Phone Bill Analysis

Here's a weird anal habit of mine: I keep all my phone bills. Or at least the portion that lists out all my (long-distance) calls. I have years and years worth of bills that show which conversations I made and when. I think it's a neat record of my social life. For example, it's interesting to know that on July 17th, 2003, I talked with my sister for 43 minutes.

So when I got my phone bill a few weeks ago, and noticed that it was the highest bill I've ever had with my current plan, I decided to do a little data collection. It's obvious why my bills have gone up in the past year: I'm dating someone who lives 700 miles away. But I wanted to see if there was any identifiable trend to our phone communication.

Here are the last 10 phone bills, with the # of minutes I used:

• Dec, 2009: 302
• Jan, 2010: 485
• Feb, 2010: 928*
• Mar, 2010: 573
• Apr, 2010: 244
• May, 2010: 1049*
• Jun, 2010: 548
• Jul, 2010: 247
• Aug, 2010: 634
• Sep, 2010: 1104*

* Billing periods where K and I did not see each other in person

Note: This is just my landline, so it doesn't represent any cell phone use. But for almost all of my home conversations, I use my landline. Also, I get my phone bill on the 16th of each month, so it includes the last half of the previous month and the first half of the current month. For example, the January, 2010 bill goes from Dec 17 to Jan 16.

What's interesting is how this data represents my relationship with K. Not every minute of my phone time is with K, but I think it's safe to say that 90% of my phone use during this period was with her.

The three months with the highest minutes, September (1104), May (1049), February (928) covered periods of time when K and I did not see each other in person. So we talk a lot more when we don't see each other. That seems like a no-brainer, but you wouldn't think that spending a long weekend together would make that much of a difference. The average "visit month" is about half the minutes of an average "non-visit month." That's more than just the loss of 3-4 days of phone calls. Live visits recharge us, so we don't need to talk as much after they're over. Compare the most active months with April (244 minutes) and July (247). In the July period we had two visits, and although April only had one official visit, the billing period started just after the March super date weekend, so we got the aftershocks of two visits.

The most promising trend, however, is how much we've talked the past two months. August was the most minutes I've ever had during a "visit month", and September was the most minutes talked, period. It's ironic that both of these record-setting months came after our scare in July, when she said she wanted to talk less on the phone.

It appears that the "break" scare was just growing pains before we started a new level of contact.

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My phone plan allows for 500 minutes and after that I have to pay per minute. That means that 6 of the past 8 months, I've used more minutes than my plan is designed for. I've considered moving up to the next plan, which is unlimited minutes for $10 more per month, but considering the amount of extra minutes I've used, it would only save me about $3 per month on average.

But more importantly, I fear that changing my phone plan to accommodate K is too much of a commitment. What if I change my plan and then we break up? I'd be paying for all these extra minutes that I wouldn't be using. And they would mock me. It just feels too much like I'm tempting fate. Jinxing myself.

So an extra $3 a month is not too much to pay for an anti-jinx fee. She's definitely worth that.

Party Half Full

I went to bed on Friday night a little deflated. I had just checked the FB event page for my party, and people were RSVPing "no" like rats jumping from a sinking ship. (Yes, "RSVPing" is a real word.)

In a moment of despair I thought, "Maybe this whole party thing was a huge mistake." The marginal people aren't going to want to come if only 5 people have RSVPed "yes." It's going to be a disaster and I'll end up sitting alone on my couch in my underwear swilling premium beer and eating caramelized onion dip right out of the bowl.

But then I had to check myself. Yes, I could think of individual people who weren't coming and be disappointed. Like the friends who I really wanted to meet K, or the people who hadn't been able to come to my last party, or the people I wanted to get to know better. Most of them bailed. But I could also think of the people who were coming. In all, eleven people RSVPed "yes." Some even said they were looking forward to it.

So I had to ask myself, will the party be half full or half empty?

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The weekend went by in a blur. I think K is a time accelerator. Time always goes really fast when we're together, but this weekend seemed to go by the fastest of all of our super date weekends. (Even faster than the one when she was only here for 34 hours due to flight problems.) I don't know why, but it could be that so much of the weekend was taken up by party details.

