That’s not a good place for an extension cord.

So, I’m listening to Matt Good right now, “Oh be joyful”, and thinking, I haven’t updated my iPod for an amazing and somewhat depressing five months. I should really get around to that. Or, I could just listen to the right ear phone, rather than the usual “left”. That seems to always screw with me if I need a change in music, because I hear the “other half” of things. Anyways, point is, I’m not finding that I have legit reasons to be joyful.

I could be joyful, because I have a boyfriend who is indescribably joyful, but that indescribability is hard to keep at the top of the floating layers in the cup sometimes, as it often becomes submerged in the other layers mainly consisting of the substance called confusion and a lot of doubt. Doubt being the most viscous, usually sits at the bottom of these quandries, but my glass is getting good and shaken lately. What a fucking weird analogy. I haven’t actually sat down and written anything in a while, so maybe this is more for myself than my “devout” readers, but I’ve got a disease, and it’s making me suffer in the daytime, and that disease, that dis-ease, is words on the brain.

Much like water on the brain, it causes uncomfortable pressure build-up and confusion. Not knowing up from down, left from right, and etcetera. Maybe that’s what love is, now that I think of it. Water on the brain promising an aneurism of orgiastic glee.

The boy causes me to conjure up many thoughts of doubt. In fact, if I were to sit and regard the whole thing for the negatives, it wouldn’t look so good at all. Actually, I should say it doesn’t look good at all, because I have done this. But yet, I can sit in his arms and feel like as long as I’m there, everything is ok, against all odds. Everything about him is severely “against all odds”, and yet, I’m still putting money on it. It’s so extremely unwise, that initially, when our status changed from a terrible phrase, to “significant other” [1], I was extremely reticent to tell anyone. A lot of this had to do with a worry about being judged, a lot of it had to do with people confirming my worst thoughts about the whole thing (my own judgements?), a lot of it had to do with people thinking less of me. Most of all, it bothered me because I couldn’t explain it. And truthfully, I still can’t, but I’m at least happy (weirdly) with this aspect of my life, so I’m choosing to just let it be right now. Whether or not this continues though or not, hinges on a lot of other things that have yet to unfold.

I was talking about this with a co-worker the other day, and she told me that she’d only ever had one other relationship, with her husband, and this relationship with a woman now, was only the second relationship she’d ever been in. She’s having a hard time right now in it, because they’re both really stressed out, but she also said, “I’m still trying as hard as I can to make it work. You have to work at these things, you know?”

I told her that I didn’t really know that, because I was pretty used to just running away if things were taking a questionable course. This was post-status change of the relationship, but I still had this odd realization that maybe this boy was the first time that I was actually just letting go and going with it, as opposed to double-digits of relationships that I’ve been in and ended at the cusp of an unfavorable change in affection. And it has been me that has ended these, 9/10.

All in all, this could be something I deeply regret and will make bad jokes about sometime in the future, but I am trying, bearing healthily in mind that there is a difference between trying, and beating an attempt to death.

The boy actually hooked me up with a very temporary job opportunity last week, in other news, that was very interesting. I have some landscaping experience, so he took me to the company he works for (after telling them of my experience and gaining their approval). It’s a notorious gig, known for the daily cash pay-outs and the colorful characters that work there. And really, it’s a total gong-show. I could go on for paragraph upon paragraph on the inadequacies of the whole place, but I won’t. I got my money, I’m done, and I actually had a pretty good darn time getting it too. After the first two initial days of absolute soreness, it really didn’t bother me to trim for ten hours. Actually it’s kind of nice once you get into it. If I had more time, and hadn’t missed my last day at work before my spring session, I’d probably go back. I’m still banking on my job opportunity as Safety Watch though.

That is supposed to be the job that carries me through the summer and gets me to some point of financial preparedness [2] for getting a real job, and possibly having to move with very short notice. I have been getting the initial chore of getting a real job done…real slow-like. It sort of freaks me out to look for a job, but I’ve been noticing lately as I slowly get my shit together, that it has started feeling really good to do all that, as opposed to hideously frightening. Because when I sit down and think about it, cocky as it sounds, I know that I can do extremely well by any school that hires me, and there’s no doubt in my mind about that now. Neat, and wildly optomistic.

Here’s the rub. It seems like things are shakily ok, but in reality, it sort of feels like a dream. I have become somehow, one of those people that is still sitting in a rocking chair with narrowed eyes gazing in the distance, shotgun in my lap, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

One of those shoes, is a wildly confusing dynamic with someone I know best embodied by this diagram. It worries the hell out of me. I wish that friendships were more simple sometimes, but at the same time, complicity is something I treasure in that context. I should thus know by now that with complicated friends…there is good, bad, downright confusing, but for now, I fret like a useless toad.

And useless toads were a-plenty last Friday, as my parents and I went on a road trip [3] to Drumheller, specifically to bring me to Reptile World. We also went to Linden to visit relatives, but that was fairly minor, I think, in the grand scope of the trip. It all started when I foolishly decided to tell my parents that I was a) incredibly broke, and b) incredibly stir-crazy. I made an idle threat about hitch-hiking out of the city (as some of my friends have done before, and been crazy successful at) to Mexico. I basically mentioned the wrong city, thinking about one of my favorite Simpson’s references, and since Mexico is my Mom’s current phobias [4] she sort of freaked out.

This is where you learn a little more gross detail about me that you didn’t know before. She freaked out, and in a very wierd phonecall later that week, my Dad declared that we were “going on a road trip”, and “it’s for you, where would you like to go?” It wasn’t for me, it was like this really weird attempt to give me fake autonomy on the way down to visit his Uncle in Linden. And so the farce went, my mom cramming herself into the back of the truck cab (if you’ve met my mom, you know how silly it is to cram an Amazon into a small space). I was to be the Navigator, and they jokingly called me ‘Greta’ after their GPS in Germany. So, I navigated us down to the south, feeling sort of uneasy and stupid the whole way down, but still managing to have a pretty good time. I do really like hanging out with my parents, so it isn’t hard to have a good time travelling with them (all my travelling, has essentially been with them to some degree), but admittedly, it was a little forced, a little coddling, and of course, throw in “eccentric”, because that stupid devil black cat came along too. Nothing says my family like walking a malignantly evil black cat through a park in the middle of desert. I mean for the love of groceries, there were children around.

“It’s time we started treating you like an adult, so you should sit in the front seat,” burns my 24 year old ass so bad. This is something that has been a bone of contention with my parents and I before. But I’m in an awkward position about it as well unfortunately. It’s a strange game. But I got good pictures. Of oodles of reptiles. Be ready for teh fantastique.

More later. Must sleep.

[1] I saw this officially on paper today, signing it at a registry for a new birth certificate for him. Right above the option for marriage license. You know, “Groom’s last name”, “Bride’s former/same last name”, “place of marriage”, etc. It ignited crazy Las Vegas thoughts, and I was extremely weirded out afterwards.

[2] Definitely not feelin’ that at the moment.

[3] Wait for it…there’s a segue.

[4] “Have you heard about ALL those DEAD Canadians in Mexico??”