4:00 PM
For two years in a row now I’ve switched apartments. This time, I’ve moved back to my old stomping grounds. The apartment I’m in is about 4 or 5 times as large as the previous 250 square foot apartment I shared with my girlfriend and yet we still got it for $225 less than the old one. But despite the sudden increase of free space we have, for me it still feels like one step forward and two steps backwards.
The new apartment is located a mere four blocks away from the building I spent the first 19 years of my life in. From my new bedroom window, I can see the park I played in as a child. I know of old schoolmates who used to live in this very tenement.
I’m happy to be living in my own apartment, where the lease is under my name and I pay the rent. But I’m really not that thrilled about being back in this neighborhood. Danica is, however, very excited about the neighborhood. It is a major change from living in the Village. Everything is surprisingly cheap here; Diesel-brand clothing for $15, coffee, cinnamon rolls and several other pastries for a grand totoal of $4.90. Still, I have yet to make this apartment feel like home.
There are suitcases and boxes scattered all over the floor. We need a lot more furniture here, pronto. We don’t even have a bed. Danica and I have been sleeping on an unreliable air mattress. We’ve been waking up on the hard wooden floor for several days now. I only managed to bring my old twin-size mattress for her yesterday.
I haven’t put up any shelves yet, but I’m looking forward to getting more use out of my first power tool. I just used it to attach one of those slide-out keyboard and mouse holders to the bottom of my brand-new hand-me-down computer table. I’m also excited about just having some space to do real work.
I’ve been wanting to play with some Linux and BSD distros for some time now (ever since I discovered Mac OS X’s Terminal, actually)—
5:20 AM
I stopped writing earlier because my mother came to the door and started helping me clear out the living room. As I said, the place is still quite a mess. After she left, Danica came home. I was on the toilet as she arrived, and unfortunately the fact that my mom and I had cleared some space in the living room by moving boxes of our or her stuff out of the way caused yet-another-temper-tantrum.
Thankfully, I was shielded from most of it by being in the shower and thus managed to ignore most of Danica’s outbursts. When she started punching her exercise ball it was grating at first, but then I realized it may actually have been a good thing; at least she was doing something about her mood instead of yelling at me about it.
For the most part, I was right. She calmed down rather quickly and the rest of the day went on without too many bumps. Several situations threatened to erupt into similarly out-of-proportion outbursts but they were mostly contained to a few exclamations throughout the night. I can’t say there hasn’t been any improvement throughout the year.
Two thoughts are going through my head right now:
- What will Danica think and subsequently do when she reads this part of the entry?
- I am totally wrecking my day tomorrow, and probably the rest of my week, by staying awake and writing this but I really don’t want to go into the bedroom and lay by her right now.
So I air my dirty laundry in public. That’s how I do things.
The former is in my mind because the last time I wrote about her (and the first time I really wrote of explicit problems I was having with her irritability) she got extremely upset when she saw it and accused me of publishing “slanderous” things about her. In her view, what I wrote does not, in the least, portray an accurate description of her.
To which I can only say, of course it doesn’t! I wrote it in a moment of frustration and resentment. No single moment, taken out of context, could possibly hope to describe her entire being accurately. And to be fair, no moment of wonderful tenderness and loving (which I have written about in regards to her before) has been entirely accurate either. So I’ve decided to write what I please because I don’t write for anyone but me.
She said that she didn’t care about what others thought of her. Just what I thought of her. It seems to me that she was implying that the supposed fact that I was slandering her indicated that I didn’t have an accurate view of what happened.
Well. That’s insulting.
So how will this be taken? And what wrath will I pay for it? Regardless, it is written. So let it be paid for.
Will this be the last fight?
The latter because Danica and I just fought yet again. It never seems to fail. Fight after fight. This time we were going to bed. We had survived the day. Danica began to get depressed. Her thoughts focused on the past and all of the negativities therein. She said she wanted to “make it stop” (the bad thoughts, that is) but was unable to do so. Sounds bipolar to me. I would know; that’s exactly what used to come out of my mouth.
So I suggested that she finish up getting ready for bed, and eventually managed to get her to take a shower (the getting ready for bed she wanted to do). Afterwards she remarked on how much better she felt, but that was short lived.
Depressed thoughts returned, and somehow—don’t ask me how exactly, but thanks to my partial reading of Emotional Intelligence I can accurately term it catastrophizing—she spoke for some time about how we aren’t working out together and oh-dear-what-should-she-do? I couldn’t stem this tide, and in that, I failed miserably, because before I knew it she was crying and I had had enough and was laying it on pretty thick, loud enough to wake the neighbors.
I was am simply tired of it all. Months ago I had screamed that I was at the end of my rope. Now I find myself with a new apartment lease, this time in my name that I can not easily afford on my own, fighting day in and day out with my live-in girlfriend. I just want to have one week or just a few days in a row when we don’t fight at all. I honestly can not remember the last time a full day had gone by without at least some hours of unnecessary negative feelings in the air.
It’s pretty simple, really. Calm is to productivity as weather is to nature. Positive emotion is to happiness as oxygen is to breathing. Put another way, I just can’t do shit with these emotional pollutants constantly fucking up my environment!
One of Danica’s co-workers is in a potential end to this situation. He currently lives with his ex-girlfriend (yes, currently living with his ex) and he is reportedly miserable every night. One of my friend’s MSN Messenger display names was particularly relevant today: The best way to survive a gunfight is to not be involved in one.
So more than anything else, more than hoping to stay together even (no, I do not want to break up, yes, I do love her), I hope that this is the last time I fight with Danica forever.
[…] as actually the oldest one she shared. She wrote it on January 1st, 2005. The start of the new year was rou […]