So, a problem. I'm depressed. Still. And it's starting to piss me off, quite frankly. At this stage in the game, I don't even know what's causing it, and that's frustrating as shit! As I've said, it isn't really about The Guy...except that really, it is.
I think I put too many eggs in that basket right out of the starting gate. That's my biggest fault, like, ever, I think. I decided pretty much immediately that this was something I could trust in -- something I desperately needed after I dated this guy in college who broke my heart like a Happy Meal toy and left me spiraling downward faster than the quality of this season's ER episodes -- and in my head, I guess I saw this potential relationship as my redemption for the huge mistakes I'd made in the past. If this guy, who seemed so right at the outset, could really like me, then it excused my immense and mind-boggling stupidity from my last serious relationship. It meant that I was absolved. The person who fell blindly and unforgivably in love with someone who didn't return those feelings, the person who found himself devalued and taken for granted by the person he'd invested himself in totally, was now in the clear again.
I know a lot of that is Freudian and stupid, and I saw it happening (which only makes it worse), but it seems I was unable to stop these issues from finding a pretty secure foothold in my psyche. I'll get over it, sure, but right now I feel like that short chick from Little House on the Prairie who got clotheslined by a low-hanging tree branch when her horse went berzerk and she ended up lying in the dirt, staring up at the sky, going, "The fuck? What the fuck? Did I win? Grandma, is that you? I'm coming towards the light, Grandma!" I don't want to be the short chick.
So, a sense of humor. This is why we have one: to deal with these issues in such a way that we don't go completely insane! Although insanity can be pretty funny, too. If you don't believe me, talk to anyone who works in a psych ward. Like my mom.
See, when my mom was training to be a nurse, she spent a few weeks working in one of these bastions of completely inappropriate, laugh-and-you'll-go-straight-to-hell-missy comedy. She tells me that one day she and the other students were waiting outside the nurses' lounge as they were being evaluated by their trainers, and a psych patient shuffled up.
"What are you guys all doing out here?" He asked suspiciously. My mother replied, "Oh, all the nurses are inside talking about us." The man squinted at her, and then nodded, grunting, "Boy, do I know what that's like!" My mother also got accused of concealing microchips in her teeth. Quit laughing, you sick bastards.
You know who else belongs in a psych ward? Dolly. I mean, I know I've told you guys before that she's crazy, and I've gone on about it to the point where she's become like those offscreen sitcom characters that everyone hyperbolizes about in such shoutrageous extremes that they end up never being able to actually cast the part because no one could possibly live up to the horrors imagined by the audience, but I assure you that Dolly is really just that nuts.
She was off all day on Monday, and it was sheer bliss. Yesterday, she had this big old meeting she had to spend all morning at, and that was also sheer bliss. She came back at lunch, though, and with her came a dark, dark cloud. I had nothing to do all morning but peruse the forums at TWoP and roll my eyes at the phone, and then Dolly came busting in here at noon, charging through the outer office like a roller coaster and barking commands into her cell phone like a half-crazed war general. Too bad she was talking to her mom.
The rest of the day devolved from there. Dolly is completely unable to work the simplest office machinery, so she kept scuttling back and forth between the front and back offices like a hermit crab, thrusting sheafs of paper into my face and frantically shrieking, "This needs to be FAXED! I can't BELIEVE how much BUSY I am right now! I don't have TIME for this!" Then, fourteen seconds later, she's back with, "And THIS needs to be COPIED!" Fourteen seconds pass and it's, "Did you fax those PAPERS? Why isn't there a CONFIRMATION SHEET yet? What's WRONG with this MACHINE!?!?"
Some days I just think about what it would be like to shoot her with a tranq gun, right between the shoulder blades, and watch her go down like a Grizzly Bear. Last night I was sharing a story with May Day about the time Dolly claimed someone slipped a roofie into her drink at the bar and her friends didn't believe her and they dragged her home and left her on the floor of her bathroom in a haze. I know attempted date rape isn't funny in the least, but I'm thinking someone might just have been trying to get her to shut the hell up for a minute.
Also last night? May Day and I saw Juliet Landau at Jerry's Famous Deli. It was really bizarre, because I'm a huge Buffy fan, and dude, Drusilla just walked by my table. That's pretty fuckin' sweet.
Last item of beeswax: if this phone rings one more time, I'm going to end up in the psych ward. I swear I can't take this anymore. It's like they just know when my favorite song comes on the radio, or the exact moment I'm going to get up and get a drink, or whenever I'm on a roll with my journal or my posting or reading a recap. And dammit, there's no one in the office today but me! Stop calling! Nobody here cares!
Fuck that noise. I'm coming towards the light.