I Won't Grow Up!!!

Peter Pan Syndrome.

This notion of never really having to grow up.

Awful was textbook this.  At 38, he thought it was completely normal to drink 7 nights a week, impulsively buy motorcycles and scooters he couldn't really afford and put himself into wild and dangerous situations: sailing in severe weather, riding a scooter drunk in a storm, keeping several weapons in his home without storing them safety and discreetly.  This one really irked me, especially because he always wanted to have people over.

Over the last few years, I have witnessed too many grown men act like 15 year old boys with their first case of Natural Light.  I have dealt with man-child grooms.  Lost little best men.  Even fathers of the brides or grooms who act like the wedding they are attending may be a frat party.  I sometimes have to take a moment NOT to laugh.  Getting obscenely drunk (and oh how many times I have seem rampant cocaine use) in public at a formal event is a personal choice, but I can't say I think it is the best look, ESPECIALLY if you are the groom.......

Well, this little rant takes me to a wedding that I planned a few months ago.  For a couple that I knew vaguely.  This couple (who were actually super sweet and lovely) knew many people who attended my same high school.  When I initially saw their guest list, I gagged, sneered and then took a xanax and laid down.  I knew it was going to be an unruly crowd.  I have to remember this when I feel judged by other people.  Yikes, I judge, too.  Bad, when it comes to these folks. 

I wasn't wrong.  See, the second I graduated from high school, the first thing I thought was, "I AM FREE!"  Free to get away from the vapid, empty, moronic and ridiculous people that I had to share halls and pretend to like for 4 years.  I never looked back.  I rarely returned their phone calls.  This was before Facebook.  You could escape your past.  I didn't like anyone enough to keep in touch, so I didn't.

But, I am the minority.  Most people from my high school stay together like a pack of wolves.  They go to college together, join the same frats and sororities.  They have all of their firsts together: sex, booze, drugs.  They move to the same neighborhoods and even live in the same condo buildings post graduation.  They marry each other.  They divorce each other.  They cheat with each other's spouses.  People that also went to the same high school.  To me, it all seems too closed.  Suffocating.  They have no close friends other than the people they shared a 6th grade cafeteria table with.  It makes me itch.  The world is bigger than this.

When the high school wedding rolled around, it was everything I knew it would be.  A bunch of people who have known each other for 20+ years all dressed up, trying to impress and shock one another.  See, this is what happens when the only new blood may be a spouse that gets sucked into the mix.  Everyone competes.  The competition is so personal.  No one can escape.  It becomes an incestuous rat race. The girls starve themselves and wear micro mini dresses intended for those under 25 and NOT over 35.  The guys wear custom suits and show off about whose family business (many work for their Dads) allow them to work the least amount possible.  They take shots.  They run to the bathroom and then ask me inane questions with coke literally hanging out of their nostrils.  They grind on one another.  At this particular event, I witnessed a man kissing someone other than his wife.  But, I have heard for years (even from my mom) that swinging in my old neighborhood exists, so why wouldn't they do exactly what their parents did 30 years ago?  The truth is that they traveled down the same path, so it all makes sense.  History repeats itself. 

And yet, part of me feels left out.  Not like I would want to part of this madness, but they have so many memories ALL together.  They knew each other as children, teenagers, young adults and now middle aged.  They have history.  My best friendships were made in college and right after.  Aside from one friend from junior high that I still keep in touch with, all of my other buds are not from a continuous phase in my life and sometimes I get a bit sad because I love memories....yet, the ones I try to block tend to be the ones that involved these kinds of people.

The best part of the high school wedding was that Crush was there to help me.  He had come into town with me to do a few wedding tasks for our own celebration coming up next fall, so he got to see the people from my high school in action.  He went to boarding school, so he doesn't have a sense of what I went through and how annoying I think 99% of the people I grew up with really are.  He has questioned me about them and about my high school experience and I always just sum it up by saying..."Ugh, think about having to hang out with the most annoying people for 4 years and pretending you liked them.  It sucked." 

As we lay in bed after working all day getting a great (with super annoying friends) couple married, my beloved turned over and stroked my face and said, "R&F, no wonder why you aren't friends with people from your high school.  I have never witnessed such inappropriate behavior in my life.  Grown men with children acting like drunk little wild boys.  It actually grossed me out.  How old were these people anyway, like 35?  Do they ever grow up?  7 guys at 1 point were all in the handicap stall doing coke when I went to use the restroom.  And let's not even talk about what all of those ladies were wearing.  I don't think if you were born in the 70's that I should be able to see your thong underwear when you dance."

And as I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, I smiled.  The person I will marry "gets it."  

Few really do.  

