February 15, 2005 Jackass, Table for One Okay, I can talk about it now. What happened was this: After arriving home from dinner with The Fabulous Robert, I walked in the door, two bags in one hand, flowers and cheesecake for Mom in the other, and inadvertently stepped on her big toe. She clutched at her foot and said, "OW! That really hurt!" I lost it. I said, "I hate you! You never really loved me! Nobody ever loved me! I wish you were dead!" I then calmly walked over to the silverware drawer, pulled out a butcher's knife, and stabbed her in the left eye. Don't bother calling the police. The cops in my home town are all related to me, so it'd be futile, anyway. Well, that's not exactly what happened, but it's a little bit more interesting than what actually happened. What actually happened is that, during a phone conversation with Laurie on the way home from dinner, she mentioned that she was angry at me for a comment I made to someone, because it made her look bad. And, rather than doing the proper thing and saying, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I should have known better, and I'll never do it again," I proceeded to turn into the biggest jackass of all time and lay into her, hitting every button I know how to push to get her into a fight with me. There was yelling. There were accusations. There was drama, and three dropped cell coverage areas. At the end of the conversation, I basically told her that I'd burn down her village, salt the ground she used to walk on, and dance on the graves of all her friends. Or something to that effect. It took me a couple of hours to realize that I had indeed been a total jackass, but I waited until this morning to write her a gigantic letter of apology, and then wait for her to wake up so I could call her and tell her that I'd sent a letter, but that I knew I was being a jackass, and that I was sorry. She said, "Yeah, and I was a model of restraint, of course!" A valid point. The main thing is that Laurie and I don't know how to argue with one another. It so rarely happens that when it does, we both get much too defensive and go for the jugular. Which is stupid, because you would think that after all the crap both of us have been through together (each losing a parent, each battling with disease, each having extraordinarily bad taste in certain boyfriends), we'd have a pretty good perspective on what the other is thinking. But we're not psychic, and we both need to realize that, so the next time we have an argument (sometime in 2006, if history repeats itself), we'll actually approach it like adults. I think that's the one lesson, after all the progress I've made, that I still have yet to learn. I've said it here before, but it bears repeating: Apologies cost me nothing. When I'm wrong, it's not a terrible, earth-shattering thing, and if an apology and an admittance that I was wrong is all it'll take to fix a slight, a mistake, or a boneheaded move, I should be aware enough to just do it, rather than insist that I am right in all things, and the world must bend to my every whim. The stupid thing is that I'm better at that with people I don't know all that well more than the people who are closest to me. I love Laurie more than anyone else in this world (tying with my family, I suppose), and yet she's the one I don't admit that I was evereverever wrong to. It's really dumb that I fall into the trap that I see others fall into, that of treating the ones you love worse than the ones you just kind of like, or don't really know at all. It's a fucked-up way to deal with people, and I'm guilty of it more often than I like to admit. However, the Zoloft has made me less depressed, not perfect. I can't expect to get everything right all the time, and luckily, seventeen years of friendship outweighs the occasional lapse into jackassedom. It's a good thing that everything is patched up now, because we had to endure The Department Meeting today. You know, when someone says, "I don't want to do all the talking and have everyone just sit there and nod their heads at me," and then proceeds to talk for two hours without stopping to take a breath, while the rest of us act like bobblehead dolls, it's not all that effective. I had high hopes for this meeting, because everyone in management had agreed that this was going to be The Meeting of The Fresh Start, with a new attitude and some strategies for getting everyone excited about the department again. Instead, we looked at statistics from last year, covered a few new ideas that we'd come up with, and left everyone exactly where they started. Laurie asked me tonight, "At what point did it stop being frustrating to you and start being funny?" I'd say about twenty minutes into it, when we were still on Slide 1 of a presentation that I knew had at least 15 slides to it. Or perhaps it was the shaky math that made it actually funny. Or maybe looking back at the glassy, disinterested stares of my co-workers. There's so much to choose from. I won't give up. I'll still push and argue and try to go above and beyond, because it's really boring as hell when I'm not doing that. Playing with databases and javascript and offering to give the new consultants the orientation to the design department is actually kind of fun, and I'm really glad to know that I'm good at this job, even if it feels like I'm beating my head against a brick wall sometimes. Especially when I get to hide things in source code? That's really fun. I had dinner with Sean and Heather tonight. They invited us over for ribs, cooked in the crock pot and broiled just before serving. Delicious! And we stayed for a pretty long time, talking about just about everything. Sean is making a ton of repairs to the house, which indicates to me that they're going to stay there awhile. It makes me kind of sad, because I adore that house, but when I have the proper down payment (by my estimation, around September of this year), I'm going to start looking around. My perfect house is different than a lot of peoples' ideas of a great place to live. I like smaller houses. I like tiny backyards, because I'm not a big fan of yardwork. I couldn't care less if there's no front lawn. There are few houses out there in my price range. I really can't afford one in my home town (I probably couldn't afford Sean and Heather's house, now that it's all fixed up, to tell the truth). When I see real estate prices in, say, Texas or Georgia or even New Hampshire, it's enough to make me weep. By the time I have enough for a 20% down payment on a Massachusetts home, I'll have saved up enough money to put down half of the entire purchase price on a home I heard about in North Carolina. Okay, I've just looked it up, and it's even more depressing than I thought. The average price for a house in Boston? $1,053,594. In Dallas (a much larger and some say more cosmopolitan city)? $236,313. If I wanted to move to Austin, it'd be, on average, $202,628. Do you know what I could buy with $202,628 around here? Maybe a studio-apartment sized so-called "loft" in a bad section of a not very nice town. I refuse to be deterred by the housing market, though. Both my brothers own homes, as do most of their friends. I make a good salary, and I have very little debt (just my car loan, which will be paid off by the end of this year), so I should, with very careful, very opportunistic shopping, be able to find a fixer-upper that I can work with. Maybe it'll be some guest house off the property of a larger home that's fallen into ruin. Maybe it'll be a foreclosure. (I'll have to get copies of the OREO report, but at least I know that it exists.) I'll find a way, I just have to be clever about it. Something happened today that hasn't happened to me in at least a year. A fully-fledged play dropped into my head, without any prompting from me. I've had some vague ideas, or had some re-workings of plays I've attempted to write in the past, but this one just presented itself to me, fully-written, fully-realized, and I could most likely dash it off in about an hour. It's only a ten-minute piece, and it's not very deep (closer to a sketch than a fully realized play), just a little bit of comedy. But still, it's there, and it's ready to be written, which I'll most likely do tomorrow. I think it's a result of a lot of things. The therapy, the drugs, the newfound appreciation for everything, combined with writing every day, and reading a lot more than I have been. I've been concentrating on a couple of visual projects (the book binding and the web-based art piece), another site with a partner that could become somewhat professional if we play it right, and have been looking over my short stories to see if I can brush them up for submission to magazines. All of that has mixed together in my brain, and I think the result is that the part of my brain that deals with fiction and stagecraft is slowly waking up again. I don't expect this to be my best work (when I look back on my earlier journal entries, I'm amazed that I was able to write so well. I hope to get back to that level again someday), but it's work, and that's all I've been asking for forever. It's a present, I believe. I've been trying really hard, and I think I've been given this small present to see what I do with it. Maybe I deserve it. Even if I am occasionally a total jackass.