post-xmas realizations

Since I have possibly infected Cassie with Xmas flu, she has insisted I come take care of her if she gets sick.

This reminds me of my previous relationship. My ex got sick once, and all I wanted to do was cook her chicken soup and bring her cough drops and she wouldn't let me.

And now I believe that I wasn't really in a relationship at all before. I was having an affair of sorts. I was her, sorry for the cliché, dirty little secret. I was the other person. The one she saw on the side.

And it makes me feel kind of sick. Fleeting, though, because that is the past and it is over and done with. But I feel sick that I was there, in a place where I would allow myself to be treated that way.

And the contrast is so great now that I am in a real relationship, now that I am the apple of my girl's eye, as Stevie Wonder says. It is almost polar opposite of how things were with my ex, and that's sort of fucked up.

I want to be to the point where I don't ever think of my ex, or maybe just once in a blue moon. I am not there yet. I was so starved for love from my ex, it is hard for me to trust a situation where I am satiated. The process I am going through now is replacing the expectations left over from my previous relationship with new, positive ones from this new relationship. So as situations arise I see how much different Cassie is from my ex and I become a little more secure. Hurt from the old relationship fades away, the memories become more distant, muted.

It is a long process, but it is good for me to see the difference. I must never forget what it feels like to be starving because if I forget, how will I be able to tell if it starts to happen again? I will always remember because I promised myself I would never go to that place again.

Cassie is lovely though. She spent Christmas with us. Her family wants to meet me. She actually wants to spend time with me. She's funny. She thinks I'm funny (which I am, of course).

She's wonderful.

She said the L word to me this morning. I said it back. I wanted to. Krystal's Xmas present to me told me it was okay to say it, it was time. She gave me a book that was the lyrics to a Joni Mitchell song with illustrations. It was the song "Both Sides Now". It said, "Tears and fears and feeling proud to say 'I love you' right out loud." I knew then. I had been wanting to say it. And the book told me it was ok, that I would be free like a butterfly. So when she said it, I was ready, I said it back and it felt good and right, if scary.

So, yeah. That stuff.

cassie's presents

Wrapped with medical tape and no scissors.

christmas brie

With fig jam.

dreams of dragons

I had a dream I lost my driver's license (not my whole wallet, just the license, and some other form of id, I think), which I would never lose in real life. I know it has something to do with this new relationship, like I am nervous about losing myself or losing my identity.

I think it's good though, that my dream-brain is on alert, or on the lookout, or something. So that maybe I tread carefully, you know. Because I like her, oh do I ever, but I love myself first and foremost.

She is very sweet and wonderful, though. I am not afraid, just aware.

I will not lose myself falling in love with her. I can love fully and still be fully me. I know I can.

We are both a little gun-shy. And maybe that is the best place to be.

I am falling for her. I can feel it. And I am trying to let go and let it happen. It is pretty wonderful, but also scary. It's hard to tell where that line is between necessary self-awareness and self-preservation, and fear-induced shutting down-ishness. I don't think I know quite what I am saying. Oh, well. Par for the course.

She is not Liz, though. Not at all.

I am reminded of the Rilke quote, mainly because it is on the wall and I am staring right at it. I included extra bits because they are so good. Just read it.

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called 'spirit-world,' death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. "

Amazing, right? Wow.

oral roberts is dead

Good riddance.

flowers

sign at the rhema light display

puppy naps

no class tonight

sleepy tyler

somethings

Today is Jacob's birthday. I can't remember how old he is (not that it matters at all anymore). I try not to miss him, ever, but it doesn't always work.

For some reason this morning I was thinking of terms of endearment, and then I remembered how whats-her-name made fun of me once for calling her "darling."

So that's really cool.

Postscript: I have a date tonight. And I am meeting her best friend. And I think I am a smitten kitten, for reals.

speaking of cancer of the soul

This.

I have no words. I'm so shocked and disgusted I can't put a thought together about it.

It makes me sick.

How are we letting them do this? What is wrong with this country, and the world, and everyone that this is acceptable behavior?

I can't think about this shit too much. It does me no good. But I need to write it out now so I can go to sleep without obsessing about it.

Jesus, though. Soulless. Rick Warren, too. All of them. They should be strapped to a rocket and fired into the sun. The world would be a better place.

Ugh. Ok. I'm done.