Failure, Rejection and Confrontation

I have been a bad bad blogger lately.  And yet, I have a bunch to say.  Lately, I just haven't felt like saying anything.  Some of it is being in a new place and some of it is that I am planning a wedding and some of it is that I am sitting around a bunch, too much.  I find that I am VERY lazy and unproductive when I give myself too much unorganized time.  When I have tons of downtime, after a while, I feel some old and familiar signs of depression sneaking up on me.  Lately, I have been blah.  Busy doing things that don't really matter, but not busy working.  I miss working.

A few days ago, I applied for a job that I REALLY WANT.  The first one that I am perfectly qualified for at a place that I would be super proud to work for. I feel this tidal wave of anxiety and doubt.  I haven't felt this want in so long.  It's the same kind of want that I used to feel when I was single and praying for a partner.

In the last few years, I have become very familiar with 2 things that I have always feared: failure and rejection.

Yes, running your own business, there is a TON of it.  Mix in a failed relationship, countless dead-end dates and living with your parents while you celebrated your 31st and 32nd birthday.  Well, I could have made a failure and rejection sundae.

But, the things that I feared the most, aren't that big of a deal.  Some people don't like me?  That's okay, I typically don't like them more right back.  I tried a new approach and it wasn't the best way to get something done?  Well, I tried something new.  And let's not even mention all of the MASSIVE business mistakes that I made time and time again?  The good news here is that I learned.  I tried and failed and I eventually made a conscious decision that I needed to change.  And when I go back to being an independent business owner again, I will be SO MUCH BETTER and WISER.  And more successful.

I may get this job.  I may not.  Life will go on and I will eventually find something that suits me.  It will all be okay.  I know this.

As then there was confrontation.  I get the chills just typing that word.  There is nothing that makes me feel worse than a fight.  I hate when people are mad at me.  I even hate when people I hate are mad at me.  I even hate when people I hate who are stupid idiots are mad at me, even when I know that they are stupid idiots.  OY.  Exhausting.

Recently, I have learned that confrontation and I are not friends because I conditioned myself to be an enabler.  I enable bad behavior, rude treatment and pure insanity to avoid altercations.  I spent years lying and over-promising to get out of necessary conversations and conflict, "You aren't treating me right...", "I feel what you are doing is unethical", "Why are you going behind my back when I can help you."  I would have rather kept silent than be on any one's radar.  This is not a good way to live life as an active participant.

Since I have moved, I have been working on this.  If I can't do something for someone, I don't.  If someone is trying to take their bad day out on me for something that isn't my fault, I ask them.  If I make a mistake, I admit it and own it and find a solution rather than running away like I used to.

Confrontation isn't such a bad thing.  I mean, without it, my favorite channel in the world, Bravo, would never exist.  Their entire program lineup is just confrontation videotaped in different cites....

Pineapple Express

Do you know that the pineapple is the symbol of hospitality?

I am moving to a place that has pineapples everywhere.  Tons of hospitality.  Dripping, just like the pineapple fountain that can be found downtown....and I AM LOVING IT!

This weekend, I attended a very special family event with Crush.  One of his siblings got married and I was his date and it was just what I needed to reaffirm my feelings for him.  My true love.  We ate, we celebrated a milestone, we chatted with old and new friends.....I saw him in social situations and I fell a bit more in love with him as we danced beneath a blanket of southern stars.  It was hospitality at its finest ALL weekend and it made me realize that I can do my job and love it all over again like I used to.  It isn't the job, it is the place I live in.  I simply need this change.  It will do wonders for me: mind, body, and spirit.

September cannot come soon enough.

I realize that all of my doubts, my fears, my frustration...well, it is all because I am nervous about this move.  This BIG life change.  This major transition from Yankee to southerner....but, well, I have never felt more at home than I do in my new almost city.  It feels so right, I cried on the plane coming home today because I miss Crush already and because I know my life is moving in the direction I always dreamed it would.

For a long time, I gave up on love.  I didn't think I would find a man that would want to marry me, but I did.  And he makes me a better person and I make him a better person and it has all been so easy that I have been freaking out the last few weeks. I have been thinking, where is the catch?  What I am missing?  How and why do I deserve this?

And yes, I hit the jackpot for me.  I did.  I really really did.  Crush isn't perfect.  But, I do believe he is perfect for me.  He does stupid things.  He annoys me.  He frustrates me.  And yes, he is a slob.  But, I am an often obnoxious, sometimes depressed, emotional binge eater who cries during Real Housewives reunions.....