K and I have established that our two favorite things to do together are hiking and cooking. (Well, the two things I can write about here, anyway.) So on Friday, after I picked her up at the airport in BigCity, we stopped by a state park that has beautiful canyons and trails. We hiked lots of "rugged" trails, took sandwiches along and had a picnic on a blanket in a cave-like opening along the trail.

We picnicked at the bottom of that thing. Cozy.

Our entire Saturday was taken up with cooking and preparing for the party. In the morning we went to the farmer's market, then the co-op, then the supermarket. We cooked most of the afternoon. Oh, and throughout the day I opened presents. It was my birthday, although for some reason it didn't much feel like it. K really came through, getting me a lot of great useful and thoughtful gifts.

About an hour before the party a funny thing happened. I was in the bathroom, washing up (and naked), when we heard a knock at the front door. K went to get it, and it turned out that one of our guests was an hour early! She had misread the invitation. She was a friend of a friend, and I didn't know her very well, so it was a little bit awkward at first, but then she did a great job of pitching in and helping us get ready-- putting food out, arranging chairs, offering advice. It also helped to alleviate the nerves I get right before a party starts and I don't know who will show up first.

In the end, it was a very nice evening. There were exactly eleven people there, all sitting around my living room. I got to talk to most everyone, some more than others, and mingle with old friends and get to know new ones. There were a few uncomfortable lulls in the conversation, but for the most part I think people had a good time.

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Sunday K and I only had time to get up, pack the car, get some brunch, and then drive two hours back to the airport. We had lunch in the airport and said our goodbyes. We'll see each other again over Halloween weekend, when I'll fly out to K-tropolis for the sixth time this year. So the next countdown begins...

Things between us are steady. This weekend wasn't quite as super exciting awesome as last month, but it also was nowhere near as disappointing as the July visit. I think we may be entering a new level. We're phasing out the stupid-in-love feelings and I see some potential challenges that lie ahead. Nothing we can't work through, but it's not all kittens and cupcakes anymore.

She told me last night, after she got home, that missed me and that she missed Snarktown. I think that's a good sign.

Now it's back to real life. After a weekend of constantly being on the go, it's nice to go back to work and relax. But I have absolutely nothing on my social calendar this week, so there's nothing to keep me from sitting on the couch in my underwear and eating leftover party food out of a cat dish. Once again, it's up to me to whip up a social life.

Unstress

The past two weeks have been stressful. I've been irritable, anxious, and unsettled a lot of the time. Like a cat in a thunderstorm, I just wanted to hide under the bed until it was all over. Aside from all the direct problems, like losing power, hurting my ankle, and going without cable/internet for five days, I think my body really misses tennis.

In the past month I've only played twice, and those were light workouts. I'm not getting the exercise I need. Working out my aggression, releasing endorphins, relieving stress. I need my fix!

I'm considering going to the workout at the tennis center tonight, even though my ankle isn't completely healed. I think last time I made it worse by playing on it too soon, but on the other hand, I really need the exercise for my mental health. It's an ankle-22, or something like that.

A lot of my stress melted away yesterday when I got the cable/internet issue resolved. It's amazing how much resolving just one issue can relieve stress. However, since then I've noticed that I'm feeling nervous and jittery, like I just drank a cup of coffee. (I don't drink coffee, so whenever I have caffeine, it makes me jittery.) Where is that coming from?

I'm excited about seeing K this weekend, but I wonder if I'm not nervous about my party on Saturday. I have about 10 people who have RSVPed that they're coming, and that's certainly enough to avoid the horrible scenario where it's just three people, but still. I worry that I don't know what I'm doing, that I won't be prepared, that I have committed (or will) some horrible social faux pas. That no one will want to hang out with me because I'm a horrible little man who no one likes.

I've spent a lot of my time alone the past week, and that heightens my anxiety. No one has talked me down from these insecure overactive imaginings. I have had too much time to "stew in my own juices." (That's one of my favorite phrases. I originally heard it in a Life in Hell cartoon from Matt Groening, which is the comic strip he did before he created The Simpsons and became wildly successful.)

