Maybe I'm Crazy to Suppose I'd Ever Be the One You Chose Out of a Thousand Invitations You'll Receive

So, I think I've figured out what's going on with Goose. It's basically The Only Living Boy in New York all over again. Goose craves the attention he gets from me, the ego rush of having a girl he can constantly make sweat over him, because he's deeply insecure. He doesn't care that he hurts me by stringing me along because it serves him to do so. Just as The Only Living Boy in New York coaxed me into agreeing to be his friend with benefits and then dropped both the subject and me because all he wanted was the boost of my agreement, I'd wager that Goose would find an excuse to bar me from the Las Vegas trip if I actually agreed to go. It hurts to love someone so much and realize that he only associates with you because it makes him feel better about himself. It hurts even more when it happens again and again.

2010 will be a year of changes for me. 2009 was easily the worst year of my life, but it'll be over in a little more than an hour. I hope to make 2010 a rebuilding year -- get my life in order, get some bills paid, figure out at least a rough sketch of where I want my life to go in the future, take better care of myself, surround myself with people who support my goals and who care about me.

Hot Hot Hot

I just got the following MMS from Goose.

Congratulations you've made [Goose]'s hottest 100 for 2009. Prize can be collected from any pub in the new year. Happy new year and keep being rad.

How many whores did he send that to, I wonder.

I Don't Even Have an Opinion on That Tramp That You Are Still Seeing

Response from Goose:

Just to clear things up, I will still (as far as I'm concerned) be with Clare when I'm in Vegas, the invitation to Vegas was merely as friends, that said, it is a long way to travel for a milk and cookies and sans sex catch up, so I'll understand if you don't make the trip across.

I literally cannot believe this fucker.

When I Saw You Kissing That Girl, My Heart, It Shattered

Still nothing from Goose. What a fucking asshole. His current behavior pisses me off on a variety of levels, but none more so than the fact that my soi-disant friend is telling me with his invitation and subsequent silence that he doesn't think I deserve to be anything more to him than his side piece. Nice.

So Long, My Almost Lover, My Back is Turned On You

No response from Goose. He checks his email every five minutes thanks to his iPhone, so I have no reason to believe he hasn't received it. I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised. I'm glad I established his position before I spent a bunch of money I don't have to meet up with him in Las Vegas. The singer A Fine Frenzy has summarized my feelings better than I ever could:

"Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

I cannot go to the ocean
I cannot drive the streets at night
I cannot wake up in the morning
Without you on my mind
So you're gone and I'm haunted
And I bet you are just fine

Did I make it that
Easy to walk right in and out
Of my life?"

Can You Become a New Version of You?

I did something today that was out of character yet made me feel more myself than I have in a long time.

My goal for 2010, which I'm starting on a bit early, is to get my considerable credit card debt paid off. I'm hopeful that by this time next year, I'll be selling my apartment and bidding farewell to temp drudgery in favor of a more rewarding career in another sector (that is, if I haven't already made the transition). The current front runner in the realm of possibilities is teaching English as a foreign language in southeast Asia. While those teaching jobs pay handsomely considering the cost of living in, say, Vietnam, it would be highly preferable to be cleared of outstanding consumer debt before taking one.

It's all well and good to say I want to pay off my credit card debt, but it's a hilarious goal when you consider that I ran up the debt when I was making about $100,000 a year more than I do right now. I've learned a lot about living within my means since my financial circumstances plummeted, but I haven't figured out a way to slash my budget down below the bone so I can live beneath my means. Ergo, I need to make more money. So, through pushiness, I rehired myself part-time on the last document review project I worked on. This means I have one full-time job and one part-time job, and my plan is to use all the money from the part-time job to rid myself of the scourge of credit card debt. I have no idea if this will actually work, since I can't anticipate how long the part-time temping job will last and therefore can't estimate cash inflow from it, but it should at least help me to make a dent.

Being pushy, which I had to be to re-insert myself into my previous project, is not how I normally operate. Yet one of the main things that has bothered me about losing my job this year is the feeling of helplessness it engendered. It's all well and good for my mom to blame the loss on the economy (not to mention accurate), but it's a horrible feeling just to be stuck waiting it out. Finding myself a way to achieve a financial goal makes me feel like I'm taking charge of my own life again. Feeling back in control of my life makes me feel more like myself, and feeling like I wasn't myself was really the other big thing bothering me for about the past year.

So, it remains to be seen how this gambit will play out, but at least I have the feeling that forward progress is being made.

You Are So Sweet, Dancing and Moving to the Beat

Goose emailed me back last night with firm dates for his impending Las Vegas trip. He was laying it on thick, telling me twice in the span of a brief email that he hopes we can catch up during the month he's there. He also mentioned he might be coming to the United States for a year with work and that he wants to come to New York next Christmas. He signed the email with a "love" and an "x" next to his name.

