Thursday, August 28, 2008

Misstatements....

In the beginning
BT (8/27/2008 4:30:06 AM): no, I have already admited that I had not been truthful to you in the past, but I have been since then

Later
BT (8/27/2008 5:34:27 AM): like last night when you accused me of talking to [name redacted, we'll call her Ex-Fiancee], then flat out saying you don't believe me?
Me (8/27/2008 5:34:52 AM): That was because there were parts of convo's that didn't belong to our conversation
BT (8/27/2008 5:34:57 AM): I swear to you that I have not been talking to her
Me (8/27/2008 5:35:02 AM): Which had happened before when you were talking to her.
BT (8/27/2008 5:36:56 AM): yes, some conversations I have had have been about sex, but it has been about sex in the past, with a couple of my ex's or are still friends of mine, and who have moved on as I have, and are now either married, or engaged, or have boyfriends, but that is how we have always talked with each other, we know that we did not work out, but we still give each other shit, and play around talking about shit like that

Later still
BT (8/27/2008 5:41:52 AM): and in that new honesty, have to be honest that the other day, yes, I did lie to you, it was one of them that had the cam on, but she was letting me see her kids, and one of them was the boy that I had to be tested before, that wasn't mine
[During a previous conversation he'd typed "hmmmm, your cam went off", or something to that effect, and I knew it wasn't a part of our conversation. He said that it was the cam his Grandma and his neice were using to talk to him on, but I didn't really believe that. Turns out I was right.]

Am I going crazy? Does any of that actually add up? I know BT will be mad as hell that I"m airing our dirty laundry but.... when you put those parts of the conversation together, it just doesn't add up to me. (And just so he doesn't think that I'm being entirely unfair, there are other bits of the conversation that don't make either of us look good and that point to various other bad things that both of us have done lately. I'm not trying to avoid those things and if BT wants to post those on his blog, he can. I'm just focusing on the part of the conversation that blows my mind and confuses the fuck out of me.)

And, I'm sorry, I just couldn't find a good song about lying to go with it.

Angry All the Time

"Angry All The Time"
(best known as sung by Tim McGraw & Faith Hill
but written by Bruce Robison and sung by him and Kelly Willis)
Here we are
What is left of a husband and a wife
four good kids who have a way of gettin on with their lives
I'm not old but I'm getting a whole lot older every day
It's too late to keep from goin' crazy
I got to get away

The reasons that I can't stay
don't have a thing to do with being in love
And I understand that lovin a man
shouldn't have to be this rough
You ain't the only one
Who feels like this world left you far behind
I don't know why you gotta be
Angry All The Time

Our boys are strong
the spittin image of you when you were young
I hope someday they can see past what you have become
I remember every time I said I'd never leave
What I can't live with is memories of the way you used to be

The reasons that I can't stay
don't have a thing to do with being in love
And I understand that lovin a man
shouldn't have to be this rough
You ain't the only one
Who feels like this world left you far behind
I don't know why you gotta be
Angry All The Time

Twenty years have came and went
since I walked out of your door
I never quite made it back to the one I was before
And God it hurts me to think of you
Before the light in your eyes was gone
sometimes I don't know why this old world
can't leave well enough alone

The reasons that I can't stay
don't have a thing to do with being in love
And I understand that lovin a man
shouldn't have to be this rough
You ain't the only one
Who feels like this world left you far behind
I don't know why you gotta be
Angry All The Time

You tube:
Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tUe8xJpK8E
can't find a good one of Tim McGraw & Faith Hill

When this song first came out, I really thought it was probably one of the saddest songs about a couple breaking up ever. It's weird because it's sung by men (with women adding the harmony in both versions) but it obviously isn't from the man's point of view, or at least it isn't all from the man's point of view. I think it probably harkens back to an earlier time in musical story telling where males did all the singing and sung songs that were stories told from whatever point of view the story was. In the comments on Youtube for the video, someone asks who it is who is angry. The response was that they both are. Even if you think that the song is all from the point of view of the woman, I'm pretty sure that she's angry too, at least alittle.

