sound and fury (signifying nothing)

I’ve done better in the self-esteem department than I think I’ll ever truly get credit for. It’s especially hard to look at yourself as a decent human being when your unconscious mind gives you a sharp kick in the integrity. When you’re down, no less, asleep and unable to give even the feeblest of nuh-uhs.

It’s not fair to wake up feeling guilty when you’ve been an absolute paragon of good behavior (and irrespective of any seasonal list-making or double-checking). That’s the predicament in which I currently find myself. I’m perfectly willing to blame it on Jon McLaughlin.

To his credit, he’s an extremely talented performer, and puts on a fantastic live show*. However, he does have a song called “Four Years” about high school (and moving on therefrom), and my Fark-addled mind has, on more than one occasion, resentfully muttered, “you know what else was four years….”**

The whole reason any of this showed up last night probably had less to do with any pop song and more with a fleeting thought of how different my new set of “in laws” is from the last batch. Add in some residual grudgery, an unfamiliar bed, and the queer sensation of sleeping in satin (as I did wind up with Christmas jammies after all), and I woke up feeling like a complete shit, nearly weeping with regret, about having cheated on my ex with my current boyfriend.

Let me spell it out, both so there’s no ambiguity and to reassure myself that it was all in my head: not only did I not even meet Andrew until my previous commitment was 1000 miles behind me, but I have never cheated. The closest I’ve ever come to infidelity was on a regrettable May night in 2004, when out of the loneliness that a long-distance relationship tends to foster, I kissed someone else. (Who would go on to tell people that it went quite a bit further, although I never touched him below the neck unless my hand inadvertently brushed against his comically small flaccid member through his jeans.)***

However, I’ve always been of the mind that if you wanted to sleep with someone new when you were already chained up, you should break off the relationship first. (To be fair, in my case this was a perk of the breakup rather than a motive for it; if I’d been happy in the first place, my eye would never have wandered.) Since I did what I consider to be the right thing, I wish my ever-yammering brain would shut the hell up already and let me enjoy myself. After all, it’s Christmas, ain’t it?****

Music: Something not-too-unbearably Christmasy

*He’s also tiny up close, like a singing Ken doll. Might be an Indiana thing.

**What would you call such Godwinning of your own stream of consciousnes? This isn’t a riddle; I’m open to suggestions.

***Now that I think about it, I wonder if this whole episode had less to do with Mr. McL than with the stupid juggalo sticker I saw on the back of a Highlander yesterday.

****Indeed, it is, and if you don’t know that reference, you should educate yourself post-haste, lest you be at risk of having no soul.

Never has this adage been proven more true than at this time of year. I have no idea how the birth of the Prince of Peace inspires such greedy, selfish asshattery. Perhaps something in that disgusting eggnog people keep drinking.

It’s one thing to have to deal with this kind of thing when you leave your house and willingly subject yourself to it. It’s quite another when you’re paying more than 50% of your salary to reside in its midst.

Perhaps this is just an overreaction brought on by the fact that, before I can shower in the morning, I have to wait for someone with a cleanliness compulsion to finish his morning bathing ritual (as distinguished from his evening bathing ritual… how the hell dirty can an IT drone get, anyway?).

Perhaps it’s just attributable to the fact that I glimpsed a tiny ray of hope in the offer to share a room with Andrew and lower the rent to a more affordable rate, yet have heard nothing since. I’ve become convinced that my stunning luck will kick in and the offer will be withdrawn. I’ll continue to have to scrape together the cash to live here, all but ignoring my credit card bills and the debt I owe to my mother, until our tax refunds arrive and we can move out. (I must admit I am curious to hear what rationalizations would be offered for it, and wonder how fast we would be replaced when we left, because without that steady rental income, the flights to Christ-knows-where to do Heaven-knows-what might have to be cut back to only once a month. And we’re not going to talk about certain vices.)

Perhaps I resent being made a dog-watcher and dish-washer. Perhaps it really steams my broccoli to be awakened at 2 in the morning by either drunken shenanigans or the dog’s vocal response to such, when I have to be at work at six in the goddamn morning.

When I moved into my last apartment, it was my first time living completely on my own, without roommates, siblings, or significant others. I was told I’d relish the solitude.

Sometimes I would trade that, even the annoying upstairs neighbors and the dreadfully Arkansan location, just to have a space that was bigger than a bedroom and the option to shower whenever I pleased.

There are times I want to hit things, shoot, things, or break things. This is one of those times.

One of the drawbacks to living with roommates is that they aren’t always considerate of your work schedule. So when they wake you up at two in the morning when you’ve only had two hours of sporadic sleep, you become frustrated. When you’re unable to get back to sleep for even a token few hours before you have to be up for work at 4, you feel like a complete failure at life.

When your well-meaning but sometimes singular-minded boyfriend offers a solution to help you sleep, you give it a try because you figure, “hey, what the hell, even if it doesn’t help me sleep, at least it’ll make me feel nice in the meantime.”*

But you still can’t sleep, because now your brain isn’t quite ready to pack in the old carnival tent. Mercifully, instead of reeling around out of control, it merely floats along over the glass-smooth surface of your mind. Instead of a frustrating commute, your mind is on an autumn road-trip to the mountains.

As is your custom during times such as these, you turn to either old memories or threads of new storylines to run on that mental movie-reel that, at least in my case, never shuts down. One in particular, an old standby, comes up in the queue, and you hit the play button. This one’s a mixture of sweet nostalgia and bitter disappointment, but the maybe-promise offered by its open-ended nature keeps the entire thing from curdling.

Until, well, now.

I did some vital letting-go over the past few weeks. Actually, it took place over a matter of hours, but what happened to me tonight served to prove that I made the right decision and I wasn’t just bullshitting myself.

It was all flat, a puzzle put together. Where do you go from that point but to break it apart and put it back in a dusty box? Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a metaphor but the actual visual effect that happened in my mind. A years-old scene, frozen and peeled away from time, dismantled for storage.

*What the hell am I talking about? It’s not rock & roll.