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5 June, 1998
I just got your message baby -- Blow Monkeys, Digging Your Scene
Cold, cold wind is blowing in through the windows ... who'd have thought it could get this cold in June. My fingers are tight on the keys as I type, almost as tight as the feeling I get sometimes, behind my eyes, when I've been on the computer for too long. Or those terrible knots that my shoulder-blades sometimes gather up in after a day at work. That song up there ... I don't remember it at all from when I was growing up in Europe in the early to mid eighties. Funny what you do and don't remember. But like a lot of songs from the 80's which I either never heard or don't remember, I like it. So I went looking for more information on the group, because I wanted to post accurate lyrics. Pictures yes, places to buy the CDs yes, but no lyrics, not even at lyrics.ch. So that's a guess from listening carefully. The music is quite bouncy with a big band-esque jazz sound, but the words are just little bit odd around the edge. Like a lot of 80's songs, it's just slightly inscrutable. It often seems as if music of the era was obviously meaningless, or so obscurely meaningful that you couldn't tell the difference. Gee, I wonder what they were all thinking about ... I personally was mostly thinking about school, sunsets, the grass outside, broken shoelaces and bruised knees and the occasional boy ... yes already. I never really got into BOYS as a theme in life though. Unlike many of my peers, for whom this was an all-encompassing passion/hobby (the discussion of, staring at, clipping of pictures of many boys, in real life and from the star rags), I was slightly to left field on this one. Every few years or so, I'd fall madly in love with one or two very particular boys. I was always the type who wound up with a very deep-seated and enduring crush on a boy and then had my heart smashed to smithereens by circumstances of age, distance, time or just plain geekiness. I was, and still am, so convinced of my inability to attract a boy that I never really actively tried to attract one. What that means of course is that I was one of those moon-eyed, moon-faced dreamers who would sit and sigh and cry and never do anything except follow from a distance. This approach was, however, successful in two cases. One in which my meandering following of a boy was eventually noticed and wonder of wonders turned to reciprocation. The other was a distant mooning for a while and culminated in a very deliberate confrontation because I just couldn't take it anymore. Heck, we were in SUMMER camp, I didn't have much time before he'd VANISH back to another state, far far away and I'd never see him again. The former of those two wound up being a very serious relationship which ended rather messily about four years ago. The latter was a summer romance which also ended rather badly because I was very stupid and young and naive. However it proved to be salvageable in the sense of long-distance friendliness, thanks to this wonderful medium of the 'Net here. See ... it's AMAZING the people you can bump into out there when the world starts being able to come to you right in your living room. Scary thought that ... but anyway. Boys were never the pre-occupation for me. LOVE was ... erm ... heh ... is. It's always been about One True Love, the transport of emotion, the depth of feeling, being carried away swept off my feet. I am addicted to that feeling, obsessed with re-creating it. I just love to be in love. An English teacher once characterized Romeo, from the classic Shakespeare play as being less in love with Juliet herself and more in love with the idea of being in love. That's me described to a -T-, I think. That's probably why I LOVE that play for all that it has become a serious cultural cliché and why movies with heart-rending love stories where impossible love becomes possible will always me draw me to the video store. The vast and mighty, recent Hollywood behemoth movie which upset Star Wars and E.T. as the largest box-office take of all time can be chalked up as another one of those movies. I wouldn't say that the film deserved all of the awards that it got, but it was certainly enjoyable. Unfortunately it's haunting me just a bit. Yes it is. I may be selling out to the mass-media phenom, so sue me. But the truth is that the film has moments which grab you just as surely as the moment when Juliet plunges that dagger into her chest at the end of the play. Okay, okay so the moments which are haunting me may NOT be quite so mainstream, but the fact that they're stuck in my head is still just as annoying as if I was one of those teeny-boppers who has gone to see the film 50 times just to see Leo, Leo and more Leo. Right. The scenes which I have stuck in my head are almost exclusively composed of the bits of Rose as an old woman. The part where she is remembering the Titanic very early on and talks about the fact that she could still smell the fresh paint and how the sheets had never been slept in. That line about the paint and the sheets keeps playing back in my head accompanied by the end scene where she goes out on the deck of the sea-platform and looks down into the water and ... hmmmm well hopefully you've seen t he film by now, if not well this is a spoiler ... giggles as she drops the necklace into the waves. Another moment which is bugging me is after the boat has sunk and Jack is dead, she makes the decision to make a stab at living and swims off her raft to grab the whistle so the rescue boat will come back for her and the scene where she has arrived in New York and is staring up at the Statue of Liberty. (Oh and of course, after all that they went through, it was pointless 'cause he died anyway. That bugged me too, but that's okay 'cause that made it a non-Hollywood ending right? Except that this way wound up making it even more of a Hollywood ending somehow .. don't ask ...) So. What does that all mean? I have no Earthly clue. Mostly I guess it's making me think of the value of life and how I want to be able to look back on a full life and still have that sly sense of humor left in me if I get to be that old. Make it count ... make it count ... right. I haven't been very good at making it count lately. I've been crabby, cranky, downright grouchy in fact. I've been difficult to live with, terribly rude to