K has had her own stresses to deal with. She's just started a master's program. This semester she's taking two graduate classes on top of working full time. I think she's been overwhelmed with all the school work and work work and trying to balance it with her fabulous single life. Since she's taking a three-day weekend to visit me, she's working extra hard to get it all done.

I hope that once we see each other tomorrow (less than 24 hours!), all of our stresses will dissipate like a whisp of smoke. That togetherness = unstress.

Problem Solver

I consider myself a problem solver.

I may bitch and moan and complain throughout the entire process, but when I have a problem, I take steps to solve it. I'm not one to ignore a problem and suffer in silence.

Much of the crappy happenings from last week have bled over into this week. I've had more and more headaches with the cable company. It's too long a story to write out here, but let me just say I've been on the phone with them six different times, and that doesn't include the three automated messages they've left on my voicemail.

All of this led to me having to take some of my precious personal business time (I only get three days per year) off work this morning to wait for the cable guy. Since I'm taking the entire day off on Friday to pick up K at the airport, it's not great timing for me to take an entire morning off. This is one of those things that always bothers me about being single and living alone. How do people who work full-time get stuff like this done?

My appointment with the cable company was supposed to be sometime between 7:30 and 10:00 this morning. I was dressed and ready for my day by 7:00, and got a confirmation call from the cable company soon after. They said they should be there by 8:30. I washed some dishes, cleaned out my fridge, and then thought about what other chores I could tackle until they got there.

Well, there was the overhead fan light.

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When I bought my house last year it had a brand-new overhead fan in the living room. It sits right over the couch, which is where I spend most of my time, and the light fixture part of it is the main light in the room. So it's very important.

Last week I started having trouble turning the light on/off. It's on a chain that you pull, and I would pull the chain and nothing would happen. It was obviously stuck on something internally, because there was no "click" that chains make when you turn on a light. I got out my ladder and took apart the fan/light fixture, but couldn't get into the internal mechanism to see where the chain was getting stuck. I was thwarted by a stubborn screw that I couldn't get loose. So I put the fan back together, put away the ladder, and ignored it for a few more days. The chain would work intermittently, so I'd just have to pull it six or seven times to get it to "click."

But it was getting harder and harder to turn it off and on, so this morning, while waiting for the cable guy, I tried it again. Got out the ladder, gathered my tools, took apart the fan/light. And this time, with a little more persistence, I was able to conquer the stubborn screw!

I opened up the mechanism to find... another, smaller mechanism that the chain went into. And this smaller chamber didn't have any apparent way to open up, not even through stubborn screws. Sigh.

I considered all my options. Will I have to buy an entirely new fan, just because the chain on the light fixture doesn't work? Maybe I should call my handyman and ask for his advice? Can I live without a light fixture in the middle of my living room? (Answer: No.) Meanwhile, I kept yanking the chain, and adjusting wires from the outside, seeing if it made a difference. Sometimes it did, but not enough to consistently make it click.

It seemed like there was a spring inside the mechanism that wasn't working. I'd pull the chain, but it wouldn't snap back like it was supposed to (making that clicking sound.) So I stuck a screwdriver into a hole in the mechanism to see if I could find the spring. Instead, I made it even worse. Now the chain wouldn't move at all. Oh, great, I thought, now I've really broken it.

With nothing else to lose, I tried to bend the little piece I'd just bent back the other way. It didn't seem like I was able to bend it very far. Then I tried the chain. Click. I tried it again. Click. Hey, it worked twice in a row! Click! Click! Click! Click! Click! Click! That was the sweetest sound I've heard all week.

I kept pulling the chain, waiting for it to stop working, but every time I pulled it, I got that beautiful clicky sound.

Wow! I fixed it! I have no idea how, but I fixed it!

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This reminds me of something my brother once said about computer programming. You can work on a program for hours, saying, "I hate this. I hate this. I hate this." But as soon as you get it to work, you say, "I love programming!"

That's sort of how I felt about my ceiling fan. Lately I've been feeling like everything in my house is falling apart or needs my attention, and that stresses me out, but it was nice to be able to overcome this challenge on my own.

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My triumphant feelings didn't last long, however. It was after 8:30, and the cable guy still hadn't come. On top of that, it was raining really hard, and I knew most of the work would be outdoor work, and I worried that the rain would make the cable guy late (if his previous jobs took longer because of the weather.)

