girlfiend

I wish that I could be more patient. Not outwardly. Outwardly, I’m pretty damn patient. I rarely lose my temper at work- last year, I only yelled once. That’s right. I taught 7th grade and only yelled once. I was even patient with the boy when he dumped me. Even when it got to the point where we were seeing each other 4 or 5 days a week and he STILL refused to admit we were a couple I was patient. It made me crazy too. In fact, I’m so worked up just thinking about it right now, that I have to write about it more.

He broke up with me in November. I saw him once that week. Then once the week after. After that, it was more like twice a week. So in my head we were dating. We got together, talked, had dinner, had sex and went to our respective residences. Sounds like dating, right? By Christmastime we were seeing each other more often- 3 or 4 times a week. We started to have sleepovers around this time as well.

I got a weekly calendar for a gift exchange at work. The last week of December I started drawing a little heart on the days that I saw him. We saw each other no less than 4 times a week for all of January and February. Most weeks we saw each other 5 or 6 times. The whole time this was happening, he refused to let me interact with his friends or family. He refused to admit we were a couple. It was absolutely infuriating, and yet, I was fucking patient. I felt like an ass. I felt like he was walking all over me, and he probably was, but still I put up with it and waited.

It felt like forever that I had to wait for him to make up his fucking mind. So many times I was ready to say screw it and move on but instead I waited. I was very patient. Outwardly. Inwardly I was fuming. Patience is a virtue. What the hell does that mean. I was patient and patient and patient and I feel like I was left with nothing. At least he fucking admits that I’m his girlfriend now. Wow. I guess I’m still pretty angry.

I had a dream last night that he proposed to me. He gave me a ring with the smallest diamond I’ve ever seen in my life. It was like one of those rings you get in a vending machine. In my dream I was absolutely devastated. It really symbolized how he valued our relationship. But in the dream I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me. I tried to act like this 25 cent ring didn’t make me feel worthless. I walked around wearing it trying to smile and act excited because I was engaged, but I just felt sad. I bumped into something and the ring cracked. I looked down at it and the “diamond” had just split, jagged, across the middle. It was just glass. He had bought me a glass ring. I showed him and he seemed genuinely upset. I asked him if he bought a diamond that came with a certificate. He pulled it out of his pocket and it was hand written in an old fashioned slanty script- like the Declaration of Independence. I was so, so sad.

Patience.

I need more patience.

A friend of my boyfriend’s just got engaged. I burst into tears when I heard. I don’t know how or when I became that girl, but here I am. It kills me that I’m so insecure and so jealous. But this friend is the guy my boyfriend lived with when he left me. This friend is someone that I just don’t trust. I’m convinced that his fiance hates me as well. I don’t even know why I’m so paranoid. It all seems so wrong. I know my boyfriend loves me. He talks about getting married and taking our future children to the park, and how we still need to be in love when we’ve been married for 20 years and blah, blah, blah, but ever since the breakup I just don’t buy it. No matter what he says, until there’s a ring on my finger I don’t believe he wants to marry me. I’ve seen business cards from jewelry stores and I assume it’s just a decoy. He can’t possibly mean it. When this couple started dating I knew that they would get married long before my boy would be ready. I’ve been saying for years that his barely legal little sister will get married long before his 30 year old ass will be ready. It kills me. I’m sort of at this point where I just think, “if not now, when?”

I’m generally pretty good at bubble tests. I did well enough on the SAT when I took it in 10th grade,that I didn’t bother to take it again. This was surprising because the night before I was on hallucinogenic drugs. Several years later I did better on the GRE than anyone else I know who took it. When it came time for me to get my teaching certificates I was a little concerned- my education program was a joke, and my students assaulted me the day before, but still I did exceptionally well. Even when I took the Reading Specialist subject test before I took the course that prepares you for it I passed with a score well above average.

So when I decided to take the test to get certified in Secondary English I thought I’d be fine. I’m certified as an elementary school teacher and as a Reading Specialist, but for the last few years I’ve taught middle and high school. I realized that many of the jobs I was applying for wanted secondary Reading Specialists to be English certified as well so I signed up to take the test. This morning, at 7.30, my sharpened pencils and I were ready to go.

