29: Backward drawbacks

It's 6:56 PM on a Thursday night and I am at the mall waiting for Mel  to finish getting her nails done. I don't really have anything to do, so I'm doing this. I've procured for us some Chinese food for dinner. I'm not sure if we're going to eat it here or go home with it, but I got a drink and some utensils.

It's been a rough few days. There have been certain... gaps and malfunctions in my behavior that have caused friction. It's the sort of thing that happens in a relationship from time to time. I'm finding my nerves are raw. They're always raw but I think because I'm so anxious about not knowing where my life is going I'm probably more sensitive. Which doesn't help the fact that it's my fault -- or my brain's fault -- things go haywire. We learn other people to the best of our ability, and we work with them duly.

This weekend we went to dad's for his birthday, which was the usual long night of kibbitzing over nothing in particular, baseball mostly. Hank some. My unemployment only briefly. That was a fairly full night and we were looking forward to a relaxing day afterward, where we had planned to get some gelato from some place uptown. It ended up being a so-so experience and we shared a Gianduia-pear combo that Mel ordered and determined was too much for one person. And the pear was, well, it was pear gelato. Not really exciting but she thought it might contrast well with the hazelnut chocolate because she couldn't get her hoped-for lemon. Pulling out, I made a traffic faux-pas that rattled her, and then kind of sent our whole rest of day into a tailspin, leading me to my first of two existential crises of the week. I ought to be stronger but I'm not and when things get off course I tend to spiral badly. Nobody's allowed to be more mad at me than myself, nobody's allowed to hate me more, etc.

Well, we got through it but we had a recurrence this week when Mel expressed her frustration that we/I had dropped the ball on planning our week off and time ha slipped away from us. It was a little hard to resolve that one and quite honestly the ticket is still open. Given we have not, as of now, booked a spa day when we said we would, the potential is there for another round, which has my stomach in knots. This is going to take some negotiating.

We don't fight a lot, but everyone does fight some, and frankly we've probably fought so little, or I've always been so averse to it, that I've never gotten good at it. I can make peace, I can fawn, I can course-correct and make sincere promises, but to battle it out... I don't have the stomach for it.

Well, my free play is actually just about up so I'll come back to this later.

Keep on rockin'

Scotto