marriage are just by observation; she's been to couples therapy with him every week for the past seven years, and professes not to have the slightest inkling as to what he's thinking. And I'm thinking, "How can that be? She's not stupid. Is she really that self-absorbed?"
But these aren't the kind of things you can say to K. Or at least that I can say, not without risking being classed as "taking his side." I'm thinking of asking whether she's seeing a therapist; I know that she agreed to once their marriage counselor said that they'd gone as far as they could without her getting some individual therapy, but I don't know if she followed through on that.
Ah, crap. I'm going to bed.
Meanwhile at work, they're getting ready for a big layoff. The department I'm in had these grandiose plans for quadrupling in revenue over the next four years, and instead we're down some thirtysomething mil for the year, so heads are going to roll. One head that's already rolled is the pointy-haired boss of our rival unit, so we Munchkins were singing the ding-dong song--we may not last, but at least we outlasted him. Actually, things look relatively safe where I sit: our unit brings in way more than it's share of the revenue, with way fewer people than our counterparts in the larger organization. Being smallish and off to the periphery of things can be a nervous-making place when the empire-builders are trumpeting about centralization, standardization, consolidation and so on, but when the board brings in their hatchet man to "clean things up" having the best ROI counts for something, or so we hope. We've had to let our contractors go, but so far that's the extent of our damage and my boss (whom I actually trust, at least where this kind of thing goes) has said that while there aren't any guarantees in life, we don't have to worry about this shakeup.
The fat lady is warming up in the wings for J & K's marriage. K doesn't want to end it, but J has moved out and would rather face the next few years (if K doesn't agree to grant a divorce, it'll be two years before he can file for irreconcilable differences) alone and "without a pot to piss in" (as J's father put it) than tied to her. I kind of hate to admit it, but I can see his point; unlike Rhode Island Red's s.o., I like K, and I think that she's deep down a good person, but I could never live with her, and sometimes I've marvelled at J's patience. I just figured that the things that bugged me about their relationship didn't really get on his nerves, or at least not as much. I knew that they'd been in couples therapy pretty much ever since I'd known them, but again I just kind of shrugged and accepted it as the way they coped. Since my marriage came apart so badly, ending up with us not even talking to eachother more than absolutely necessary to run our lives, I guess I figured who am I to judge? Maybe that's what normal people do . Whatever works for them. Guess I was wrong.
Since I've spent just about every Saturday of the past three years hanging out with them and their son A, and have even gone on vacation with them, down to Disney for a week, and to that con every year, this will be a big change in my life. I'm going to try to stay friends with both of them, J because he's been like the brother I wish I had (instead of the brother I got), K because she really needs a friend, but I can tell already that it's going to take some managing and drawing of boundaries. I told J that, and he's cool, but we'll see about K. Fortunately, I've had a lifetime of practice at compartmentalizing, thanks to my parent's divorce and subsequent attempts to get me to take sides, or to send eachother messages. It left me the sad and bitter shell of a human being that I am, but I got really good at the "Don't care. Don't Care. Save it for each other. Mom/Dad, I DON'T CARE!" bit.
I read J the riot act Wednesday, not so much needing to leave, but for the way he's handled the whole thing, which has IMO been terrible, and harder on everyone concerned than it ever needed to be. He would keep formulating these sensible (relatively) plans to take things slow, not make any hasty or irrevocable moves, etc., discuss them with his therapist, discuss them with his friends--and then next we hear he's done something hasty, hurtful, and stupid. I have to say, he took his dressing down with good grace, and admitted that he screwed up. Today he even called to thank me for being honest with him about how mad I was at his handling of it, and seemed quite relieved when I told him I was still his friend.