But I think that sometimes we don't know how to get out of our anger. Especially those of us who have so much of it, those of us who's first and primary response in any situation is go get angry. And when one person is angry, it's hard for the other to stop and step back, to not get angry themselves. I also think that our first response is to defend ourselves, to defend our position, but that really does nothing to diffuse the situation. As Dr. Phil would say, "Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?" Then again, sometimes there is nothing you can do to diffuse the anger. Sometimes nothing you do is going to be right. And then I don't know what you do.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

You Should Have Seen It In Color- Jamey Johnson

I said "Grandpa what's this picture here?
It's all black and white. It ain't real clear.
Is that you there?" He said, "Yeah. I was 11.
Times were tough back in '35.
Thats me and Uncle Joe, just tryin to survive
a cotton farm in the Great Depression.

If it looks like we were scared to death
like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should've seen it in color.

Ohh and this one here was taken over seas
in the middle of hell in 1943 in the winter time
You can almost see my breath
That was my tail gunner, ole Johnny Magee
He was a high school teacher from New Orleans
and he had my back right through the day we left.

If it looks like we were scared to death
like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should've seen it in color.

A pictures worth a thousand words
But you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should've seen it in color

This one is my favorite one.
This is me and grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up the day we said our vows.
You can't tell it here but it was hot that June
and that rose was red and her eyes were blue
and just look at that smile, I was so proud.
Thats the story of my life, right there in black and white

And if it looks like we were scared to death
like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should've seen it in color.

A pictures worth a thousand words
but you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color.
You should have seen it in color
Yeah a pictures worth a thousand words
but you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

You tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBk07l2aKrE

When I first heard this song, it made me think of my own grandpa. Not that we ever had a conversation so in depth, but I remember us going through the pictures before his funeral that we'd lay out for the viewing. I think it might just have been something for my uncle to do to keep himself even busier than he already was. But we now all have pictures of him in our living spaces. One of my favorite ones, the one that is hanging by my bedroom door and came with me when I lived at TyRoys is one of him and my grandma sitting at a kitchen table, with my mom, aged probably six, squirming in between them. Even though I'm sure I'm not a great judge of how I look, I know that I can see myself in all those faces. And in my grandfather's James Dean-y handsomeness and charm, I can see BT as well. (No, we aren't related.)

My grandma's grief conselor told her that it was a good idea to put of pictures of my grandpa around the house, partly as a good reminder and probably so that it wouldn't catch her off guard and hurt her more when she did see those things. At the house, I always sleep in "the guest room" and, since it became the guest room, the head of the bed has been surrounded by beautifully framed pictures of our family at different fancy family functions (weddings, parties, etc, not alot of them in my family). (Sidenote: You'd think this would get in the way of having sex in that bed, what with being surrounded by pictures of my family and all. But it doesn't seem to.) No one had warned me about the grief conselor's advice, but I wasn't freaked out by the fact that there were more pictures of my grandpa around. What did freak me out was the quilt on the bed. I don't think I had ever seen the quilt before. It was a quilt handmade by my grandma, on their 38th anniversary, with embroidery about their wedding date and their children. I lost it right there and then. This last visit I was looking at the picture of my uncle and my grandfather, at my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary party and I almost lost it again.

But I heard this song twice today. And what stood out was that he uses the same chorus to describe him and his wife on their wedding day- "And if it looks like we were scared to death, like a couple of kids just trying to save each other." Reminded me of BT and I. A couple of kids just trying to save each other. I could sure use some saving now.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Angel Quote

This is one of my favorite quotes from a TV show of all time and I try to think of it when I feel like nothing I'm doing is amounting to anything and no one appreciates anything I do. (I know, Wah, wah, wah.)

In the greater scheme or the big plan, nothing we do matters. There's no grand
plan, no big win...all that matter is what we do, cause that's all there is.
What we do now, today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward,
finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it... I want to help because
people shouldn't suffer as they do. Because, if there isn't any bigger meaning,
then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

Spoken by Angel in "Epiphany" Angel

A Different Kind of Freedom

So I'm kinda stuck right now. Thankfully, this time it isn't because I don't know what I should do. What I should do is pretty easy and laid out there easy as pie for me. It's more getting off my ass and doing it that has been the hard part.

