Author: Melanie

Memory Lane

Addendum

Melanie

“It can’t last forever, but who made the rule that the best loves do?”
— Tracey, from Ally McBeal

I’ve been thinking about my last post for the two days since I posted it. I really agonized over whether to share that with you guys, once I remembered what had really happened. I was ashamed to tell you, and I worried that you’d judge me, mostly because I’m judging myself. Anyone who knows me knows I have very high expectations of people, but most of all of myself, and it’s very difficult for me to come to terms with not living up to them. I suppose that’s why I managed to “forget” what Spike (in the comments) quite rightly called “key details.” But I also suppose I come by them honestly, by learning from my mistakes and vowing not to make them again.

I texted Karen before I posted it, asking if she thought I should. She asked if I could tell the story without including the part where I cheated. I said, “Not without feeling like I’m being untruthful.” She replied, “Then you have to tell it. Is your blog to make you look good or to express yourself honestly?” I decided she was right, and I still think so, but I do feel the need to defend myself a little.

I was 18 and about to be a sophomore in college. In my journal I had written that I was sure that I wanted to marry D, but that I wasn’t ready to “give up” the next “4-7 years” (I don’t know how I came up with that number) and never experience whatever else was out there. God, I was naive. How can you say, in the same breath, that you want to marry someone, and then describe the time between now and marrying him as “giving up” other experiences that you could have? That’s so wrong. I thought if I just kept saying I was happy, that I wanted to marry him (both of which I was sure were true, even as I developed crushes on other people), that it wouldn’t matter what else I said or did. Like knowing I loved him was a free pass to do whatever I wanted. That’s a truly shitty thing to do to someone (and that is the first real curse word to appear here at HMITH – well deserved, I think). Ok, so that’s not so much a defense as a self-analysis, but who cares? I just needed to get some of this out.

I can’t remember if I ever told him I cheated – my journal doesn’t say because it picks up a couple weeks after our break up and is light on details. I do know that about 5 years ago, I was reading through old letters and came across his. I read every last one of them, and when I was done I felt two things: deep sadness and profound gratitude. The sadness was because of the letters he wrote me while we were broken up in February, and remembering how much I’d hurt him pained me so much. The gratitude was because he managed to love me at all, in spite of everything. He really was so good to me. I had his email address, though we weren’t regularly in touch, and I sent him an email (which I saved, of course):

I was doing some organizing tonight, and I came across some letters that you sent me throughout our relationship. I just wanted to say thank you. Reading them, I remembered just how good you were to me, and how patient. I know that I never did anything to deserve someone like you, so I feel very lucky that I had you in my life. I am not trying to rekindle anything, I just don’t believe in letting kind things go unsaid. I wanted you to know that I have always thought that, of any man I’ve ever known, you loved me the best, and reading your letters tonight only confirmed that.

He responded, and was kind enough to lie a little: he said that he hadn’t treated me any differently than I treated him, that the feelings he expressed in his letters were a reflection of me, that I’m a good person, and that he was glad we had our time together. I saved that, too.

I feel horrible now, after writing the last post and thinking about the end of our relationship and what I did, but the truth is, when we were together and we were happy, it was so good. I don’t have any illusions that if I hadn’t cheated and we hadn’t broken up at the beginning of sophomore year that we’d be married for years by now – we probably wouldn’t have even lasted through college. But we might still be friends who keep in touch now, and we would have avoided a particularly ugly post-breakup event (the details of which I won’t go into). I miss him. He is a good person, and I miss having him in my life.

The point of the Memory Lane series is to figure out what I learned from each relationship, so here’s what I learned from D: the grass is not always greener; you think it will be, but it’s not, and sometimes, once you cross the fence, you can’t get back to the other side.