Sigh
Well, I'm back. The con was pretty boring this year, or maybe it's just that I've been there and done that. I had an okay time in the evenings, hanging out with J, although most of it was devoted to drinking and talking about his problems with K, but during the day I felt like I had nothing to do. Usually when that happens I head for the gaming room, but this time when I got there they were in the middle of some stupid, petty local fan political spat--at least it seemed that way to me. The guy "running" the room was calling for somebody to call con security (why he couldn't do this himself wasn't evident to me) to eject some woman who was in the middle of the room ranting to anybody who would listen that that they couldn't call con security on her because she had paid to attend the con and had as much right as anyone to be there and yadda yadda yadda. I vaguely gathered that she wanted permission to do something in the room--run a LARP maybe--and the con guy was refusing, but it was evident that whatever the dispute was it was part of some much larger psychodrama that they had fought out endlessly before, because they were both being beyond childish about it. I had been thinking of volunteering to GM a game, or at least play Munchkin (I brought my set), but there was no way I was going to stick around and listen to fan tantrums just so I could volunteer. I think that this was probably the last time I go to this con, unless I come up with a better reason to go than keeping J company after hours.
I was supposed to leave for a long weekend at the con with my friends J & K, but J called this morning to say that instead of leaving at 10 AM, he and K had to go to an emergency session with their marriage counselor at noon, and that they are probably Splitsville. We still might end up going, although he might room with me; he has to go, 'cause he's a guest of the con; she wants to go because she sees her friends there once a year. I'm not at all sure that I want to be anywhere near this, but if J needs me then a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do (to coin a phrase).
They were both really supportive of me back when I was gathering the gumption to leave W (aka the invisible woman--apparently for the longest time lizzard was under the impression that our marriage was some kind of immigration scam), so I owe them. I didn't see it coming; now that it's here, I can't say I'm totally surprised, but I definitely thought that their marriage was--despite its visible ups and downs--basically working. Of course, it's not like I have more than one or two working marriages among my friends to compare it with: lizzard and jhk, a and e, and, well, that may be it. My sis and ls are still married, but they're "temporarily" living in different states. My mom and dad are both two-time losers (harsh, but that's really the way I think about it--not wanting to be like them was really one of the things that kept me in my broken marriage way too long). The librarian and her two husbands seem happy enough, I suppose, but that's a little hard to compare...
Not only was Movable Type easy enough to set up that I now have another three blogs (one personal, one for reviews, and one group blog for my gaming group), but I was able to succesfully reformat all my old reviews (back to 1996!) as if they were the output MT expects from Blogger and import them as blog entries. Sweet. It makes me all eager to start reviewing again. Thank you, Movable Type! I haven't decided whether to keep this blog around for semi-anonymous ranting or fold it into my new public blog. I'll probably try doing both for a while, and see which one falls by the wayside. The content of this blog, in particular, is likely to suffer, since most of what I write I'd be perfectly happy to put my name to, but we'll see. If nothing else, I need a place that I can comment on Badgerbag...
I'm experimenting with Movable Type on my website, for no absolutely compelling reason: there are niggling little things that bug me about Blogger, or maybe it's Blogspot, since it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Since I already have a website, maybe self-hosting is the way to go, now that I've gotten my feet wet in the "blogosphere." On the other hand, the anonymity of this blog is one of the attractions. I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to track down my real identity from this blog, if someone really wanted to, but that's not really the point; rather, it's that I feel free to say things that I don't necessarily want some of my friends (and most of my relatives) to read. Nothing too horrible, because I'm not really that sort of guy, but it would be awkward, for instance, for my friend R to read my opinions about his horrible SO whatserface. And since my friend R visits my website sometimes (although I haven't really updated anything on it in ages).... well, you get the picture.
I suppose that I could maintain this blog for anonymous posting, and another blog on my website for stuff that I don't care--but that wouldn't really get me away from Blogger/Blogspot, would it? Ponder, ponder...
See my post on Blogosophy if you don't know what I'm asking.
Yet another web quiz, this one on famous first lines from novels. I got 11 out of 13, one I really kicked myself for missing, and one I knew was a wild guess anyway. Give yourself extra credit if you can name the book without looking at the choices (8 out of the 11 that I got I just knew off the top of my head).
And then there's this vocabulary quiz, where my love of obscure words and some shrewd guesses got me 10 out of 10. Yes, I am geeky enough to be mildly proud of that.