See, I don't want to start pouring out relationship angst here. For several reasons, a) I find it embarrassing to re-read, b) I find it embarrassing to type, c) there is the privacy of other people to consider, and d) my love life can be such a rollercoaster and so convoluted that it takes a 3D graph to track it, and relating the details would undoubtedly get complicated, tiresome, and would take over this journal. My RL friends have suffered through enough of that. :-)
But it does come up. E.g., I'm not back in California yet. That's 'cause I changed my flight from early this morning to late tonight. That's 'cause I spent all of yesterday afternoon talking to Kevin about relationship stuff, which was ultimately reasonably productive, but there were some very bad moments in there, and the whole thing was just exhausting.
So that after we finished up and went out for dinner (the boy took me to Japanese, which is really nice of him 'cause I love sushi and he hates fish...there wasn't much there he could eat) and came back and I spent an hour or so on the phone with my friend Kirsten who called to discuss her wedding plans and then I played a little Nintendo (lode runner) and then we watched a very soppy Deep Space 9 at 11:00, I was feeling pretty low, and not looking forward to getting up at 5:15 to catch a flight away from him. So we moved it.
The relevant part of all this is that a) I didn't get any work done yesterday, b) this doesn't bother me so much because the relationship stuff was important and necessary to discuss since it affects job and living arrangements and c) as I started out saying, I'm still here 'til this evening.
I probably didn't need to even tell y'all that much, but the fact is that I want to talk about it. I want to vent a bit, and get feedback on all this, and Lisette's undoubtedly still asleep and Roshani's at campus and David and I had a fight yesterday which we'll hopefully fix today but is still making me a bit tense and Kirstie's at work and Jed's asleep. These are the usual suspects for this sort of discussion, so it's making me a bit antsy not to be able to reach any of them yet.
The gist of it all is that I'm going to look into possibly coming out to Utah this summer. Which means I'm going to look at teaching jobs in Salt Lake and in the Bay Area, apply for them, see what, if anything, I get, talk to Kevin and then make a decision. There's a good chance I'll be out here, unless I get a really good teaching job in the Bay Area.
Yesterday we also decided that I might try to do the same thing for the next academic year, that I would at least look into it, that although he and I have lives that send us running around like chickens with our heads cut off (for example, for academic year '00-'01, Kevin may be moving around every few weeks instead of being in one place, which means that it might not make so much sense for me to move to Utah for '99-'00), we still might be able to sustain this relationship, even if it means we do years apart at times.
We also figured out that I want an anniversary present this year. I don't usually feel strongly about this sort of thing, but seven years is worth celebrating, don't you think? There were so many times when I didn't think we'd make it this far.
The problem isn't just distance and schedules, y'see. The problem is really very different long-term goals for what we want to do with our lives, and we're not sure we can make them mesh. Kevin says that I'm very much a live-in-the-now kind of person, and I suppose that's true, even if I don't generally think of myself that way (I do like to plan). I can't bring myself to end something good just because of perceived potential problems in five years time...even if they're serious problems. They might not even materialize, after all, and *then* wouldn't I feel stupid. (Well, I wouldn't know if I'd left, but theoretically.)
I know, I'm being vague. This is probably all tremendously hard to follow, and I am more than a little tempted to just spill it all, lay it out for you, but that would take pages and pages in any case. I asked Kevin last night what we'd figured out (a few hours after the discussion, and he looked at me a second and then said, "It's complicated." Which it was, which is why I said, "Remind me -- I'm going to forget otherwise." :-) Which he did.
I do think that having three of her best friends get married all in the same summer is more than any woman should have to bear (whether she's single, in a relationship, or married herself). The only up-side I can see to all this talk of flowers and dresses and eventual babies (well, aside from their happiness, which I am honestly pleased about) is that I will hopefully be thoroughly sick of the subject in a few months, and will have most of my fluffy romantic thinking squished by the realities, and will be able to think rationally about the subject. We can hope.
When I said I wanted to march to the beat of a different drummer, they didn't warn me that it would be one very small drum doing its thing in the midst of a vast sea of drums going one, two, three, four, one two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two...