Still passing the open windows and falling down the stairs

Cracked

“If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have gotten to me earlier.” — Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

The tough nut turned out to be uncrackable and in the past that might have left me feeling a little cracked myself. But it didn’t this time. I’ve been truly cracked in the past so the damage has already been done. I didn’t necessarily handle the situation with the nut as coolly as I would have liked but overall I know that I did the right thing.

I’ve realized that I have really come a long way in the last year. I ended a relationship with a really nice guy who was not a lifetime match for me. I recognized that the nut would likely end up causing more frustration at a point when things should be fun and easy. I listened to my instincts and walked away from both. And I know that I will continue to reject people and situations when my instincts tell me to do so.

In many, many ways, 2012 has sucked ass. But in a few important areas it has been one of my best personal growth years. Still, I’m happy enough to see it go.

Tough nuts

I love mussels. They are a favorite treat and I love to explore the wide variety of delicious methods in which they can be prepared. But I learned two things, two very important things, about mussels early on. (1) Never cook a raw mussel that is already open and (2) never eat a cooked mussel that has remained closed. My initial instinct was to try to pry them open with my fork or my teeth or slam them against my forehead. Bad ideas, all. Some mussels aren’t meant to be eaten.

I always wonder if that is true for nuts as well. Pistachios in particular. When staring down a tightly closed pistachio, I ponder the end result of trying to crack it open. Will it make me sick? Will I break a tooth or, worse yet, a nail? I usually just toss it, unwilling to take the risk for one tiny delicious nut.

So, how about men? I’ve recently (within the past six months) encountered what I am now beginning to believe is a closed man. The difference is that this man opens up a little, then sometimes a lot, then seems to close again with little notice.

There are some understandable reasons that this might be so, the primary being distance. And I get that. A 4-1/2 hour drive is a pain in the ass. But I’m a girl whose first serious relationship was with a bloke from London and third LTR was in Ohio for the first 18 months of three years together. So a neighboring state seems like a cake walk to me.

All I know is that he’s definitely a tough nut and I’m no nutcracker.

My Stuart Smalley moment

In a little more than eight years, I’ve written 502 posts. Now 503. About five a month. Not a very high average. But, for some unknown reason, I can’t seem to let this space go. It’s not about trying to draw in readers; it’s about trying to find my voice.I still have no idea what that is.

When I started writing here, I guess it was a break up blog. Then it was a stupidly get back together with the guy who was behind all of the initial pain and try to put bandages on the compound fractures of the relationship with cute little posts about kitten breath blog. Then it was a break up blog again, with less moaning and wailing.

And for a while it was a just happy to be alive and writing blog. Until it became a dating blog. Which, of course, returned us to the original format…break up blog.

If I were more consistent about writing recently, I guess we’d be back to dating blog but I’m so freaked out that the dating stuff will just lead back to the break up stuff and my poor blog and I will be stuck in an infinite loop of awkward conversations and gut wrenching sobs.

Which begs the question, do I give up dating? Or do I give up writing?

There were brief spurts of attempted humor as well. Some weren’t half bad. But most had one consistent theme. Self-deprecation. It’s my go to. For unknown reasons, my fall back humor is the kind that makes the audience laugh and then make then awwwww face. I guess it could be tied to self-esteem, except that I generally feel pretty damn good about who I am, finally, but I’m so used to saying negative things about myself that I find it difficult to stop.

And the self-deprecation goes hand in hand with the angst. It seems funnier to me somehow if I turn the negative results of a relationship back on myself. But it’s not really that funny. Since I started this site, I’ve loved two men deeply and I was destroyed both times. Trying to make a joke out of that, especially at my own expense, is not going to change the results or my outlook on the future.

So, I guess I’ll keep writing without any expectation of some sort of blog theme developing. If it ever does, it will happen organically. And if it already has and this is indeed a dating/break up blog, I’ll try to keep it entertaining. At someone else’s expense.

Showing my privates

I’ve spent a few minutes browsing through some of my more “recent” posts and I reread Spring Cleaning, to which I cried, “bullshit”!

I wrote it in an effort to conceal that I was still hurting from the break up, as a proactive mask in the off chance that the guy I had recently met would find my blog. But none of it was real. I wasn’t over it. And I wasn’t in a new “relationship”. But I wanted to be both and so I changed the visibility of 30 break up related posts from public to private.

I censored myself which is I something that I had never wanted to do on this site. Which is not to imply that I just vomit every thought onto my keyboard. I (usually) think through my posts and determine what I am and am not willing to share. I will admit to a couple of knee jerk posts here and there, but I don’t want to feel shame or regret for being a human person, so I had always let them stand, until last May.

And so I have decided to flash my privates to the world! I have returned all posts to public visibility and now every post ever written over the past eight years is here for the world to see. Some are clever, some are depressing, and most are pointless to anyone but me. But who cares? This is my space and I will not concern myself in the future with who might read what and how that might affect their opinion of me.

Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a post.

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

I had for a time forgotten I have a blog. The name Bandick had escaped me, although it is on my driver’s license. I had lost my desire to be creative in any form.

But for some reason, although the weather is turning gray and the daylight is diminishing, my spark is returning.

It started with some yarn and a pair of knitting needles. Before I knew it, I was half way through a scarf. I can’t knit anything other than straight lines, so I am relegated to scarves and blankets. But it was enough to remind me that I NEED a creative outlet.

Much of my life is as it was in May. Still unemployed. Still (again) single; more on that later. Still healing in some ways. However, all of my windows were cleaned and all of my bushes and trees were pruned in a timely manner this year. As if to say my windows had been washed any time in the past several years…they had not.

It struck me yesterday that my life had become too organized and that my creativity was suffering as a consequence. So bear with me while I attempt to organize my thoughts and feelings into tidy little sentences and paragraphs in this poor neglected space.

I’m not going to make any great proclamations about how often I will be posting, particularly since I don’t believe anyone still checks in here, but I do hope to reconnect with writing in some meaningful way. Starting now.

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