On my way out to the wedding, I was waiting for my flight at my gate and a beautiful little baby girl about 9 months old kept making those flirty baby eyes at me and then crawling over to my seat and giggling and cooing at me...it happened at least 10 times.  Her parents kept apologizing, but I loved it.  I love babies.  Her parents said, "she usually isn't so friendly like this"....I hear this a a lot with babies, I will admit they are drawn to me and I consider it to be a huge honor...little miracles they are.  Well, airport baby had a very special name....the same one that my maternal grandmother had and the name of the town I will be living in eventually in my new state and let me tell you it is a rare name.....it is also the name of a city that Crush's sister will be visiting in Italy on her honeymoon......I love when things like this happen.

More to share soon and good night!  

Mean Girls and A Pack of Wolves and Lessons Learned

I spend too much time wondering what people think about me.

Lately, I have gotten a bit over myself and dried my eyes and realized that if I am talking shit about someone, they are probably talking shit about me.  What goes around, comes around, and it is life.

I have recently been practicing holding my tongue a bit.  Censoring myself.  This mostly comes to not saying things like, "the barrista liked you, I could tell, he was just staring at the huge bulge in your pants and it made me very proud to be with you, " in front of Crush while he buys me my vanilla latte.  Sometimes I get a bit carried away.  And Crush wears his jeans a little snug.....my bestie calls them "Texas Jeans" and she is from Texas, so she would know.  There is nothing quite as nice as fitted (NOT TIGHT) jeans on a man....YUM YUM YUM!  Strong thighs and a cute tush....bring it on.

Growing up in the neighborhood I grew up in really messed me up.  Like A LOT.  I was much happier before I moved to the place where my parents (and me) still live now.  I never really fit in, in my heart, even though I was popular off and on.  As soon as I had the chance to flee to college, I never looked back.  I stopped returning calls from high school friends, I didn't visit them at their new schools, I changed my phone number, and I didn't come home much for college breaks including summers.  I NEVER wanted to come back and yet I did, 5 years after I began college, I came home to work in the city close to my parents and start my real adult life.  My heart was never in it.

This place, the place I get to leave in 8 months (WHOOT) is the silliest.  People live WAY beyond their financial means to impress, they all like the same ugly things, no one has an original thought, and everyone starves themselves.  People who are "best friends" sleep with each other's husbands, they wear the same clothes as their children, and they party all the time....

Clue: Mean Girls the movie was based on where I grew up and yes, it is just that pathetic. Everyone grows up together, goes to college together, moves back together, marries each other, and then publicly divorces in the most hateful and cruel ways.  It equals my version of HELL.

I always yearned to go somewhere warmer, to be free of the pack mentality that my little neighborhood provides.  The hungry wolves who eat each other's souls instead of eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Even at 10 when I arrived from the East coast, it all felt so silly, so empty, so stupid.....but, I felt that I had to change myself to fit in rather than be who I really was...the person that just started to truly emerge in the last year.

There were two girls that made my life HELL growing up.  One I call The Bitch and the other I call The Snake.  These two....if I saw them to this day, my heart would drop and the blood in my veins would turn to ice, I just HATE them.

A little back story....

Bitch and I became friends in 5th grade, went to the same Hebrew school, she was kind and sweet and VERY needy and meek as a little one.  But, she needed the POWER.  The boys, the girls, the older kids...she liked conflict and drama.  These are the things I have always hated.  I knew the minute I left the room, Bitch would scheme and rally a plan against me....to bring me down to make me feel like a nothing.  Everyone got a turn in our group and mine came often.

Snake and I became friends in 8th grade.  My mom met her mom through a business interaction and her mom begged my mom to have her included in our group.  Meh, it was super awkward.  Especially because I always felt very weird being alone with Snake......she was just not like the other girls I was used to hanging out with.  No one wanted her to come and everyone, mostly Bitch, made my life hell because my mom was making me bring Snake around to our sleepovers and trips to mall.  You all know where this is going right.....?

Bitch and Snake became best friends and who was kicked out, why yes, me.  I have never truly forgiven my mom for this...I know, I like to hold on to things....but, I promise you all, I will never interfere with friend politics one day when I have children.  Sometimes I like to think about what high school would have been like if Snake wasn't around.

Snake and Bitch were then inseparable.  They also became anorexic together (the true standard of beauty in my neighborhood is simply who is the skinniest, horse faces aside).  They left everyone else out.  The started rumors about me....one being that I was a lesbian which is ironic and I will touch on that later in this post.

When they got caught with booze or pot, it was always mine and everyone believed I was this super bad kid that I wasn't.  I truly didn't even know how to get the pot they were smoking.....people's parents began to not want me around.  I had this bad reputation for nothing.  My vices were Hershey Bars and Fritos.

