Had a great weekend. I took match.com girl to the Queen City roller derby and she thought it was really cool and I got major brownie points (by the way, nice performance, dragonlady7). Things went really well on the date, especially after she came back to my place and we had several beers. I don't know where this is going, but it sure is nice to be able to snuggle next to someone in the morning.

(uncutsaniflush, last night the text of my journal was not showing up and I didn't know why. I had thought that putting the word "Date" in the title might have been some specially reserved estrip word that was messing up the parsing of something or other, so I changed the title to some silly name like wangdangdoodle that I knew would never be a specially reserved word to test things, but forgot to change the title back. It turns out the problem was actually was the e plus colon plus dragonlady7 in the text that caused the entry not be appearing, which is why you don't see dragonlady7 in standard estrip username notation).

Talked with match.com girl again tonight via phone. She does have a cute voice and her laugh reminds me of the laugh that a really awesome ex-girlfriend from my Ithaca days had. One of those "that's so stupid but I'm going to laugh anyways" kind of laughs. She was open to the idea of seeing roller derby this saturday, so most likely we'll be going there saturday after dinner somewhere (I know that the knockouts aren't skating, but I wonder if (e:zobar) and (e:dragonlady7) will be there?) I have absolutely no idea where this thing with the girl is going. I must remember--no eggs in one basket, at least not until after I've made the flan (which reminds me, I really should literally make flan sometime soon). She does like whiskey and mythbusters, so she can't be all bad.

On a different note, it's kinda funny, living on Richmond. It's really like an urban jungle. Which is not to say that it isn't a nice place to live, but it resemebles the kind of jungle you see in the movies where everything is quiet at night and then all of a suddenly the random, loud howling of a monkey disturbs the tranquility. Except on Richmond, it usually isn't howler monkeys but emergency vehicles, esp. police cars; it'll be 4:00AM and all of a sudden I'll hear "whoop-beep-squalk-whoop-beep-whoop". Of course, tonight there are real live monkey's, howling and disturbing the peace and playing with their own feces, except these monkeys have blue fur with yellow streaks. In another month or two, one way or the other, my jungle will be back to the way I like it.

(e:metalpeters) comment on (e:jenks,39076) reminded me of something I had thought up a few years back.

Pop psychologist Dr. John Gray wrote a book called "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus". I've found a more fitting analogy.

Women all tell you they want to date Luke Skywalker, when in fact the person they really want to hook up with Han Solo, though they usually end up dating Darth Vader.

And there you have it, 99% of all modern romance explained by Star Wars.

In other words, there's what women say and there's what women do/mean, and what women and what they do/mean are actually two very different kinds of beasts. I think that my life would have been so much easier if at the beginning of high school someone had told me that despite what all the girls were saying, being Luke Skywalker was an absolutely terrible idea.

Another message of interest from an admirer of the silicon variety, this time from match.com

"Here it is possible to write everyone about yourself much, but I think the person it is possible to learn well only then when you will communicate to him some time!"

She looks like Jennifer Aniston but she talks like Borat. I'd have thought the Russian hackers would have spent the extra ruples for some content that almost resembles passable english. If I got a message titled "I need big strong man to pull plow" I could at least give them a few brownie points for humor.

To expand on (e:metalpeter)'s theme of the day...

If she likes homemade mojitos
And gettin' caught in the rain
If she roots for the Sabres
But is okay with the 'Canes
If she likes Saturday lunches, at the India Gate
Then she's likely the woman that I'd probably date.

Just random pieces of doggerel floating through my mind. Move along, nothing to see here...

A week ago, I write about how much I love that my girlfriend is up here.

Tonight, we discuss on the phone that we're not right for each other and that maybe we should break up.

Life's kinda ironic that way.

Hell has frozen over and the woman is up from NC visiting me.

Blackboard O' Love.



I think that spending Valentine's Day without female company doesn't bother me as much after that 5-year stretch I spent between 1998 and 2003 where the most contact I had with women was shaking their hands and the occasional hugs from friends.

Amazing I'm still sane after all these years.

Tonight I had a conversation with my girlfriend who still lives in North Carolina.

Me: Do you know yet whether you can come up for my birthday Nov. 17th?

Girlfriend: I'm afraid I can't. I just can't.

