The latest newsticker from the rumor mill, is that D.H. is preparing to leave for the summer to return to her home in Georgia, possibly not to return.
Again, I say, “Damn.”
It’s not just that yet another relationship has failed before it ever started, it’s also that I will be losing another friend to the all-too-popular practice of getting the hell out of this polluted, stinking town.
I’m getting very tired of saying goodbye. It’s not that I can’t make new friends. Quite the opposite, really. While I may have a difficult time talking with women that I’m interested in, I can make friends and meet new people relatively easily. The problem lies in quality, not quantity.
I don’t like fair-weather friends, and unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, this is a very popular category.
I’ve described my “friend” categorization system before, briefly. And unfortunately, I know far too many “People I can handle in small doses” and “Oxygen Thieves”. Just so you know, you don’t want to be in the latter category, if you have to be in either.
And now, I’m preparing to say goodbye to a friend that I’ve had a quasi-relationship, a pseudo-relationship if you will, with.
And, damn it all, it really sucks. According to some, I can be a good friend. And, really, I try.
But, what about… I don’t know, what’s the word… “partner”?
I hate that word. It sounds so criminal in connotation.
I admit, I haven’t had much of a chance to test my relationship aptitude in a real-world environment since my last doomed relationship, the one that I had no business ever dating.
I could go on, and I will (as usual).
Two years ago, at Project A-Kon, a convention for anime (Japanese Animation) addicts and other ne’er do wells,I met a girl at the Saturday night rave they have every year. We got to chatting, we got to dancing, and eventually, we made our way to make out.
What business I had in thinking I could find someone interested in a wholesome, healthy relationship at a convention specifically designed for people that are not well-adjusted to begin with, is beyond me. I suppose that I was just lonely, and wasn’t really looking toward a relationship at the time. I’ll admit, I’m a male, and I have hormones surging through my body (GASP! Say it isn’t so!), and I have almost as much hormonal chemicals in my body as I do caffeine (now that’s scary). So perhaps, it wasn’t a relationship I was looking for, just someone to be close to, in that cheap and tawdry kind of way.
Actually, now that I think about it, it was the cheap and tawdry one.
But it didn’t end there, of course. Inside my own demented little random misfiring of dendrites I laughingly call a mind, warning flags were flying, red alert signals were sounding, and my rational brain was crying out “Stop! Please for the love of all that is good in this world, STOP!”
I should have gotten a clue when we first met and she said “Oh, you don’t know yet, I haven’t trained you.”
Ummmm… What?
Turns out she was not exactly what one would call emotionally stable. In fact, I think the term “Oh my God! You’re fucking psychotic!” would be a little bit closer to the truth. Turns out, and I found this out the first night we met, that she had several clinically diagnosed emotional disorders, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Clinical Depression thrown in to give the mixture a little bit of spice and make things interesting.
And, what was my rational mind doing while learning all of this? Screaming for attention, of course. The rest of me, on the other hand, was ignoring the rational side and thinking “Wo-man! Wo-man! Wo-man!” like some demented sex-craved caveman.
So, we talked on the phone quite a bit for the next couple of weeks. As the 4th of July approached, we began to make plans for her and I to meet in Dallas and enjoy the 4th of July activities, enjoy a LAN-gaming party, and enjoy each other’s presence. That was the plan.
For those that can’t recall how my plans turn out more often than not, I’ll remind you: Not well.
We made plans, I requested time off of work, and the 4th of July weekend approached, like some wolf in sheep’s clothing who’s zipper I had not yet spotted. By this time, I think my rational mind had pretty much submitted to the futility of the situation, and was off working on less complex and more hopeful problems than my own bottomless stupidity, such as quantum temporal physics.
And, I drove down to Dallas to meet up with this girl. The entire weekend, in a nutshell, did not go according to plan. In fact, I think it was the polar opposite of said plan.
She was the first girl I had ever been with, as in “been with”. And let me put it this way… it was not enjoyable, by any definition of the word, except maybe “shitty”. As a friend of mine has so elegantly described… “Sex is like Chinese food. You’re not done until you both get your cookie.”
I didn’t get my cookie. Not good for such an inaugural event. So to speak.
And, to top it off, immediately afterwords, one of her more colorful personality traits, decided to let itself shine through. She had an anxiety attack.
Because of my empathy, I had an anxiety attack as well. It was about all I could do to keep myself sane at that point (as opposed to how I am now, I just embrace the insanity).
