A Real Life Saint?
This Siberian freeze that is wrecking snowy havoc all over Europe really needs to stop. I am sitting in my room now wearing a hoodie over my extra-warm Uniqlo heat-tech long-sleeve top that I usually wear when I go out and when it's absolutely freezing cold - and I still feel cold. It, of course, doesn't help that the heating will be turned off soon because college accommodation, so it's going to get even colder. This morning, I found myself drifting out of sleep at about 7am, and felt absolutely miserable as I tried my best to pull my pathetic single-sized duvet as tightly around myself as possible; but my pyjamas pants kept riding up my legs, thus exposing my feet and ankles, and it was basically horrible.
I ended up falling asleep again when the heating came back on. Alas, I woke up at about 10am and eventually got up at 10.45am. I was too groggy to make lunch so I had a huge bowl of muesli for lunch. At least that keeps the fats at bay, I guess? I've been eating so much lately - and by that I mean I've been eating all these sweet things, totally breaking my one-sweet-item-a-week rule. I went to formal at Pembroke last night and had cake; I went for dinner with Jay and his friend on Tuesday night at the Rainbow Cafe and had a delicious white chocolate and pecan cheesecake (sorry John, it wasn't vegan); I had a defective Kit-Kat Chunky (with no biscuit) at some point a few days ago because I was hungry; and I had a chocolate cake from the cafe at the law faculty a few days ago too because I was hungry.
Just stop eating, yeah? Let's not get fat, please. After all, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
(Is it worrying or wrong that I actually genuinely believe that? I love food and all, but I love looking good even more, so...)
For the avoidance of doubt, by 'stop eating' I mean stop stuffing my face with all these sugary things which I so love but which my waistline so abhors.
Anyway. Formal at Pembroke last night was fun. Pablo invited us - us being myself, Ivan, Josh, Raffael and John, who replaced Raffael's girlfriend Giordana, who couldn't make it from Oxford as she was ill. Unsurprisingly, conversation over dinner was nerdy. Raffael and Josh went on about some paradoxes from some ancient Greek dudes, then Josh mentioned Bernard Williams' theory on when it's rational to commit suicide, and because I'm interested in the philosophy of suicide, I was all ears. It was actually ridiculous. Basically the idea was that suicide is rational when you have run out of unconditional life plans to pursue - and these being the kind of life plans or goals that you would bring yourself into existence to pursue. This contrasts with conditional life plans, which are plans that you pursue because you're already alive, so you might as well do X, Y or Z. But it seems to me that the unconditional life plan is inherently conditional upon the fact of my existence. If I weren't alive, if I didn't exist, how would I know what kind of life plans are worthy of pursuit? Sure, it's a thought experiment, and as is the case with most philosophical thought experiments (or philosophy simpliciter), it has no connection to reality. I get the point about how some life plans are so meaningful and transcendental that one could say that the worth of their pursuit are not conditional upon existence...but no, that's just silly.
Later, we minus Josh adjourned to the common room where tensions ran slightly high when John kept asking (I'm being polite here by using this word) Ivan to bake a vegan cheesecake. It was entertaining but also rather uncomfortable because I could feel the simmering tension which did not sit well with my non-confrontational nature. But it all blew over and it was all good, and we walked back together in the lightly falling snow.
Oh, the snow. It is pretty when it settles and when I am indoors, but it totally fucked with my plan to go to the faculty yesterday. It was snowing quite heavily when I'd finished lunch, so I thought, okay, I'm just going to stay in my room. I then took a shower, and when I was done, the sun was out, so I changed my mind about staying home and started blow-drying my hair, the first step of my getting dressed. When I was done, it'd started snowing heavily again. That was when I decided, screw this, I'm just going to stay home. Half an hour later, the sun came out.
How does one deal with the weather that is more volatile and capricious than a PMSing woman? I guess one ignores it in the same way that one ignores the irrational and hormonally imbalanced rants of a PMSing woman.
So yeah. It's been really, really freezing cold the past few days, and it makes me tired. I even took a nap yesterday because I was so sleepy - and I never take naps. It's interfering with my plan to finish Chapter 1 by February. It's now 1 March and I've only written 6000 words - which is maybe a third of what I want to write. I have all these things to do but it feels like I have so little time in the day. It's terrible.
*
On another note: against my will, without any intention whatsoever, I'd somehow managed to turn a simple 'met this guy on Tinder he's nice he seems to like me I like him let's date' scenario into pure drama. I don't even know where to begin, or what to think, or how to explain why I have been acting like a crazy psycho bitch, why I have let my insecurities get the better of me and almost let a really good man go.
I said in this entry that the only thing that would make my budding relationship with Thomas go south faster than his impending departure was me: my insecurities, my need to control everything, my freaking out like an irrational person when things don't go my way. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But how tragic that, despite having the foresight to know precisely how I would cause it to go up in flames, I did it anyway.
I would say 'in my defence', but as any first-year law student knows, intoxication is not a defence, just a mitigating factor - and a poor one at that. I wasn't even upset when I went out for drinks with Kaara and Milhan on Saturday night. Sure, I was confused as to why Thomas had been completely silent, and sure, I was thinking in my head that maybe he wasn't a good match because he didn't seem to think that my making myself vulnerable to him when I told him that I have genital HSV1 warranted some sort of a response, and no doubt I'd thought that his complete silence and the fact that he hadn't responded to a message that I'd sent at 11.56pm the night before was pointing towards the conclusion that he'd changed his mind about me. But I'd adopted a rather calm attitude towards it - calm, that is, for my standards. I wasn't so hung up on his disappearance that I couldn't focus on anything. I did some work, had some dinner, and met my friends because I'd wanted to, not because I'd needed a distraction from him.
