Alright... a few more grays.... sorta

I'm not ready to write a new post yet, but if I don't they will suspend my blog...soooo.... that's the source of a gray right there! Moved back to Detroit area 7 months ago... adjusting fine, good job... workin' hard and hanging out with friends, new and old. More to follow...

This Year’s Grays Recapped and Some Self Discoveries

Well, the year sure started out well. I was employed and involved with someone casually in the beginning of the year and felt like things were on the upswing. As the year progressed, I lost my job and the casual relationship became a bit less casual, until it got really great and fun and then inexplicably ultimately it crashed and burned. While I knew what I was getting into I never imagined it would be something so difficult to recover from. Thankfully I got a new and better job around that time otherwise, I’m not sure how well I would be doing today.

When you have spent your forty-something years being mainly concerned with self-confidence, independence and career success it doesn’t really feel that important to have someone else in your life to share it with. I have good friends and a decent support system, and that was enough for me. Now and again I would be involved with someone here and there and think, well, that’s a nice bonus to my already pretty good independent life. I can’t say I’ve had a relationship quite like the last one before where the person was over all of the time and helped with so many things, and I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to give that up. I spent so much of my life proud of being independent up until then, that I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on relying on someone else to do stuff for me. Mind you, I just came to this conclusion while I was washing the dishes, and this guy never did the dishes, so I’m not sure why this was the magical moment that made me think of this.

What I’ve come to realize about myself is that I need to be working. It’s important to me in so many ways to be doing something I enjoy doing, that I do well, and that allows me personal and financial independence. While my current job does, or will do soon, all of those things, there are things in my personal life that I absolutely hate doing, most notably the bullshit around the house. I hate coming home and having to make something to eat. I love to cook, don’t get me wrong, and I’m good at it, but it would be nice to come home and have stuff done for me. If you’re paying any attention, you know where I’m going with this I’m sure. I need a househusband. I want to come home to clean organized house, and I want the trash taken out, and the dishes done, and my clothes laundered and the bed made, and the floor swept. Is this a bad thing to want? Is there anything wrong with wanting someone to hand you a cocktail when you walk in the door? Now, the last guy, while he was over a lot didn’t do that much around the house… but he did reach the stuff on the top shelves for me and he did carry my laundry up the stairs for me. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure he wanted the same thing as I did, which was someone else to do crap around the house, which neither of us wanted to do.

Thank g-d for my OCD roommate! We are strictly platonic, mutually so. However, he works out of the house and does all that crap I hate to do! I have never had so much counter or table space as I do now. I set something down on the coffee table, and if I’m not quick enough, it gets scooped right up! It’s nice. He does the grocery shopping, and all I have to do is loan him my car so he can run his own errands too. He takes out the trash and he takes turns with me doing the dishes. It’s great. So, what I realized between the last guy and my roommate is two things. I enjoy having company around the house. I like coming home to a little bit of activity. I like having stuff to do.

What I also realized is that I don’t need the kind of constant activity that I had with the last guy. While I miss him now and again, and while there are a lot of things he made it hard for me to do without getting sad, listen to certain kinds of music, watch certain television shows, play yahtzee or backgammon (yes the actual games and the other…), I don’t miss him being in my face all the time. I don’t miss him following me to the bathroom and never having a moment of privacy. Sometimes it was fun, but sometimes it was like – dude… get outta here. I don’t miss his endless diatribes. I don’t miss his ADHD, I don’t miss him demonstrating martial arts moves, etc etc. All of those things were entertaining sometimes, but now that I have a little peace, and some really good full nights of sleep, I recognize it really was a bit much to take.

What I know now as a result of this past year’s drama is what I want in addition to what I don’t want. It seems like at this age it should have been a lot more intuitive, or simple to figure out, but it isn’t that easy. Sometimes you have to experience the extreme of something to know how much of it is too much, or how much you are missing.

Anyway, it was a rough couple of months, so I couldn’t write anything without being full of emotions that I couldn’t organize or contain, so now that I have regained the ability to find the humor amid the bullshit… I wish a wonderful, happy and healthy new year to you all!

