Tag: relationships

by on

Photobucket

For no good reason I’m thinking about people who settle scores. Well, not for no reason. I’m thinking about a non-lj friend, who, having endured a break-up years ago, is still seeking an explanation from his ex. This is a person whose work touches on themes of social justice and activism, and when I talk to him, the parting still looms large. We tend to think about this as wanting closure, but what he really wants is a just outcome. He wants both he and his ex to come to an understanding about their break-up that would be reasonable not only to them but to outside parties. When he wistfully asks me about what his ex is doing, or talks about wanting to hear from them, it never has anything to do with a nostalgia for the times when they were together. I don’t hear the longing for love, I just hear them saying “unfair, unfair, unfair…” Walking Lehigh tonight I thought that it isn’t possible to achieve justice on that level, between individuals. Perhaps we could if we returned to dueling. We could demand satisfaction and declare when we had received it.

And my friend’s approach to previous relationships makes wonder what they are expecting when they talk to me about finding someone new. Score settlers are are usually score keepers, and I can’t see how that bodes well for sustained romance.

by on

If this activity is about anything, it’s about returning me to a life of reflection and integration. The past two years have been ones of upheaval. My life has been reshuffled, and It seems as though I’m still playing catch up. For the first time since high school I’m living in the same place as all my possessions. I’ve spent the last year in a kind of shock. All of my friendships seem up in the air. In the last month I’ve tried to rectify some of this, to reconnect. Complicating the effort is my tendency to react emotionally and not always in my own best interests. That has led me to false starts, allowing myself to drop out of touch with people. There is a curious way that I’m feeling unable to manage my connections to others. It all seems haphazard. My apartment is a series of narrow walkways between heaps of stuff – clothes, files, boxes, collections of things that only have a value to me because they are collected. Again it feels clotted, constricted, (oh no, my chi is blocked!) . This is a physical manifestation of the past holding the future back. Or at least that is the way I keep presenting it to myself. By this point any one reading this must be thinking “For god’s sake! get up and clean the fuckin room instead of writing about it!” so I will.