reflections

Reepal and I broke up two months ago. we went thru a two week break last year in October. at the time it was because I was unhappy and didn't think things would change. we didn't do much. I would go over and we would watch netflix. we would go out and watch a movie. that was basically it. I wanted some excitement. I didn't want our next 50 years to be Netflix.

we were supposed to not have contact for a month but I caved and after two weeks I contacted him. I spent a lot of those two weeks thinking and I had some realizations about who I was and how rip and I were different. around the same time I was getting a lot of pressure from my mom about marriage, etc. I had never wanted to get married and I wasn't feeling particularly differently but I felt that I could marry rip and be happy enough. I was probably just too afraid, but that once I decided I would be happy with my decision. satisficers vs maximizes, you know? I had asked rip if he had any epiphanies and, well, not so much. but for a while things were better. I tried to get into a different mindset, and we did do more. we went to vegas with his family, we went rock climbing, we went to museums, we ate at new restaurants.

I started working again in march, and rip became really busy too with his work. so things kind of went back to as they used to be. calling him to see if he would wake up, getting off work early, seeing him for a little bit meant going to get food and watching Netflix. it was okay. it was a routine but we had made vague plans of moving out, getting married, progressing.

around summer I started thinking again. about our future. and it scared me. I didn't want to get married. I didn't think I could be happy. I didn't think things would be that different if we did get married. Rip felt differently, of course. not that he thought marriage would fix things, but that he was so busy with work right now, and I was so stressed from dragon boat... things would be different, better, I just needed to give it a half year.

I couldn't wait tho. not when I knew so clearly that things would not be different. that I would not be happy. but how strange it was that reepal felt so strongly the exact opposite thing. we just could not agree tho it was our future together we were thinking about. at one point he said to me that if it didn't work out we could always get divorced. that broke my heart. he's never wanted to sign even a pre-nup, thinking that when you get married you shouldn't plan for a divorce. and here he was offering me an out.

two months later and I still feel this was the right thing. I could have waited, but what if things weren't different? how could we have broken up then? this was hard enough. but rip felt his same way too. that I was making a mistake. but I felt that if it was the right thing for me then it must be the right thing for us. I asked him if he was any different in the two months and he said no. that made me sad. i knew then that we would never change enough for me.

last night he gave up on me. he's going to move on. which I know I should be happy about and yet... this is what I wanted, right? but I think I wanted to be proven wrong. I wanted to be able to find my way back to him. except that now he won't be there anymore. so I'll be on that huge subway platform alone with him speeding off and transferring trains, completely unfollowable to me. I can only hope that I haven't made this huge mistake. that I won't be a hobo in the station, but that I'll be heading off somewhere too. annie g and ting are going thru similar breakups, in the sense that no one really wants to break up but we're all doing it because we think it's the best thing. that in the long term, we'll each be happier apart. which, at present, none of us fully believes.

last month Mike said something like "he wasn't motivating you enough to want to get married. and now he's not motivating you enough to want to get back together with him." which is true. rip disagrees with me, but he, I guess, respects my descision enough to just wait for me to change my mind or come to the realization that he's right. I don't know. really, that's a bit insulting. in any case, I also feel like you're *telling* me things are going to be different but you're not *showing* me that it will be. it's compounded by the fact that part of the reason I'm unhappy is because I feel that we don't DO enough. and here you are still not doing anything still.

rip said to me that I never really opened up to him. which I think became true. I internalize my hurt too much. I force myself to move on and get over it. but I'm permanently bruised all over. over the summer I asked for a few things. I asked for reassurance, and he put me down instead. I asked for a compromise of sorts, which he ignored. they were little things but they meant a lot to me. I don't come up for air very often, I said, so when I finally do... it's terrible how we test people. and worse still how readily we recall the hurt, but not the happy instances.

in the last few years we've both been traveling. him for work, me for db mostly. he's been traveling a lot this half year. gone most weekends, actually. i had mentioned that it was hard on me, him being gone so much. he seemed incredulous. it's hard in other ways too. i love traveling. exploring new places makes me happy. and rip, well, he likes traveling for other reasons. but i see the pictures, read the posts, hear the stories, and think about how much fun we're having. seperately. how many of our favorite momements were spent apart. i feel so terribly about that.

