duermemucho's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vacation This vacation was about as good an idea as the invasion of Iraq. I'll ignore all the difficulties encountered in just getting here. I'll ignore the weather and the fact that I forgot a fucking umbrella (four months and I'm not yet sufficiently acclimated to a dry climate to not get nosebleeds, but I am acclimated enough to forget to bring an umbrella when leaving the area. Fucking figures). This trip is making me feel naive. It's always been a policy of mine, with only one exception, to remain friends with exes. I have felt this way because I feel that they have been good people, for the most part, and because I don't want to be a door-slamming asshole who only leaves bridges intact when there's something on the other side he wants. I never thought until just now that trying to be a friend with someone you dumped, well, is fucking stupid. It puts pressure on them, makes them resentful, makes them feel petty because they're pressured and resentful. When Owl said she didn't want to talk to me for at least a month I felt like I had been punched. Now that I'm a captive audience in her house because she has the week off and says she won't see me again for "a long, long time", I understand why she wanted that, and why it would have been better for me to accept it and spent this "vacation" of mine at home in Washington, not answering the phone and sleeping in until noon. I might get out tonight or tomorrow and have a full day to myself, but how much could I really accomplish in that time? At this point I just feel like getting drunk, which is kind of sad when you're nominally on vacation. To top it off, I stopped by the old lab yesterday and Woodpecker had some choice words for the work I'm doing now, calling it "not really science" and critiquing my ideas, before launching into a critical review of why all the figures for my final, still-unfinished publication with his group must be redone. The odd thing is, if it were years from now and my history in this city were far behind me, I would probably be having a pretty good time right now. When I arrived, Cleveland was just how I like it the best: still and humid, trees still green, the sky an overcast the color of highway asphalt. A beer-drinking time of year. I love the Great Lakes-upper Midwest part of this country specifically because it's such a difficult, unlikely place to love (for most people), and I was reminded why as I rode the rapid train out to pick up my rental car. Surrounded by idiots on cell phones and poor people silently riding to work. Lots of elaborate graffiti on the retaining walls alongside the tracks. It's so different here than on the west coast, where people just settled, grabbed all that they could from the land, and made themselves comfortable. Here, people labored long and hard to build a city from nothing, and usually for virtually no return. And today people don't even appreciate it, while they extoll San Francisco and its excesses built by gold-grubbing, Indian-raping 49ers and dot-commers who would sooner drink their own urine than $15-a-bottle wine. But I digress. I'm going crazy and I miss Lark. The sooner I get out of here, the better. I've learned my lesson, joke's on me. Ha ha. Now let me the fuck out. 6:38 a.m. - 2006-09-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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