The following post was written and edited, probably poorly, before this paragraph. I can't decide if all that follows sounds familiar because I've posted about it before or because I've written and deleted similar posts before. If it all sounds to familiar you are more than welcome to find the little red square with the x in it. Clicking it makes me go away.
There's no sense pretending that I'm in a great place right now, but I'm not as badly off as I could be or as badly off as I have been. It's arguable that I'm as likely as not to be worse off in the future, but I'm at least thinking I'm digging my way out of this.
One thing that's working in my favor is that I'm not depressing myself much by thinking about those things that depress me, mainly my seeming lack of money and my definite lack of a love life. I'm not going to even bother mentioning the complete nonexistence of a sex life, but that is by design as I'm not trying to get any and of course am therefore not getting any.
If I think about money I'll drag myself into a pit where all I can think about will be money. Right now I owe my landlord just over half the rent he was due for the month, but I have the money. I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard from since I got paid Friday, as that's the day I told him I'd have the rest. I'm also going to send my next student loan payment about a week early so that I can get that money out of my account where I am too likely to accidentally drink my way into it.
That's not entirely as likely as it has been in the past. I do have a history of spending the bulk of my money at the bar, but I'm working on that, and the biggest help here is always going to be keeping tabs on my bank account instead of running up tabs at the local.
Anyway, I've got those two monetary exits, and this time I'm not going to forget about them when I look online at my balance and don't see them having gone through yet. I do fully expect about 80% of my next check, just over a week from now, to be an in full payment of my next month's rent.
I also owe Momma somewhere in the realm of five hundred dollars for bills we still share, most of which is a bank loan we took to pay off a credit card that had begun to eat us alive. She's been cool about letting me slack in getting money to her, and while I fully expect her to continue to be cool I fully expect the weight of the knowledge of this debt to continue to weigh on my own mind. But I try not to think about it.
I haven't mentioned my phone bill yet, and I can't for the life of me figure how AT&T justifies charging nearly twenty dollars for removing Momma from the deal and putting me entirely in charge of it. It's highway robbery, but my option is to spend even more money to end my commitment eleven months early. Chances are though that near the middle of 2011 I'll be shopping for a new service provider. For what it's worth, AT&T isn't likely to get more than half of their bill from me before I next get paid.
And speaking of pay, that's a whole other depressing thing that I'm trying not to think about, but my role as a cook for hire and my feelings about my place in this business are fodder for a whole other post.
Hoping we've entirely covered how much money I owe random people and how not thinking about it is not depressing me with it we can move to love/sex/relationship issues that I've mentioned I'm also not thinking of.
To say I'm not thinking about any of it is a bit of a lie. I'm not allowing myself to dwell on it, and I'm contenting myself with telling myself I'm being patient about it. I don't run across that many gay men in my normal daily life, and I don't actually have any close friends that are gay that aren't lesbians. I love my lesbians, and they are great friends, but there's still only so much that we have in common.
Not working toward or looking for a relationship is driven by two reasons. One is that I have a bad habit of rushing into sex when given the chance. Because my chance encounters are so random, when the idea seems to present itself I, by habit, rush it like kids around the pinata that just hit the ground. I want to not do that in part because when things don't work out I can't not think of that later, and any chance of a normal ol' friendship with that person is negated. And I do need to find friends of the gay male variety. It would help me to not feel the aloneness that I also don't think about. It would be nice to actually feel like there were other people like me out there.
A second reason for the avoidance is that I don't really think I'm in a place to be a good partner. Some of this gets back to the cooking for a living issue mentioned above. Being in the closet for so long gave me a view of who I am and what I like that is wrongly colored by being in the closet. I'm learning that my love of the kitchen is different than I thought, though I have yet to figure out how I most want to approach food and cooking.
I've mentioned in the post previous to my most recent overly long blog silence my writing. I'm not sure what I want to do with it, but I'm falling back into some amount of habit of doing some amount of writing. And this isn't the only thing that interests me, but the other interests are things I'm worried to approach. I never allowed myself to even consider so many things as interests from inside the closet that I'm now almost overwhelmed with ideas and stuff and things that are like ideas.
A sad fact here is that I'm spending too much time not thinking about some things and not enough times thinking about other things. While I'm not really doing that much, my life seems to be moving quickly through too many days of the same ol' thing.
Momma discusses the idea of working toward finding balance, and that's what I need to do. But I keep not thinking, so I keep not doing. But even when I'm not thinking I'm still thinking. Now I just need to really think and work toward focus.