I've had a few people tell me in the last year that I'm so strong. I don't believe that's true. I think I just have a harder and thicker shell than most. I've always prided myself on my independence, but I feel that I've learned self reliance in dating rip. there have been a few times over the years where I've thought, very clearly, during a conversation with him that "it's just me. I have no one but me." the worst kind of loneliness is whe you're alone with someone else. and I've come to realize that that's why I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't stand to feel that crushing loneliness my whole life.

in the end all you can really hope for is that you don't have too many regrets, that you learn from your mistakes, and that you actually improve upon yourself. I'm still trying in all three.

between the world and me quotations (other)

ta-nehisi coates - between the world and me

"Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing." (65-66)

"She said to me, 'You take care of my daughter.' When she got out of the car, my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you." (66)

"Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope." (71)

"The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have the time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us." (91) [my bold]

Solzhenitsyn - To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. (98)

between the world and me quotations (race)

ta-nehisi coates - between the world and me

"Fully 60% of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail." (27)

re: Queen Nzinga, "who ruled in central Africa in the 16th century, resisting the Portuguese... When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body." (45)

"The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine." (70)

"You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured out very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold." (71)

"The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will." (79)

"All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to 'be twice as good,' which is to say 'accept half as much.'" (90-91)

"I am ashamed I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more." (97)

"Destroying a black body was permissible--but it would be better to do it efficiently." (112)

"She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. 'And we can't get the message,' she said. 'We don't understand that we are embracing out deaths.'" (144)

social media gah!

I really like twitter. I've been on it for years. of the social media sites it was the only one that appealed to me right away. I blog already so I took to microblogging very quickly.

since I like twitter so much, I volunteer to tweet for multiple organizations. I tweeted for socal harvest for maybe a year-and-a-half. I tweet for scdbc, and in the summer I tweet from their tourney account. when I was on space I tweeted for them, and after switching teams I now tweet for xg. and of course I tweet for algalita (I am their social media manager after all).

there is a dragon boat blog that is fairly popular. I don't know when it came about but I think I started seeing posts maybe two years ago? anyway. end of last year they did this feature on like 15 dragon boat twitter accounts you have to follow, and also 10 dragon boat instagrammers you need to follow. space was on the twitter list and xg was on the instagram list.

I couldn't help but be annoyed. space tweets very infrequently. at that time maybe once or twice a month. when I was tweeting for them it was generally twice a week. I've stuck to that same frequency now that I'm tweeting for xg. obviously, quantity and quality are not the same but I don't think my posts were worse than the ones now. and seriously, how must you follow an account that tweets only once every three weeks? one of the lesser reasons I left space was that I felt like it was super clique-y. most of the leadership was dating within the leadership and they always hung out together. and the same people being recognized over and over again. at banquets it was the same 10 people winning the same awards every year. I tweeted for them and managed their blog for many years and I don't remember being thanked for it. in fact, I remember saying how long some blog banner update thing took me only to have someone else comment that it would've taken them like a quarter of the time. ...but you didn't do anything, did you? I certainly don't volunteer for the recognition, but it is nice to be appreciated after years of effort. but I eventually quit space and completely forgot about it until they were recognized for their twitter. ugh.

anyway. I tell myself that since there are fewer db teams on instagram than on twitter, that db blog probably promoted lower quality accounts in order to get a bigger spread of teams. it just so happens that my work was again not recognized. honestly, I don't think it would bother me much except for the space issue from before which I'd completely forgotten about until this happened.

really tho, none of this stuff matters. I volunteer because I like to. I try to do a good job because that's who I am. ...turns out I'm petty too, haha!

enemies

"you have enemies? good, that means you stood up for something, sometime in your life" - winston churchill

this quotation has ALWAYS bothered me. a lot of people use this quotation as an excuse to be an ass. okay, having enemies means that you disagreed with someone. but that doesn't mean you were right. maybe you're an idiot. maybe you're on the wrong side of history. maybe you're just an asshole and you have enemies because of your personality, not because of your beliefs. and anyway, not everyone liked mother teresa and a shit ton of people revered hitler.

also, being right about something doesn't give you a pass on manners. good for you, being an animal rights activist, but you shouldn't throw paint on people. and right on, you gay rights believer, but don't beat up homophobes. there's a right and wrong way to make enemies. make sure you're making them respectfully and righteously.

nag to nothing

it's interesting how so many of us grow into our parents tho we generally swear we won't. I'm not far enough in my life to know how much of my parents I am, but I certainly am the opposite of my mom in some ways. not that it makes me a better person, and in fact, it's just as bad.

my mom nags about everything. i hate it. so now i nag about nothing. if something rip does bothers me, i'll keep quiet about it for like 8 months. then i'll say something. we'll have a conversation about it but i won't go apeshit and this conversation won't last hours. then i'll say nothing and wait for him to make adjustments, if any. if he makes none, approx 10 months later i'm breaking up with him.

it's ridiculous the lengths we go to to avoid replicating the ridiculous behavior of our parents.