This Month’s Gray: The End of an Error

Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.  Let me start this by saying that The Boss and I are still friends and he still does business with my roommate, so it’s more complicated than it really needs to be.  It is so much easier to move on when you don’t have to confront the situation you are trying to put behind you every day or two.  I do feel like he made it more uncomfortable than it needed to be and did not handle it like an adult.  Here is where the younger man falls short.  It’s a maturity issue.  Somebody forgot to teach this kid respect for other people just for the sake of getting through life on a day to day basis, let alone with personal relationships.  Not to blame his parents, I don’t know them, but I tend to wonder if they didn’t just give up trying to discipline him because they couldn’t figure out how to deal with him. 

I don’t know how to describe him really except to say that he is a user with no conscience.  I think he actually might be a sociopath.  No, he’s not dangerous or anything, he just somehow got it in his mind that people are disposable.  So when he doesn’t want to hang out with a person or talk to them he just disappears.  This is where it gets weird with us.  He can’t just disappear this time.  We have a potential business relationship in addition to the business relationship he has with my roommate.  Essentially, it’s potentially going to put a few hundred bucks in my pocket every month, which I could surely use!  It will save money for the client, who would be a relative of mine, and everybody wins.  I believe he’s good to his word here and won’t screw me over in this case, but I honestly don’t care if it happens or not.  If it does, great for me, and if it doesn’t, that’s all fine too.  Nobody gets hurt either way.   Because of this, we have to talk sometimes, and he is in contact with a family member of mine, which is fine as well.  This person isn’t going to enter into this business lightly and just for my benefit, it will only happen if it is a good business decision for him, which makes me happy.    

Anyway, with all that said, he also is friends with my roommate and he hangs out at our place from time to time, which is how we met last year.  It has always been very casual, but also very consistent.  It started out with him coming to hang out with my roommate and then when my roommate would leave to hang out with his girlfriend, he would stay and hang out with me.  Eventually he was just coming over to hang out with me whether or not my roommate was home.  Next thing you know he’s spending the whole weekend with me.  We would stay up for hours and talk and play games of Backgammon, Yahtzee, Trivial Pursuit, Cranium, and etc and yadda yadda yadda.  It was fun.  Then he started bringing emotion into it.  This is where I think he really screwed up.  I was totally fine keeping it casual.  He decided to bring in feelings and emotions and sweetness and all that garbage.  Then what happens, he freaks out worrying that I’m too emotionally attached, which I’ll admit was beginning to happen.  To be clear, I never saw this guy as the man I would spend the rest of my life with.  However, I was beginning to look forward to hanging out with him, and to see his car outside my house when I got home from work. 

So, when he started behaving strangely towards me as I’ve mentioned in the past.  All of that nonsense about making me uncomfortable in my own place to the point that I left town for a while, only to return to the same crap and feelings of wanting to leave my own place.  I was really upset at first and for a few weeks I was so confused.  Why would things change, etc…?  Well, it turns out, I don’t care.  Once I gave it a little bit of thought, I realized that I’m really not very interested in him other than the company and the entertainment of listening to his long drawn out philosophical ravings.  The stuff he would go on and on about, I can’t even begin to tell you about it because it really would end up being a character study that could turn into an hundred page master’s thesis.  He would say, oh you make me so happy, you listen to me, and you don’t judge me and you let me be myself.  Well, sorry dude, but I think in your haste you forgot these things about me, and now I’m not so interested in listening to you drone on for hours about stuff that means nothing to me.  Also, if you’ve found yourself a new weekend backgammon tournament, don’t be so surprised when you find out that a) I have played in other tournaments as well, and b) I won, game over.

Weekend Update: No Time!

Well, I finally have a new job.  It's great and I am so excited about it!  The problem is the commute, but I'll get used to that eventually.  Being Saturday today, I had a smooth drive and was able to stop at Starbucks to get something to eat and some more coffee before opening up the showroom.  Meanwhile, no time for anything else yet, and boy is the adjustment to normal hours difficult after over 2 months of unemployment.  Since I was hired on Tuesday and began working on Wednesday, I haven't had time to put together a single thought let alone a sentence.  Suffice it to say, this feels like a real grown up job, I am not going to be micromanaged, I don't have to punch a clock, or worry about making up hours. Whatever I need to do to be successful here, the owner is cool with.  It's so nice, and so laid back, and I have high hopes for this.  Finally!

