Tag: frustration

Circle of friends

Well, my great plan to write an entry per day for a whole year lasted about a day. But who wasn’t expecting that?

My social life has improved tremendously since I left the States. For one, I have a loving girlfriend with whom I’m physically and emotionally intimate. I don’t live alone anymore. I have a few close friends to talk to, more to meet up with for activities almost every evening, as well as get to travel with on occasion. Life is good. In fact compared to my earlier situation—being completely isolated and having suicidal tendencies—my current state could be deemed life in Utopia. But even so, there’s been one thing that’s been constantly nagging me:

Everybody I know knows everybody else I know.

Let me try to explain this. Everyone I get to interact with from day to day: my partner, friends, flatmates, landlords, activity partners, … is either someone I work with or someone they knew and introduced me to. Every single person. This isn’t inherently bad, but I don’t think it’s normal. I feel like I can’t ever say or do or feel anything toward any of these people without everybody else somehow knowing. And that bothers me quite a bit.

This thought has been gnawing at me for a while, but only recently did it crystallise in my head. With which came the obvious solution to my predicament: I needed to bond with other people removed from this bunch. But along with the obvious solution came the obvious problem: I believe I’m borderline autistic, and that my current social circle materialised through pure luck. How could I possibly recreate that environment?

Breaking news

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These past few days have been quite chaotic. Shortly before I landed, my favourite grandma had a nasty fall and ended up breaking her hip in numerous places. She’s not in pain anymore, but the doctor that performed her reconstructive surgery yesterday said she’d take a few months to recover completely. In all this activity surrounding my grandma—trips to the hospital, handholding old relatives (and coddling their grand-children!) who keep popping up to visit her, sorting out food for some of the longer-term stays, disseminating information about her progress, …—I haven’t had much time really to talk to my parents about my life; about Stacey.

A couple of months ago, I was lost. There were voids in my life I knew not how to fill. The wide array of choices I had laid out before me for when my contract in Scandinavia completed made it quite obvious: I was OK with doing whatever, wherever, in my search for something more. All this began to change as I got closer to Stacey. After spending nearly every moment with her since I first met her, it became clear to me that I was happy right where I was with her. I liked my job and my friends and my home and my city (fucking cold and dark as it can be!). Unfortunately, this realisation came just a few weeks before my current contract expired, taking down with it my intimately-linked European work/residence permit. We tried quite valiantly the last ten days or so to sort something out in terms of employment, but my months of telling people I was leaving (to teach kids) and turning down offers to extend my stay was hard to undo. Not wanting to take any chances, I decided to book a ticket back to India, and sort out how to return from there. Since we were confident things would work out on that front, I left much of my stuff back in Oslo with my friends and Stacey suggested she’d join me, transforming this hasty trip into a month-long vacation in India.

She’ll be arriving soon. We’ll be leaving soon to find somewhere relaxing that’s neither too hot nor too wet in July.

I wanted to sit down and explain all this to my folks. Talk about how I feel toward her. Talk about my life, the choices I’ve made and the ones I’m still yet to. That they needn’t worry for me. That I’m still their responsible boy. That no matter how unsure I am about the future, I’m nearly thirty years old and I’m brave enough to do the things I want to. And happy for it.

But I can’t. They’ve been distracted by another phone-call requesting them back at the hospital.

Avoiding a scene

I wish I could say a lot of this to your face, but I won’t. I’m tired just thinking about the drama I’d have to endure.

Every time you go off on one of your rants reminding me how cold I am for not displaying my affection toward you in public, I shut up and hug you to placate you. But the entire time, I’m thinking of only one thing: How I really wish you didn’t have to remind me—how I’d be all over you if only you were smaller, younger and cuter.

I wish you hadn’t lived such a hard life, and didn’t have any of the scars to show for it. Sometimes, I want more than just someone who’s very good to me. Sometimes, I want someone whose physical allure makes it impossible for me not to jump them.

I’ve fantasised and fantasised and fantasised about how my life ought to be, and how much I’d yearn to caress and cuddle the woman I love (yes, even in public, since this is such a big deal to you), but I just can’t seem to make myself behave that way all the time around you. It’s different when I wake up needy in the morn or when I feel vulnerable and alone, but sometimes when we’re out together, I am almost embarrassed to be with you. As wonderful a person as you are and as loving as you are toward me, you’re not what I thought my life’s catch would be. Part of me is always left bitter and unsatiated, leaving me feeling I could do better.