By 9:30 he still wasn't there, even though the lady this morning said he'd be here by 8:30. I started to panic and imagined scenarios where they never show, after I had to take this time off work and everything. I was all ready to be furious at the cable company.

Then, at about 9:35, the guy showed up. It took him 20 minutes to fix the problem (a bad thingamagig on the cable pole outside my house.) Now I have cable, internet, and landline phone at home.

And all my stress has melted away. I'm not even mad at the cable company anymore. The repair guy said they'd take $20 off my next bill for the interruption in service. I may have a really bad temper and hold grudges, but once someone fixes the problem and makes amends for it, I'm over it.

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And just in time. K comes on Friday for my birthday and our ninth super date weekend. I can't wait!

Atonement

On Monday I came home to a house with no power. Power was out in the neighborhood for three hours, and although my fridge was loaded with leftovers from cooking frenzy over the weekend, I had to go out to dinner. Because of the power outage I missed a phone message, I didn't see the final of the US Open, and I wasn't able to vacuum, which had been my plan.

Thursday morning, K and I had a misunderstanding and I thought we were fighting for half a day. That's a horrible feeling.

Thursday evening, after three weeks of no tennis because of a tendonitisy knee, I twisted my ankle at a tennis workout. No more tennis for another week or two.

Friday night, after seeing the doctor about my ankle, I came home to a house with no cable. I get my internet and phone (VoiP) through cable, so those were out, too. I called the cable company, "Bombast", on my cell, but while I was on the phone with them (FOREVER!) my cell battery died, because I hardly ever use it so I don't think to charge it. I was, quite literally, cut off from the outside electronic world.

I was finally able to charge my phone and call Bombast, and it was determined that my outside line was somehow cut. They would have to send someone out. Their first available appointment was next Wednesday, but they said they could "escalate" my call and hopefully have someone out this weekend. Now I just needed to stay home, and near my cell, all weekend in the hopes that they might call.

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No power, misunderstandings, injuries, no cable. It's been a rough week. So when I got up on Saturday morning, I remembered that it was Yom Kippur. It's the Jewish day of atonement, and Jews are to fast from sundown to sundown. Because K is Jewish, I knew she was fasting.

After the shitty week I had, I decided that I must have done something to piss off the Universe that I should atone for. So, 1.) in solidarity with K, 2.) to atone for whatever I've done, 3.) because I hadn't done it in a while, and 4.) just out of spite toward the Universe... I decided to fast.

I didn't eat a thing all day until sundown Saturday night.

It was a pretty awful day to make that decision. First of all, all my morning errands involved food. I went to the farmer's market, the food co-op, and the grocery store to stock up on food for the week. I came home and there was no internet or phone. It's very disorienting and I felt out of sorts all day long. Luckily, I still had some things left on my TiVo that I could watch, but it worried me that no new shows could be recorded. It felt like living off of savings. (Ironically, recently I had the radical idea of maybe someday breaking up with TiVo. Maybe I could live without TV for a while! I now see that for the ridiculous notion is was.)

To go with the "atonement" theme, I did something I really didn't want to do, but needed doing: cleaned my bathroom. I tried to nap, and watched TiVo, and mowed the lawn, and watched a Netflik. But all the while I was starving with a dull headache. And everything just felt "off" without my internet fix.

I know I'm blowing things out of proportion. I know people with real problems, like losing their job or getting seriously ill or having a death in the family, and here I am suffering real anxiety over the fact that I don't have cable for a weekend. But we all deal with the stresses we have. Take, for instance, my cats. They have a roof over their heads. They are well-fed, healthy, loved, taken care of. But that doesn't mean they don't scream bloody murder if I pick them up at the wrong time. They still have moments of anxiety and fear when I run the vacuum cleaner or during a thunderstorm.

So I guess that's what I'm like without cable: I'm a cat during a thunderstorm. My routine and my environment are messed up and I don't know when they will be back to normal. This morning, Sunday, I've had to come over to my brother's house while his family is at church to get my internet fix. Bombast hasn't called yet, and if they can't come this weekend, I don't know when I can get this problem fixed. I can't take an entire day off work to deal with it, and next weekend K comes. (I'm already taking Friday off work to pick her up at the airport.)

