Happy new year, Team Wordlords.
Christmas , as SR-71 sang so long ago, was a time to say "I love you." Of course, this year, it was also a time to say "no, I don't want any more booze," and "well, if you've opened it, I'll drink it."
I did a weird thing this Christmas--I got a job. I came out to OilDollarVille, and since everyone was working during the day, I made a phone call to my furniture-store-running uncle, and, 5
minutes later, had full-time work at the United Furniture Warehouse near St. Albert.
I rejoined the Alberta workforce old-school with an instant $12/hour, 20-minute traffic-riddled commute on two major freeways, and eight+ hours a day with utterly and completely indifferent retail dregs and retarded salespeople.
The weird thing out here--there's NO incentive to work hard. Don't like your job? Go across the street and get a different one! Don't like that one? Come back across the street and back to your same job, but with a $5/hour raise! It's ridiculous! Don't like that? Buy an 18-wheeler on credit, get your company to pay for your class 1 license training, and make $200/hour hauling water to and from oil rigs.
Got a brain? Keep it! You'll need something to entertain yourself while the people around
you perform their daily "which non-white race is worst" pageant loudly and unabashedly.
Anyway, I lifted furniture for a week, got big pipes, and quit that very Friday.
Christmas itself was good. Relaxing. Other than my 45-minute panic attack Christmas Eve where I cursed retail and corporate culture for convincing an entire society that extreme guilt is the motivating emotion behind gift-giving, it was all quite smooth. We all got presents, and we all had fun.
New years was a dreamland of escapist escape and ...escaping. A friend of a friend has five or so acres of abandoned apple orchard two hours from Oceantown, so we went out there, ran arround in Sleepy-Hollow-esque woodlands, stopping intermittently to slide on the frozen duck ponds, marvel at the variety of wood-and-mud construction buildings they've erected, and retrieve my drunken, stoned cousin from the frozen creek bed. With four dogs, two cats, 22 people, and a three-story open-concept space-hippy house, it was "an event to be remembered," as Gateway entertainment writers used to constantly say. The alcohol ran freely. The drugs were available and ignored by me. The dogs fought eachother constantly. The people were completely new, for the most part. And the kids were this odd breed of rural children, who say odd things like "let's go play outside" and "I'm sorry" and "I'm tired of watching TV." Odd breeding, I suppose.
Foreboding the forebodables was my girlfriend's complete disinterest in attending any of the post-OilMoneyVille events when I returned. I didn't take it personally; she generally declined most invitations, citing lack of leadtime (she was not a fan of spontaneity, unless it involved icecream) or general disinterest in bars, loud events, and most outdoor activities.
I thought not a lot of it until we had a fight over her blowing her nose.
She uttered the words "I don't want to do this any more."
I agreed.
As breakups go, it was fairly amicable. There are details to her sexuality that preclude my usefulness to her---this became increasingly evident when intercourse and tears came together for an extended visit, and then both left on the same train, never to return. There are points in both our political ideologies that conflicted in the same way those of Hitler and a Jewish rabbi would. And there were fundamental flaws in the compatibility of our senses of humour. I like jokes that span a range of topics. Shock value is high on the humour scale.
She likes delicate, thought-out humour, and often, depreciating humour. Puns were fine. Jokes about her, to a point, were also fine. To a point. I like crossing lines. And so on.
So it's been a few days. Maybe this post is too long, but I'd like to say this--it's tough. I'm too old to be breaking up. She told me right when we first started dating that this couldn't last forever, and in my naivety, I assumed she might be wrong, or could be convinced otherwise. That theory was buffeted by constant reality checks and frank discussions between us, and I accepted the fact that things probably wouldn't last forever. We almost broke up several times, but this time, it finally stuck.
SO, in conclusion, hot female readers of random blogs who aren't monkey-toothed, lobotomy-scarred degenerate chair-filling troglodytes, I'm single again. What I'll do with this newfound freedom has yet to be decided. So far, my old friends SimCity and booze are tiding me over. But eventually, things are going to have to get better. I hereby declare 2007 the Year of the Functioning Genitals. I mean the year of pleasant long-term relationships. Or maybe the first one.
