Curvy Jones on: MEH!

(This post is long and mostly for me, so if you don’t want to read it, I’m not bothered by it. *sniff* So… just… skip over it to something happy. *glances over shoulder to see if you’re watching*)

MEH. That’s about how I’m feeling, right now. I was doing pretty good, until a few days ago, and now I’m all MEH.

Short story long, here’s what had happened:

As has been customary for RIM (Blackberry manufacturer) and perhaps TMobile, there was a nationwide outage. In unrelated news, I recently changed my phone number. These two events converged to drive my parents absolutely INSANE. For some ODD reason (because my parents rarely call, let alone my father) my dad tried to call me. During the outage. To my old number. They HAVE the new number, I promise you they do. They’ve called me on the new number.

Unbeknownst ( and yes, I use words like unbeknownst and subterfuge, deal with it) to me, people are freaking out, in Spokane, Wa. No one can reach me. They’re either getting a ‘this number has been disconnected’ message, or it’s going straight to voicemail. All of a sudden I’ve been kidnapped and am in the trunk of a car headed across state lines with some kind of serial killer. Or I’ve fallen and hit my head and am bleeding to death. Or I’m ignoring them. Whichever option sounds good to a vivid imagination.

So the outage is over and I’m on my merry way, at work. It’s a few days before Christmas and I’m looking forward to calling my parents on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, then calling my brother and talking to my nephew, then maybe trying to track down Joe’s girlfriend and seeing how the Peanut is doing. He just turned two.  So imagine my surprise when I get an email from one of my mom’s besties: PLEASE CALL YOUR PARENTS IMMEDIATELY!

Seriously? When you’ve had a sibling and a family member die suddenly, pointed emails such as these are not good. Do these people realize WTF that does to a person? When I get an email, in caps, in the middle of the day, to call my parents, I pass out, first. And then when Ipick myself up off the floor, I force myself to dial the phone and face whatever bad news is coming, because when my mom wants to talk to me, she’ll call or text. Since she couldn’t I was already mid-nightmare about what might have happened. I cannot take another death close to me. I’ll go nuts. Really.

So I call my mom’s cell. She picks up. So she’s fine. I begin to breathe, again. And she starts yelling at me that she can’t get a hold of me. And I start yelling back that I’ve been sitting there with the phone right next to me and it hasn’t rang. And she yells back that my number is saying its disconnected. And I yell back that she’s dialing the wrong number, my number has been changed for about a month. And also there was a service outage the day before that did not correct itself until that morning.

‘Oh.’  OH? You nearly KILL ME and your response is ‘Oh’? SIGH.

So my dad gets on the phone and he’s quite upset. The death of Joseph has hit hm so, so, so hard. Talking to him makes me sad. Really. I feel bad for even saying it, and he yells at me for not calling often enough but the truth is that I don’t call because they make me sad. They make me miss Joe. They remind me of what HELL they are still going through, because Joe lived there, not here. I’m so far away that it’s easy for me to forget. I’m a compartmentalizer– you can see it in the 182 blogs I keep. I need to keep things separate, in my life (which is another thing that came up in recent conversation, how I used to not be able to let my food touch. Now my blogs don’t touch. HA). So I’ve compartmentalized my grief about Joe. I’ve done my best to move on and to heal, because mourning doesn’t bring him back. Tomorrow comes. Everyday. Until it doesn’t.

Anyway, he yells and cries and gets off the phone. I give all the necessary information to my mom to reach me whenever, wherever, all the dang time. And I tell them I’ll call them on Christmas.

On Christmas, I call. I talk to my mom for a few minutes. It is the same stilted conversation as always. I’m a hermit: I do nothing but go to work and come home and hang out. I have everything I need right here, especially in the winter. On occaision, I meet a friend for dinner. See a movie. Go hang out with someone. I think my parents expect me to live a life I just have no desire to live. And I think my lack of desire (okay, let’s call it energy and interest) makes them sad and worries them. They worry about how much time I spend alone and they all think they’re going to get a call some day when someone figures out they haven’t seen me in ages. Morbid people!

Anyway. My dad gets on the phone and it’s like he doesn’t want to ever hang up. He asks all sorts of questions about things he never cared about before. How many friends do I have? Where did I meet them? Why do I meet people from the internet? Do I go out to eat alone? When I do that, what do I usually do?  UGH. What?

Then he digs into the personal. Am I dating? Why don’t I date? What am I looking for? And it’s then that I dip into ‘meh’ mode.

I inform dad that I’m not dating. I don’t have interest or intention of dating (again, let’s call it energy and willingness to forgo who I am for what ‘he’ wants). My sister in law is pregnant again, so that makes grandbaby number 3 for them. They’re doing good on grandchildren, they don’t need me for that. It’s not happening.

This, again, makes him sad. Yeah, well join the club. Sort of. Again, it’s one of those things where I’ve put it away. I don’t think about dating. I don’t think about men or relationships or sex or love until someone brings it up and makes me sound crazy for not wanting what they have. Then I start to think about it and then I start to want it.

I start to want things I can’t have because I don’t know how to maintain it. I start to want things I can’t have because I don’t do it well…. the dating thing. If I could meet a guy and get married and then get to know him later, that would be ideal. That limbo, in between, ‘does he like me, I mean really like me, I mean really really like me enough to not want to be without me’ feeling drives. me. insane. I HATE that step, and I know everyone has to go through it, even those who make dating easy, who are pretty without effort and always enjoy the attention of men. It’s hard, even for them. So imagine how hard it is for me?

I suffer no delusion about how I look and who I am. I have to try hard, to look  ‘okay’. Me au naturale is not a pretty sight. I just… don’t care. I’m sarcastic and funny, but also bitter and negative where men are concerned. I try not to be but it seems like every man I meet reinforces how I feel. I recently told my dad that dating is not the same today as it was when he was dating. These boys out here are not taught like he was, not raised like he was. I’ve never met a more selfish, twisted, backwards minded generation of people– and that’s ALL of us, because men wouldn’t be the way they are unless women let them. Throw race in there and I’m quoting Whitney all day ‘Hell to the NAW!”

Anyway. I guess I am saying all that to say I was fine until a few days ago and now I’m all ‘meh’. I’m wating for the ‘meh’ to pass. But while I’m sitting here in ‘meh’ I am contemplating things like what it would take to get me to a point where I felt like I could date. Where I felt like I could be open to a simple friendship with a man. Where I could be proud of me and who I am and what I look like. I think it would take some work. Okay, a lot of work. And I don’t know that I’m up to it.

I don’t know that I’ve reached that point where I’m tired of being alone… maybe because I know that even when I was there, and ready and happy and open, it didn’t work. It wasn’t there, for me. It was a rough day when I woke up and realized that no one out there (that is sane and has teeth and hair and a job and a home and knows what he wants and is ready to go there) is looking for me. The good thing about being quirky is that there are few people like you. The bad thing about being quirky is that you’re nothing like everyone else.

Quirky people are work. Most people are looking for easy. And something that reminds them of themselves. Most people are looking for someone like everyone else.

Here’s to hoping the ‘Meh’ wears off soon.  It’s annoying. I want to get back to that Happy, ‘not thinking about any of that stuff I don’t have’ Compartment.

Curvy Jones is a northerner playing a southerner who is living, working, playing in metro Atlanta.

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Tags:  dating · holidays · men · parents