snakemeister

Name: snakemeister
Joined On: Jun 20, 2006
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Age: 28
Occupation: IT Support
Location: Falkirk, Scotland
Currently: Offline
Last seen: 5/20/08

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10/03/08

The lesson I had to learn - 3 of 3

Last, but not least is Lynn.

She actually worked on the same floor of the office I did. I never worked with her directly, but I knew who she was. It was a few months after Jullie had fled the scene, and I honestly wasn’t looking to get hooked up again, but something just seemed to click. She had quite a bit of backstory – she’d been married, her husband had left her for another woman and there were rumours that she herself had been having an affair with a married man on our floor. My friends didn’t really think too highly of her, to be honest, and I think that added a certain ‘frission’ to things when we started flirting via email.

As is the way of these things, I can’t remember when or why we started chatting, but we began exchanging friendly emails that slowly changed to become flirtatious. Our first date was a day out to Loch Lomond, which we kept secret because we didn’t want anyone in the office knowing just yet. This was at her urging, and even though I didn’t quite see the need, I went along with it because I was daft and excited and didn’t see it for the warning sign it was. Had I told any of my friends, I’m pretty sure they would have physically restrained me.

Lynn was a few years older than me, and obviously had more life experience. I guess there was something of the rebound in there, because she was nothing like Jill or Jullie. She didn’t smoke, hardly drank, and bought her clothes almost exclusively at Marks & Spencers. ‘Nice’ is the adjective I think most people would use to describe her.

My mum never took to her, neither did our cat Tigger, both of which were more warning signs I chose to ignore. I suppose it was kind of a whirlwind – we went from almost complete strangers to dating seriously, to me declaring myself to be in love within a couple of months. Definitely something of the rebound in there. In retrospect, I think Jullie hurt me more than I realised at the time, and Lynn was a subconscious reaction to it.

Deep down, I knew things weren’t really right between us. I’m not a particularly conservative kind of guy, and I’ve always been very laid back. Lynn was rather uptight, slightly prudish (outdoors at least), and while she wasn’t high-strung, she wasn’t particularly laid-back. I think I was as much of a rebound thing for her, as she was for me. I was younger, adventurous and probably nothing whatsoever like her husband or any man she’d dated before.

As time went on, I started to see signs of some of the issues she kept hidden. If prompted, she could get pretty badly worked up about her marriage and divorce. Even though I was barely out of my teens and flat broke, she had a problem with me living with my parents, even though she was doing the same. The one time I challenged her about that, she went off on one about how ‘her house’ had been stolen by her ex, etc.
She had a weird thing about me not sleeping over at her parent’s house, even when they were away one weekend. I remember distinctly we had sex one night late on and I fell asleep afterwards (which is actually odd for me – usually I’ve got a weird rush of energy afterwards) and she woke me up about 2 in the morning, and told me I’d have to leave and she’d drive me home.

What’s funny is that her parents were really, really nice people. I think they were two of the nicest people I’ve ever met – Elizabeth (Betty) and Alan. As much as Lynn had a problem with my living arrangements, she didn’t seem to be doing much about moving out of her parent’s house herself.

Eventually things ended. There wasn’t any drama, any cheating or anything like that. She started to grow distant and pull away eventually, but I was too much of a blouse to challenge her about it, and just stuck my head in the sand. She broke things off one day (it seemed to me) out of the blue. I can’t remember what she said, but I was in tears. I’d convinced myself that were going to be together forever, so my world fell apart. I went off the rails a wee bit, started doing the Goth thing, dyed my hair black, painted my fingernails black, bought a leather trenchcoat (which I still have today). My friends ribbed me mercilessly about the whole thing, but I didn’t listen to them, I just shut myself off.

I did all the stupid things you do when you’re heartbroken. I kept a bottle of her perfume so I could smell it when I wanted to torture myself, I sat and cradled pictures of her – the whole nine yards. Soon enough, I got a grip on myself. I woke up one day and decided enough was enough. I cleared my room out completely, binned everything of hers I could find and put the whole thing behind me.

When I look back, I realise I got over Lynn quicker than I thought I could or would. For a while I worried that I hadn’t really, and that I was carrying a torch for her secretly, but now that I’ve had time to think about it I realise that it was mostly a rebound thing, as I’ve said above.

It was maybe 6 or 7 months after that when I met Morag through a mutual friend from the office. It wasn’t love at first sight, but we certainly hit it off when we met on a Wednesday night at my friend’s place. The Saturday following, our friend was going to get a tattoo – Morag was already going to go with him for some mutual support, and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind my tagging along as well so that I could spend some time with Morag. He didn’t, so I did, and the rest is history.

