the solipsist in love

A general-ish update

I’ve been busy this week with writing assignments, classes, and my new job – all excellent and yummy things to be spending my time on. My blog has meanwhile become harder to post to because I’ve been getting caught up in page hits and this sort of thing – not exactly inspiring, at least not for me. But not posting at all is definitely not going to get me more readers, so what the hell, I’ll just post the drivel that’s been sloshing around in my head for the past few days.

I started reading Augusten Burroughs’s memoir Dry today. I have to say that 100 pages in, I don’t much care for it. I picked it up because I had the sense that it would be sordid, and substance abuse issues are perennially fascinating for me (as you might guess, it’s about his recovery from alcoholism). There’s even the gay male angle, which I’m always weak for. But the actual writing is sloppily done, and poorly edited to boot. My experience with memoir is very limited, though I understand that it’s a genre that has gained a large readership among the masses, and being the elitist I am, I naturally assume that this means memoirs in general can be poorly written and still make assloads of money because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. Which means they are, more often than not, poorly written and barely edited. This Burroughs piece only strengthens my ill-informed notions to this effect. So sad, so sad. It makes me want to avoid the genre altogether. Getting too close to that pulse of celebrity and commercialism is bad for my health, and I suspect it’s bad for my creative process as well. And yet I so love talking about myself that you’d think it would be perfect for me! 😥

In other news, this weekend I have my first OkCupid date since my breakup with Poly Dude and Kristen. It occurred to me only tonight that it would in fact be my first date since the end of my last relationship, which should be, like, a big deal or something, right? I don’t know. But it isn’t. I’m not really excited in that “oh god I need to look flawless and be funny and smell great and get my cunt waxed” kind of way. If anything I’m just interested in encountering another human being who has shown himself to be fairly intelligent and witty. I don’t think I could possibly feel less sexual than I have these past few days. I just want to know how people operate; I want to dig into the tender bits. Maybe this is a result of my stupid couple of weeks talking to Luke – I’m not sure I mentioned how that ended, by the way: he finally decided he would give his relationship with his girl-thing an actual chance instead of being a sleaze about it. Congratulations, Luke, on choosing (eventually) to be a decent human being.

As the loyal (and attentive) among you may recall, Luke and I had a purely physical cyber-fling for about a week before he busted out the “I’ve been dating a girl for 3 months but I really want to get to know you as a person before or while we have filthy, violent sex in real life” line. There are just so many things wrong with this sentiment. But the one I want to talk about at the moment is the getting to know me part. Because for some reason I didn’t really believe him, or maybe I just didn’t want to, because it only highlighted his inability to commit to the girl he was seeing and his cowardice in dealing with that situation. And so, strangely, while he at least superficially expressed an interest in understanding me as a person, I felt used by him. On top of that, I just didn’t see him as being very interesting, or nearly emotionally aware enough for me to feel safe exposing myself that way. And that’s a terrible feeling for me. I want, more than anything, to feel understood and accepted; conversely, I fear being regarded as alien, or perverse, or freakish. Sometimes I can handle this in small doses and even provoke it, but that’s all under my control. There’s no vulnerability there. So maybe what I’m saying here is that I encountered someone who professed to want to get to know me, and because of my gut reaction of “he totally won’t get it,” I walled myself off from him and maybe from all other potential suitors. Who needs that kind of rejection? I suppose it just goes to show that I’m not ready to put myself on the line again yet.

It’s probably for the best, as I don’t really need to be expending so much energy on looking for someone to share naked-time with. I have enough going on, particulary in the realm of grad school applications. And apparently the vague possibility of attraction/sex/intimacy, in the form of first dates with Internet men, is enough to tide me over until my craving for High Drama finally returns.