Nearly three years on, I often find it strange how well I get on with my husband. I hear all these voices out there about how marriage is such hard work, how “love hurts”, how much politicking people do in their relationships… And I really just don’t understand. Am I just lucky that I’ve managed to score the best friend and lover in the world (PS. he is the best lover, incidentally…)? Or is there something more intrinsically wrong with the way others manage their relationships?

I’m not saying we’ve never had our tense moments. Being a self-absorbed hermit, I’m bound to be slightly less capable of thorough communication and much slower at being considerate and polite. He’s got his eccentricities, habits and choices which clash with my own, and I’m sure I do things every day which annoy him. But that’s called being individuals. I don’t want to “be” him and he doesn’t want to “be” me - we just love being together. A major functional component of our relationship since the beginning is our lack of desire to “control” one another. This becomes adaptive in a domestic setting - since living together creates a whole new layer of necessary compromises and mutually agreed behavioral modifications. But the adaptations required by the latter are minimal. They are, admittedly, a continual developmental process that cannot be ignored lest they evolve into a larger rift. On the whole, we are each our own person, and our desire to be together and share our lives does not translate to a desire to manipulate the desires or choices of the other.

I’m thoroughly convinced this is the issue which makes relationships work. The most successful relationships I’ve seen among friends and acquaintances and in my own life are those in which the partners are independent entities functioning in tandem. They happen to be on the road to the same place and thus they are sharing the journey. Too many relationships start out without that necessary ingredient: the individuals involved are not going in the same direction, and yet somehow the ralationship becomes an end in itself, bringing little pleasure or reward other than the mere status of its existence. Thus it becomes a futile game of control and sacrifice, and is doomed to frustration. One or both parties are bound to realize one day that their journey got off track, and that they’ve given up too much of themselves. That’s the point where either the relationship ends explosively and ruinously, or the person’s life effectively ends: they give up entirely on the expectation of happiness.

My boy lets me travel in my own direction. He supports and encourages my own independent journey, and he is secure enough in himself and his own journey that he doesn’t feel the urge to leash me with insecurity or fear. His own independent spirit prohibits it, since he wouldn’t want that from me, either. The purpose of our union is the happiness we get from the intricacies of one anothers’ company and the shared joy of our common ground. He’s the best thing in my life, and I love him for being a part of it.

I’ve searched hard, but no song in my vast goth collection seems sad enough…

I’m searching for an appropriate requiem for the bravest woman who ever graced the American business world. Her history is tragic - not because of her shortcomings, but because of her virtues. I wonder if her true story will ever be understood… the story of how a nation consumed by self-sacrifice was able to destroy a woman who committed that nation’s most unforgivable crime: she was proud of her achievements…

I started listening to The Cure when I was 10 years old. My sister had bought a few tapes by them, and within a few months I had approriated them and they were on endless rotation in my little cassette player. I was in love. Robert Smith was my hero. The Cure saved me from a possible life as a bland suburban white boy. The Cure have influenced me probably more than even I realize, aesthetically, emotionally, musically and behaviorally.

Mr. Smith has often said he dislikes the way in which Cure fans often tend to worship him and dehumanize him. For some reason, I continued to do this long after most fans of my generation had stopped in the mid-late 90s. The Cure had failed us my moving on from their usual “profound” recordings to music which was more self-indulgent, rambling and uncharacteristic. I gave The Cure many second chances before finally shedding my illusions of eternal devotion sometime shortly after the most recent album, “The Cure” was realeased. I thought I understood long ago why Mr. Smith meant when he said “please stop loving me… I am none of these things”.

But perhaps a later song is more appropriate. Understanding it allows us to enjoy the positive side of the end of a long relationship without necessarily harming the long-standing devotion I will continue to have to who The Cure were and what they continue to mean to me. I think I appreciate The Cure more than ever now that I have stopped expecting the undeliverable from them from here on out.

Ultimately, I’ll probably still be buying every new album Robert Smith puts out, even if it includes duets with Madonna and recordings of his diarrhea. I probably won’t get my money out of them, but the payment will be for what The Cure have given me through the years. The enthusiasm has waned, but they are still there, and still important.

David’s car was broken into Saturday night for the second time in less than a year. He is always careful not to leave anything of value in the car to avoid tempting unfortunate people with Earthly delights. However, the person or persons that have broken into it these past couple times don’t seem to have been interested in any specific item within, but rather we’ve found the seat positions displaced in such a way as to suspect that the culprit is a homeless or bedless individual in search of shelter.

