By some strange miracle, I seem to be considerably healthier today than I was at my physical six months ago. I’ve lost weight, my “good” cholesterol is up (my “bad” is always low anyway) and I’ve backtracked quite a bit on that road to diabetes, heart disease, and all sorts of other nasty things. I’m kind of amazed, considering how rough the past few months have been for me personally and how–until a few weeks ago when I finally got my head out of my ass–I was basically using comfort food and lethargy to treat the symptoms.
So can I lose fifty pounds this year? What say ye?
Other stuff:
Mark arrives for a quick visit tomorrow. It will be the first time we’ve seen each other since December and I am much looking forward to it.
The oldest supermarket in Charlotte is about to be torn down. I’m a little depressed about that, but I’d be more depressed if there were a little more of the original buidling left to begin with.
In case you care what I’ve been doing at work lately, here are twosamples. They’re part of a bigger project I’m working on that’s still in beta (and not finished).
I actually had occasion to bring my Zip drive to work (and even to use it) last week as well. That was fun.
There’s something else big that’s supposed to make up this last bullet point, but I don’t remember what it is.
Photos from the holiday trip west are here. There are none of the assorted family gatherings because I’m increasingly squeamish about posting that sort of thing publicly.
Last week, I went to a great Indian place I’d never visited before and thought about telling Mark we should go there sometime for lunch. Then I realized there wasn’t much point since we won’t really be going to lunch anymore after next week. That was kind of a melodramatic moment. Now that he’s posted about the specifics, I figure I owe some of my longtime readers and friends a little explanation as to what’s going on here. I’ll make it quick and snappy:
Yes, Mark and I will no longer be living together after the first of the year. He will be moving back to San Francisco. I will be staying put in the Triad. Unlike before, there is no specific timeline for when we might be living together in the future.
No, we are not calling it quits, no matter how much it may sound like it. I love my boy very much (and I know it’s mutual) but we’re adjusting to the fact that our relationship will look rather different in the future than it has for the past nine years–in many ways.
Yes, I want Mark to be happy. He’s not happy now, which is making us both unhappy. So we’re giving this bi-coastal thing another shot in the absence of other mutually acceptable options. Hopefully, this option will work. I realize that doing nothing will definitely not work.
No, I will probably not be discussing this further in this space (1) because this part of my life is personal and not for public consumption, (2) because I want to avoid oversimplifications like this one, (3) because I want to avoid any temptation to communicate by website rather than “face to face”, and (4) because it’s just not what I want to be writing about here.
So that’s where we are. Please join me in wishing Mark well in San Francisco. And don’t worry too much about me either. I’m not in a very happy place right now (big understatement there), but I’ve proven over the years to be nothing if not resilient. I’ve got a job I love and lots of new toys to occupy my mind until we have our first rendezvous in Minneapolis or Omaha or wherever. And I’m really trying to see the positives in all this, albeit with mixed success in certain Indian restaurants.
So it’s Thanksgiving Day, the traditional start of that period known as the “holiday season.”
For a variety of reasons, I’m having a hard time working up much enthusiasm for the holidays this year, but here we are just the same. Today brings lunch with my dad’s side of the family in Greensboro (in a suburb, actually, but it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference) and tomorrow we’re leaving for a few days at the beach. I make it a habit never to go to the beach during the summer; November through February is beach season for me.
A few extremely busy weeks of work follow. I’m on two search committees right now, and I’m also hiring a temp and several student workers in my department in a mad dash to spend as much money as possible before the state budget crisis comes crashing down around us. The next six months will be really hectic, which is actually a very good thing for me right now.
The week before Christmas brings ten-plus days in California visiting Mark‘s family in Fresno with side trips to Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will be my first trip west in two years, my first multi-day visit to the City of Doom™ in maybe four years, and my first time in Southern California since 2005. I wish the circumstances and timing of the trip were different but it will be good to see some old friends, some palm trees, and Clifton’s again. And lest I forget, there’s that whole exciting option of choosing cancerous death rays vs. getting felt up by a (probably ugly) complete stranger at the airport.
