Tonight I’ve drank almost a gallon of water and listened to the song Peanut Butter Jelly Time 7 times in a row.
I’ve hand-picked our warm up songs for our marquee matchup on Sat against our rival frienemy. Hint: One of them is Smack My Bitch Up.
One married coworker told me something another married coworker said about me today, something about how I’m like a nice car you park far away so no one dings it. I laughed and told him I’ve always felt I would end up being someone’s 2nd wife. Just waiting for that guy to finalize his papers.
Married guy from Intel came and played tonight. Black dude who kind of declared he thought I was really hot at ISS, the night after another Intel dude tried to follow me off the elevator wanting to “use my bathroom.” I was pretty disappointed in the state of married men after that trip. He left me a message earlier today asking if he just walks in the front of the gym or if there was another way he should go in. I responded, of course you can walk through the front. What are we, white people?
Married guys. Just come with the territory when you’re a single woman in her 30’s. I was thinking today what it would have been like if I’d settled down in my 20’s. I wouldn’t be me, that’s for sure. Almost in a way, because I didn’t succumb to that desire to partner up with someone, or I averted the scenarios of tying lust/sex to partnership, of the need for companionship driving me to make a choice, I passed that period and now I’m reaping the rewards of that (and the trade-offs). When you’re young, you don’t have the means or the vision to flex and take advantage of freedom, opportunities and the space to be yourself. In your 30’s you get into the right mental space and have the means, but if you got married and had kids, you have the responsibilities. I don’t answer to anyone if I don’t have to. When I do it’s because I made a choice to want to. And I don’t see a reason to get tied down because I don’t have the irrational drives of my 20’s clouding my perspective. And I like being alone.
I can’t figure out if it’s just me or just me being a woman who’s single in her 30’s but made peace with herself. But I feel lucky. Especially when I meet some of these married guys. For the most part, they love their wives, they love their children, and they don’t want to hurt them, they don’t want to disrupt the foundation of that life they’ve built. But they also love life, and life is so massive and diverse and complicated. Or it’s just as simple as wanting a different flavor of ice cream once in a while. It’s hard to reconcile the two because one is fixed and the other is infinite and multi-dimensional. If only we could live our lives in parallel and explore all the things we wanted without jeopardizing the things we’ve built in each but we can’t. Life’s all about compromise.
I stay away from married guys because I don’t like complicated situations, I don’t like hurting people and I can’t let myself do things if I’m already conscious it’s wrong. I actually get really angry when married guys come after me. I don’t like when people do things behind the backs of people who trust them. But married guys do like to circle me.
My theory is that hiding behind their marriage makes them bolder. Because they have nothing to lose and they always hide behind their behavior being harmless because they’re married (this logic makes me laugh every time I hear it but so many say it!) Single guys feel they have too much to lose to get involved with me so they don’t. A lot of the good ones settle down early-ish. They feel it’s the responsible thing to do. That’s why I think I’ll be someone’s 2nd if I ever partner up. It’ll be some guy who got married because he thought it was the right thing, the natural progression, r maybe it was easier than breaking up, but over the years, he’ll realize his life got away from him.
Earlier this week, I told Jerry I had a dream I was holding Carter. What I didn’t tell him was that in the dream, the baby was mine. And his. And that baby made my heart radiate in a way I have never felt in this world. When I woke up, I didn’t feel guilty even though I felt guilty for not feeling guilty, because that was that world, and had nothing to do with this one. In this one, I am protective of his family unit because it’s a matter of principle.
This was the first super realistic dream I’ve had in a long time, the 2nd with a baby.
The roads not taken…the decisions not made…do those lives continue as real parallel worlds? Our spirits living on in lives of their own? Is it true that in a parallel world we would have wedded last March?
In waking life I have no more consideration or interest in him outside of what we are, good friends. It ran its course and after last month’s fever over the emx guy, I burned out the last of it and it’s nice.
But every once in a while I have dreams so real the world I wake up to seems more like a dream than the world I wake from.
Hey, as long as that version of me and him in that world are happy. In this one, I’m happy with my freedom, he’s happy with his family unit, we’re happy with our friendship. It’s already a best case scenario.