I met an eighteen-year-old girl named Ashley at my secondary job a few months ago. Her sister, Chelsea, who also worked with me at the time, stole a twenty dollar bill from my locker during my first day on the job. I’m positive that Chelsea was the one that stole it, though how I’m positive isn’t as important to mention as the fact that any c-h-e-l-s-e-a retains a substantially lesser amount of cool than any c-h-e-l-s-i.
Thankfully, soon after the evil c-h-e-l-s-e-a stole my hard earned cash, she quit. But assuming that bad habits like that ran in the family, I wasn’t too keen on Ashley for quite a while. However, time passed and several weeks ago her tiny little doe-eyed blondeness won me over (because it isn’t her fault that her sister is white trash) and I graced her with dialogue. As it turns out Ashley is an awesome worker, and I’ll even go as far as to say that I enjoyed it when we were scheduled together. That’s “enjoyed” with an “e-d” because the Friday before Christmas two police men walked into our place of business and arrested little Ashley because she missed a hearing regarding her two counts of theft, one of forgery, two of breaking an entering, and I haven’t seen her since.
That’s one example of how my intuition when it comes to filtering the good from the bad is failing me. (The other is, of course, falling head over heels for an adulterer, but I’ll get to that in a second.) On the bright side, she left her CDs behind and today I was listening to one at work when an old song called Crazy Over You by 112 came on. I started smiling because it reminded me of my younger and dumber high school self.
My very first very real boyfriend and I coincidentally started going out on January 12 (112, get it?) during my sophomore year of high school, and because I was a huge hunk of cheesy, sappy, romanticy grossness, I used to fall asleep to the melodramatic love songs of 112 while I thought about how perfect my relationship was and what color my bridesmaids would wear. We broke up, naturally, and he’s currently a military man complete with a child and a wife who forbids him to speak to me, but while I was listening to 112 today, I couldn’t help but feel a little happy. One of the reasons I love music so much is because it has the power to strip away all the bad things in my memory, and this enables me to recall the exact reasons (or at least replicate some of the emotion that I once felt) for things I did that in retrospect, seem a little stupid. Most of the time when I think of this ex, all that comes to mind is the way the relationship turned out. It’s not that I wish I could be with him again (not even if he was the last man on Earth) it’s just that it’s so awkward now. I’m happy for him, but I think if I saw him or any of his immediate family members on the street, I’d probably wish I could disappear.
A primary reason for our break up was that we were/are just too different. He desires a life of coming home and relaxing by the fire with his cup of hot chocolate, his slippers, his dog and The Bible. Me? I like cats and I want to lie on the floor in front of the TV with my TiVo remote, a down blanket, a bottle of ice cold beer and, if I’m lucky enough to find any, I’ll have a pair of clean socks on as well. I think his family noticed our incompatibility before we did; it’s either that or they hated my guts because they got the vibe that I was a dumb tramp whore. In any case, they weren’t afraid to make it apparent that I was not their cup of tea. But back then I was too happy to care, and before any of our differences were realized, my boyfriend and I were very much in love with each other. 112 helped me to remember that love today, and now I’ll admit that I couldn’t have asked for a better first relationship.
Present day: I wonder if I’ll ever be able to think about my ex relationship with Cheater Boy and not have to fight the urge to vomit or slit my wrists. I hate admitting it, but he’s really got a hold on me.
I had an argument with my father the other day, and this is important to mention because the last time I argued with my father was, oh, never. My parents’ divorce back when I was eight caused a weird rift between my dad and I because of the custody results (my brother stayed with my father and I moved out with my mom) and he never really got to have a say in the way I was raised. Earlier this week all of his pent up frustration over our lack of a good father/daughter relationship exploded, and I was subjected to three hours of crying and an unloading of emotional rants that I’m sure were backed with love, no matter how awful or desperate they sounded at the time. One of the things that got me most is that he brought up the divorce in a way that made it sound like it had just happened, even though it was well over a decade ago and my mom has been remarried twice since. I now understand that my poor father has been bitter toward my mother this whole time because he still feels like it could’ve worked out. Even though I know better, even though my brother knows better, even though anyone who knows both of my parents KNOWS better, my dear dad thinks that if she had just taken his advice, that if they had gone to counseling, their marriage would have been saved and they’d be old fogies together. I don’t know whether to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of that, or to cry because of how badly deluded he is.
