The Story of Shanna and Me
We met on Nerve. It turned out that she was a friend of my friend Bruce. For our first date we met up at Oceans 11 in downtown Austin, which for those of you not familiar with the place, is a tiki bar with a "rat pack" theme. When she first sat down, for a good 7 seconds, all we could do was smile at each other.As fate would have it, I just got canned from Apple that very same day. I scattered my belongings to friends' houses and took turns crashing at a couple of their houses. After a while this seemed silly to her, so we moved in together. After two months I got so anxious from not being able to find a job that I got cold and distant. It was never the same since. After that, we fell into a back-and-forth pattern of expecting affection, and the other person recoiling in a defensive posture. Bad bad bad.
When I found a job and we found a bigger place to move into, we had high hopes that a new place would also mean an escape from the resentment and psychic poison of the old place. This turned out to be true. Unfortunately, it only lasted a week. School had started by then and I was (and still am) committed to not fucking it up. In the past I have had trouble balancing my time and energy between lovers and work and school. This time was no different, but this time I decided that school would not be the one thing that got the shitty end of the stick. In my struggle for balance, she was dissatisfied with the time that we spent together, and thus dissatisfied by me.
Shanna is the first girl I've ever lived with. I'm her third or fourth. I'm afraid I didn't do a very good job of it. Holding my shit together is very important to me. She's looking to settle down. Long term. While I'd love that too, the daily effort spent keeping my priorities on school and my emotional state healthy don't leave much left over to process relationship drama (and heal poison psychic plaque). She says that she isn't even interested in salvaging a friendship. Time will tell.
And so it went, and so it goes. Continue Reading…
Posted by Administrator on Sep 28, 2002