Monday evening roundup and ramble

Sleeping pills do very little other than mess with your body.

I have to admit, I don't understand why some of this stuff is considered bragging. Then again, I'm not on Facebook; I gather that if you are, you're setting yourself up for hearing other people share this stuff. I think someone expressing appreciation for the 'best birthday gift from the best husband ever' is just sweet; I doubt the accused is actually out to empirically designate her husband the best ever, and if she is, good for her: let her (him) set a high standard. I feel like people who complain about that kind of thing are the same people who complain about how their friends' weddings make them feel pathetic. If you can't feel happy for the people in your life and celebrate meaningful events with them without making it about you, the problem is you and not your friends. For those about to accuse me of hypocrisy, since you've heard me complain about parents who brag about their kids, keep in mind that I was talking about a certain set of bragging parents. I care about my friends' kids, and they don't brag so much as share. There's a difference between a friend sharing in a positive moment or a child's epiphany, and someone you barely know lecturing you about how brilliant her kid is (and yes, I've been a victim of the latter, more than once).

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On Day 5 sans wisdom teeth, I went to work for the first time and even did a light workout. I felt like I had to: I wanted to feel my muscles move, after four days of lounging around. As far as I can tell, nothing (i.e., no blood clots) budged during the workout.

After the workout, I caught up with a friend in the locker room. We talked about getting older in general, and in particular, going gray and seeing our facial structures change. I told her about the part of “Celeste and Jesse Forever” where Celeste describes the woman she sees her ex with as “a younger me.” To which my friend said she'd heard about the film but was wary, because of the very review I discussed on these pages yesterday. I told her that the film was cute and funny, but yeah, the message that the woman had to try harder to accommodate the man-child in her life, as Ann Hornaday impeccably phrased it, was disturbing. I'd like to think that maybe the message was that they both should have tried harder, but that we see the toll on the female protagonist because women tend to take more responsibility, engage in more self-blame, when relationships go bad.

I think I've written about how the biggest issue with a lot of dating advice out there is that it's geared to women from the perspective that men will be boys, and it's up to us to accommodate their bad behavior. If we freak out because they're putting us in a position to freak out, we're not understanding men's nature and we're threatening the relationship. Well, who started the cycle?? More importantly, why is it on us to manage it? Maybe--as I also wrote on these pages, as another friend just reminded me--that relationship was doomed, so why give women a complex about how they killed it because they didn't adequately read the male mind? You, my readers, offered that priceless wisdom when I was banging my head against the wall over the relationship advice I was getting: pay it no mind, because it won't matter with the right guy, in the right relationship.

My friend at the gym talked about how “I should just try harder” runs into natural limits; it only makes you crazy. I told her about the epiphany I had many years ago, a year after I got out of a dead-end relationship, months (of trying harder) later than I should have. The epiphany hit as Jay and I were hiking on Mt. Charleston, outside of Vegas. We thought we were on a promising trail and kept trying different paths that we thought were the continuation of the trail. We tried and tried and tried, but never got anywhere. It turned out that we had taken the wrong trail head, and so no path would have gotten us on the right track. How analogous: when you're in the wrong relationship, the whole relationship is a maze of wrong ways; no amount of trying will get you on the right track.

In my case--the more recent one--trying harder not only kept me stuck, but made things worse. Trying harder manifested itself in convincing myself that I was at peace with things I couldn't actually accept. This made me feel like I was sacrificing, which, in turn--and perhaps this was going on on both sides--skewed the proverbial half-way point, and the frustration of sacrificing without being met remotely half-way, I later saw, brought out bad behavior (but in fairness to me and fidelity to the topic, the other person's bad behavior also brought out my bad behavior). In the end, trying harder—and the strain it put on me, and the outward manifestations of that strain—ended the relationship in its own way, because the relationship was bound to end. It was the wrong path. And so was Celeste's. I can see how her pain would have had her think, "I wish I had fought for it," but she had to know that no amount of fighting for it, would have fixed it.