Or, in the immortal words of the Rolling Stones:

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime
You might find you get what you need

Memory Lane

Memory Lane of Men, Part 2

Melanie

I don’t care what they think
I don’t care what they say
What do they know about this love anyway?
— Melissa Etheridge, Come to My Window

What can I say about D? Well, we met the July before we started at our small, east coast college, at a weekend orientation for incoming freshman. He was tall and skinny – 6’4″, 180 pounds – which for a very long time was precisely my type. I don’t remember how we ended up on the quad til 2:30 in the morning the first night, kissing, but we did. It wasn’t a furious make out session, either, it was a “I kind of really connected with you and I think I might like you, so let’s talk and kiss and talk some more” kind of thing. I remember that we each shared our senior year heartbreaks with each other and talked for hours. And that he told me he’d never rolled down a hill before, which I couldn’t believe. There happened to be a small hill right off the quad, so I went first and convinced him to follow me. He thought I was nuts, but he did it, laughing the whole way down. Later, after we’d been together four or five months, I convinced him to dance with me in the rain. Those are two of my all-time favorite memories.

When we arrived on campus in the fall, we had been talking on the phone a couple times a week, and we found each other’s dorm rooms pretty quickly. We didn’t start dating right away, and he didn’t end up being my first, but like Felicity said about Noel, he should have been.

He was a basketball player, and at our small, D-III school, everyone knew him. He’s black, and when we started dating, he took a bit of flack from some people, because he never tried to hide it. We’d walk to class holding hands, and kiss when we parted, and we never made a secret of the fact that I spent most nights in his room. Once people saw we were serious, they backed off, and no one ever said anything to me directly, but I know that it cost him something in the black community at our school to be with me. If it bothered him, though, he never let on.

D was . . . I can’t say shy, because that’s not it, but reserved, I think. He was very observant and didn’t talk a lot in a crowd or in class. Once we started dating, people would ask me, “Does he ever talk?” I’d kind of smile and say, “Yeah. He talks to me all the time.” It made me feel special. I can’t call him shy, because one of his favorite things to do, when it was just us, was play air guitar to Purple Rain. I won’t do that alone in my own house, but he would just go to town; it was the best (or “de best,” as he liked to say in a funny accent sometimes). He loved Prince. And basketball. And me.

And that’s what I can tell you about D: that of all the men I’ve dated, seriously or otherwise, he is the only one who I know for sure was truly in love with me the way I was in love with him. J, sure, he liked me a whole lot, and he might have even loved me, but he was never in love with me. And I’ve come to realize that M, who you’ll meet in Part 3, was only ever in love with the idea of being in a relationship – he was with me because he wasn’t with anyone else. But D and I, we were in love with each other. We had a good run; we had a very hard thing to deal with in the middle of our relationship, but we got through it and never looked back.

When May rolled around and it was time to head to our respective homes for the summer, I was devastated. We weren’t sure how often we’d get to see each other, and I knew it was going to be hard. We said goodbye for a long time, and I cried and cried. He handed me a letter before he kissed me goodbye for the last time – it was all about how much the year had meant to him, how much his life had changed since meeting me, how much he loved me. At the end, I’ll never forget, he wrote: “Don’t forget to come back to me.” At the time I thought, “What in the world does that mean?”

We saw each other once that summer, wrote each other a million letters, and talked on the phone every other day. It was awful. I missed him terribly, and he missed me. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even talk for minutes at a time, we’d just sit there on the phone, knowing the other was on the other end, and it would be enough. I couldn’t wait to get back to school in August so I could be with him again.

And then, when I got back, I can’t even explain what happened. We were both on campus, and we each knew the other was on campus, but we never called each other. I’m thinking about it now, trying to understand, and I can’t. I don’t think we talked for an entire week, and we didn’t run into each other in that whole time, either. When we did, we both just understood that it was over. I hadn’t forgotten to come back to him, I just couldn’t.

***** ~squealing brakes~ *****

Ok, have you ever remembered something one way only to hear the other person tell it and it’s completely different? That just happened to me, except it was my 17- and 18-year-old self who remembers correctly what happened between me and D. I wrote everything above and then went to re-read my journal from college because I wanted to see how I explained the not talking to each other when we got back to school. It turns out that the truth is, I was a terrible, fickle person who did not deserve him.

When I started this blog, I determined that I had only one rule for myself: no lying (apropos of nothing, and to maybe make you laugh one last time before I come clean, this is also the only rule of I Never, my favorite drinking game). So I’m going to tell you now what I had somehow managed to convince myself wasn’t true or had conveniently forgotten:

I cheated on him. At the end of the summer, just before it was time to head back to school. Oh, and once, I think, the first night back at school with an old friend (I was definitely the girl looking for love in all the wrong places. It apparently was not enough that I’d already found it, and in someone who wanted to love me back, no less, unlike the others.).