The rest of the idiots in the room weren’t so ready. I’m sure that anyone who has ever taken a bubble test remembers the routine. The person who administers the test reads from a script. They lead you through filling out your name in bubbles. It doesn’t take a genius to fill in the bubbles that correspond to the letters of your name, but frighteningly for the youth of the U.S., many of our future teachers can’t figure that shit out. The morons weren’t even able to figure out the serial number of their tests that were clearly marked in RED in the upper right hand corner: Serial Number. People, please. The administrator directed us to turn to page two of our answer sheet. Some idiot woman says, “Excuse me, my page two is blank.” She wasn’t even looking at the answer sheet. On page two you have to copy a statement that certifies you are who you say you are. The directions clearly say “Do not print.” Three people had to erase the whole thing and start again. The test did not start until 8.30 because of these not-quite teachers.

The first 50 questions or so were all literature related. I did pretty well on that section. Although I’ve never read anything by Horatio Alger before, I looked him up and I definitely got the question about him right. There were several easy questions about Tennessee Williams and The Catcher in the Rye.I even think that I got a question about The Canterbury Tales.

Then there were questions about poetry. I spent an entire marking period teaching poetry last year. I thought I was well versed in poetry. But when I was asked to identify a poem’s rhyme scheme- of my four choices, I was only familiar with one. And apostrophe? I thought an apostrophe was just a punctuation mark. I didn’t know it was a poetic device. Caesura? I don’t know what the hell a caesura is.

The next section was even more of a nightmare. It seems that I know absolutely nothing about grammar. I felt like such an idiot when I got to the third question about gerunds and I’d never even heard of a gerund before. I’m too afraid to even look it up. I started to catch on that gerunds end in ‘ing’, but that’s all I know. The rest of the grammar related stuff was so foreign to me I can’t even remember what it was.

The last section, thankfully was fine. It was all about how to teach English. I cruised through that part and realized I still had an hour to kill. I hate these tests because you’re not allowed to leave when you finish. You can’t even bring a book. I spent 20 minutes reviewing my answers. Then I spent five minutes tapping my foot. Then I counted the tiles in the floor. Then I started counting the number of times the man two seats away from me erased an answer, changed it, erased it again, and changed it back. After a while I just started counting. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. After about four hundred three I nearly began to cry. I was so desperate to get out of there.

I really hope I pass. I don’t think I can deal with taking that again.

Use exclamation points after the titles of your blog posts. Or use double exclamation points at the end of the sentence. Believe me. Nothing! Is! This! Exciting! When! You’re! Reading! It!!

My gym has what they call the FAB (Frequently Abused Body) club. When you walk in the front door the first thing you see is the board that lists the members of this elite group who must average 11 or more gym visits a month over the course of six months. The board is a fairly large dry-erase board divided into three columns. The board lists the members in order from most frequent visitors to those just squeaking in at 11. It also lists the number of projected visits per year.

For the first three years I belonged to the gym, membership in the FAB club eluded me. Then, finally, in early 2003 I made it. There I was at the very bottom of the third column. I was elated. Slowly but surely I worked my way up the list, to the bottom of the first column. Generally speaking, for the past year and a half I’ve averaged between 15.4 and 17 gym visits a month placing me between 30th and 50th on the board. On the months when my name is higher and the number of projected visits is close to 200 I feel good about myself.

Today I unfortunately found my self down near the bottom of the second column. I’ve dropped to 12.5 visits a month, with my summer of slack. Devastated, I headed for the locker room to weigh myself. To add insult to injury, my lack of gym visits has caused me to gain weight. Who the hell gains weight in the summer?

The part that bothers me most is how much this shit affects me. I shouldn’t feel like a loser because I’ve gained three pounds, and I certainly should berate myself for only going to the gym 3 times a week. I mean, three times a week is pretty good when I’m able to think about it objectively, but for some reason, I immediately want to stop eating for the next week and hit the gym everyday for the next month to get the number on the scale down and the number on the board up.

It saddens me and sickens me to have fallen so deeply into the beauty trap. I know it’s wrong to obsess, and to compare myself to pictures of airbrushed women, but I find it incredibly difficult to stop. I hate that when I look in the mirror all I notice are lumps, and rolls and flab. There are so many people in the world who actually have weight problems, and I’m not one of them yet I can’t stop thinking that I’ll never be good enough.

I stopped taking pictures last year. Up until then I was all about the photos, both the digital and the normal kind. But after the big breakup I stopped. I don’t think it was purposeful. I certainly didn’t make the decision to put the camera away, but it’s been close to a year and I don’t even know where a camera is. So for the first time in my life I have a year that has been undocumented. the only pictures of me that I can recall are the ones that were taken for school.