I guess I've done this enough times that I should know what to do. And I know that making certain commitments will get me moving, which is why I start by doing that. For example: Even though I wasn't ready to actually go back to school, I knew back in July that I needed to go back to classes in the fall, so I did the easy part of it. I enrolled in the classes. I filled out the FAFSA. By the time I had to go up to school to sort this and that out, I had already gotten the ball rolling, so I figured I might as well do the crappy stuff too, so I could get to the fun stuff (the learning, yeah, I'm a dork). So why haven't I gone to get my books yet? Classes start Monday. And I ended up going out of town at the last minute, so getting my books has been permanently postponed until Monday after my first class.

The easy answer to why I haven't gotten my school books yet is just that I'm lazy. And that my sleep schedule is very messed up right now and I'm sleeping all day, awake all night. (I blame talking to BT, who is +8 hours from me. ;) ) But the real answer has alot more to do with being scared than anything else.

If things go even partially as planned, I'm going to be entering the real, grown-up, sink or swim world here in the next couple months. It won't be terribly well-planned. And it won't be like some sitcom dream. When BT comes back to the States, I'm only really hoping for us to have enough money to get a place and to get him a vehicle, mostly because circumstances have been such that we haven't started saving until just now. (My parents aren't too keen on us living in their basement and, frankly, neither am I.) I will have a part-time job, but I will also be going to school. While I know that I am perfectly capable of doing that, I also know that I don't have a good track record of doing it consistently enough to support myself. Also, BT will have earned leave days which he will take the pay for, but he'll need to find a job soon after he gets home. While I don't anticipate him having a hard time finding a job, I do know that many returning from "over there" often do have trouble finding and keeping jobs. This doesn't even take into account that money is just tight all around these days. I am constantly reminded that, for most Americans, us included, all it takes is one thing to go wrong for them to be completely fucked. Getting ill or being injured for an extended period of time, or even just having your vehicle break down and not having the savings to repair it can lead to loss of job which can lead to loss of home. Just the economics are scary as hell.

But that isn't what I want my life to be about. Last night I was reading the 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon University by David Foster Wallace in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. Here's a link if you want to read it through, which I suggest because it's really good: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html His basic argument in the speech is that liberal arts educations don't actually teach you how to think, which is a cliche that many commencement speakers repeat, but what to think about:
"And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts
education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your
comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to
your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely,
imperially alone day in and day out."
I am well aware that I have always feared that real, non-crazy, non-bohemian, adult life meant that you had to go through everday like the above because I've always feared all of that life is what Wallace only admits to one part involving- "boredom, routine, and petty frustration." I know that I've talked in this blog before about a temp job I had a couple years ago, where I did data entry in a cave for 40 hours a week over a couple winter months before I quit. After that job, I was scared to death that, if I ever allowed myself to live an adult life, it would be just like that. I hated how little energy I had at the end of the day to do anything more. All I felt I could do was veg out in front of the TV. Here recently, in large part because of what my family is going through and also because of being with BT, I realize how fulfilling other parts of adult life can be, parts I had also shied away from before. When I read the speech by Wallace, this section made me cry: (emphasis mine)
"But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is
most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world
of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The
really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and
discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice
for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day
."
While at this point, I really have no desire to be a mother, I do have a huge desire to take care of my family, especially as we go through such a difficult time. And while I have reservations that this is 'woman's work' and thus tend to steer away from it the way I do cooking, I have wonderful male role models who have taught me that this just isn't true. That it is not only everyone's responsibility to do what they can for their family, it can also be something that everyone can take pride and comfort in having done.

But in all this, in wanting to take care of my family, in wanting to build an economically and emotionally stable household with my husband, in wanting to finish my degree, in all this I fear that I just won't have the strength. That's I'll start it but never continue with it (as there really is no finish in most of these things.) That if I put forward a little but can't put forward enough, I'll disappoint everyone, because that little I put forward was just a down payment on what is expected. So I'm stuck because I'm scared of failing. How completely ordinary, huh?