And that explains why I didn’t call D or seek him out; I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to tell him or if I should tell him. My journal says that prior to cheating and getting back to school, I had already been feeling like I wanted to break up with him, I was just waiting to be “sure,” because I’d already hurt him before and didn’t think he’d be as inclined to forgive me this time if I changed my mind again. (Something else I’d forgotten was that we’d broken up twice in February – shortly after the “very hard thing” alluded to above – because I’d decided I wanted to see other people, and he took me back when I realized I’d made a huge mistake. He knew I’d been struggling with that for a while, and when I crawled into his bed the night we go back together, crying and apologetic, he whispered in my ear, “I’ll never give up on you.”)

I should change the opening quote to Fiona Apple:

I’ve been a bad, bad girl
I’ve been careless with a delicate man.

Uncategorized

I’m a Liar

Melanie

I get my ya-yas at IKEA. You have to put them together yourself, but they cost a little less.
— Chandler, on Friends*

Ok, so when I said in my last post that I was “working” on Part 2 of the Memory Lane series, what I really meant was, “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about it, I’ve been thinking about it, and I might write it if I feel like it this weekend.”  Guess what?  I don’t feel like it.  Or, I do, but I’d rather talk about my day, because today, I went to two of my favorites stores:  Ikea and Costco.

When I was a kid, going to Ikea was a big deal, because they were exclusively in bigger cities, and it was a whole ordeal to get there.  Ever since college, though, I’ve not been that far from an Ikea for any length of time, but I still love it.  They have so many great things for, like, 59 cents.  It’s unbelievable.

I always end up at the checkout with a cart full of stuff I never intended to buy.  Today, for instance, I went in for curtains and curtain rods and to replace the bowl my cat eats out of (the last one broke and he’s been eating out of one of my cereal bowls, which doesn’t match his water bowl, and if you know me, you know that makes me die a little inside every time I feed him).  I expected to spend about $30.  I left $125 poorer, but I got two chairs for my dining room table (now I can actually eat at it), seat pads for them, three of the bowls my cat eats out of (in case they break again – hey, they really were 59 cents apiece; you can’t beat that), a pot lid rack, a giant poster, some art cards for a frame I’ve been trying to find art for, scented tea lights, some jumbo tealights that match the color scheme in my bedroom (you never know when they’re going to discontinue them), curtains and rods for my bedroom, and a $5 saw (conveniently placed in the store next to the curtain rods I bought, which were 55″ long – perfect for one window, too long for the other – with a sign near them that said “Easy to cut!”)!

If it weren’t for Ikea, I’d have practically no furniture.  I outfitted my entire bedroom in my first apartment after college at Ikea for less than $500, and I still use that set.  When I moved here, I bought my dining room table from them, and I have more Ikea picture frames and kitchen items than I can count.  I love to walk around in there and see all their display rooms; there’s one that’s a whole studio apartment -270 square feet – and it has more cabinet space in the kitchen than I do in 700 square feet.  I want to buy all of the rooms, as-is, and make the Ikea people come to my house and set them up exactly the same.  Someday.

But.  Ikea is nearly always crowded, and that sucks.  If you frequent Ikea, you may remember that they have very helpfully laid out arrows on the floor to show IN WHICH DIRECTION YOU SHOULD BE WALKING as you make your way through the showroom.  You, there, with the overflowing cart and ankle-biters weaving in and out of people’s way: Must you defy the rules of traffic flow?  Why do you insist on walking in the opposite direction of everyone else?  I know you started in the same place we all did, so why now are you backtracking?  There are no checkouts up here, and very few items to be picked up and placed in your cart (and I promise, you can find all of those few items downstairs.  Really.  Trust me; I’m an Ikea expert).  Stop swimming upstream.

