Difficult Decisions

One week later. And what's new in my life? Not a whole helluva lot.

The rogue cow in my neighborhood has finally been captured, and the city can again go back to Mt. Storm Park. Granted, the majority of Cincinnati had no idea where the park was previous to all of this silliness, and the only reason why most folks know now is because they went looking for the escaped bovine. I was kind of hoping that they would never catch her, and she would become an urban legend.

Chuck Jones died. I am currently in my own private form of mourning, re-reading my copy of Chuck Reducks and watching the PBS special that aired last year.

Still no job yet. I'm beginning to think that the words "Would you like to super-size that?" are in my future.

My former employer's benefits department will not return my phone calls. At this point, I want to get all of my stocks and retirement packages as far away from their clutches as possible, and they won't even return my phone calls so I can set the ball in motion. Mind you, when I worked there it was ingrained into our heads that voice mail messages should be returned within a 24 hour period, and the "send all" function was to be used only if you were in a meeting or in cases of utmost emergency. I think the longest I went on returning a call was three hours. Granted, I didn't have 8 billion messages a day, but in the three attempts to contact them, the calls have gone directly to voice mail. Hate them, hate their voice mail.

Roger Mexico is not going to be able to visit over Easter as planned, which really sucks since I was looking forward to seeing him again. Turns out he has a tech rehearsal that weekend that he was unaware of. Which means I will be all grumbly that weekend as I stuff my face with jelly beans and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs, and he'll be stuck watching unending rehearsals of Macbeth. And our phone bills will be horrendous.

And now to the post I never wanted to (or thought I'd have to) write... I apologize in advance for airing my dirty laundry, but I need to put it somewhere. My mental laundry hamper is overflowing.

I have come to the realization that I need to call it quits on a relationship with someone that I thought was a close friend. The more I think about the way we have interacted in the past, the more I realize that I have been the one doing the majority of the emotional giving, and the other person has for the most part used me, at times ranging through to abuse. I'm not the only person having a problem with this person, and he has been called on the carpet about his interactions with others,as well as the way he lives his life and how it affects those around him. At first it seemed as if the confrontation had done some good, and he appeared to be making amends for his wrongdoings, but now it looks like he was just doing enough to make those around him think he was sincere while returning to his old ways. and personally, I've had enough and just need to make him disappear from my life right now.

This has been emotionally trying for me, because given all of the personal shit that I've been through in the last year or so, the last thing I needed was to realize that complete strangers care more about me and treat me with more compassion than this person that I considered to be one of my best friends. Upon re-examining my life through working on my novel (I've reached the point in the plot where my narrator has hit absolute rock bottom in her life), I've been able to look at interactions and situations from a new perspective, and some of the things I've learned have been downright frightening. This person has shown himself to be interested only in himself, with very little regard for others' feelings. He doesn't seem to want to move forward at all in his life, and has becoming involved in unsavory situations, mainly ones that feed his ego. People that he previously had close relationships with are being ignored and passed over for a new set of friends. When he does find time to spend time with his old friends, his motives are questionable, and if things don't go exactly the way he wants, he makes excuses to cancel plans or leave early.

Now I can understand that people don't all follow the same path throughout their lives, and that the allure of new friends can cut into time spent with older acquainatances. Everyone likes having their ego stroked on occasion. But I always thought that friendship was a two way street. At times, compromise is a very important thing. If one person is continually the one who sets the rules and reaps the benefits, while the other person is the one who makes all of the efforts to be who that other person wants them to be, then there is a serious problem. And for the past several years, that's what I've been doing to maintain a friendship with this person. I went to see the movies he wanted to see, I ate at restaurants he wanted to eat, I listened to the music he wanted to listen to, I participated in whatever activity he selected. He often joked that I never made a decision on things, but it was mostly because any suggestions I added were met with much rolling of the eyes or flat-out replies of "I don't think so." Topics of conversation that I brought up were repeatedly ignored, and at times if he didn't feel like listening to what I had to say (because it didn't mesh completely with his beliefs) I was told point blank to shut up. He continually told me that I talked too much, and insinuated that what I said didn't really matter. As a result, I held my tongue and believed that I had nothing important to add to conversations.

I gave him a book of my poetry two years ago, and he has yet to crack the cover. (The same can be said for another friend's book of short stories that he received in 1997. He hasn't found the time in the last four years to read it.) He has my website bookmarked, but has (to my knowledge) never visited. (So there's no danger of him reading this!) However, he expects me to remember every last detail of every artistic venture he has undertaken in the last four years, most of which have not gone past the planning stages.

His excuse for not reading my poetry or website is that a lot of what I write about is of a disturbing nature, and it emotionally upsets him too much to read it. Well, yes, I do write from a personal perspective quite a bit, and much of it isn't very pretty. But unfortunately, it's a part of my life, and those disturbing things that I've examined in my poetry or prose have contained lessons to be learned and have shaped me into the person I am today, for better or worse. I know that last year, when I was at one of the lowest points of my life, I attempted to reach out to him for help and he ignored it. Well, he called another friend to see if I was alright, but he didn't bother to ask me. When I finally confronted him about this (and several other things), he said that he had tried to be there for me for a while, but I didn't seem to want to discuss what was going wrong in my life, so he gave up. I tried to explain to him that it's not so easy to talk about problems of an emotional/mental manner at the drop of a hat, that sometimes your mouth just can't say those words until you reach a certain point. (There are still some things I'm having problems saying.) I doubt that he understood what I meant. I just crossed him off the list of people I could talk to about serious matters.

There are other matters of too personal a nature to go into here that have just completely crushed me and made me feel completely unimportant in his life (or anyone else's), or have made me outright scared to be around him.

But despite all this, knowing that he's bad for me at this point in my life, I still am having a hard time following through on my plans to cut off communication. It's really hard to just close the door on all those years of good times. Because yes, there were good times. There were also a lot of bad times that I forced myself to forget, and a lot of emotionally damaging times that I tricked myself into remembering as good times. I can't count how many times that I've sworn I wasn't going to call him or email him, but found myself two hours later leaving a message on his machine. (And mentally berating myself for doing so.)

This time I mean it. I tried to return a call Tuesday night, when he said he would be home all night, and I've yet to hear from him. We had planned to go to a show at the Aronoff this past Sunday, and his level of excitement went from "Let's invite everyone we know!" to "Well, we can still go..." to "I might be out of town; I'll call and let you know." (And as I said, I've yet to hear from him.) I've spent most of the past week thinking this over, trying to decide what I could do, what I could change to salvage our relationship. And then I realized that I was the only one trying to salvage anything, and had been for quite some time. I'm tired of sitting around fretting and crying and writing letters to him that I'll never send. I have other things to do with my life, and I'm tired of waiting for him to decide if he wants to be a part of my future life.

I don't want to do this, but I can't think of any other way to handle the situation. Best to just close the door, and pretend that he's moved away somewhere with no phone or computer access.

At this point his side of town seems a world away.