Today's Gray: Update.

Well, The Boss came over yesterday and we had it out a little and once I yelled at him I felt a lot better!  Imagine that....  Then we were fine and had a lot of fun which we do, and we did a little talking about it.  He says sometimes he's in a bad mood, why didn't I just talk to him about it.  I said, because you're impossible to talk to, and he said, yeah that's pretty much true.  Duh!  So, then he said, well getting pissed off and leaving doesn't do any good either does it? Also true.  Also, he said, I can't believe you packed all my stuff in a Trader Joe's bag!  That was a little hasty, but that's me, I get pissed off!  He said he didn't want to end things, which is progress I suppose.  So, let's see what happens next time.  Ugh, please let it go better than last time!

Today’s Gray: Part 2

Okay, so the letter was delivered to The Boss.  While I had a number of chances to change my mind about it, now that it’s done, I feel truly relieved.  I’m surprised because I thought the only way I would feel any resolution would be to actually have a face-to-face chat with him.  What was the most frustrating to me, I guess, was the fear of having that discussion, because he can be really impossible to talk to if he doesn’t want to hear something.  So, while writing it down in a letter seems kind of childish, I’m dealing with a fairly immature individual.  He probably won’t care, because he seems to lack a conscience, and the potential is there for him to find it amusing.  Regardless, I said what I had to say, and I feel better and less stressed just knowing he’s received it.  Like I said before, I had a great time, and I knew what I was getting myself into with him.  It’s not like I didn’t know what he was like.  It was just that until last week he hadn’t been that way towards me.  Unfortunately with someone like this, when you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.   He pushes and pushes to see how far he can push you until you push back.  In my opinion that’s just a game where nobody wins and everybody loses.  

It’s a bummer to see something fun come to an end, especially in such a weird way, but until you meet the one you’re going to be with forever, there will always be new beginnings and there will always be endings and they’re usually not fun, but with each one there’s something to be gained and nothing to be lost.  I have some friends who are so afraid that if things don’t workout with someone that they have wasted time that could have been devoted to another relationship, because they’re not getting any younger.  So they keep working on the relationships they’re in.  That confuses me.  If they are so concerned about wasting time, why continue to waste more time if it isn’t going to work out?  Then there are the people that think they have to find someone else to be with before they can end the relationship they’re currently in.  How is that being in a relationship?  If you’re looking for somebody else then you constantly have one foot out the door.  Why not just decide whether this is the right person or not?  Not should it be this person or that person.  Are people really that afraid of spending time by themselves?  No matter how old I get, I’ll never feel like I’ll be alone forever, and I sure as hell will not be with someone just to avoid being alone.  After all, being alone does not have anything to do with being lonely. 

Today’s Gray: If Forty is the New Twenty for Women, How Does That Apply to Men?

If that applies to men as well, then frankly ladies, we’re pretty screwed aren’t we?  That would make a man in his 30s a lot like a man in his teens.  Remember what they were like? 

Let’s just say, The Boss has retired, or maybe I’ve been fired, I’m not exactly sure, maybe I was pressured into resigning.  I’m actually not as upset about it as I am annoyed at the way he handled it, or should I say, his avoidance of it.   I’m not entirely sure what happened the last couple of weeks, but I feel pretty confident that he’s avoiding me at this point.  Which is pretty cowardly if you ask me.  However, this guy is pretty odd, in case you hadn’t picked up on that over the last posts.   So, today I packed up the stuff he had here, and wrote him a note letting him off the hook, since he couldn’t man up and be straight with me.  I’ll be cordial to him as long as he’s pleasant to me when he’s here to see my roommate, for my roommate’s sake.  In the meantime, I had a really good time, and don’t regret a moment.  On to the next, as they say.