Mathheads (particularly DISCO whores): I’m curious as hell as to whether Scott has an answer (or even a start) for a theoretically unanswerable problem.

I’m also expanding my opnion of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof from “nice entry” to “damned awesome blog”. Her post on her friend AB had my head spinning.

I know what it’s like to never let a single soul push you around or bring you down, to challenge everyone and everthing and stand your ground and then one day wonder how you got to where you are, sitting on the floor feeling like nothing but death. Death of yourself, wishing death on the road as he is driving home. Horrible, wasted, lifeless thoughts. Not because the world is a cold place, not for any loss that you’ve suffered, but for what you’ve become to yourself.

No one can make you, but they can break you, if you let them.

How is that not simply awesome writing? Spinning, I tell you. My head feels like a hard drive…

Sunray recently posted “Venting”. The concept is simple–address 11 people in your life and tell them something that you might not otherwise say to their face, without naming names.

I’m feeling dangerous tonight. I like this concept, but for time’s and sleep’s sake, I’m only doing about 8 of them.

1. In your mental comparisons of me to others in order to classify me, I don’t think you realized that I am me and exactly what that entails. Your mixture of tough love followed by praise has helped create a woman who praises too late; who scares others with the criticisms that people always think she is blunting; who is frequently deaf herself to praise; who takes to heart too many failures; who struggles not to redefine “failure” in a mixture of a desire to remain true to her standards and of a desire to find and quantify in very real, very practical terms her breaking point; who is ashamed of her desire for a little relief from the things that bother her that “shouldn’t”. I am not created of only your contribution, and it has taken me twenty years to be able to understand what that means to me and how it manifests itself. I’m done with blame, and I’m done with hate, but until my softer and less responsible and less practical sides can be acknowledged and accepted before they are disapproved of, I’m also done with effort.
2. ave such beautiful lines. I see you every day, and every day I never fail to watch you. The way you walk, the way your clothes drape your body, the way you greet me–a perfect stranger in the night–the way your eyes connect with mine and the way you will never fail to notice me across a room and the angular build of your body that I suspect belies a sinewy strength. The straight lines of your face and body humorously contrast those of your hair, which is curly and long, not unlike that of a friend of mine from home. When we pass each other in the wee hours of the morning, I wonder if you can read the exhaustion that has sent me from the sanctuary of my home-away-from-home to the dark nook that is my bed. I wonder what you’re doing up at those hours just as much as I wonder if you wonder what I’m doing up. When I see you, I feel a little more at peace, a little more okay at being out in the cold at lonely hours.
3. I can’t imagine the thing that will break our relationship, unless we allow time and distance to do it for us. Our friendship is the most rock-solid thing in my life I have helped create and perpetuate, and when I think of acceptance, our better moments are often the ones I think about. You were the first to help me redefine my interpersonal boundaries and ideas of what’s appropriate and acceptable, and that set me up for some interesting experiences then and in later years. I marvel at your ability to focus and put energy into more than one person or interest at a time so that no one feels neglected while I still find myself gut-wrenchingly needing to disassociate when I am away from those I love for more than a week. I’ll always count myself as extremely mature for the mere fact that I’ve never been bitter or jealous of your other relationships.
4. You scare me. Very rarely have I ever wished for someone to turn their attention away from me completely, but not only you see into too many of my depths without having to ask a single goddamn question, but you paint my sicknesses in a light that attempts to make them beautiful. I don’t ever want to become complacent like that; I want to be pushed to grow and change and improve. I will not let you push your lack of impetus on me; it would be worse than death.
5. Ours is more of a love-hate relationship than I think you realize. I love that you have the power to make me question particular boundaries; I hate when I find the need to redefine those in a protective manner to spare myself hurt. I love my vulnerability; I hate my vulnerability and the lack of yours. I love our fun; I hate our lack of responsibility, because it does not bode well for our success. I’ve recently come to realize that ours is a freight train of a relationship that may jump its tracks tomorrow or any number of months from now, and my defenses are rising faster than anyone around me has realized or can calculate. A defensive Lissa is a vicious Lissa, however, and that alone may break us if I am not careful.
6. You taught me more fully about my other half. I listened to you talk about women and jobs and what you will do and avoiding talking about what you are doing and I found myself quantifying how large that sphere of influence is in my life. The amount of time I have spent among you and yours has been disproportionately small compared to that spent with the other side, but I can now look at some aspects of myself and see them not as anomalies, but as perfectly normal and expected.
7. You are a puzzle to me. Intellectual enough to be able to (and willing to) cater to my curiosity, obscure enough that I have trouble finding and wording questions to ask. I don’t know where our boundaries are, and ours is one of the few relationships I’m in where my people-skills outweigh the other’s. I want to poke into the depths of your self-esteem and deeper thoughts and the layers of your love-life, but I very much don’t want to bruise. I feel like there’s a lot more vulnerability in you than you let on, and I find myself being protective of that.
8. It would be awesome if we could not talk every time you see me. I do not always want to be greeted, or asked how my day went, or asked what I’m doing and where I’m going. Yes, it is bitchy of me to say and think such things when you’re just being polite, but our worlds really don’t overlap that much, and I like it that way. When I feel like talking and have exhausted my other, more preferred, options for idle chit-chat, you’ll be the first one I look up, since you always seem ready for a conversation. Until then, please shut the fuck up. Thanks.