After my long flight home comes the new year and what I anticipate will be a very long and cold winter. But I’m not even going to think about that just yet…
Sometimes you run into an old song, one you might not have cared about all that much at the time, at a point in your life where it suddenly seems more important because it reminds you of another, earlier point in your life where things seemed a lot simpler, and maybe even happier in some ways.
I’m thinking right now of Thanksgiving, 1992, when I’d just moved to San Francisco. It was the first major holiday I’d spent away from North Carolina. I had dinner with the lesbians on Potrero Hill who were friends of my roommates, all of us expatriate North Carolinians. We were all different flavors of happy and excited about how we’d escaped and were carving out new lives for ourselves in a place that still seemed exciting and new.
My God, it’s been a long time. I was so young then. Everything seemed new and exciting. It’s just not like that anymore for me, and I miss it sometimes. I’m happy with a lot of things in my life right now. I love my boy, no matter what. I love my new career; in fact, it’s one of the only things I consistently enjoy these days, even though it comes with some stress of its own. And I’m OK with where I live, if not terribly excited about it. I’m not unhappy per se (I sort of am tonight, obviously, but that’s another story) but there’s this lack of intensity.
I know a lot of that comes with age. I’m not 28 years old anymore. I don’t have my whole life ahead of me. In recent years, I’ve become a lot more serious about attempting to have the career I never had when I was younger ad cared more about having a good time, mainly because I woke up one morning and saw myself heading down a path toward becoming a 62-year-old greeter at Walmart and it scared hell out of me.
Some of this lack of intensity or whatever is likely related to the lack of a social context in my life. I’ve never really been a social butterfly, but in recent years, I almost seem to have given up on the idea of having friends. I can see the progression; a lot of it started when Mark and I coupled. I’ve always been a person who needs a lot of time alone, and once we started living together, I became more and more stingy with the time I might have shared with my friends. Moving to North Carolina, where I really didn’t know anyone anymore, really increased my isolation, especially after Mark started working in San Francisco so much. Most of my closest friends probably had no idea what a dark period that was for me because, well, I wasn’t sharing it with anyone. I was unemployed, spending most of my time completely alone in an apartment on the east side of hell, and not doing much else. Throw in a little bit of cancer, the loss of any measurable self-esteem, and a financial paranoia that made me give up many of the things I still enjoyed (random, spontaneous travel is a good example) and you have my first two years back on the east coast.
It got better, obviously. I’ve reinvented myself these past few years and I’m generally happy with the results. Again, I’m not in my twenties anymore, and things will never be quite the same as they were then. My priorities have changed. I don’t drink and smoke. I’m not looking for a party. I don’t chase boys around till all hours of the night. And I have absolutely no desire to start doing so again, even though I have no regrets about doing it before. That’s not how I want to spend my time now. Alas, I’m often not sure how I do want to spent my time (which is a pretty big problem for me lately) but I’m pretty clear on how I don’t want to spend it.
Maybe I’ve just become too serious or just given in too completely to my midlife crisis. I feel like I’ve aged about ten years in the past two months. Granted, there have been some major external forces involved in that, but it didn’t happen in isolation. I very much fear becoming a boring, vaguely sad man that no one wants to be around. I also don’t want this to become a boring, vaguely sad website that no one wants to visit, so I’ll shut up soon.
I miss 1992, but it’s not coming back, and the 1992 version of me likely to return. Neither is the 2001, the 1986, nor the 1997. The trick is to figure out what the 2011 model should look like.
A couple of email messages and a post I found on another site recently have clued me in to the fact that a lot of people seem to think I’ve moved to Pittsburgh. I guess I can see how the casual observer might come to this conclusion, what with my (relatively) new job, the fact that we own a house in Da Burgh, the fact that we’re trying to sell the house in Winston, the hubby‘s recent abandonement of San Francisco, etc. But the reality is that I still very much live in the Triad. Full-time, even. The reason we’re selling the house is to eliminate the thirty-mile commute to Greensboro that we both now face on a daily basis.
Again, we do still have a house in Pittsburgh. Mark has done wonderful things with it. And I visited it this weekend for the first time in almost five months. It’s a nice house in a nice city. It’s just not where I live.
I wanted to make that clear, since geography is inordinately important to me.