I am overwhelmed by the temptation to read into his email that he wants us to go from being friends to being something more. Yet, the 0.01 percent of my brain that has a lick of sense cautions me against doing that. So, I responded to his email by saying, inter alia:

Vegas! Since you're entreating me to rendezvous with you there, I have to ask if you're now single or planning to be single by the time this trip rolls around. I'd love to meet up with you, but I don't think our feelings have changed toward each other since Peru and the overwhelming likelihood is that you'll have your junk out in, like,five seconds, and I don't want to be one of the things that happens in Vegas and stays in Vegas. I want something to happen between us, but only if it's allowed to.

Overlooking the fact that I stuck the world's longest run-on sentence in the middle there, I was satisfied with my response. I wanted to keep my tone light and humorous while still conveying to him that I'm serious about not coming to see him if he's still attached to his girlfriend.

Now comes the part I hate, in which I have to await his reply. He may not reply at all, or he may reply without addressing the line in the sand I've drawn, or he may reply by saying that he has no intention of breaking up with his girlfriend and if I'm not comfortable coming to see him under those circumstances, then too bad for me. Obviously, I'm hoping he'll say that he has already broken up with his girlfriend or plans to do so very soon. No matter what he says (or doesn't say), I'm trying to remember that I did what was right for me, even if it meant risking his displeasure.

I Wish I Had a River I Could Skate Away On

2009 has been the worst year of my life.

I can't wait for it to end.

Every aspect of my life feels like it has gone to shit, and I really have no idea how to fix things. I don't even know how much I can fix things as compared with how much I have to let time fix them or scrap the things I've had and try to forge something new.

The job situation is the main issue. It has been almost six months since my last day at my law firm, and I'm still a temp attorney doing document review. The fact that my project is long-term is a blessing, but it's also a curse because by the end of it, I'll be five or more years out of school with hardly any more experience than someone who just graduated (but with higher salary expectations). In other words, I have virtually no chance of going back to the level of firm I was at before, and it will be a very tough row to hoe to get in anywhere decent. So, I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that my career is over or at least changed so fundamentally that the one thing I enjoyed about it (the money) is no longer available to me. Obviously, if the only thing I liked about my career was the pay, it might be for the best that I can't be a lawyer anymore, but this is not at all how I would have chosen to leave the profession. It should have been my choice. And I don't know what I want to do instead, so I feel stuck in career limbo. I can't go backward, but I don't know how to go forward either.

The job situation has brought to my attention trouble in another area: friends. My job plight has taught me that, in general, people do not handle other people's negative emotions well. When I first found out I was losing my job, people overflowed with hugs and supportiveness. That dries up real quick. Being struck by a tragedy like this makes people see me differently. A lot of my friends look at my shitty temp job and say "at least it's better than nothing," as if that's helpful. Yes, the temp job is much better than nothing, and I am grateful to have it. But why should I have to take "better than nothing" when I went to top-ranked schools and worked my ass off so that I could have my choice of jobs? Or people are pushy about what they think I ought to be doing -- starting my own law firm (as if I want to get more deeply invested in a profession that has been so unkind to me) or turning one of my hobbies into a career (guaranteed to suck the fun out of things I actually enjoy). Or people avoid me, probably worried I'll remind them how precarious their own jobs are. Basically, no one says anything right, and, in fairness, I don't know what they could say that would be right. But most people do not have the patience to really stick by someone through a long bout of depression.

Which leads to another thing currently in a state of disrepair: my general disposition. I am not a cheery person or an optimist even in the best of times, but I have become more depressed and pessimistic than ever after this year. Due to the aforementioned inability of others to cope with long-term crankiness, I find myself constantly battling my desire to be real and honest with my friends in favor of trying to slap a smile on my face. My natural impulse when I feel any negative emotion is to isolate myself, and if I feel obligated to pretend to be happy when I'm not, that impulse becomes irresistible. But then, people start to seem offended that I haven't been spending any time with them. It's a no-win situation.

And speaking of people I don't want to spend time with, it has been a shit year for guys as well. In the spring, I thought I would surely be engaged to The New Guy by this point in the year. I had never had a guy pursue me so vigorously. He called when he said he would call, he said sweet things, he had a lot of positive qualities that I desire in a mate. And then he turned out to be a psychotic jackass and continuing a relationship with him would have ended up with my mom starting a domestic violence charity in my memory. Why did someone who started out seeming so perfect for me end up being someone I'm afraid of? Why couldn't he just have been the person he pretended to be? And what does it say about me that one of the only guys ever to pursue me (instead of merely succumbing to my pursuit of him) is someone who probably just wanted to hit me and certainly wanted to control me? And then, of course, there is Goose. I love Goose so much, and Goose just strings me along. I deleted all his emails today in a fit of pique.