I usually try to make the best of situations like this, but I know I'll be anxious and uncomfortable until the situation gets resolved. It's just how I am.

Falling Apart

I expect that any day now parts of my body are just going to start falling off. That's where the trend is heading, anyway.

After a three week hiatus due to patellar tendonitis, last night at a tennis workout I stepped on a stray ball and twisted my ankle. Again. For the 27th time.

This the same ankle that I twisted during a match last April. It took an unusually long time to heal and, in fact, was still in the habit of hurting after I played, although it didn't seem to limit my mobility. (I did win my league this summer, after all.) The same ankle that I've twisted about 3-4 times over the past four years since I took up tennis.

This is the same ankle that I used to twist all the time playing basketball throughout my 20's. I would routinely come down on the side of my foot when I jumped. It got so bad that I stopped playing basketball altogether and took up tennis.

This is the same ankle that I originally sprained 22 years ago during a wrestling match in high school.

I've been through the drill. I'm well acquainted with this particular brand of ankle pain. But I worry that this time I've really fucked it up. That the accumulative damage of spraining this ankle over and over again over the years will someday prevent me from running at all. When I visited the sports medicine clinic about my knee a few weeks ago, I told the guy about my ankle, and he suggested that the recurring injury might have made it arthritic. Arthritis? But I'm only 38!

It hurts more now than it usually does. I can hardly walk and have to limp around the library. I have to go to the doctor today to get it checked out. All kinds of grisly scenarios go through my mind. Maybe it's broken. Maybe I'll need surgery. Maybe a part of the bone chipped off and is traveling through my bloodstream to my heart, where it will kill me. I've heard stories.

I do want to make it known that, although I stepped on a stray ball, twisted my ankle, and fell on my ass like an idiot, I did win the point. Just like last year when I broke my clavicle.

Who knows how long this new injury will set me back. I just want to play tennis, but tennis keeps hurting me. It's true what they say: we hurt (and get hurt by) the ones that we love the most.

Single Homeowner

In theory; on paper; whenever I reflect on it; I love being a homeowner. I often look around my house and am amazed at the fact that I own this! That light switch? It's mine. The arched ceiling between the living room and the dining room? Mine. The ceiling fan? Mine. The entire garage? Mine.

Sometimes I feel guilty for leaving my shoes lying around, or not cleaning the bathroom often enough, or for accumulating a pile of clutter on the kitchen table. But then I think, who cares? If it's not bothering me, then why worry about it? I can leave my shoes where ever I want--it's my effing house!

But there are also times when owning a home, by myself, doesn't feel right. The house somehow elicits more alone attacks than my apartment did. Is it because it's more space? That I don't share walls with neighbors? Because it's so dark? I really can't explain it, but it's there. I have more frequent bouts of feeling lonely in my house than before I moved in.

Part of the problem may be that I don't feel like a competent homeowner. There are so many things I feel I should be doing to maintain my home, but I'm not. I don't garden, unlike almost every other homeowner that I know. Although I like to mow the lawn, it's the only thing I do for my yard. I let weeds grow free to the point that my lawn is more weed than grass. I should do a better job of maintaining my gutters, or cleaning my baseboards, or insulating my crawlspace, but I just don't have any interest.

And even for the projects that I plan to do, I'm dragging my feet. Any slight impediment at all will cause me to put them on hold indefinitely. I don't have the time, or money, or motivation to get them done.

There's a big rectangular depression in my backyard that I like to call the Portal to Hell. No one knows why it's there, but the guess is that it was a bomb shelter that got filled in. (There are remnants of concrete walls around the perimeter.) I'd like to fill it in and level off my yard, but I'm afraid I'll do it wrong. I know it involves ordering a huge mound of dirt, having them dump it in my driveway, and then transferring all the dirt (via wheelbarrow) to the backyard. Then wait for the dirt to settle and reseed the grass.

Mystery indented rectangle: Portal to Hell?