Posted by snakemeister @ 10:52 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

10/02/08

The lesson I had to learn - 2 of 3

Second was Jullie. That’s the correct spelling – her dad was drunk when he registered her birth. ‘Nuff said. She was a good friend of a girl I worked with at the time, Laura, who was also a very good friend of mine, one of my best friends in fact. She’d had her eye on me for a while apparently, even while she was dating a guy, Paul, who I worked with. Are you seeing a pattern here?

Jullie drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney and got stoned like it was going out of fashion. She was from one of the scummiest parts of Cumbernauld (my home town) and her brother, who was actually a really nice guy, was pretty much a layabout drug-fiend. She was also the first girl I slept with. She had her own flat in Cumbernauld, and I ended up spending a lot of time there, sleeping over for days at a time and only going home to grab new clothes and keep my parents happy by spending time in my own bed. I think we dated for about 6 months or so.

She was nice enough, and while I can’t say I was exactly head over heel for her, I liked her a lot, and she’d even given me keys to her flat. We had plenty of fun, and we spent a lot of time together with mutual friends which was great. I’d also finally managed to kick my depression into touch, and was doing large amounts of Extacy at the time, so my perceptions of how much fun it was may have been skewed somewhat.

I’m not sure if things started to get too serious for Jullie, or if she figured out that I wasn’t as interested in her as she was in me, because things came to a halt when I caught her swapping spit with another guy one night when we were all out clubbing.
It was a Friday night, and myself and ‘the guys’ had been out on our own, while ‘the girls’ had been doing the same. We met up later on in one of the many dingy clubs in Cumbernauld. Immediately I knew something was up, as Jullie was distant, wouldn’t sit near me, hardly said two words when we came in and had a face like thunder (as we say over here). I paid it no mind at first, as I was drunk and a little high, but as time went on it started to work on me, and our friends noticed it too as the atmosphere started to dampen. Eventually she staggered back from the dance floor with a stranger in tow, some guy her and her brother knew from way back and hadn’t seen in years. She paraded him round us for a bit, then dragged him away to dance with. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, getting a little annoyed at how close they were dancing, but tried to put it down to paranoia. I was wrong though, and when I was going to the toilet I saw the two of them against a wall, tongues down each other’s throat. I just walked past them, not really sure what I was going to do. On the way back out of the toilet, they’d gone. When I got back to the table we were all sitting at, Jullie was pulling her coat on, and saying that the guy (I’m not sure if I even knew his name) was leaving and she was going to walk him to the taxi rank, then go home on her own. I didn’t believe her, and felt sure she was taking this guy home with her now. I’d had my doubts about the relationship for a while, and I knew immediately that I didn’t feel like fighting for or about it, so I just nodded and let her go.

As the rest of us were leaving the club later, I took my friend Laura aside and told her what I’d seen. She wasn’t sure whether she sold believe me or not, and kept asking if I was sure about what I’d seen, but I was adamant – I knew what I’d seen. I was drunk and a little high, but not enough of either to be seeing things. Jullie denied the whole thing, but I knew what I’d seen. I suppose it gave me the excuse that I was probably looking for to get out of the relationship, but it still left me feeling pretty down. I refused to return Jullie’s phone calls for a week, and moped around the house. My mum realised something was up, but I didn’t give her any details for a couple of days. The one thing that really pissed me off was that the majority of my friends seemed to think that, even if it was true, and she had slept with the guy, that I should forgive her and move on, because I was just being stupid and should settle for what I had. Given that one of my friends had got his girlfriend pregnant then dumped her in her 8th month, and another was regularly seeing his ex – the mother of his baby girl – behind his girlfriend’s back, I wasn’t too inclined to listen to them. On of them had the nerve to give me shit after I went over to collect my stuff. I’d said to Jullie I’d come over to talk things over, but when I got there I finally realised there was nothing to say, and just handed her the set of keys she’d given me, grabbed the few belongings I had and left.

I was bummed out for a couple of months afterwards, but nothing too serious I don’t think. It hurt for a while, given that I’d lost my virginity to this girl; I caught myself almost crying once or twice, but fought them down – I wasn’t going to waste any tears on someone who treated me that way. Picking through the rubble with Laura later, she mentioned that Jullie had told her she was worried the relationship was getting too serious too fast, and that she was thinking about slowing things down. Well, her methods may have been unconventional, but they were certainly effective

Posted by snakemeister @ 4:48 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

10/01/08

The lesson I had to learn - 1 of 3

Here's a new one for you, gentle readers - a multi-parter. I'd written the lot up, intending to post it as one chunk, but at 2414 words, it would be a bit much I think, so I'll split it up into three parts, which fits the subject matter perfectly, as you'll see. Don't worry, this first part is only a couple of hundred words.