I guess the only thing I can do, what I am planning on doing, what I started planning on re-committing myself to doing after I read that speech, is to put one foot in front of the other and do what I can. No one realistically expects me to be perfect (except for me and I don't have realistic expectations). I have a great family who will support me when I slip, most especially when they know I am trying hard in my own right. And things that seem to big to tackle just need to be broken down into managable peices, what needs to handled first and second and so on. There's another quote that I need to remember now. (I'm sure I don't have it exactly and I'll have to come back and edit it and attribute it like a good English student.) "Don't do nothing because you can't do it all. Do something."

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Trashy Vampire Novels

So last night I finished Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton. I had bought it several months ago at the request of BT, because he said that a particular relationship between characters mirrored something he wanted. I've had the book for months and haven't read it, mostly just because I haven't read anything. Last week I finished the first novel that I'd read since...... damn, I don't know when. Probably since I re-read Time Traveller's Wife so that I could highlight it and just refresh my mind before I sent it to BT, because it is one of my favorite novels of all time and because it reminded me of being without him. I guess lately I've been content to lay around and veg out in front of the TV, maybe catching a movie I want to see, though more likely just a movie that I'd already seen and kinda liked. (This is a very VERY good reason not to have a cable TV with all the HBOs in your bedroom. Damn you HBO, showing V for Vendetta a hundred times!!!!) But I digress......

So, especially now that BT and I are back together and working on all aspects of that, I read the book so that I could get an idea of what he was talking about. Now, I had read quite a few of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, series 4 years ago, when I was still living in the Bigger Midwestern City. At the time, I had read a review of the latest book in the series and my interest was piqued. But the series was already quite long at the time and I didn't want to have to buy all the books. I was in luck because a co-worker of mine at the time owned the first 5 or 6 of them and the first book of Hamilton's other series. I read them all, in succession, during a very depressing and boring winter break.

I guess I should go back a bit. I've always loved horror novels. When I was younger, I read way ahead of my age group. If I remember right, I was reading Christopher Pike's young adult horror books by the time I was in the 4th grade. (Dad had tried to get me into fantasy series, but it just didn't work. I think because we were too cheap to buy the series from the beginning and the YA section at our library didn't have them either. On the other hand, one of my good female friends had alot of Christopher Pike books and an older brother with more advanced tastes, Koontz, Rice, that he'd loan to us.) By 5th grade, I was starting to read the Stephen King and Dean Koontz, though my mom had to approve which books I read. I couldn't read King's Gerald's Game, for instance, because of it's sexual content. When I was in 6th grade, I bought Anne Rice's Witching Hour. It was widely known among my family that I couldn't read Rice's vampire series, but no one had said anything about the witch series. I loved the book. Sometime during 7th grade, I finally managed to get my friend's brother to let me borrow the vampire series. But, in my opinion, I've found that alot of genre writers (hell, writers in general) tend to tread over the same turf. The problem is that when a genre writer does it within that same genre, most especially within the same series, it gets old pretty fast. That's why I haven't read any of Anne Rice's latest work.

And it's why I haven't read any Hamilton books since my last go round. While reading Narcissus I noticed several places within the same book where she reuses the same phrases, etc. Also, she goes against the writer's rule that countless fiction writing teachers have drilled into my head: "Show don't tell." And, while I may be nitpicking about this, while Hamilton as a writer treats gay/bi men very well in the books, if not with a bit of airbrushing so that it's more sexy to female readers, Anita as a character gets on my last nerve because she won't accept homosexual activity from any of her lovers, though she continues to have several male lovers of her own. I guess because I've had bisexual male lovers in non-monogamous relationships and they've been with other men, with my knowledge and approval (hell, I've even gotten to watch!) her insistance that her male bi lovers be with only her (and I guess other women???) makes me kinda pissed off at her hypocrisy.