I know what I have to do, but I'm afraid to get started. I'm afraid of starting the project and running into some snag and not being able to finish. I don't want a big mound of dirt in my driveway indefinitely. Or do it wrong and mess it up worse than it is now.

That's just one example of my homeownership procrastination. I've also been thinking lately of painting the walls in my living room. Why? Because I can. Because they're my goddam walls and I can paint them if I want to! Because maybe the plain white walls could do with some color. But of course then the doubts set in. What color should I choose? What if I put all the work into painting and then hate it? So I sit on the the idea.

A lot of this is a consequence of being a single homeowner. If I were in this with someone else, a lot of my problems would be our problems. We could tackle such projects together. Or, at the very least, it would motivate me to have someone else depend on me getting my ass moving.

I'm beating myself up about this, and whining about being a single homeowner, but one thing I've realized about the foot-dragging on home projects is, this is how I am with everything. Whenever I have an idea for a project, I often have to sit on it for a while-- several weeks, months, or even years-- before I get around to doing it. Many ideas have to incubate in my brain first.

These issues are not a consequence of owning a home, it's a consequence of owning my brain.

So, in sum: Being a single homeowner is mostly cool. But it would be better to be a joint homeowner.

Going International

I may have been struggling with my IRL (in-real life) social life lately, but aside from the fact that I'm crazy in love, there are other parts of my life that are going great, and I want to give props to that.

My blogfriends.

In the past few months my blog has taken off and more than doubled its active readership. My network of invisible friends now stretches from Boston to Seattle and from Texas to Canada, with many locations in between. It even crosses the Atlantic to England.

Snarkbutt Divorced has gone international and overseas!

I really appreciate all the feedback and comments I get from my new friends. It's fun to follow the lives of such a diverse group of people, and have them follow mine.

A recent post about my upcoming birthday party-- and subsequent comments about inviting my blogfriends-- made me realize that although I'm stuck in a relatively small town surrounded by corn fields, hundreds of miles from any metropolis and even further away from any coast, I have a significant strategic advantage.

I am at the relative center of my blogging world. I'm pretty much equidistant between the East and West coasts, and between Texas in the South and Canada in the North. So if we were ever to hold an IRL blog party, it should be in Snarktown.

I'm not seriously proposing such a meeting, even though I'd be happy to host it if people were interested. I know the logistics are improbable, plus the fact that my blogging network is not the same for all of my blogfriends. Just like IRL, we all have separate, but sometimes overlapping, networks of friends. But it's a nice fantasy.

Whether we ever meet IRL or not, I want to say:

Thanks, blogfriends, for enriching my life!

Warm Fuzzies and Funny Stories

K told me a while back that she likes being in a relationship (like ours) much more than she ever thought she would. Since I am her relationship partner, I took this as a compliment. I am exceeding expectations!

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When I was in grad school, I went to the university counseling center to see about getting matched up with a therapist. Since individual therapy was only free for a couple of sessions, they tried to put me into a therapy group, which would be free for as long as I wanted.

I met with the leaders of the therapy group for an intake session, and they said that there may be a conflict with me joining, because someone else from my graduate program was already in the group. You can't be in a group with someone that you already know, because it would obviously inhibit your ability to speak openly. But to protect confidentiality, they couldn't tell me who it was, and they couldn't tell the other person who I was. So somehow we had to figure out whether I knew this person.

There were hundreds of students in my program, so it was possible I didn't know the other member. So the leaders of the group asked me to name off some of my friends from the program-- first names only. Well, it was a large list. I never had as many friends at one time as I did in grad school. There were four Amy's, two Sarah's, and some "Texas" names like Austin and Tucker. K was in that clique, too, but she sort of drifted away after I asked her out and she rejected me.

So I named all these people, and a week or two later I heard back from the group leaders, who said that there was a conflict and I couldn't join the group. I never found out which of my acquaintances was the one who kept me from joining.

Last night I was telling K this story, and we tried to speculate on who it could have been. Was it one of the Amy's? Could it have been one of the (few) other men in our class? Hm. I guess we'll never know.

So then K told me that she was in group therapy once, but she didn't really get a lot out of it. She quit after a short while. It was when she was in grad school, actually. Our first semester.