One day when Bitch's brother drove us home from school....I realize now that it was a set up, he started in on how he was going to go to the cops because he found MY POT in Bitch's room and he didn't like my influence on her and I should thank him for not going to the authorities because Bitch begged him not to and then he called me a "fat cunt" and stopped the car in the middle of a busy street and told me to get out.  It was December and freezing and he was home from college for Xmas break...he was a sophomore in college and I was a sophomore in high school......and I didn't tell my parents because I knew my dad would go over to his house and kick his ass and come after winter break...it would make it all so much worse when I had to return to school.  It wasn't my pot of course, it never was.

Sidenote: Once, when I was in college, I saw Bitch's brother smoking pot at a concert and went right up to him and told him I was going to call the cops.  He looked at me blankly, stoned out of his mind trying to place what I was saying and who I was (I was quite thin at the time) and I walked away......I am sure he had no idea the emotional damage he did to me when he kicked me out of the car. To this day, being called a "fat cunt" something that sadly happens from time to time with clients (because some are from my neighborhood and I won't work with them anymore for the most part...but, fat cunt seems like a really popular insult around here) triggers something inside of me that keeps me in bed for days.

Bitch and Snake told people I said things about them that I never did.  I woke up one day without any friends, it was like a nightmare.  Oh my, if there was Facebook....it would have been epic, the level of bullying these 2 would have done.  I am glad there wasn't because I don't know if I would have survived.  I hated confrontation and still do.  I didn't know how to handle all of this nastiness.

I will say, after a while, I let them win and disappeared.  I made friends from other schools.  I turned to books and food.  This is the time I truly began to cope by eating and not feeling.  To top it off, my mom's brother was having a nervous breakdown and declared bankruptcy and I didn't feel like I could really burden my parents with my drama.  Especially because my uncle was living in my house at the time.  I became utterly depressed and didn't really talk about it.  I stocked up on junk food at the local convenience store and got into bed and read YM and Jane and cried and ate Cheetos.  I felt like a failure.  Instead of rocking grades and whatnot, I started really slipping.  I felt like if I couldn't have friends.....I couldn't have any other success in life.

After high school as I mentioned earlier, I disappeared.  I went to college broken.  But, I made real friends.  A few who I love and cherish like sisters to this day.  I didn't believe I was worthy of friends because of high school, but I made them. I also reconnected with a best friend from junior high in my early 20's and we are super close to this day as well...oh how I missed her.  Bitch and Snake first kicked her out of the group before they did me in....It kept me up nights on end before we reconnected, why didn't I just stick up for her.

We went to our 10 year high school reunion together and none of the mean girls could show their faces.  Karma is truly a Bitch.

Bitch once invited me out sophomore year of college when I was home for a few days over Xmas break.  I saw it as a peace treaty and I accepted.  She never picked me up.  I remember when I got her on the phone a few days later, I told her every single thing I thought abut her.  This had been on the tip of my tongue for over 10 years at the time.  All she said was sorry and hung up.  I think my boldness surprised her into silence.  To this day, I have never seen her.  God has protected me.

Snake called me junior year of college after stalking my mom for weeks for my cell phone number.  She apologized and wanted to see what was new with me....I told her honestly and openly that she will always know inside what she did to me and I will always question why, but I don't ever want to be friends with her and I couldn't accept her apology because I genuinely felt she was apologizing for her....for a deeper reason....it seemed so insincere.  I have seen her twice by accident and both times she scurried away from me.

3 years after she called me, Snake married her high school sweetheart (a TOTAL douche who I see from time to time and think very little of) only to divorce him rather messily a few years after that because she finally came out and is now in a loving relationship with a woman.  To this day, I think she called me in college to confide that to me, that she was attracted to women and not men.  I think she knew inside that I wouldn't have judged her and I would have supported her.  I would have.

And bingo!  There is was, the secret, the thing that never seemed right.  Bitch and Snake loved each other.  I knew they had threesomes with people in high school at drunk parties and had this secret bond of sorts and now I truly believe it was because they were absolutely in love with each other and didn't want me to find out.  When I was invited to a party, they would call me and tell me I couldn't come because the host said no fat girls aloud.  When I wanted to go to a concert, they said I couldn't come because all the parents hated me because I was a "bad kid."  When I wanted to go shopping with them after school, they said I would stretch out the clothes....I was a size 8-10 btw...

Because well, I would have been THE PERSON who would have said something heartless, careless, and bold without even thinking about it. I would have exposed them without even realizing I was doing it.  I think they feared my mouth as much as I feared their torment.  As a team, they stuck it to me before I ever had the chance to call them out.  But, I do think I would have figured it out in real time, I am perceptive that way and I think they knew it.

Years later, I will never accept them or acknowledge them, but I understand.  I know that being different in high school is hard, even if you are the most popular girls in the grade.

And now I try to keep my words firmly placed in my mouth when they need to stay there.  High school is nothing if it doesn't teach you life lessons.