So why did I finish Narcissus in 3 sittings? Why did I buy the next one in the series while I was out tonight looking for the first novel in another vampire series? Why am I not reading "real" literature, great historical literature, non-genre literature? The most likely answer is that I'm just lazy. Narcissus was an easy read, the pages kept turning, and I really wanted to know what would happen at the end. Also, there was alot of sex. Granted, alot of what is now considered new classic literary novels (guess I'm thinking of novelists like Phillip Roth) have sex in them. Maybe even good sex. But this book...... well, maybe it was the combination of the supernatural with the sex, maybe it's just that I'm really horny right now, but the sex in this book was awesome!!!!!! Which kinda didn't help alleviate the horniness, but.... well, you can't ask for everything.

Of course, all this has me thinking about my own writing. While all my fiction teachers look down on genre fiction and push the "show don't tell" rule, Hamilton has published 10 times as many books as they have combined and probably makes quite a comfortable living off of her "little" "genre" books. In my last fiction writing class, I think I wrote two of the best stories that I ever have. Because I know that fiction teachers frown on genre fiction, so I wrote stories of everyday people in slightly more than ordinary situations. On the other hand, several of my fellow students wrote stories with aspects of genre fiction in them- apocolypse, vampires, murder. These stories stood on their own merit as a piece of fiction, not as a piece of genre fiction. Which begs the question of how I should write and what I should write. Do I want to approach my writing based on what I can write decently and what will sell the most? Or do I approach it based on higher literary fiction principles? Is there maybe something wrong with looking down on genre fiction while propping up "literary" fiction? And what separates the two? Is it maybe a class thing? That genres are supposed to be for the lower class who don't want to think as much about the literature that they are reading? Wait- doesn't that describe how Charles Dicken's novels were first read? On the other hand, just how many radical ideas could you put into a literary novel, since most of them are set in a real world context? Even with all of what I see as Anita's hypocrisy, the books still have fairly non-mainstream views on sex, sexual relationships, and non-monogamy. And, while this isn't literature, I remember how shocked I was the first couple times I heard the characters in (SciFi channel's) Battlestar Galactica refer to their female superiors as "Sir". Just that little word used to refer to females as well as males went a long way to show the ways in which this society had more equality between the sexes. When you take your story out of the real world, you can do quite a few things that you couldn't get away with in a real world context- whether that be having an alternate universe where the vampire district is Laclede's Landing (the area just around the Arch) or having one in which males and females are so equal that they all use the same bathrooms and shower areas. So should a writer just cut themselves off to that, if that is a way in which they would like to write?

So, what do you all think?

Friday, August 08, 2008

You Look Good In My Shirt- Keith Urban

You Look Good In My Shirt- Keith Urban
When you walked up behind me and covered my eyes
And whispered in my ear, guess who
I rattled off names like I really didn’t know
But all along I knew it was you

And, the longer we talked, the more we laughed
And wondered why we didn’t last
It had been a long time, but later last night
Baby, we caught up real fast

And maybe it’s a little too early
To know if this is gonna work
All I know is you’re sure looking
Good in my shirt
That’s right
You look good in my shirt

Well now I’m not saying that we solved overnight
Every way that we went wrong
Oh, but what I’m seeing I’d sure love seeing
Every morning from now on

And maybe it’s a little too early
To know if this is gonna work
All I know is you’re sure looking
Good in my shirt
C’mon now

Aww that’s right
Oh you look so fine
And maybe it’s a little too early
To know if this is gonna work
All I know is you’re sure looking
Good in my shirt

And maybe it’s a little too early
To know if this is gonna work
All I know is you’re sure looking
Good in my shirt
You look good in my shirt
You look good in my shirt

Monday, August 04, 2008

You Used To Love To Dance- Melissa Ethridge

You Used to Love to Dance- Melissa Ethridge
Lying in a city night
A million fingers tingling my skin
Out there in the sea tonight
I thought I saw you clutching your sin
You rolled me over long ago
And told me you were strong enough to go
You needed more than this lover's dream
You need the steel and the concrete beams in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