Then I went to Costco.  I wasn’t sure what I’d buy, as I live alone and don’t have much storage space, but I was thinking trash bags, soda, and cat food.  They didn’t have the size trash bags I needed, but I got soda, cat food, a crapload of good candy for the bowl on my desk at work (I eat almost none of it, and I never see anyone else take any, but it disappears little by little; I like to imagine the cleaning people hanging out in my office after hours, shooting the breeze while sucking on Atomic Fireballs), four pounds (!) of chicken breast tenders, some cereal, some fruit cups for lunches, and some, um, personal items.  Between that and the stuff from Ikea, I made 5 trips from my car to my apartment when I got home.

Sadly (Jane, don’t be mad), I did not buy a stainless steel Food Saver (it had everything, all the bells and whistles, and canisters!) for the unbelievably low price of $125.  I know it’s a great deal – I’ve priced them, and that model, without the canisters, is usually $160 – and I really wanted to, but I just couldn’t justify it today.  Pity me.

The thing about Costco for me is, intellectually, you know you don’t really need a 500-count bottle of vitamins (honestly, if it’s just you taking them, you can’t possibly use them all before they expire), or a ten-pound bag of rice, or a bag of 50 apples, right?  But then, you whip out your cell phone, which, conveniently enough, has a little calculator, and you do the math.  Those apples?  They’re only about 6 cents each or something.  You can take a vitamin every day for nearly two years for the low, low price of 4 cents a day!  Make all the rice you want for 17 cents a cup!  (I am, of course, making these numbers up because I did not buy vitamins, apples, or rice, but Pico eats for 32.2 cents a day, and my Diet Dr. Pepper is only 24 cents a can).  It’s seductive.  You see the unit price, and you know it’s a good deal, so you buy it even if you don’t really need it.  And then you get a hernia carrying it all up three flights of stairs to your apartment.

One day, though, I’m going to have a giant family, and a house with plenty of storage space, and we will shop at Costco weekly, and I will buy 48-packs of toilet paper, and 72-packs of Capri Sun for their lunches, and 500-count bottles of Flintstones vitamins (they can share; we’ll use it up in no time).  We will be thrifty and we will save a ton of money.  I’m taking applications for a husband who can carry all of that into the house for me.

* Ok, if you read this overnight and are back again, you know I’ve changed the opening quote. Friends just is a better fit for me than Fight Club, but I didn’t remember the quote until this morning. I can’t be sure I’ve got it precisely right, because, shockingly, IMDb doesn’t have this quote on its Friends page, and the only other source I found by Googling was a site in Swedish, and I don’t trust them. Feel free to correct me if you know the right wording, and I’d love to have the episode title that it came from as well.

Uncategorized

Things to Be Happy About, Vol. 10

Melanie

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
— Albert Schweitzer (oddly enough, this is also often attributed to Ingrid Bergman)

Honestly, I am over this. I think I might drop this feature from weekly to biweekly or even monthly – or maybe just “when I feel like it.” I don’t know; I just wasn’t in the mood to post yesterday. I kept meaning to, and then didn’t. It’s not that I don’t see the value in it, and it’s not because I’m feeling down or anything, I just . . . I guess it’s that this started when I wasn’t sure I’d have enough to say to sustain a blog, and thought this might give me an easy way in to posting. It turns out I’ve got more to say than I thought, I’d rather be free to do that than be constrained by a schedule, even one as lax as this (and I do know that it’s me who’s constraining myself, always demanding that things go in a precise order).

So, here is tonight’s list, which may have to sustain you for some time. [Confession: not all of these are actually in my little notebook yet; I cheated a little today and added some on the fly. I’m unpredictable like that.]

1. my crossdressing 2-year-old nephew [This kid is a riot; he loves his trucks, but he also loves his sister’s dress up clothes, especially her princess dresses. I’ll post a picture if Nate says it’s ok Here’s a picture:]

