{"id":8373,"date":"2012-10-19T02:32:29","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T09:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/2012\/10\/19\/8373\/"},"modified":"2012-10-19T02:52:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T09:52:50","slug":"8373","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/?p=8373","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight I&#8217;ve drank almost a gallon of water and listened to the song Peanut Butter Jelly Time 7 times in a row.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>One married coworker told me something another married coworker said about me today, something about how I&#8217;m like a nice car you park far away so no one dings it. I laughed and told him I&#8217;ve always felt I would end up being someone&#8217;s 2nd wife. Just waiting for that guy to finalize his papers.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;use my bathroom.&#8221; 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?<\/p>\n<p>Married guys. Just come with the territory when you&#8217;re a single woman in her 30&#8217;s. I was thinking today what it would have been like if I&#8217;d settled down in my 20&#8217;s. I wouldn&#8217;t be me, that&#8217;s for sure. Almost in a way, because I didn&#8217;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&#8217;m reaping the rewards of that (and the trade-offs). When you&#8217;re young, you don&#8217;t have the means or the vision to flex and take advantage of freedom, opportunities and the space to be yourself. In your 30&#8217;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&#8217;t answer to anyone if I don&#8217;t have to. When I do it&#8217;s because I made a choice to want to. And I don&#8217;t see a reason to get tied down because I don&#8217;t have the irrational drives of my 20&#8217;s clouding my perspective. And I like being alone.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t figure out if it&#8217;s just me or just me being a woman who&#8217;s single in her 30&#8217;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&#8217;t want to hurt them, they don&#8217;t want to disrupt the foundation of that life they&#8217;ve built. But they also love life, and life is so massive and diverse and complicated. Or it&#8217;s just as simple as wanting a different flavor of ice cream once in a while. It&#8217;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&#8217;ve built in each but we can&#8217;t. Life&#8217;s all about compromise.<\/p>\n<p>I stay away from married guys because I don&#8217;t like complicated situations, I don&#8217;t like hurting people and I can&#8217;t let myself do things if I&#8217;m already conscious it&#8217;s wrong. I actually get really angry when married guys come after me. I don&#8217;t like when people do things behind the backs of people who trust them. But married guys do like to circle me.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;t. A lot of the good ones settle down early-ish. They feel it&#8217;s the responsible thing to do. That&#8217;s why I think I&#8217;ll be someone&#8217;s 2nd if I ever partner up. It&#8217;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&#8217;ll realize his life got away from him.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week, I told Jerry I had a dream I was holding Carter. What I didn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s a matter of principle.<\/p>\n<p>This was the first super realistic dream I&#8217;ve had in a long time, the 2nd with a baby.<\/p>\n<p>The roads not taken&#8230;the decisions not made&#8230;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?<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s fever over the emx guy, I burned out the last of it and it&#8217;s nice.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Hey, as long as that version of me and him in that world are happy. In this one, I&#8217;m happy with my freedom, he&#8217;s happy with his family unit, we&#8217;re happy with our friendship. It&#8217;s already a best case scenario.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight I&#8217;ve drank almost a gallon of water and listened to the song Peanut Butter Jelly Time 7 times in a row. I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbl5mn-8373","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8377,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8373\/revisions\/8377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}