They told me you have found your love
You moved in locked up and put out your blues
Well all God's children got to grow up
And play house make vows to hang up their shoes
Do you sit and talk over coffee cups
Do headline mornings satisfy and fill you up
I kept your eyes and your cigarette kiss
You couldn't keep the lies the adrenalin bliss in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

I'm gonna go out tonight
I'm gonna drive up to the hill
I'm gonna dive on into those city lights
And I'm gonna dance, dance
Dance till I get my fill

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Lord it felt so right
But ecstasy ain't free
And compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

As anyone who knows me knows, I tend to live my life in a weird parellel to the art I consume, though I'm going to be using the word "art" quite loosely here. While I'm not quite sure if this is the real reason, I'm going to blame it on being a relatviely smart kid with lots of ideas and more access to books, movies, music, and televison than I even did my peers. While in some ways the art I consume does tend to mirror my views on life, it also tends to point out to me and make more concrete in me ideas that were only half-formed before. And I have to credit this art with sometimes getting me out of funks and leaving me with that nugget of inspiration to help with later funks as well.

This song is one of my favorite songs by Melissa Ethridge. I was not quite a teenager when she came out of the closet and it was quite a big deal at the time. For a young, rock-loving, wanna-be musician like myself, who was also starting to realize that she might be not-straight as well, she was a huge inspiration. I remember taping her MTV Unplugged when I was 12 on the spare tv and our beta VCR. (When we sold our 3 bedroom house before we bought another home, we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Because my mother didn't allow me to have a television in my bedroom, I could only watch something other than what my parents did on a different tv in our living room. Needless to say, it cut down drastically on me watching things I shouldn't.) I was reading a couple books on Bruce Springsteen and his early career at the time for a school project and I was overjoyed when he was on her Unplugged special, singing "Born To Run" with her. Within the next year, I bought all her CDs prior to Yes I Am, which I already had.

I think I always liked this song because it spoke to something I had always felt. I never wanted to "settle down". I wanted to be wild and crazy and live an unexpected life. At the time when I got this CD, we had just moved to the suburbs of this Small City and I was surrounded by this suburban dream of a nice house and nice job and nice family. While I knew several girls in high school who had big career-oriented dreams and ambitions for their lives, I didn't know any of these girls, or at least was not aquainted with them and their dreams, in the middle school where I started out. This was the place where, in the first class of my first day, my partner on a class exercise said that she was happy that we were done with it with time to spare to talk about the really important things like guys and make-up. Needless to say, even though I knew we had moved here so that i would get a better education and live in a better neighborhood, I despised it. In fact, I dreamed of the day when I turned 16 and got my first car so that I could disappear again into the Big City we had previously lived in, where I would live a precarious existence, having to finish high school and work enough to live on my own. But even in high school, where I knew some very ambitious college and career-oriented girls, I don't think I ever really knew anyone, male or female, who wanted to embrace the messy, not well-off but comfortable, and full of artistic integrity life that I wanted. That I still want to this day, though I knew now more of how hard it is to have that.

I also liked this song so much because I already felt betrayed by this time by people in my life who I thought would want that kind of life but didn't. I guess you grow up assuming that the people who instill certain values in you are consciously instilling those values in you and that they themselves will live by those values. Also that you assume that the way of life that you adore when you see it in someone else and that you aspire to in the future really makes the person living it happy and will always make them happy. None of that is really true and I think now that feeling that way largely comes from being a kid and not realize that the people you put on a pedestal are up their because you put them there not because they should be. Because really no one should be as we are all human, with all the messy, illogical, contridictory desires, flaws, hopes, dreams, and mind-changing that comes along with that. But at the time, I felt betrayed by this. (To be honest, still do sometimes.) For so much of my life, my godfather, who was one of the closest males to me during my young life, lived in the city proper and dated multiple women at the same time. I loved his freedom and the life that he had. When I was 8 though, he met and fell in love with a woman who he would marry and settle down with over the next 2 years or so. It probably didn't help that she had a daughter who was just a year older than me. When they started living together, he moved into her house in the suburbs. After a disasterous vacation two family vacation, we all kinda lost touch. So, at 13, even though I knew Ethridge probably wrote this song about a female lover who left Ethridge to settle down properly with a man, I felt like it was about my godfather settling down, giving up what I thought of as a privileged life just to settle down and have a family. I kinda had similar feelings in regard to my uncle marrying and staying in the same town as my grandparents over the course of my high school years.