Wait a minute, I said. You were in a therapy group at our same university, the same semester that I tried join one? You were the person who kept me out of the group!

Oh, she said, you're right! She heard that whole story and neither of us realized that it was about her! What's even funnier is that she said that she hardly ever spoke while she was in the group. But one of the things she brought up was the fact that some guy had asked her out, and she felt bad about turning him down.

That guy was me.

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Later in the conversation, I was telling K about the US Open. I mentioned Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, and she asked me who they were. I said they were the two best tennis players in the world.

She said she couldn't imagine being the best in the world at something.

Me: You're the best in the world at making me happy.
K: Awwww. That's sweet.

Like tennis shots, sometimes I say the right thing and hit a winner. If our phone date was a tennis game, I think I held at love.

Party Purpose

For two years now I have been boycotting the b-word. Maybe I'll mention this time of year that my odometer is turning over, or that I've completed another trip around the sun, but I just didn't feel like celebrating being another year older, divorced, and living alone with my two cats.

So I think it's pretty significant that this year I'm throwing myself a birthday party. I'm ready to celebrate my life.

I'm not sure if it was K who put the idea in my head to have a party, or if I mentioned it and she said, "I'll help cook for it!" But I do know I woudn't be having one if it weren't for her. She throws her own parties all the time. She's visiting me that weekend, and my birthday is on a Saturday, so it's perfect timing.

I don't have a great history with throwing parties. But my housewarming party last August was relatively successful, and that has inspired me to try again. I sent off the invitations this weekend and now I'm freaking out. What have I done? Who am I to ask people to celebrate my birthday with me? Will they think my event is stupid? Will some of the lesser-known acquaintances wonder why I'm inviting them? I wonder if I will ever get over the feeling that inviting people to a party is imposing on them. That's a ridiculous attitude to have.

When I was trying to decide who to invite, I had to ask myself a question. What is the purpose of throwing a party? Is it a referendum on my popularity? Is it to have fun? To provide others with a fun time? To show off? I really don't know what my motives are. People throw parties. And I want to be people. So I'm throwing a party.

My biggest fear is that there will only be three people there: Me, K, and some friend of a friend who I invited to increase the numbers. It will be awkward and I'll look like a loser to the one party guest. With that in mind, someone suggested that I only invite people who I would have fun with in that scenario. Only invite people that I could imagine being the third guest. It should be about quality and not quantity.

But I'm not crazy about that idea, because one purpose of this party is to increase my social circle. I want to invite peripheral people who might become better friends. And there's something appealing about mixing up my friends & acquaintances from different places. And let K meet more of the people in my life. Karma dictates that if I want to be invited to parties, I should host one.

Is that enough reasons? Do I even need a reason to justify a party? It's my fucking birthday!

Improved Divorced Man

During a typically winding conversation between me and K yesterday, somehow I found myself telling her about the very first post I ever made on this blog. It was the day after SnarkEx had just told me she was leaving me, and I wrote about how I hadn't got much sleep the night before.

Between trying to sleep and spinning the wheels in my head over and over and over again, I fantasized about all the great sex I'm going to have as a divorced man. I know this is just a fantasy. There's no reason to believe I would have any more sex as a divorced man as I did before I was married, which was seldom. But fantasizing about sex usually relaxes me and puts me to sleep. It didn't quite work, but at least it was a diversion.

But when I relayed that story to K, I realized, wow, I really am, uh, living the dream, so to speak. (Trying to stay gentlemanly here, but let's just say I'm much more satisfied now than I was when I was married.)

This morning in church I realized that, as a divorced man, I'm doing a lot of things that I didn't do when I was married. Like the fact that I was in church. (Okay, it's Unitarians, so it's not really church. More like a secular humanist community with some singing and sermonizing thrown in. But still. They call it church, and I go there on my own.) One of the sticking points in our marriage was that SnarkEx wanted to get more active in our church and I didn't.

SnarkEx and I also fought about cooking. So it's pretty amazing that I've taken an interest in cooking lately. K and I like to cook together, and on our phone dates we often talk about what recipes we're making. Friday night she texted me to say that she was looking at recipes, and although I was watching tennis on TV, there was a cookbook in front of me, and I planned to pick out what to make this week. (Verdict: stuffed peppers. They were very good.) So we were doing the same nerdy thing on a Friday night.