What’s scarier (and the part that ties all of this together) is that just before the cataclysmic argument with my dad I had a conversation with Cheater Boy and I told him that I’m sad because I feel like we could have worked out if we had done things differently. I told him in a small, earnest voice because I was desperate for him to feel what I was feeling at that moment. I wanted him to believe with me that when things that were once amazing crash and burn, that it’s possible to rebuild them and get back to that original amazing-ness.
The sudden realization that I am becoming my father hit me like a truck, and scared the shit out of me.
I'm not really phased by my poor judgement of Ashley because I'm sure she's actually a good person. I don't feel the need to fix anything when it comes to her because I simply never cared enough in the first place, you know? But this whole ex-factor thing is so frustrating. I don't want to be bitter about this breakup ten years from now, so yesterday morning I deleted Cheater Boy from my social networks. This way I won't have to see all of his new slutty friends/photos and it will be easier for me to just forget until there comes a time when remembering it is pleasant instead of painful. I know you’re probably rolling your eyes right now and thinking, wow, all of this ranting just to conclude that he’s no longer in her extended network?! but seriously guys, as pathetic as it sounds, that’s like, HUGE in my world. Show a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t, OK? I'll take it in the form of clicks on my AdSense column over there on the left. Thanks.
When my most recent ex-factor admitted to sticking his dick in other vaginas behind my back, I made him get tested for STDs and all that jazz at Planned Parenthood. I could have gone myself and refused to tell him the results just to be an asshole, but seeing as how he HATES going to get tested and I wanted to put him in the most awkward and uncomfortable situation that I possibly could, I went with it.
Planned Parenthood gives a free bag of condoms to every patient, each time he or she comes in for whatever it is they’re there for. The Ex Man’s car was, at the time, inoperable, so I had to drive myself out to the city and chauffer him around just so he could get this naughty dick business taken care of, and by the time we finished our two visits (one for testing and another to pick up the results) I had a hefty amount of condoms in my back seat. Here’s where I tell you the moral of this story: it’s not a good idea to live out of your car. I did this for two years and it’s brought me nothing but terrible luck. Two Decembers ago my car was broken into right outside of my apartment in San Francisco, right after I had done a month’s worth of laundry back at my parents’ house, and the fuckers stole all of my clothes. ALL of them. I was (as always) on a budget, so I ended up going to The Gap and leaving with a sack full of items that had tags with descriptions like “waffle-knit” and “cuffed-wool”. I was a lemming and it was awful. After that I thought to myself that I’d never leave all my shit in my car again; that no matter how tired I was I’d always bring all my stuff in at the end of the day. That idea lasted for a while, but as time passed and I re-built my wardrobe, I kind of forgot about it and slowly but surely my car started to fill up with random shit once again.
So there were the gazillion condoms, chillin’ in an old purse I bought from Banana Republic over four years ago like happy little clams, when my car was stolen. And it’s not like I missed them. I hate condoms and I didn’t even think of them when I took a mental inventory of what I thought I’d never see again that fateful morning at the BART station. But boy oh boy did I remember them when my FATHER, my poor, ignorant father who loves to live in denial and probably thinks I don’t even know what a penis looks like, took me to pick up my car from a tow yard after I got a call from some woman at the police station who said it had been found at a junky movie theatre nearby. I can imagine it: x amount of hoodlums (yes, “hoodlums”) start to go through all the shit in the back seat of the car they’ve just stolen. After laughing at the parking tickets shoved in my console, cracking up at the private, inner-most secrets of mine that were jotted in the moleskin I JUST filled and left in the pouch on the driver’s seat, they discover a purse and excitedly open it thinking that this poor perverted bitch has left some highly valuable things behind, only to discover that it’s full of condoms. Red, yellow, green, blue and even the tuxedo black one. Then they laugh some more at the pathetic picture they've got of my life, throw the condoms around like they’re fucking confetti and soon after ditch my poor car at a theatre where they continue to make fun of me while waiting for the main feature to start.
They also left some stuff of their own behind, including a wrapper for those wretched pink snowball snacks, an empty Cherry Coke bottle and a Broncos hat, so I suppose it was probably easy for my dad to believe me when I told him that the condoms weren’t mine, but then again I said it while trying not to throw up and I’m sure that sweat was projectile-shooting out of every pore on my body, so who knows, maybe he thinks his daughter is a hooker. That would explain why last night he tried to talk to me about why it’s bad to have one night stands.
Fuck, man.