So last night, at the wedding of one of my favorite people, one of my bestest friends from grade school and middle school and high school, I was devastated to realize that I had forgotten a camera. This was an occasion that I’d love to have evidence of. My friend and his new wife both looked wonderful and ecstatic. I wish I had a picture. I danced with my father for the first time in years and I wish I had a picture. My mother gave a toast where she managed not to offend anyone and there’s no proof. I have to find a camera soon.

When Boyfiend and I first started dating more than four years ago we ran into an old friend of his from college on the street while walking my dog. I didn’t get a good look at her, but she had red hair and as a child I wanted red hair desperately so I felt awkward. I left them to chat and went on to the dog park. A few days later while he was reading email at my house I was standing behind him and saw an email addressed to ‘darling,’ signed love, R. So I asked him what was up. He told me that she was a friend from college- which I didn’t buy, so he admitted they fooled around off and on in college, but never dated.

The plot thickens. Every once in a while when he was on my computer I’d walk in and he’d very quickly x out of his email. I, of course, was immediately suspicious and began looking for signs of him cheating on me with this girl he swears he never had sex with. They went out for a few happy hours, never inviting me along. Then, one night he was supposed to hang out with her and some other friends from college. He didn’t get home until after 3 in the morning. It turns out it was just the two of them in her apartment. I was pissed. After this, he didn’t see her for a while.

But every once in a while I’d see him very quickly x out of his email when I entered the room and I knew he was reading something from her. As I’m a snoop by nature, it became my goal to check his email as often as possible. On several occasions when using my computer, as he was at my house A LOT, he failed to log out. So I snooped. And snooped. It turns out this redhead who I’ll call Red was seriously in love with him. She wrote him all sorts of emails talking about how perhaps they’d made a mistake by never seriously dating and all sorts of other pathetic drivel. He’d write back telling her that he had a girlfriend who he loved, and she had a boyfriend who she loved and blah blah blah. I figured I had nothing to worry about and since he’s actually trustworthy, I didn’t.

Fast-forward a few years. In November, my boyfriend abruptly freaked out, broke up with me and moved out. After he left I had a bit of a breakdown. I’m actually amazed I was able to function. Even though we were no longer officially together, after a few weeks we saw each other more and more. One afternoon I saw them out for drinks together. I was enraged, but tried not to show it. I really wanted to get back together so I didn’t harass him about it.

By the time January rolled around we were seeing each other 4 or 5 times a week. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t actually back together. Again, it became my goal to check his email when he failed to log out. I snooped. And snooped. I went all out with the snooping this time. It turns out Red was STILL seriously in love with him.

One night, even though she had a boyfriend who she lived with, she went to Boyfiend’s house looking to finally score after 10 years of desperately wanting to and was only deterred because he had other friends over. Another email gave the link to her blog which I read daily. She wrote about him often. Then, she spilled all over the fucking internet posting old journal entries about why he’s her soulmate. I guess she was pretty drunk as she quickly removed that shit- probably in case her boyfriend saw it. I was pissed, but I couldn’t stop reading her stupid blog.

One of her entries actually referred to me directly. She called me his crazy ex-girlfriend and even wrote about my mother. I lost it. I admitted everything to him. I told him about the snooping, about all the shit I read on her site and in his email. I told him that he was a fucking prick for telling her personal shit about me and that he had to tell her we got back together and that he wasn’t interested. He told me he did. I think he chickened out.

She continued to write about him. And me. One day this obsessive woman wrote an entry that suggested she had access to my email. So I deleted all of my old entries on this site in a rage, renamed the site I Hate Red, and started writing bitchy entries. Of course I felt like a complete ass and decided that by writing about her I was just as bad as she was. Remember, we’ve never really had any personal interactions, so who am I to call her a crazy bitch. But I just couldn’t stop reading her blog. At this point, he had sworn up and down that not only did he tell her he wasn’t interested, he told her that he was in love with me and planned to marry me. I actually believed it, because the following day she had this depressing entry about how much her life sucked and how miserable she was. Bad karma or not, I was thrilled.

The entries about him slowed down although clearly she still wanted contact. She didn’t mention me at all for a while. But today, it’s back. This time she called me a wackjob. Twice. So here it is. A brand new site, with a brand new name, for the enjoyment of anyone who stumbles upon it. I reposted some older articles from this site and my old diaryland site and renamed it. The new title and description of this blog are not my own words, they’re from an email Red wrote to my beau. Here they are again:

There are too many connections too many things I’ve ignored away. I’ve flirted with you forever, flirted with the idea of you forever. We never dated and we never will, and despite being in love with other men at other times, it’s always been you. For my entire adult life, it’s been you.

Red, for him it hasn’t been, nor will it ever be, you.