Things I Hate
There’s a lot that I hate about the choices that Christmas made.
I hate the fact that she betrayed me.
I hate the fact that she kept it from me for so long.
I hate the fact that she told one of my friends about it before she told me.
But more than all of that, I think the thing I hate the most is the fact that she didn’t give me a chance. She had these concerns about our relationship for so long, and she only told me about them when it was too late. I really believe that if I’d known about her concerns sooner, if we’d been able to work on them together, that we might have been able to build something that would have lasted forever. But instead she kept it to herself until she decided on her own that there was no way for our relationship to deal with those concerns. She never gave me a chance.
I think that our relationship might have been able to survive all of the other bad choices that she made. But obviously, there was no way for it to survive this one.
“How to Handle a Woman”
Unfortunately, it turns out that’s a load of crap. I loved Christmas. I loved her with all of my heart. I made sure she knew it. I tried my hardest to make her feel loved whenever we were together.
And even so, she gave up on me and gave up on our relationship.
So I don’t know how to handle a woman, but I do know that “simply love her” isn’t enough.
Not Rebuilding
(Christmas, this is another post that I went back and forth on grey boxing. It’s not pain-infused, but I suspect that it will make you sad, and I really don’t want to make you sad. So use your judgment in deciding whether or not to read it. You can always skip ahead to the next one, which is a cute quote about Christianity.)
That way I found to deal with my anger, mentioned a couple of posts back, worked. It really did. That horrible, visceral, incapacitating anger is gone. I was really unable to think about anything else, I was yelling and punching things and generally out of control, and I’m not any more. So now I’m at a point where I think I would be able to work with Christmas to rebuild our relationship and make sure it delivers everything that we both need.
Except, of course, that I came to this realization long after she made the decision that our relationship would never be able to deliver everything that she needs. So I’m ready to rebuild a relationship that doesn’t exist any more.
Doesn’t that suck?
Personal | Comment (1)Quote of the Whenever
Quote of the Whenever:
“Son… this is the honest truth about the universe:
The universe was created by an all-powerful all-knowing being who came down to us in the form of a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Your little friends might laugh at you when you tell them, but trust me… pretty much all us grown-ups actually believe this is true.”
-seen on Slashdot
Quote | Comment (0)Indie movie editing
I just saw “Darjeeling Limited” last night. Have you ever noticed that the majority of American “indie” movies have the same choppy editing style? Scenes don’t end, they just stop. Sometimes they stop when it feels like they should keep going, and sometimes they drag on long after they should have stopped, but they don’t conclude the way scenes in more mainstream American movies do. The flow from scene to scene is usually a lot weaker in indie movies, too.
A few examples of movies where I’ve noticed this kind of choppy editing: Darjeeling Limited, Must Love Dogs and (much as I love the movie) Lost in Translation. A notable exception, assuming it counts as an indie movie, would be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Now, I can’t imagine that smoother editing would cost any more. Smoother scene-to-scene flow might cost a little more, since it could require more establishing shots and other transitional material, but not a lot more. So I’m thinking that this choppy editing style isn’t done for cost reasons, instead it’s a deliberate artistic choice. I wonder why–do people think it just feels more “indie”, less polished? Or is there some other purpose?
Movies | Comment (0)Dealing with my Anger
I’m feeling a little better, because I’ve finally found a way to deal with my anger over Christmas’s betrayal. The reason I was having so much trouble, the reason this anger was debilitating me so much, was that I’d literally never felt like this before. Whenever I was angry in the past, it was quick flareups of anger that burned intensely but subsided quickly. My anger over the betrayal was a constant burning anger that didn’t subside, but just continued to burn and eat away at me. Since I’d never been angry like that before, I didn’t know how to cope with it.
So I found something that I did know how to cope with, and, like a mathematician, tried to “reduce” this problem to that one. In this case, the thing I do know how to cope with is anger at myself, when I’ve done something stupid or wrong that caused me a lot of damage. (Say, for instance, when my camera and stuff were stolen in Costa Rica.) When that happens, the mental process I go through goes something like this:
- Naturally, my first instinct, like anyone, is always to make excuses for myself. So the first step to recovery is to get rid of all of the excuses. I have to be honest with myself, and admit that I did something wrong, and stop making excuses, before I can try to make things better.
- Next, I take full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. I admit that all of these negative consequences are because of what I did.
- Finally, I figure out exactly what I did wrong, and what I can do differently in the future, and vow to do the right thing next time. This is what really helps me move on, but I can’t honestly do it until I’ve been through the first two steps.
So what I did in this case was, I asked Christmas to walk through those three steps for me. I asked her to do it both over the phone (so that I could hear it coming from her) and by e-mail (so that I have something to re-read when the anger comes back). I asked her to say these things to me only if she really meant them, and she assured me that she did. In case you’re curious, here’s specifically what I asked her to say to me:
- What she did was wrong, and there are no excuses for it.
- She takes full responsibility for all of the pain that she caused me.
- No matter what her emotional state, she is never going to be unfaithful to a monogamous relationship again. (It’s too late for us, of course, but if this prevents somebody else from suffering the pain that I suffered then at least some tiny amount of good came out of it.)
I still hate what she did to me. I still hate the fact that she was capable of doing it. I’m still tortured by mental images of the two of them together. And I’m still seriously worried about my future ability to trust other relationships. But the visceral anger that was preventing me from thinking about anything else has subsided a lot as a result of this, so I think I may be on the road to recovery.
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