As I was driving in to the office this morning, Madonna’s ‘Power of Goodbye’ came on the radio. I’m not really a fan of Madonna, but one of the lyrics stuck in my head, “You were the lesson I had to learn.” It got me thinking about my ex-girlfriends, and I thought I would share them with you.

First up we have Jill. I think I was 20 when we hooked up. She was the youngest sister of a woman, Elaine, whom I worked with at the time, and we’d met at Elaine’s birthday party. We chatted for a while, but I didn’t really think we ‘clicked’ or that I’d made an impression. Turns out I was wrong, and on the Monday following, her sister-in-law asked me if I wanted to meet Jill again, I said yes and handed over my mobile phone number.

Jill was a year or two younger than I was, and fancied herself as a bit of a Goth. She was also pretty hot, and I had no idea why she was interested in me. I think the fact that I had my eyebrow pierced at the time made her think I was a bit of a rebel. She wasn’t really that bright, either. She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves, believed she was going to become a witch and start her own Coven and all manner of strange things. I really should have clocked that it wasn’t going to work out, but I was still struggling with the tail-end of the depression I’d been dealing with since my teens, so I wasn’t exactly au-fait with how to handle relationships – Jill was in fact the first ‘girlfriend’ I’d had, I had to pluck up the courage just to try and kiss her.

Things just kind of petered out, I suppose. We actually broke up, then got back together for a few weeks, then broke up ‘properly’. I can’t remember if it was me or her that broke it off, and I suppose it doesn’t matter now.

Posted by snakemeister @ 10:23 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

09/26/08

What's wrong with me?

That’s kind of a rhetorical question, to be honest – I don’t really think there’s anything ‘wrong’ with me.

Sometimes though, when I peer into the inky black depths of my mind, I wonder if I might be ever so slightly ‘wrong’, because sometimes I get the feeling that I’m hooked on drama. For example; a while back, when my mum was in hospital, there was a very real danger that she wouldn’t survive her surgery. If I’m brutally honest about my thoughts, there was a small part of me that was hoping that she wouldn’t make it.

Deep down, there’s a little nugget of Snakemeister which would revel in the heartbreak, trauma and depression which would result from the loss of my mum. There’s even another part of me which would welcome it, given that the death of my mother would make it easier for me to cut all ties with my father.

And it’s not just that. Say, for example, my girlfriend had been cheating on me. Depite the fact that I’d be utterly heartbroken, and my world would fall apart around me – while I was sitting around lost, wondering what had gone wrong, there’d still be part of me deep down giggling like a schoolgirl, happier than a pig in s**t.

I’d love to know where that comes from. Is it something to do with a desire for sympathy from other people? Is it due to a lack of attention from my parents in my formative teenage years?

It doesn’t surprise me that I’m a little weird this way – I’m emotionally stunted at the best of times. My girlfriend and I used to have arguments about my not being able to open up to her when we first started dating, and the fact that I struggled to convey my feelings, even though I knew how much I love her.

We weren’t big on touchy-feely emotional stuff in my house. I can count on one hand the amount of times I remember my mum hugging me, and my dad has never actually said out loud that he loves me.

I know it’s a bit of a cop-out to blame things on your parents, and I’ve tried hard to work through the issues I’ve got. I’m happy to report that I’ve got no problem holding hands, cuddling, snuggling or being touchy-feely with my girlfriend, and I suppose that’s the important thing really.

Posted by snakemeister @ 6:47 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

09/12/08

ADD

Can you suddenly ‘develop’ ADD just before you hit 30?

Recently, I feel like my attention span has a length of roughly 10 minutes, sometimes even less than that. I find myself avoiding articles and columns online that I’d normally read through with relish, because I’ve skim-read them and weighed them up to be too long to bother with.

It extends to pretty much everything else – listening to music at home, I’m slicking through playlists constantly. When I’m watching movies, I’m ready to jump out of my seat if they don’t grab me right away.

Even writing this short piece, I’ve clicked out of Word and back to Firefox several times. It’s extremely annoying.

P.S. It turns out the seal around our bath has been leaking for some time now, and the flooring under the bath has been seriously damaged by the water, but I’ll talk about that another time.

Posted by snakemeister @ 9:35 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

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