Recently, as I've been trying to decide how to proceed in my life, I 'rediscovered' this song while listening to an MP3 disk with lots of different albums on it. It still strikes a cord with me, though for different reasons.

I guess it was the love of that non-settled down lifestyle that made me agree to marry BT, the fact that being with him seemed to promise that I wouldn't be "settling" or "settling down." While it was that craziness and chaos that led to so many of our problems, I have to admit that it was also what brought us together. And, to compliment what my grandmother said about how he and I are both dreamers and don't always live in the real world, I never felt like I would have to "grow up, play house, make vows to hang up [my] shoes" with him. In addition to just having an open relationship, I felt like I had found someone who I could share all my dreams and fantasies with, that I wouldn't have to compromise who I really was, even though I knew we'd both have to compromise on other things. While he wasn't the first to want to marry me (or the last, as it's turned out), every other man who wanted to marry me wanted to "settle down", to have that sort of very stable household and family. And, in some ways, I know now that played a role in BT wanting to get married as well. But he was happy with the ways in which it would be crazy and messy and unstable, if for no other reason than I am all those things. But I think he was, and still is, one of the few guys who didn't see me as a project, as something to be fixed, even though, on the other hand, he never thought I'd be "like this" forever. And when he was around, I wasn't, which only reminds me of another song lyric, "Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good so I never tried." (Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat")

I think that "settling down" part was probably a large part of why I couldn't have stayed with TyRoy. MP recently said to me that he thought TyRoy had been giving me something which he thought he had to give me in order to keep me but that, in truth, I wasn't ready for at all. I think that's probably true. There was this big house and this comfortable life there but, whether this is true or not, I always felt like that came hand in hand with being a dutiful wife, even if we weren't married at the time. As TyRoy pointed out to me last week when I said that I never felt like he chose me but just chose to be with someone, I wasn't the only woman who wanted to live in that house. That might be true. But I would have been just as happy to not live in that house, to have stayed with my folks'. I only moved in for the period of time I was there because it was easier for us to see each other and because I thought he wanted, needed, a person living there with him. And though I might not have conveyed this as much as I wanted to, I wasn't trying to get with him, wasn't trying to be his girlfriend/wife, wasn't trying to get a commitment out of him, though I was happy, if hesitant because of experience, to take it when he offered, when the "other women who wanted to move in there" were actively working to get a commitment out of him and were actively trying to move in there. And I guess, in the begginning when things are all shiny, and after my ordeals with lies and ommision with BT, I thought I had found someone with whom I wouldn't have to "hang up my shoes" either because he wanted the openness but wasn't jealous and had shown himself not to be a liar (even by ommission), so I ignored the trade-off. "Compromise is chance", right?

And the final thing about this song, right now, that gets me, is about the jukebox. Even though I'm quite a horrible dancer and have yet to be broken of the tendency to lead, I still love to do it and don't get to do it often enough. But I love the image of two people dancing. And two people dancing to a jukebox just seems to be this terribly romantic image that I can never get out of my head. The kinda messed up thing is that I can only think of a handful of times that I've danced with my male romantic partners or a person I had a romantic interest in of either sex. I know that I've probably danced more with my uncle than I have all my romantic partners or potentials combined. I actually can't think of a single time I danced with BT. And while I'll never forget the night I met BT just because it was the night I met him, I'd always remember it for another reason if he and I had never gotten together. As in the song, the place was a dive, a little bar overlooking the highway and the river, where you had to be buzzed in. And they had a jukebox, though I doubt you probably got 3 songs out of fifty cents. But someone, probably my uncle or his boyfriend, did put some money in it and played some songs. And I danced with my uncle to Patsy Cline, who both he and my mother love. And whenever I see a couple dancing to a jukebox, I think of that.