Sitting in the boyfriend's apartment drinking Miller High Life (the champagne of beers) at 2:45pm on a Thursday afternoon and eating the leftovers of someone else's Hamburger Helper I continue to wonder if life will ever realign with expectations. I'm a bit confused how after eight years my vegetarianism so completely vanished. I blame the convenience factor. And the boyfriend. Always the boyfriend.
In which order to I wish to bitch electronically today? So when I met the boyfriend my freshman year of college (cue flashback music) five years ago, we were on a trip to Virginia, Minnesota with his boyfriend at the time who I'd been fooling around with after meeting online. Matt was coming down from meth, which I didn't learn until a few years later, and Ty hadn't told Matt we were fooling around. Matt was this tweaky almost-anorexic little 19 year old making fun of me for going to college and talking about David Lynch. I was the 18 year old college freshman, six hours from home, who'd made three friends at school and met a string of boys from the internet. A week later Matt and I were fooling around too. This is a story I tell often, as if continued recitation will make it more understandable.
I didn't even know what an open relationship was when I met Ty. He seemed sweet until I learned the bit about having a boyfriend. (Oh dear, I suddenly had a flash of where this is going). Matt was the first, and still the only (minus one big gay midwestern college conference experience) boy to ever show interest in me that I hadn't met through the internet. And technically, since I met his boyfriend online, he's only one step removed.
Anyway, freshman year progressed with me floating in and out of their relationship all the while having various awkward to traumatic meetings with internet boys. They eventually broke up in spring and I went to England the next fall, all the while maintaining contact online with Matt for whatever reason. The summer after England Matt and I seemed to be building something more than just sex, but I was for the most part busy reading Sylvia Plath, listening to the Decemberists, and updating my livejournal. At the very end of summer Matt told me he'd never dated someone who wasn't an asshole. Days later I started dating Nate, another ex-boyfriend of Matt's. That relationship was over in three weeks, pointlessly restarted, and then over in another three. Via text message.
I'd convinced myself Matt would never make a reasonable boyfriend. He was a drug taking, cigarette smoking, high school drop out living at home. By the time I was done with Nate and well into my Junior year of college, Matt had quit smoking, taken his ACT, and enrolled in college for the next fall. I was busy crashing my mom's van and carrying on a series of trysts in Minneapolis at the time and only saw Matt once. By the start of summer, it was time for my 21st birthday and Matt came out to get me drunk. All of my other friends left early in the night, leaving Matt to be the only one to take me to the bars. And then he took me home. Five days later we were officially dating, and now almost 28 months later I still have no idea what I am doing.
Part of what “allowed” me to start dating Matt and see him as something more than a fling was that he appeared to have renounced the old vices. He changed. In the course our relationship I've started drinking beer and lots of it when I never drank much to speak of prior. I've also stopped being a vegetarian, mostly at his insistence. He's recently started smoking again and despite not really giving a damn, I see it as a bad sign. Well, not a bad sign, but it sort of represents how people don't really change. Everyone backslides. I've been talking to boys online since June for the first time in years. Chicago turns out to be a bit too small, so I'm sure I'll continue to feel the waves of that dip for some time. Two years in I am questioning if I want to continue. I love Matt, but our day to day interactions are so damned boring and complacent. Marriage be damned. People need new stimulus. I know why commitment is important, so I question my current values and priorities. I feel like I've changed a lot, but I'm not sure it is all for the better. But do I give up the severely tried and tested for something novel?
On another note entirely, I started reading Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero for the first time, which is strangely enthralling.
I'm sitting in my psychiatrist's office the next day coming off from coke, sneezing blood. My psychiatrist is wearing a red V-nick sweater with nothing on underneath and a pair of cut-off jeans. I start to cry really hard. He looks at me and fingers the gold necklace that hangs from his tan neck. I stop crying for a minute and he looks at me some more and then writes something down on his pad. He asks me something. I tell him I don't know what's wrong; that maybe it has something to do with my parents but not really or maybe my friends or that I drive sometimes and get lost; maybe it's the drugs.
“At least you realize these things. But that's not what I'm talking about, that's not really what I'm asking you, not really.”
[…]
“Let's talk about something else.”
“What about me?” I scream, choking.
“Come on, Clay,” the psychiatrist says. “Don't be so…mundane.”
There seems to be a dialog into the book that's referenced almost verbatim in Nowhere by three valley girls before they're vaporized by an alien. I wish watching MTV still meant you were disaffected.
I saw a stage adaptation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore last night with a boy named Cameron. The adaptation was kind of a huge let down, with the audience laughing while Johnny Walker beheads Cats rejects. The tone was completely different from my experience with the book. There is no slapstick in my vision of Murakami. Cameron really likes theatre of the absurd. He is 27 and works as an arts administrator for a tap dance company and has an older brother who is also gay. I haven't mentioned I have a boyfriend. I need to stop doing this. The karma is starting to affect my electronics. When it comes to music and movies, Matt and I are a near perfect match. Unfortunately dragging him to a play, art opening, or museum is an intensely frustrating experience. He's going to be in school for another billion years, and he gets extremely frustrated when working and taking classes. I don't know that those are legitimate reasons to end a relationship. On the other hand, are spooning and sex reasons to keep a relationship?
This is all a bit too personal.