Category: deep stuff

Shame on me!

Not 24 hours later, I ended up arguing with Mr. Kat 2.0 again and I blame myself 100%.  First, I shouldn’t have answered the phone at all when I saw the number on caller ID; I was at work, I was tired and frankly, I was still irritated at him from yesterday, so I shouldn’t have taken the call.  Second, I can’t believe I fell right into yet another dispute when I know better than to even engage in it in the first place.

Here’s a sample of the irrational conversation from today:

Me: It’s your dog.

Him: He was our dog.

Me: No, you had him before we were even dating, before you even knew me,  thus he’s your dog.  Take responsibility for him.  (I’m calm at this point, completely factual.  Logic is my friend!)

Him: Well, you kept the storage building.

Me: What? What the f-ing hell are you even talking about? (I’m a little irritated at the new topic, but I’m not mad.  I cuss all day long, this use of ‘f-ing hell’ was merely emphasizing that I have no idea what he’s talking about)

Him: You kept the storage building, and that should be mine.

Me:  What does that have to do with the dog? (I’m trying to find the logic here, even though I know there really is none to be found!)

Him:  I think I paid more for the storage building than you did.

Me: (this is the part where I should’ve stopped the conversation because see how he changed the subject from the dog to something else completely random out of thin air? where did this topic even come from? random topics in mid-discussion to distract me are so annoying, but I know this trick of his and should’ve just hung up)  No, you didn’t, I have the check to prove what I paid but I don’t care about the money.  If you want it, please take it, move the damn building already! (see, at this point, I’m officially pissed, because his whining about the storage building has gone on for 18 months, and every time, I’ve said come get it if you will shut up because I’d much much much rather have peace than any storage building…but there’s no sport in taking the building, is there? It’s only fun for him if he gets to randomly argue with me about it)

Him: Why are you always so mad at me?

Me: ARG! (the conversation that followed was infused with a ridiculous number of angry obscenities flying from my mouth before I hung up in disgust, so we’ll just sum it up with ARG!)

So.  Shame on me for getting mired in the most idiotic of disputes, shame on me for falling for the random change of topic to turn nothing at all into an argument, shame on me.  I will do better next time; I will let voicemail pick up…and if I must talk to him, then I will try to keep the conversation focused and calm, not letting him digress into other conversational hot buttons just to stir up a fight out of thin air.  Above all, I will be grateful that he’s the only person that I argue so nastily with on the whole planet and I will be grateful that we don’t live together anymore, ever again, hallelujah for that.

so i had this thing this morning of importance…

………..and i didn’t throw up, that was a biggie.

and thank gawd for some sanity-saving, ego-boosting pep talks to keep me from hiding under the table or running around in circles chasing my tail (talk me down, man, talk me down)…

……but like so many things of late, it’s one of those things that i can only put out there, lay it on the line, and wait & see, wait & see, wait & see.  i have pretty much unlimited patience, but how thin can i spread it before i freak the hell out?

camping!

Went camping yesterday.  I’m pretty easy to camp with, I think.  Don’t care where we go, don’t care what we eat, don’t care what spot we pick, don’t give a crap where I put up my tent.  All I care about is will the wine bottle fit in the cupholder on my camping chair (no, not a cup or a glass, the whole flippin’ bottle?!), and once that’s settled, let’s go!

Campfires should be mandatory therapy for the stressed out.  With nothing but the sounds of the river and the nocturnal critters in the background, gazing into the campfire is meditation.  It’s relaxing and calming…throw in some dark chocolate s’mores and it’s nearly nirvana.  The crackle and pop of a campfire in good company is something I’ve been away from for too long.

I was first to wake this morning.  Waking up out in the woods is pretty special…chipmunks running all around, the air is clean and the day is new and unspoiled.  No cell phone signal to interfere with the quiet, no tv, nowhere to be but right there in the moment.  I took a walk and enjoyed the silence, collected my thoughts in a way I haven’t done in a while.  Really good stuff…

hey

Ask me.

Ask me anything,

I’ll tell you,

I wanted to tell you something,

Wanted to blurt out five thousand things,

But wasn’t sure if silence was the currency

Holding it all together.

Will I, can I

Can you, will we

Ask me.

interesting

Someone told me today that they have hard time reconciling my real life good cheer with whatever the tone of the moment is in the ol’ Kat Box.  I’m cheerful to the point of being annoying most days, and often those same days, the postings in the Kat Box will be sad or serious or pissed.

