is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Valentine's Day!
On Monday I woke up in Puerto Rico, where I had had a very lovely relaxing weekend with Caroleen. Since then, everything has been much worse. There�s no reason why I should be having such a shitty week, but I am.
And of course today is Valentine�s Day, when I�m supposed to feel infused with love. I do not. But Valentine�s Day has a screwed up history with me. I used to cope with it by having parties and making elaborate cakes, and inviting anyone who wanted to come to a party instead of whatever it is people do on Valentine�s Day. That tradition fell by the wayside after I left San Francisco because since then I haven�t lived any place where I could gather a critical mass for a V-Day party. Not even in New York, where I know lots of people. New York people are harder to gather than San Francisco people, it seems. It�s OK. But this week has made me realize that I need some new kind of tradition in place to stave off this ugh-feeling I get around now.
It�s not about Hallmarky things. And I don�t mind seeing other people in love, whether I�m single or double. In fact I always like seeing other people in love, even when I�m in a terrible mood. It�s more about other things you see on this day� people full of sadness and anger and disappointed anticipation. And then there�s my own history of the ridiculously tragic effects of having a fight of choice-between-loves on Valentine�s Day: in college I had a boyfriend�at the time I couldn�t imagine a more perfect human being than him, it�s true�who asked me out for Valentine�s Day during our first year together. Of course I said yes. Then, on Valentine�s Day he called to say his best friend wanted to hang out, so could we postpone? I knew his best friend, too. He was pretty great. And they had a great really close friendship such as you rarely see guys having. I liked their friendship. But the friend also liked to prove, constantly, that my BF would choose him first. That was the deal. So I got mad when I was told I would come in second on Valentine�s Day, but I didn�t really offer any ultimatums or demands or anything. I just said something like, �Why don�t you think about what he is doing.� He did. And so he took me out instead. That would be a fine ending, usually, a way of negotiating a complicated three-way relation.
Except that his friend was killed in a motorcycle accident a few days later before they ever talked again or patched up their fight.
That BF and I stayed together for a few more years after that, and had a good relationship. But I sometimes wonder, even now, whether he doesn�t also sometimes hate me, even now. Not because of anything I did. Just because of circumstances. I may not deserve to be hated for that. But sometimes things aren�t fair, and you can�t even expect them to be.
Ugh.
Anyway, this morning Marilyn sent Evany and me an email reminding us of this really cute elderly Asian couple we once witnessed dining together at a restaurant. They were so cute, and their love was so evident, that it made us fall over or something, metaphorically speaking. It hurt us. By which I mean, it gave us one of those feelings you get where there is too much feeling going on for it all to be processed rationally, so it registers as pain, even though it�s not unpleasant. So I�m thankful to Marilyn for starting the day off with that.
And I am looking forward to seeing Gus later this weekend.
But right now there is some seriously freaky shit going on in my building that ended up with one of my neighbors dead, tortured. I am not lying! The police have been here for like 12 hours. Some evil force gathered from some guy�s past and messed him up real good, in a way no human being should be messed up. It�s freaky that that could have happened basically across the hall from me and NO ONE HEARD ANYTHING.
I mean that in the real way. It�s not that screams were heard but no one wanted to get involved. It�s that apparently no one actually heard anything. At least I didn�t. There are, I�m sure, many facts of the case that I don�t know. The ones I do know come from the loud-talking police officers outside my door.
Valentine�s Day!
9:28 a.m. - February 14, 2008
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