Me: Why not?

Girlfriend: Because Buffalo took you away from me.

Me: What? What? (in disbelief)

Me (thinking silently to myself): I waited close to two weeks for you to ask at work and figure out whether you could come up and visit me for my birthday. And after all that time, the answer you give me sounds like something you could have thought up in two seconds and could have given me two weeks earlier.

Me: So, after I've flown down and visited you this summer, you just can't do the same for me? (did I mention I'd be paying for her entire ticket up here?)

Girlfriend: sorry, I can't come up and visit you. It's like me saying 'I've got this really nice friend in North Carolina, and I'd like you to come down and see him.' Buffalo is what took you away from away from me, so I can't go up there.

Me (thinking silently to myself): Me trying desperately to get any computer job I could back in NC and submitting hundreds of resumes and constantly getting turned down, followed by you and your mother calling me "selfish" for staying in Raleigh for a potential job interview instead of driving you to to do work errands for your mother, who's also your boss, that you couldn't run yourself because of your driving problem*, followed by your mother busting on me for being a 30 year-old man without a job who couldn't support her daughter in the future and who should be spending his time sending out resumes--that certainly influenced my choice to take a job up in Buffalo. You should be blaming that BS for taking me away from you.**

Me: Do you know how silly that sounds?

Girlfriend: You just don't understand.

Me: You know, in this entire relationship, I've gone out of my way a lot to come and see you. For over a year I did all that driving back and forth from Raleigh 40-60 miles out to Zebulon and later Wilson several times a week. The whole time, you almost never came to see me in Raleigh. I was kind of hoping after all those times I came to see you, the very least you could do would be to come up and see me.

Girlfriend: You just don't understand.

Me: Well, I need to go to work tomorrow. Goodnight. Bye.

Girlfriend: Bye.

(End of conversation; I hang up).

The irony of this situation is that I just came back from the end of services for Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday which deals with wrongs you feel other have done to do you for which you're supposed to forgive them) and already I have something that I should be steaming furious about. I guess I'll try to rise to the spiritual challenge and look past it. Of course, that means not letting anger dominate my life; it doesn't mean continuing to let myself be jerked around on a string like a Yo-Yo.

• My girlfriend has this issue with driving long distances. Basically, up until a year ago, her mother forbade her from driving distances more than 5-10 miles, even though she was 20. The GF told me, at the start of our relationshiop, that if she were to drive any significant distance, her mother would call the police and report the car as stolen, even though the GF was the one making the payments on the car and insurance at the time. If someone tells you that you can't do something and prevents you from doing that thing and threatens you with punishment for doing that thing, and if they are successful in getting you not to do that thing, then they have basically undermined your ability to do that thing. Whenever the GF needed to go somewhere and her mother couldn't take her, then I had to take her because of what her mother did to her. In the last year, my girlfriend has denied that her mother ever did this, and has basically internalized her mothers feelings about her driving as her own. The end result is that she can't really go anywhere other than a few miles from her house, and she thinks that "this is the way things have always been."

• I tend to see any attempt by the mother to get me to drive her daughter somewhere, or her refusal to drive her daughter to somewhere she wants to go, as a refusal to acknowledge the damage in her daughter's development that she caused in undermining her daughter's ability to drive significant distances. That the mother would refuse to acknowledge her role in making her daughter unable to perform the errand while casting me as the "selfish" bad guy because I would not help her with the errand is something I consider to be intolerable hipocrisy.

Thought of the day: relationships suck. Especially when you're torn between wanting to be with someone at all costs and listening to the people you know and trust (yourself included) who have correctly pointed the number of difficulties that you've had in your relationship.

And so I'm faced with a paradox. It feels like the relationship was always meant to be, and that I know the person as well as I know myself. Yet at the same time the other half the relationship is unwilling to match the 50% of the compromise, sacrifice, and personal growth that I'm willing to put forward, and ones wiser than myself tell me that these attributes are cornerstones of relationships that are meant to be.

I know that no amount of complaining that I do will resolve any of these issues, as sorely tempted as I am to do this (which I probably will do over the next several weeks). For tonight, the most I can do is ponder how confused I am right now and take some comfort in the fact that writing this all down makes me feel better.