I need you but I don’t want you.

Is it so hard to see now why I have such difficulty expressing my affection for you freely in public? It’d be tantamount to announcing to the world how desperate I am not to be alone.

That, and I don’t want to ever dissuade that cute woman glancing in our direction from talking to me.

Ineffectual

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It was the second, perhaps the third, time that night. I had that sinking feeling of despair wash over me as I realised how little of a man I was. As I lay over that beautiful woman—wet and ready with her legs parted in invitation—I found myself doing the unthinkable. I was desperately holding my shrinking cock in my trembling hands and stroking furiously: I needed to be hard again. I needed to feel that wonderful sensation of her pussy lips wrapped around me once more. I needed to feel like the strong man towering over that delicate flower rocking rhythmically as I caressed her chest and face with my own.

I needed to be within her.

I am shrinking some more. Panic is beginning to set in. Her annoyed breaths are turning to sadness as she’s trying to egg me on. “Please,” she sighs, “don’t stroke yourself when you’re over me. Just enter me.” I could have died at that instant. I haven’t felt as little or as inadequate as I did right then. All I wanted to do was to show her how much I loved and needed her. All I ended up doing was to struggle to stay hard and convince her there was something wrong with her form.

I don’t deserve anyone, especially not such a gentle loving creature that adores me so. I don’t know what went wrong, but I am terrified.

Hey, wait a minute. That’s not how this story ended!

However the story did end, the moral of the tale is this: Don’t use newfangled muscle-relaxing, cock-desensitising, stay-hard-for-her-longer condoms.

Dig out your soul

This is a forced entry. I haven’t had the remotest urge to write here (I blame µ), but I’m going to try to push myself back into the habit. Brace yourself for an immense drop in quality.

I’m still reeling from an exhausting day that was spent almost entirely in the cold rain outside. There was hiking, archery, climbing-related knot tying, tree climbing (which I shamelessly chickened out of), trivia-quizzing and feet sniffing (by cute little shot-dead-bird-retrieving dogs). I have the nagging feeling one of the activities ended with the penis of a bull, but there was too much cognac involved for me to be sure, and none of this is really central to today’s story.

I realised during the course of multiple conversations during the day that I have a certain style of speaking that leads people to respond to me in one of only two ways: (i) Either they get intimidated/bored (it doesn’t really matter which) and leave me alone, or (ii) they open up to me completely, looking upon me as an entirely sexless shoulder to lean on; both of which suck.

For geeks and stalkers

This isn’t something I wanted to bring up on the journal, but I’m going to anyway because I’ve been starved for content.

My computer behaved splendidly for the better part of the last year-and-a-half. Through the many drops and liquid spills and exposures to frigid colds, it’s been my steady workhorse allowing me to get a lot of work done. With it, I’ve actually managed to wrap up my grad school research and compose my entire dissertation over numerous tireless nights.

But recently, it’s all been going awry.

A couple of months ago, shortly after the release of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), I installed it on my laptop replacing the venerable OS that preceded it, Tiger. And that, as far as I can tell, was the beginning of the end. You see, one of the hallmarks of my computer was how stable it was. No matter how much abuse it was put through, I could go without rebooting it for weeks, and every time I closed its lid amidst working on something tedious, it would cleanly suspend and resume to exactly how it was when I later opened the lid prepared to continue working.

That was the story with Tiger.

With Leopard, these uptimes dropped from weeks to hours, and suspend-and-resume was now about as pleasant as tugging in the wrong direction after getting a pube stuck on your foreskin. At one point, I became so paranoid about losing work that I stopped suspending it entirely. This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but it’s a huge deal for me, as I like to work when I want to work—not when my computer intends on cooperating with me.

A self portrait using the MBP

But hey, its web-cam still works wonders!

There is a lot more to this story, which does get worse—like the primary programs I need for research don’t compile or work on it for esoteric reasons—but I shan’t bore you with the details. I’ll just leave you with my forced realisation that moving to Leopard was a dumb move.