Sabs' family, though for the life of me, I LOVE his grandparents and wouldn't want to hurt their feelings in any way. I haven't been taking in the sunrises, I haven't been smiling at the birds and reveling in every moment. I'm just continuing to stew, stew, stew in place. Quite pathetic actually ... doing nothing, nothing, nothing all the time. You see I was SO busy in May, had so many things to do, went off so many times, had guests so much that I don't know what to do with myself now that I have time. Actually, that's not true, I'd really, dearly love to SEW right now. I have a dozen projects lined up but they are all firmly locked up in my sewing trunk which Sabs closed by accident on the day we moved, with the key inside it. Well, actually the key MAY be somewhere else, but since I have been utterly unsuccessful in finding it while unpacking, I am rapidly becoming convinced that it is locked in the trunk along with the lion's share of my sewing equipment, except for my emergency sewing case. Do you know what it's like to want to sew (or do anything else for that matter) so BADLY and not be able to because ... well just because you CAN'T!? Oh. The Frustration. Anyway ...what was a talking about ... oh yes ... boys. See I warned you that this time this would be different. This is all just flowing right out of my head and onto the page. Stream of consciousness if you will. Well, not quite. I do back up to correct my typoes ... mostly. Boys. I haven't had much luck with them in the course of my short life. The first boy that I had a REAL crush on from the time I was 6 years old -- ah that first day of first grade and there he was .. just perfect ... the perfect boy ... and i wanted to marry him on the spot ... oh well -- moved away when I was 10 and was only rarely heard from again since. The irony is that we now live in the same city but I still haven't seen him again since I moved here (chicken). Later crushes weren't quite so major, heck, it took me a little while to get over him first. The next major crushes were generally on older boys who were quite un-attainable. I wouldn't even try. One of them was actually a my age, a few scant months younger and I carried on a flirtation with him when I dared, but mostly, we were just friends and I'll never know what would have happened if I'd dared to say anything. Oh well. In high school there weren't many ... just the aforementioned summer romance which ended when we all went home. Except that it didn't really end until about 2-3 months later when I realized that carrying on a long distance relationship when you're 14 years old across 600 miles from summer to summer just doesn't work and then proceeded to get angry 'cause this slightly older boy didn't TELL me that and he should have known better ... blah ... blah ... blah so I cut him off cold and I've regretted it ever since. Let me say that again, I wish I hadn't done that, I really do. I wish that I'd had more courage and saved myself from self-induced heart-break because, heck I missed the boy! Oy. The insanity! The only other high school relationship was the one which lasted 4 years. Sam. I was going to marry him. Well, I thought so anyway. But it didn't turn out that way. Then there was Sabs playing double duty as friend and lover and counselor. In retrospect that probably seems rather twisted. Of COURSE I developed a crush on my therapist! (Well he's NOT really a therapist but he was doing a nice job of getting me through a terrible depression and a bad break-up and all that jazz, so I guess I can chalk that up to reverse Florence Nightingale syndrome). Anyway. He wasn't interested in any kind of long-term lasting attachment at the time. So I eventually got over the crush and started looking around for a new boy. That's when I found J. The younger man. Oh did I ever feel worldly wise ... le sigh ... what an ego boost, how nice to be showered with gifts, dinners out, flowers and all of that old-fashioned gentlemanly attention. But that one was never going to go anywhere, not with me graduating and him only being 19 ... I'd already made it clear to myself that this one wasn't going anywhere before it even got off the ground. This led to some bittersweet goodbyes later ... he's a really, really nice guy and, well he deserved better than getting stuck with this crazy chick who was mending a broken heart. And then Sabs called ... missing me. Say what? And my luck changed. So I'm doing that whole long-term thing again ... you know the one where you share just about everything and you're REALLY a working couple already and the only thing missing to make you married is the piece of paper. I'd almost forgotten it but Sam and I even had a joint bank account once upon a time -- see we really WERE that serious -- so despite all of the assurances and the ring on my finger there is still a lingering shadow of doubt about this whole "he's not going anywhere" business. How much have I grown and changed since that moment 4 years ago when I hung up the phone and knew that my life would never be the same again? I don't know. Heartbreak changes you, you see. Sometimes I feel like I am much quieter than I was. I had started to bloom you see, during that year in Europe. Sometimes I feel like a stunted growth. That betrayal took a lot of ground-covered away from me. I wish I'd been able to turn it around. Not let those traitorous words over a long-distance line get to me so much. Just live something else ... let the pain go and let the other joys count more. Who knows why I couldn't and why sometimes I still feel broken inside, as if the pieces just, don't really match up anymore. You'd think I'd have gotten jaded and cynical about that whole true love thing. Maybe I have. Sometimes, I get paranoid and wonder if I'm settling for what's good, because I have something good. And then I look at him and I smack my forehead and realize that it doesn't really get much better than this. That what I've got is it. The swoopy feeling may not always be there 24 hours a day, but it tries real damn hard to be, sneaks up on me unawares and makes me smile. Who knows what it is that makes things work between two people. But I've got it now and I'll be danged if I'm going to let it go. I'm sick of coming close only to have fate make it slip through my fingers. This time ... I'm making it count. |
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