I think the explanation is that I sort out all of the mayhem in my head right here for all the world to read so that when you deal with me in person (for the lucky few of you that get to bask in the glow of my glorious Katness), you get a fairly happy Kat most of the time.

It’s an interesting contrast to who I used to be, and who I used to be was a mess of exceptionally angry with huge doses of sad and fearful thrown in for good measure.  I was a raging out of control wreck for a long time with a menacing temper (for example, it’s been a few years since I’ve Walker-Texas-Ranger’ed a deadbolted door open with a swift kick).  

My temper is still fairly quick to heat up these days, but it’s just as quick to dispel.  I try not to hold grudges.  Sometimes I need some quiet to collect my wits, but I don’t like to argue anymore—arguing is not a sport that I want to medal in.  I’m not perfect, I still yell, but then I feel like a jackass, so I try not to do it often. 

I’ve learned to let it go, let it go, let it go…sounds so simple to type it out, but it took me years to get a handle on who I am (not who others want me to be, who someone manipulative might wish I was and try to push me to be). Once I got a grip on who I am at heart, then I started evaluating negative situations to determine if I could change anything about them or control any aspect of it.  If I couldn’t change the negative, then I had the choice to roll with it as it was or just walk away. 

I’ve walked away from a lot—not just the Mr. Kats, folks; over the years I’ve walked from friendships and business opportunities and the like because there was more negative than positive.  Walking away was rarely easy, but for the things I get to choose, I want to choose the good stuff, the happy stuff.  And I’ve also chosen to roll with some of the negative, just roll with it, not accept it all as my problem, just go with the flow.  Stampin’ T and I say almost every single day “It is what it is.”  We’re zen like that.

And when I get irked or sad or need to sort something out, I come here because every day isn’t rainbows and unicorns and Hallmark cards.  I type it out.  I make sense of it as I go.  Seldom do I blog about a problem and not feel at least a little better right away.  And then you have your Happy Kat back, the bouncing Tigger-like spaz that I am in person, ready to cheer you on and bake cakes and take calls and send 100 emails and sing songs and be a goofy goober.  I believe it was the wise Spongebob Squarepants who said, “We’re all goofy goobers.”  Find your inner goofy goober and nurture it!

My posts about wanting…

…were lost in the move from one site to another.  About how I want things I can’t have and a friend’s point that wanting what I can’t have is a deliberately destructive move on my part, where I then countered that it wasn’t deliberate, that sometimes you don’t know you want it until you catch a fleeting glimpse of something awesome…(damn I miss all those lost blogs!! curses!)

And I’ve pondered and reflected and mused a lot since then (because the fun park inside my head never closes, never stops spinning), and I decided that the Stones were right in the whole can’t always get what you want but ya get what ya need thing.  I am getting what I need right now, I am.  What works, what fits into my life and my schedule and my general fast paced insanity, it’s all good and I have it now.  So Kat admits publicly that all is well, all is good, amen.

Good to say things out loud sometimes…

I’m a writer not a talker.

I type somewhere between 4 and 100 billion emails a day.  I talk on the phone maybe twice a day, maybeeeeee.  I am so addicted to blogging that in the less than 36 hours that the Kat Box was down in transition, I was pacing the floor and having what could only be described as a hissy fit.  Need to write, need to type.

But sometimes, you have to say things out loud.

And today, I did pretty good with that, I think.  In one of my blogs that disappeared into the ether in the transition, I talked about my friend with cancer–I don’t think he’d mind me using his name as long as I don’t give out any other personal info.  Kevin has stage four colon cancer with spots on his liver and his lungs right now.  This news is pretty fresh to me, just learned it in the past month, even though Kevin and his wife have been working through this nearly a year now.

Kevin was my first real boyfriend in high school and we are so close in age that the word “cancer” confuses me.  No one our age has cancer, right?? I’m still processing the information really.

Got to have a short visit with Kevin a couple weeks ago, and he said some good stuff to me, things that were good to hear, good for the heart and soul.  Got me all teary-eyed indeed, and I was pretty much speechless on the spot. 

So then I had to decide what I wanted him to know most, because there are so many things to say!  Think back to any single person in your life who was important to you; what would you want to tell them?  Do you thank them for passing on their love of crazy fast cars?  Do you thank them for spoiling the snot out of you so much that you now operate under ridiculously unreasonable expectations?  Do you thank them for class rings and passed notes and mixed tapes (god, I love mixed tapes/CDs, they are SUCH a gift!)??  What do you say?