0105081239.jpg
2. the National Air Force Memorial at sunset [I saw this through the train window on the way home tonight, and with the sun almost totally set and the clouds, it was gorgeous]
3. fresh mojitos
4. walk-off homeruns
5. playoff football
6. chorizo and Swiss cheese on a fresh, crusty baguette
7. the top of the Empire State Building on a clear day, not unlike this one [that’s me and Aimee]:
ans-and-mdw-at-esb.jpg
8. taking in a show at the Moulin Rouge in Paris
9. being friends with your brother
10. public libraries [when I was a kid, I think the limit at our library was 12 books at a time; I was in there almost every day in the summer – I’d rather read than do almost anything else]
11. sleeping with the window open for three nights in the middle of January [back to coldness tomorrow, boo]
12. an old hotel with lots of history
13. the big ferris wheel in the Toys R Us in Times Square
14. realizing that something you did really made someone’s day
15. when the floor is warm and toasty under your bare feet because the heating pipes run underneath it
16. clearing out clutter
17. waiting for it to rain so you don’t have to wash your car
18. “boy-blue” oxford shirts [you know the ones I mean, right?]
19. making the last payment on a credit card [yeah, this hasn’t happened for me in some time]
20. summer nights when it’s just cool enough for shorts and a sweatshirt

I’m working on Part 2 of Memory Lane; hopefully it will go up this weekend.

Entertainment

Gladiators, Ready?

Melanie

“At my signal, unleash hell.”
— Maximus to his troops, in Gladiator

So Karen asked me last night if I was serious in my new year’s post about watching American Gladiators. My response was, “Um, yeah.” Duh. I was psyched for this to start – Nate and I used to watch this every Saturday (I think) at noon because we didn’t have cable and it was the only thing on. Plus, it was awesome. The original Gladiators had names like Malibu, Lace, Blaze, Nitro, Turbo, and Jade (thanks, Wiki!). They were pitted against average Joe and Jane contestants in contests like The Wall (scale the rock-climbing wall while being chased by a Gladiator intent on pulling you off the Wall), Joust (just what it sounds like, except on three-foot wide platforms 15 feet above water), and Assault (shoot a variety of weapons using tennis balls as ammo at a target suspended above a Gladiator armed with a tennis-ball-shooting gun – get hit once and you’re toast).

This “revival” of AG now airing on NBC (Mondays, 8pm) is terrible. Like, can’t-stop-watching-even-though-I-want-to-poke-my-eyes-out terrible. I freaking love it. The male Gladiators this time are named Toa, Militia, Justice (oooh, scary, especially with that triangle mohawk), Titan, Mayhem, and Wolf (I hate him; he howls – that’s original). The girls are called Siren, Fury (who has one of those super-long, top-of-the-head ponytails, complete with a conical ponytail holder thing), Venom, Stealth, Crush, and Hellga (yes, with 2 l’s – clever isn’t it?).

Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali “host,” but it’s clear the two of them have taken too many shots to the head in their careers, because they can’t read cue cards to save their lives. And writers’ strike or not, and “reality TV” label notwithstanding, this show is scripted. Badly. Even the contestant interviews and insults from the Gladiators are cliched sound bites.

And the puns. Oh god, the puns. The only one I can remember – because they’re so groan-worthy I forget them as soon as possible – was that one of the girls was going to have to work hard to “snake” her way past Venom. Snake. Get it? Get it? Just kill me now.

Tonight they had two contestants from the South, and boy did they milk it. The guy, who they said was nicknamed “Big Country” (as if anyone is really ever nicknamed Big Country), kept talking about how back home in Tennessee, they mud wrestle and hog wrestle, so this should be a piece of cake. The girl kept saying that her “Mama” (which the captions spelled “Momma” so it’s even more southern) was her hero and taught her never to give up. Christ. Those two just set the South back 20 years.

These contestants, though, they are hard core. They’re always talking about giving 110%, and last night one of them even went so far as to promise 200%! Can you believe it? That’s like 1.8 times the regular amount of effort! Unreal. One guy last night was the sentimental favorite – he tried out 14 years ago for the original AG, made it, but got stuck in LA traffic and missed his taping time slot. Too bad he was an asshole and no one was rooting for him. And this other girl rammed her forehead so hard against a metal pipe while swimming under a 20-foot long plank of FIRE that she completed the rest of the obstacle course with blood streaming down her face. In all seriousness, that was awesome. Not the ramming of the forehead, of course, because, ouch – but the blood.

The biggest change is that the format, instead of just being a season-long tournament for money, has changed so that the final 8 competitors (4 men and 4 women) will compete for a spot in next season’s (that’s optimistic) group of Gladiators. What a great prize. I assume NBC will pay for the requisite plastic surgery for the female winner (and maybe the male, too, if Titan is any indication).