Relationships

When did dating get so hard?  There are now multiple mediums to contact someone, so how do we know anymore what is the appropriate amount of contact?  What does a text mean, is it ok to text often?  Does it mean something that all conversations and plans are made by text?  I can't remember the last time I just had a genuine conversation on the phone with a friend.  I recently broke up with my boyfriend and we talked on the phone, but also on Skype and through email.  Now I am single in this new digital world.  I've been single before, but I was still in school so finding a relationship wasn't hard.  All of my real boyfriends have been through some connection while I was at school.  I wasn't allowed to date until I was 16, but my first "real" boyfriend Erick was in one of my classes, as well as my second ever high school boyfriend Doug.  My college boyfriend I met through my sorority, my law school boyfriend I met through my landlord and my most recent ex was my friend in law school.  Now, something like 50% of relationships are made through the internet.  Match.com, plentyoffish, eharmony, ok cupid etc.  What happened to meeting someone organically anymore? 

I don't know when is the right time to date again, I have had mixed feelings about all relationships one I get out of them.  My high school boyfriends I wouldn't call exactly real relationships.  We weren't making plans around each other about going to college, although I know a lot of people have.  My mother forbade any such talk like that, and now I understand why.  Boys are distracting.  The hurricane Katrina of my relationship was Aaron, the man I loved more than anything my sophomore year and part of my junior year of college.   When he broke up with me I thought my world was going to end.  I looked at my life and didn't know where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.  Finally my mom snapped some sense into me and gave me a purpose, stick with the law school plan.  After Aaron I planned to take some time off, find a job, but that would have been the end of any further education for me so I'm glad I had my forward-thinking mother around.  I cried all day and felt like life would never go on.  It was dumb, I was young, I thought I would get married right out of college and life would be great.  I think there should be a ban on anyone getting married younger than 25, and even that's pretty young in my opinion.  Eventually life did go on, I was able to breathe a little bit easier as the days went by, and even found myself having a chuckle every once in awhile, I had forgotten what the sound of my laughter sounded like, and I liked it, I began to see that I had a purpose, to go to law school, and this dulled the pain.

My next boyfriend, Adam, was a funny guy but we were all wrong for each other.  Once again my mother worried, she heard me talking nonsense about maybe staying in Upstate New York (have you ever spent a winter in Upstate, if you have, you would know I was CRAZY to think such things).  I was going to live the small town life.  The problem was, Adam and I fought like cats and dogs, I never really understood why, I'm not a confrontational person but everything I did seemed to be wrong, no I couldn't go out drinking with my friends, or talk to boys in my classes.  Everything just seemed wrong.  I was glad that relationship ended, but still a little sad, he always made me laugh and his friends were a lot of fun, it helped ease the loneliness I felt at law school, a place where most of the people were unbearable.

My most recent relationship was with Don, a sweet caring boy who I cared about very much.  Our relationship went in fast forward though.  He confessed he had feelings for me since the first day of law school and I was flattered.  We stayed together through one of the hardest times in our life, the dreaded bar.  The fundamental problem with our relationship was that he was taking the bar in California and I was taking the Texas bar.  He was wonderful, attentive, nice, but something just didn't feel right about it. We dated a month, then endured a long hard summer, he visited for a week and then a few weeks, but we were talking about moving in together and he would have to be away from his whole family, and he was really close to his parents.  Everything just got so real.  I had to take a good hard look at my life and think, much too early, is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?  I knew that if I let him take the bar here and move here, I would never get out, even if it felt wrong, because I would feel too guilty.  I had to end the relationship, as hard as it was.  I honestly feel a little relieved to be out of the relationship.  I knew it wasn't right but I thought what's wrong with me that I don't want to be with a perfectly nice and caring guy?  I knew though that my heart of hearts wasn't in it and I couldn't do that to him, he deserves so much better.  I had to let him go and I knew how much it would hurt him.  That's what I feel the worst about, I feel relieved because a lot of pressure is taken off me by making this decision.  I knew I made the right decision, but I also know he is hurting like I was hurting with Aaron.  In this situation I am Aaron and he is me.  I wonder if Aaron felt the relief I did when he broke up with me.  It's the relief of knowing that you are no longer with the wrong person.  As much as I cared about Don and no matter how wonderful he was, he just wasn't my Mr. wonderful.  He will most certainly be someone else's Mr. Wonderful, and I hope that day is close for him.

I am now single, in supposedly the best place to be single.  I wonder where they get that notion, the best place to be single.  I work, I know people, but I don't know enough people I guess, don't have quite enough friends.  I guess that's something I'll have to figure out now, since being in a relationship is so safe.  You make plans because you can, and you have someone to make them with.  Now I am planless and relatively alone. 

Voice-Overs

Some of my favorite shows involve voice-overs.  Sometimes I wish my life had a narrator, to  bring the lessons I learned come full circle from a simple quote.  One of my favorite shows with a voice-over is not in fact Sex and the City, although I will say I did love a lot of those episodes.

My favorite voice-over show and all around show for great quotes is a little known Canadian show called Being Erica.  Her life is a mess but her therapist, Dr. Tom, always sheds light on the situation with a great quote.  Voice-overs and quotes are great because they give a kind of perspective that you might not have seen, if only real life was like that.