I thought about it, and I decided what I most wanted to tell Kevin.  I went to see him this afternoon, and I basically told him this, which I don’t mind sharing because it’s so very true: Thank you for telling me I was a worthwhile person at a time when I really didn’t know it; thank you for telling me that I was a good, special, beautiful person even though I couldn’t always hear it back then, couldn’t accept it.  Kevin’s positive opinion of me made a difference that I’ve carried with me all this time; he pointed out to me back then that I was not broken, was not damaged goods, was perfect just as I was. 

And that’s a lesson that I’ve carried on through the years—-if you’ve ever been in a moment of personal crisis with me and you’re falling apart on me, you know I will tell you that you are perfect just as you are, that you are worthwhile and great, even if you are in transition, a work in progress, that you are perfect to me.  Only in comprehending Kevin’s cancer did I recognize that the lessons he taught me way back in high school I still carry with me and use every day—and isn’t that incredibly cool? 

I know it might sound cheesey, but we are all our life’s experiences mushed into the here and now…so who taught you what you know?  Who taught you to love ranch dressing on captain’s wafers?  Who introduced you to Slayer? Who took you mountain biking for the first time?  Maybe there’s someone you should thank, and if you’re feeling especially brave, maybe you should say it out loud.

Thanks, Kevin, and I wish you and your wife Brenda good things as you push through this, as you best the beast together.

duh

So there’s this book out by an Asheville native and she’s making all the rounds of the book touring circuit and good for her for getting published and making money and yadda yadda, but I have to say the general premise of her book 365 Nights is a big honkin’ DUH, people, DUH!!  To me it’s so DUH! that I can’t believe people would buy it, but more power to them and the author if it helps them get a clue.

Ok, so here’s the premise: the author decides for her husband’s birthday that her gift to him will be sex every day for a year.  Her book documents this one year journey–not necessarily all the naughty bits, folks, but the emotional aspects of this effort to spend time together privately every day.  Good for her and him for doing this, but come ON!

This is where your Katster gets up on the soapbox…(wait for a sec while someone scoots the soapbox over my way…)

Ahem.  If you are in a commited relationship, you should be putting aside a window of time (almost) every dayto nurture your relationship.   Episodes of the stomach flu, death in the family and other such disasters might thwart the “every day” aspect, but as a general rule, you need to make that connection often.  And it doesn’t have to be sex, folks, but it needs to be a no bitching, no whining time of being the couple you are.  Why do you think it’s so awesome when you’re dating?  It’s great because you spend little windows of time together just enjoying the beejesus out of yourselves…getting freaky and most importantly of all, laughing.  And then eventually things get, well, ordinary.  You stop laughing, you stop making time…or you let complaints about who loaded the dishwasher last get in the way of what should be “your time.”

Your Kat does not believe that things everhave to get ordinary.  EVER.  I believe in the every-single-day-connection, even if it’s only 10 minutes of undivided attention at the very end of a long day when the younguns are finally asleep, as it is critical.  I can say the recent demise of my marriage was largely in part to Mr. Kat 2.0’s unwillingness to focus even 1 uninterrupted minute a day on us; every little thing falls apart if that connection’s not there, folks, and one partner can’t pull the weight alone, one partner can not do all the work, it’s painful and unrewarding to do it all.

A few years ago, maybe it was on Oprah, there was a relationship therapist that insisted that you take the time to kiss, reallllllllllllllllllllly kiss, at least once a day every single day of the week.  That counts, too.  This doesn’t have to be nasty bondage and feathers to work, friends, although that’s fine!  It doesn’t have to be deep heartfelt speeches every day either.  It’s simply happily acknowledging who you are together in the whirling swirling mayhem of parenthood, work and the rest of the real life stuff that closes in on us each day.

So buy the book if you want to ponder it further, or you can just take Kat’s word that you need to connect daily, really. 

The next Mr. Kat will be the right man for me if he knows that no matter what, we have to put the disagreements over who used the last of the peanut butter aside, put the grouchiness over wet bath towels on the bedroom floor aside, put the stress of hectic workdays aside, put it all aside for just a few minutes every day to just freakin’ appreciate each other just a little bit.  I believe in it.  I believe in giving the appreciation, I believe in receiving the appreciation, and if it gets all shagadelic, baby, that’s great, too.  Every day.  I’m serious.  Kat has spoken.  So be it.