And then there's the whole issue of making babies. Right before she left me, SnarkEx was getting the itch to procreate. I didn't have it. She made a point of telling me that was not why she would leave me, but I know it bothered her. Now, I'm starting to feel like maybe I am ready to have kids, or rather, I could actually see a time when I might be ready, and I know the person I could be ready with.

SnarkEx would probably be upset if she knew the things I'm doing now: church, cooking, thinking of babies, and um, ungentlemanly things. I don't know if I needed to go through a divorce in order to be ready for them, or if just was with the wrong person. But whatever the reason, I can see the difference between me then and me now.

Eye Contact

I just finished a book called Look Me In the Eye: My Life with Aspberger's. It's an autobiography written by a man with Aspberger's syndrome, a mild high-functioning form of autism.

The title comes from the fact that, throughout his childhood, adults would scold him for not looking them in the eye. People with Aspberger's have trouble making eye contact or reading social cues during conversation. I've wondered before if I have some sort of borderline disorder, whether it's Aspberger's or OCD or bipolar disorder. A few months ago I wrote here, "Sometimes I even think that I might have a mild form of Aspberger's, since I'm so anal about following rules and focusing on numbers and I can be very antisocial."

So when this guy talked about eye contact, I thought about a peculiar habit of my own. I'm very good about looking in people's eyes when we greet, or when they are talking. But whenever I talk, I've noticed that I have to look away, at some distant point beyond the listener. I can't talk and look at you at the same time.

I think it's human nature for people to read a description of something and ask themselves if it applies to them. You hear the symptoms for Conditional Inner Squeezeball Syndrome and think, "Hey! That sounds like me." Or "Wow, what freaks. I'm glad I don't have that!"

So of course I read this book carefully, looking for evidence that either confirmed or denied that I had Aspberger's. By the end I had a list of things that I have in common with the author, and things that I don't. But it probably wasn't enough things to say that I have Aspberger's, despite the eye contact thing. Sharing a few characteristics with someone doesn't mean you have the same psychological profile.

There are parts in the book where he struggles with conversational cues. Like someone will make a comment and he'll agonize trying to decide what the socially acceptable way to respond is. Funny thing is, in some cases his "inappropriate" response sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would say. For example, a female friend tells him, "My girlfriend is having an affair with a guy who rides a motorcycle like yours." His response was, "Which friend?" His lady friend then said it was none of his business. Well, then why bring it up? I might have asked the same thing, and would even defend my response if she'd called me on it. But maybe, because I don't have Aspberger's and haven't been told my whole life that I'm "weird" or "different" or lack social skills (at least not to my face), I have more confidence in my social skills.

The book was mostly interesting, but he spent way too much time describing pranks he pulled on other people. I've never been a fan of practical jokes. (I hate April Fool's Day. Let's all have a day where we LIE to friends and loved ones to make them look like idiots!!) I doubt his penchant for tall tales was a result of his Aspberger's, though, and so I wasn't very interested in those parts.

He's obviously very smart and was a successful engineer. Near the end of the book he has a long discussion about "choosing" his wife. She has two sisters, so he's spent a lot of time thinking about whether he chose the best sister to marry. He wants to evaluate the three sisters as if he were buying a sports car. Did he get the best sister? He's trying to show this as a reflection of Aspberger's, that he coldly and impassively studies such questions, and people think he's a robot-like freak for it. But instead of being offended that he's treating his wife like a commodity, I focused more on the fact that his logic was faulty. It's not out of superior logic that he approaches such questions, because to me it's obvious that there's no single "best" wife, like you could have a best vacuum cleaner or best radial tire.

A marriage is a match between two people, so the "best" wife for me would not be the "best" wife for you. His wife even told him as much. When he asked if she thought he got the best sister, she said, "It depends on what you want her for."

Anyway, it was an interesting read, but if I do have some form of Aspberger's, it's a very, very, very mild form. Maybe there's some other disorder that I have.

Snarkbutter's Syndrome? It's when you can't stop blogging about personal issues after a divorce.