Here are some of my favorite Dr. Tom quotes, I hope you find them as inspiring as I do.

"Labels are for cans, not people." Anthony Rapp.

They say love is friendship set on fire. And if you're lucky enough to find someone you can give yourself to, mind, body and soul, you should hold on, and hope like hell you don't get burned.

"There is no try, only do.”  Yoda

"You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses." Zig Ziglar

"There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen.

If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere.  (Rabindranath Tagore)

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.  (Baruch Spinoza)

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. (Albert Einstein)

Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make. (Abraham Lincoln)

Pressure makes diamonds. (General George S. Patton)

The life which is unexamined is not worth living. (Plato)

We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. (John Halt)

Those that fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. (Winston Churchill)

No party is fun, unless seasoned with folly. (Desiderius Erasmus)

Learn to be what you are, and learn to resign with good grace all that you are not. (Henry Frederick Emile)

It takes a lot of courage to grow up and be who you really are. (EE Cummings)

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

Your parents will mess you up. They don't mean to, but they do it anyway. (Philip Larkin)

"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how
things may be, to see them as they are." Samuel Johnson

"Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you acted." (Bob Dylan)

"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart."

Albert Camus

"Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable."

Coco Chanel

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."

Winston Churchill

"All truths are easier to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

Galileo Galilei

"There is no shame in not knowing. The shame lies in not finding out."

Russian Proverb

"Did you know that talking as a means of resolving conflict actually goes against every biological instinct that we have? You know, we feel threatened and so we fight. Or if we don’t have the stomach for that, we run."

Dr. Tom

"Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence."

Martin Luther King

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

William Shakespeare

"Every action has a reaction."

Isaac Newton

"To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence."

Mark Twain

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

Albert Camus

"Chasing the past, she stumbled into the future."

T.A. Sachs

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one’."

C.S. Lewis



Traffic

Every morning and every night I walk my dogs.  The recently adopted Gigi is a gem but the transition from farm to home wasn't the easiest for her.  Gigi is a border collie/dachshund mix and probably one of the sweetest dogs I've ever met.  To get some of the energy out I take them on walks in my apartment complex.  I understand traffic in the morning, people work all different hours and have appointments in the morning etc., it's the night traffic that makes me wonder.  Tonight I walk my dogs a little later than normal.  It is 10:25 on a Tuesday night and I see not one, two or three cars leaving, but FOUR cars leaving the complex.  It makes me wonder, are they going to work?  Are they going out?  To a significant other's house?  Late night grocery shopping?  What in the world are these people doing at 10:25 on a Tuesday?  If you know me I often make the same rant about traffic.  I have never understood traffic and probably never will.  I wish I could go on one of those traffic helicopters to figure it out.  I completely understand why the right lane has traffic with people exiting and running into lights, but why is the fast lane stopped as well?  Where is the source of all this madness?  I wish I had the answer.  There are probably thousands of studies being conducted every day, why can't someone conduct a study on why there is traffic and where people are going.  Usually as I sit in traffic on what I thought would be the perfect time to leave I think about getting out of the car, tapping on someone's window, and asking them what they are doing and where they are going.  Someone, for the love of pete, please conduct a study for me!  I wish Austin had a good transportation system like the subway, I would ride that to work every day as long as it ran at a decent hour.  Oh people in traffic, where are you going?  I guess the answer is nowhere.

Welcome Y'all!

This is the first blog I have ever done so bare with me.  I've been seeing blogs everywhere, it seems like everyone I know has a blog so I thought it might be interesting to start one.  I have no preconceived notions that anyone is actually going to read this blog but sometimes I have thoughts in my head that I want to express and this is the perfect outlet.  I guess this is the part where I talk about myself.  I was born in Groton, Connecticut; moved to Silverdale, Washington at age 2;  San Antonio,Texas 4-8; Nampa, Meridian, Eagle, Idaho 8-18; Austin, Texas 18-22; Syracuse, New York 22-25 and finally back to Austin, Texas.  I majored in Goverment with a minor in Business Foundations at the University of Texas and went to law school at Syracuse University.  I am lucky enough to have a job here in Austin, I work as a patent litigator which sounds a lot fancier than it really is.  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love doing it, but sometimes researching all day takes its toll.  I know I get a lot of flexibility at my job so for that I am extremely grateful.  I have one dog who is a chihuahua/poodle mix named Swift.  He's basically the light of my life.  I am in the process of adopting another dog, more on that later.  I am also in a long distance relationship.  I absoltely love the man but boy are long distance relationships hard!  I miss him every day.  In our profession there is no simple way to move to a different state.  You either have to be practicing for a consecutive 5 years or you have to re-take the bar exam in that state.  Oh yeah, he's an attorney as well, we met in law school (something I've always wanted to say!).  So Don and I (that's the boy's name) are kind of stuck.  Since I'm currently the one with the job it makes the most sense for him to move, but who knows where life can bring you.  So this is my blog, I will probably write things that don't make sense to others or go off on rants or not finish my thoughts, but this is my blog and I guess I can do whatever I want with it.  Until next time cyberworld...