Late Night Entry

Lol, well, not really late night, considering it’s only a bit after eleven.  I was just browsing some past entries of mine, back in April of ’04, where my sleeping schedule was really outta whack.  You know, I’d sleep unilt two and be up till four or five, that kinda thing.

You know, March starts Drew’s and my seventh month of living together.  In a way, it surprises me that we’ve lasted this long, but in another way, it’s completely expected to me.  It’s weird how often throughout my life I talked of wanting a Prince Charming type to find me and pretty much carry me off into the sunset.  Because when I finally have found the guy I truly want to spend my life with, he doesn’t equate to Prince Charming at all.  He equates to Shrek.    I suppose it’s like Fiona said in the second movie.  "I want what every little girl wants: to live happily ever after.  With the ogre I married."

Drew hates dressing up, yet he’s gotten all fancy-dressed for me, with no complaints.  He doesn’t talk about his feelings, his past, his weaknesses, at all easily.  Yet he’s opened up to me.  He doesn’t take criticisms at all well, yet he’s listened when I’ve talked about things that he does that need to improve/change.  (Not always, but sometimes he listens.)  He doesn’t like skating, but he’s gone with me twice.  He doesn’t like people touching his back, yet he lets me massage it.  He says he likes sleeping alone, yet I’ve slept next to him every night since Valentine’s Day.

I know, especially the bad times I’ve written about in here concerning him have probably given him a bad reputation among the people who care about me.  He’s not as bad as my entries may lead you to believe.  He’s not bad, period.  Yes, he’s made bad choices, but those choices were made based on whohe’s become because of how he was treated throughout his life, as well as how he expects to be treated because of what he’s come to expect from people based on experience.

People can pretend all they want that their past has no bearing on who they are as an adult, or no bearing on who they are later in life, or no bearing on who they should want to become/will become.  It’s not true.  How your parents treat you, how they raise you, the lessons/wisdom/contradictions they impart, those things all become a part of who you are.  My grandparents on my mom’s side were neatfreaks.  They had to be, what with my grandpa being blind.  When you’re blind, you memorize where things are in a room by the number of steps you take from one object to another, among other tricks and stuff.  And if furniture is constantly moved, or things left out on the floor, the person can trip, injure themselves, or break whatever object is left in their path.

The point is, they had to be neatfreaks, they didn’t have a choice.  And because of that, my mom grew up to hate, of a sort, neatness.  You visit my parents’ house, you’ll find A) they’re both hoarders.  Not anywhere near as bad as you see on those shows where the people have, like, newspapers from sixty years ago stacked to the ceiling all over their house or whatever, but still, they both collect stuff.  B) the place is cluttered.  They keep talking about ‘wanting to get the place cleaned up,’ but it’s never gonna happen.  They won’t admit it, but it won’t happen.

Things from them have rubbed off on me.  A) the hoarding, though I’m getting better.  B) my mom would generally never tell someone off.  Instead, it’s ‘be nice to their face, talk about them behind their back.’  What she doesn’t like about them, what she should say to them, what she actually thinks of them but would never say because of whatever reasoning, etc.  I won’t necessarily badmouth someone behind their back, but I used to alays be the ‘nice to their face’ kind of person.  Or, if I didn’t like them, I merely avoided them instead of risking a confrontation.

Melanie’s like that, too.  Not the examples I named above, (well, okay, maybe she’s a bit of a hoarder,) but one thing she admits she got from her parents, specifically her dad, is her ‘guilty until proven innocent’ way of thinking.  She could have changed where that goes, but she definitely used to be the kind of person who . . . I guess for lack of a better description, figured you had an ulterior motive until you proved otherwise, that your intentions/friendship/whatever was sincere.  I also don’t doubt that aside from her father, she came into that mindset because of her middle school experiences with this girl she finally got sick of and told off, who turned around and did everything she could to make Melanie miserable.

Just the same, Drew’s had a number of bad experiences that have shaken his already fragile state of mind concerning trusting people.  His brother pretty much hated him since before Drew can remember.  They apparently never got along.  Then add to that that when Drew was thirteen, he found out he was adopted during an argument with his adoptive mom.  I mean, how much worse of a way can someone find out that their parents aren’t biologically related to them?