on relationships...

AzureLunatic (11:56:00 PM): ...it's odd.
AzureLunatic (11:56:14 PM): I tend to go for older men with less experience.
AzureLunatic (11:56:31 PM): I guess that makes it more "civic duty" than "robbing the cradle" ...

Ants in my Panties

Apparently my cleaning efforts last night were all for naught. I woke up to Nephew being noisy in the living room before leaving with Mommy for preschool and work. As I groggily moved myself around in preparation to get dressed, I noticed a sharp stinging pain in my thumb. Ant bite, yep. I squashed the bugger and kept on getting dressed.

When I went to get my backpack I saw ants all over it. Skreeked, panicked, dumped the thing out on my bed. All over everything, the research paper reference books, everything. Packed what I needed back in, grabbed the bottle of benadryl pills, head to school. Fume at Darkside for a while. ("What's the matter, Lunatic? Ants in your panties?" "Let me hug you and share the joy.") I think the crisis is over -- no. Ants fall off my shirt to the table. I smash them. Backpack is still infested.

I itch like hell. Darkside has been laughing at me all morning. I flipped him off, he said, "No thank you," and I punched him. I usually don't punch hard. Today I wasn't punching hard either, but I was pissed, and I guess I startled him. His chair skidded away a few feet when I connected solidly with his ribs.

The last time someone's punched him that hard was sometime back in his school years when someone was trying to beat the shit out of him.

Darkside shared with me the story of how he was about Nephew's size and stood on an anthill... he had ants in his pants, his shirt, his socks, anywhere an ant could be, it was.... I laughed at him, a little, and smashed more ants on my backpack.

Happy Frickin' Birthday.

Well, I found out what it is.

It's the package of cookies I left in my backpack for lunch at work about a week ago.

It's been invaded, and it's in the *other* pocket of the backpack, the one I didn't dump out.

Good gods.

Now I think I'll go roll up my sleeves and dump the swarming horrors in the trash.

Drugs and abuse (or not)

Took some benadryl to help with all the itching from the ant bites. Began wandering around the school in a not entirely conscious fashion. Sought out Adam and leaned against him, wrapping my arms around him and setting my face against his chest. He held me while I almost fell over.

Dawn came in to that lab, and I spent an entertaining hour with her in the cafeteria, explaining in words of one syllable (because that's all my mind was capable of producing) why exactly Darkside's relationship with me is not abusive. She was concerned, because I was showing her the place on my leg where there will be a bruise where Darkside kicked. She started asking pointed questions, and I saw this and explained.

It's not abusive because it's a stretching of the limitations of our bodies (the martial arts aspects of it) and the bruises and such are mere scuff-marks incurred in the doing of this. It's not abusive because he and I both know that he would never actually harm me or do to me anything that I did not give him permission to do, nor would I to him.

There are things that he could (but would not, not ever!) say that would be abusive, if he said them. He hasn't said those. He hasn't exploited my body, my friendship, my love for him, my mind. He gives back in equal measure, and when I am falling, he catches me and makes me whole again, or at least heals some of the cracks. I've had relationships where the other partner did not do that. That time -- the young man never struck me, but he diminished me, and hurt me in ways that did not show on my skin, and I'm still recovering from it. Darkside makes me more myself. I don't need Darkside. I'd be hurt terribly if he uprooted our friendship, but everything he and I do together is because it makes us happy to be this way.

S* never struck me, but abused me. Darkside strikes me every day, but has never abused me.

Physically, yes, I do take a roughing-up, but so does everybody who plays a rough-and-tumble sport.

Mentally, Darkside has showed me the path to heal myself more than any one other person has been able to do.

Emotionally, this is one of the closer, more loving, more intellectually satisfying, friendships I've ever had.

Debug successful.

After doing that, I did find Adam and collapsed at him, then I had a long monologue at one of Darkside's name-clones (I scared the poor guy). Then I ate lunchish breakfast thing with Dawn.

Talking at cross-purposes

What irritates the holy living fuck out of me is when someone ends up having a serious conversation with me, at length, when my mind's only half there.

It doesn't help either when the person on the other end of the conversation is an opinionated person who's more than five years older and loves to hold forth on subjects that he knows more about than you do.

It really doesn't help when he is mistaken in names -- and when he doesn't know the people he's talking about, never met either the one he thinks the person is nor the actual person... and it doesn't help either that I'm still high from the combination of benadryl and three hours in a programming trance without proper preparation (still with the antihistamines in my system, making me foggy and disaware) -- and I can't summon the words or the mindpower to interrupt and say "Hey! We're not talking about the same person here!"

...nor the mindpower to say "No, that's not what I meant."

My mind's still mostly gone.