Reboot

A lot has already happened since my last entry.  😀

Tonight I am staying up however long it takes to ensure that I’ll feel halfway sane when I wake up tomorrow (er, today). I have been putting things off, every night crawling into bed after getting the minimum amount of stuff done to make sure I don’t make a fool out of myself professionally the next day, but I need to take the longer view.

So to that end, I’m putting on Christmas music and puttering around the apartment.  It will probably be a lifelong, conscious effort of mine to help my mind to remain focused by keeping my surroundings unscattered and calming.  I am so much better at making sanctuaries for other people.  If it’s "just" for me, I am apt to forget.  One of the great dangers of living on my own, for me, is that I am apt to get tunnel vision about work and all that happens outside of my apartment.

To everyone interested in what happened with the kayaking guy and his father; in short, I found out rather abruptly (two days after my last entry) that this guy had a new girlfriend who wasn’t me.  After a few exchanges around this, I explicitly told him, "I don’t want to do this.  I don’t want to be the intellectual sparring partner at the expense of being a whole woman.  I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve missed out on other opportunities as a result."  And a few other things.  And I’m afraid I really, really enjoyed telling him *not* to take his new girlfriend to my Scottish country dance class (the way he announced her existence was by saying that he really ought to bring her to my class so that he could show her what it was all about, so that she wouldn’t worry that he’d been seeing me behind her back [he had come dancing with me]).  I said something to the effect of, "If you need to show her what it was all about, and your explanation isn’t enough for her, you have bigger problems to deal with … "

And honestly, the more I think about it, the more relieved I am that I have excused myself from that relationship.  I could have really liked him, but I was lightyears ahead of him.  I don’t think it’s weird for a 31-year-old woman to want something more than high school style dating … in short, to be more interested in making a *life* and possibly sharing it with someone, as opposed to killing time with someone.  In retrospect I think I was one of several women on his radar that he was getting to know in order to figure out who to date; I don’t really care about that, but I don’t have to pretend to be his friend now after being essentially discarded once he made up his mind.  I have to kind of laugh now at how he would remark on how I was the "least boring person" he knew and he hoped to keep me around.  Like, what, a jester?

But enough clearing-the-decks business.  On to what’s really the core of my life!

My weekend:

Friday night, after a relaxing day (Fridays are my day off this year.  I’m in heaven.  I have not known an empty Friday evening for about four years!), I went to a friend’s house for dinner.  She is newly-married.  I don’t think I ever named her in OD land.  She is somewhat younger than me and goes to my church.  I had always seen her as a particularly fortunate young woman.  Her family is affluent and very sane (from my outsider’s perspective), she has the time and resources to devote to her musical hobbies, and she is really photogenic and charming.  Anyhoo, when I first came to this church I always felt somehow at a distance from her – partially because, out of sheer goofy shyness, I always managed to say weird things in front of her, and because her situation seemed so impossibly healthy compared to my own.  I was really quite jealous, but amicably so.

When she and her new husband got back from their honeymoon, I missed her housewarming (sadly, to attend the banquet at which the kayaking guy’s dad behaved embarrassingly … ).  So she said I had to come over for dinner on Friday, and bring some stitchy project or other.  I did.  I brought fresh-baked bread, too.  She had made red lentil soup.  It was lovely and cozy, and it was one of the few times she and I have ever hung out, just the two of us.  We had a fantastic chinwag and I realized we were much more alike than I had thought.  Which, in a way, was rather liberating.  In fact, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I am like her, but with parts of herself she hasn’t had to realize yet; I am like her, but have gone through things that have toughened me and made me more sure than ever.  A rare moment of leaving someone’s company, thinking much more of them and of yourself at the same time, appreciating the beauty of difference as well as the empathetic sameness.

Saturday, I taught most of the day, and then the Ridiculously Unnameable Orthodox Guy came to the music school to practice Stravinsky with me.  We’re practicing the piano duet version of The Rite of Spring.  It’s FUN.  It’s HARD.  I love it.

After Stravinskying, we went to Vespers, where just a few of us huddled in the cold church, watching our singing voices turn into little constant clouds of condensation …

Then RUOG and I went to our friend’s house to make pizza, and watch Star Trek.  I was giddy with the sheer happiness of more shared food and more friend time.  Lots of gemutlichkeit going around these days.

Sunday afternoon, RUOG, the pizza friend and I (and others) went across the border to visit an older couple from an Orthodox church down there, who, for about two? years now, have hosted monthly dinners for older singles/newlyweds around their area.  The newly-married girl I saw on Friday actually met her husband at one of these dinners.  (A picture of them is proudly displayed in the older couple’s living room, as if to say "WE did that!")

So it was a very sharing-food-with-good-people kind of weekend.

Now it’s Monday (or, er, Tuesday) and I am taking stock of the situation.  I had a pretty good teaching day today.  Monday is one of my biggest days.  I am still trying to figure out this balancing act between enjoying all the people in my life, and making sure I have lessons planned well in advance.

And KT is coming to town!!  She’ll be staying with the Curious Mango while doing one of the final segments of med school, I forget the technical term of it … SHEER LUXURY:  KT and the Mango and me all in the same city for Advent, Christmas, and New Year’s.  Heisse scheisse!!!!  We have several shenanigans planned already.