I just want to let everyone know that I’ve changed my ways and I’m not angry at the person who broke into the car. I understand their plight, and 150 bucks for a new window is a small price to pay for providing some poor junkie with a place to sleep. I know that it’s my fault that they got this way. If I would only give up the profit motive and accept a life of poverty in the pursuit of the happiness of others, our world would be without want and without war. Thus, I am glad to give up such things as security of person and personal property. These people aren’t criminals, they’re victims of corporate greed and stuff. Right?

“Jesus died for our sins. That sacrifice should not have been in vain. Thus, let us all go forth and sin as much as we possibly can.”

- “Anonymous” post at InTheFaith.com

It’s like nails on a chalkboard every morning when my coworker asks me if I want any coffee from Starbucks by asking “You need anything from the cafe?”

I think of a cafe as a small restaurant which serves breakfast and lunch. Starbucks is just the fast-food of foofy coffee. It’s like calling McDonald’s “the diner” or something…

Along the same lines, when I’m at Starbucks, I often have fantasies of sabotaging some of the stupid yuppies there by find a way of sneaking half-and-half into the “nonfat milk” and “soy milk” cannisters. I would laugh long and I would laugh hard as I watched their prissy faces turn sour as that thing which is fat and cholesterol which is so despicably alien to them invaded their scrawny defenseless frames… MWAHAHAHAHAH!!!

From LiliBat:

“I will miss SF, but I rarely go out. Most of what I do is come home and play games and the way things are now I can’t afford a lot of games OR going out. The cost of livivng here is so high I can’t afford to live so what’s the point?”

How David managed to spend 13 years of his life in the City so far I’ll never understand. I had a rather severe nervous breakdown last night after an abortive attempt at finding anything comfortable or cozy about this city once more. It’s a semi-annual affair since I moved here. I think I try REALLY hard to enjoy this city, but every time it feels uncomfortable, wrong and forced.

I end up escaping to the comfort of our postage-stamp-sized apartment and realize that I still am itchy to get out. I’m just not used to feeling so claustrophobic and isolated, and after two years it’s getting to me more than usual. This was accentuated by the fact that last night I seemed to realize more than ever that the type of comfort I’m looking for just doesn’t seem to exist here. I think I’m just not cut out to be in a big, dense city. I’m enough of a home body that having a tiny apartment and not being able to afford my own home to tinker with and improve is a major let-down. But I’m also enough of a social being that having only options involving HUGE crowds and alcohol-, drug-, or scene-culture is very alienating.

Maybe I’m just feeling unfairly spurned by this city that’s housed me for two years, but I have this constant feeling that the people here are just too cliquish and exclusive for me. I’m somewhat socially inept and dorky around crows, I don’t have that “style” and “confidence” that so many people seem to display (whether faked or real), and I seem to get this attitude-riddled vibe around just about any public place I go here… Like I have to “prove myself” in order to “belong” and it just makes me more withdrawn. I started totally clean and made tons of new friends several times over in Fresno, at new places and without feeling such a sense of trepidation. Either I’ve just grown too isolated or there really is a difference between big city people and the kind of people I’m used to…

Either way, the final stickler is my sense of self-accountability which forces me to analyse this all as “whose fault is this?” In other words, am I making excuses for my own inability to be happy here? By longing for a move back to a slower, mid-sized suburban town, am I just running from the real problem? The fact that I came to San Francisco because I was, ultimately, running from an entraping family/job situation in Fresno throws up a red flag and makes me wonder how many places I’ll end up running from, and whether the next will be any better…

The Big City means high-end urban areas such as NY, SF, LA, Philly and Chicago. Places where owning a single-family detatched dwelling is not feasible for the vast majority of residents. This rules out up-and-coming cities with rational real estate such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Austin and Denver. It also rules out most of the rust belt, where property values tend to be declining and the population decreasing.

The Big City has three types of residents: 1) those who were born there 2) those who come there and 3) those who stay there.

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My Political Compass position:

Economic Left/Right: 6.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00

Contemplating the possibility of a future move to the Beautiful American South (land of evangelicals and baptists, birthplace of lynchings and the conformity of “rebellion”), I sometimes pause a moment to consider how my attitudes and behaviors might need to be modified in relation to my distance from the closet.

This essay, of course, refers to the closet that all us deviants and social minorities deal with in terms of allowing or promoting the exposure of our identity to the outside world. I owe significant inspiration for this work to the scratchings of and my chatter with a certain New England Nun, who has written his own plentiful volume on the matter.

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