The rest of the weekend was filled with such fun-filled highlights as the massive fight at the LAN Party, the arguments with her parents, and other such… hmmmm. Well, how about the term “Learning Experiences”? Yeah, we’ll go with that.
So, I decided to part ways with her at that point, and only consider further relations with her only at the behest of a massive anuerism or permanent traumatic brain injury.
By now, many of you have noticed a trend. Guess how long my resolve lasted? A whole freaking week. To quote the recent Guinness beer commercials: “Brilliant!”
We decided to “get back together”, in that we were talking to each other again on the phone in a style reminiscient of a relationship, albeit one that would creep out a wizened psychiatrist. She admitted to me that she had been manipulative to me, and apologized for her failure. I accepted the apology and offered forgivness. My rational mind poked its head up, stared gaping at the rest of my decision-making processes, almost spoke-up, reconsidered, and basically said… “Screw you, moron, you’re on your own.”
A week later, the fecal matter impacted the oscillating air circulation device. Or, for those of you who don’t like to hear me talk as much I seem to enjoy it, the shit hit the fan.
I was up at my local game store, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and generally having a grand ol’ time slaying imaginary ugly beings carrying pointy weaponry and such, when the phone rang. It was her, asking me to go home, because she needed to talk. She needed me to convince her of something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Go home, I need to talk to you.”
“Well, we’re almost done here, and the store’s getting ready to close. I’ll pack up my stuff and be home in a few minutes. I’ll be on Instant Messenger.”
“…K.”
When I get in, the conversation that ensued, which I still have saved as a reminder of what exactly constitutes a mistake, she tells me that she’s over at a friend’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. His friend was, though, and therein lies the problem.
She tells me online that she started making out with him, and effectively asked me to convince her not to have sex with this guy. Then she had an anxiety attack.
How… special. In a short school bus kind of way.
I tried to calm her down so I could have a rational conversation. We did for a while, and then she told me that her friend had arrived, and she was going to have him take her home. She indicated she would drop me a message when she got home, and we would talk further then. I told her that since I hadn’t eaten anything more substantial than Doritos in 36 hours, I was going to make dinner and make my malnourished stomach stop complaining. I would listen for the computer to “Ding!” when she got in, and we could talk then.
Two hours later, I’m sitting on the couch, playing with my neglected cat, and she hasn’t shown back up online. At this point, I decide my best option is to go watch my friends get drunk.
The next evening, I told her I sincerely hoped the screen door smacked her on the ass on the way out, and of course “Good luck!”. That was Sunday evening, about 10:00 P.M.
Tuesday, around lunchtime, I was sitting at work, having just finished lunch, and she gets online to message me. Somehow, the conversation steers towards the topic of rebounding, which, if my saved logfile serves me correctly, she brought up. She tells me that the last two nights, she had slept with two different people. Since it’s Tuesday afternoon, this means that Sunday evening, immediately after I told her to go get fucked, she went and did, followed the next night by a sequel, with somebody else.
How… special. In a… you get the idea.
In the times that I’ve been in contact with her since (not on my own volition or initiation, just to assure), things have not really gone that well, and I fully expect to see her again at this year’s Project A-Kon, which I plan to attend.
And that’s my story.
Still with me? Hello? Is this thing on?
Where I was going with all of this is pretty simple. Since this string of utterly insane and stupid decisions, I reasessed my situation, and began a long, rocky, poorly mapped journey of self-discovery. Ultimately, I’ve learned quite a bit, and refuse to regret the situation I put myself in (as much as I joke about it), no matter how idiotic it seemed at the time, as I am now a wiser individual for it.
Unfortunately, I now may be a bit too cautious, hence my current problem.
So, as I have been apt to say recently, I can’t win for losing. It seems that I have the worst luck in terms of romantic relationships, and many of my platonic friends are moving on, leaving me to ponder returning to my hermetical nature, not by choice, but by default.
After putting this all into words, I’m left with one question. Why? Why tell all of you this long, drawn-out, and hardly significant story? I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest. Maybe so you can understand where I’m coming from. Perhaps even so I can better understand this concept myself.
Ultimately, however, if I’ve learned one thing only from all of this (which isn’t true, but just for the sake of argument), it would be thus:
Don’t date chicks that you meet at a convention designed by and for those that most others consider social outcasts. In short, don’t date freaks.
Which, most people could have probably told me not to do anyway. I suppose I still have a lot to learn.
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