Despite my promising Raffie that I would give him until Monday to get back to me, despite fully intending to keep the promise, three drinks at Novi later, I found myself in bed at 1 in the morning, my phone in my hands, noting that he'd read my message an hour ago but didn't reply. I would like to think that, had I not been rather drunk, I would have kept my promise to Raffie and left it and put it out of my mind, put my phone away. I really hope that I would have done that, because I am blaming, and will always blame, the horrible text messages that I proceeded to send to him on the alcohol in my system.
How is it possible for someone who values rationality, who tries to treat others with respsect, who thinks about what is the right thing to do in difficult situations, who professes to be an ethical deontologist, to end things with a man whom she'd purportedly like over a drunken text message? What the hell was wrong with me? It wasn't just a text message; it was a drunken text message, full of anger, saturated with accusations, utterly unfair, and as it turned out, utterly wrong. First, I accsued him of ghosting me. Then, I said a bunch of shit which I don't even remember about how disappointed I was about the way he'd handled this stupid herpes thing. I wish I could go into more details about the horrible things that I said but I can't, because I don't remember, and I am too ashamed of it to go back and read it. But I do remember that the text message had ended with, 'I'm done with this and I mean it this time. Good luck with everything and goodbye.'
But here's another puzzle. How is it possible for someone to have received that message to still want to date the fucking crazy person that had sent it? Is he actually Saint Thomas? I am flabbergasted as to how he didn't completely write me off after that. Was it the apology that I'd sent a day later? Or was it my massive email that I sent just last night, in an attempt to clarify his fundamentally mistaken view that I'd dumped him simply because he didn't reply to me in a timely manner, and his presupposition that I'd known that he'd liked me and yet had decided to drop him anyway? He was, of course, wrong on these two counts, and I couldn't let him think that I'd ended things with him over a pure triviality; and neither could I let him think that I would drop him just like that despite knowing that he'd liked me. That was the whole problem: I didn't know, I wasn't sure, and this uncertainty was magnified by the alcohol and made me go crazy. He'd chosen the worst time ever to disappear for more than 24 hours, and his silence following the herpes conversation led my insecure and anxious mind to the conclusion that he didn't want to see me anymore. He hadn't understood what I'd meant by our defective communication in my rational, apologetic text, in which I'd said that, while I was sorry for falsely accusing him of ghosting me and for treating him with disrespect, I'd thought that the general point still stood: that we didn't seem to be able to communicate with each other very well, and that a relationship premised on poor communication is doomed to failure.
He'd taken that to mean some arbitrary standard of the length of time it should take him to reply to me. Of course I am not as unreasonable and crazy as that. In my long email, I detailed - detailed - all the ways in which I didn't know whether he'd liked me, or how much, and that was what I'd meant by bad communication. I'd finished it a couple of nights ago and had wanted to send it, but I didn't have his email address, so I had to wait till the next day. The next day, while I sat down to send it, I read it over...and the tone of finality didn't sit well with me. I'd said that, even though I'd effectively ended things while drunk, it was the right thing to do for me.
In all honesty, the main thing that had prevented me from retracting my drunk message was my pride. The other thing that prevented it was a fear that he'd tell me to sod off, once and for all. In all honesty, then, I did quite a bit of ex post facto rationalisation, just to cover up the regret that I'd felt when I woke up at 5am and realised what I'd done. But I was mostly convinced of my conclusion: that we communicated terribly with each other, that something was wrong if I couldn't feel that he'd liked me despite his saying that he did, that something was also wrong if he didn't think that I would need some words of reassurance from him after I'd put myself in a vulnerable position to disclose to him that I have a stupid and insignificant STI.
Mostly convinced; but not entirely. I thought about taking it back, stating explicitly that I would like to try again, and this time, I shoved my pride aside and thought, 'What have I got to lose? I've already done the worst that I could possibly do, and on the other side of the scale is a man that I was considering going to Florida for just a week ago.' Whether or not I asked for another chance shouldn't be contingent on what he was likely to say; it should depend entirely on what I was willing to fight for.
I ended up changing the last part of the email. In my mind, I left it open and asked explicitly, 'Am I wrong to reach the conclusions that I did?' But I didn't make explicit that I didn't want it to end because, if what I'd thought to be the facts were right, then I didn't have much confidence that trying again would be a good idea.
I woke up this morning - at 10ish am - to a long message from him that made me cry. In yet another instance of miscommunication, he'd taken my email to be a seal of finality on this 'relationship'; he'd thought that I was committed to giving up. I don't need to point out how ironic it was that I'd actually changed the last part of my email to remove my commitment to giving up.
'I was hoping for a message that was a clarification but also an opportunity to try again,' he said. 'Through all your points and paragraphs you still committed to one thing: giving up.
'You can craft many deductions and apply reasoning. You still cannot understand that I really liked you and wanted to continue with this. I did not care about what you told me that evening before you left; I cared in that it obviously affects you but it did not affect how I felt towards you.
'Never did you wonder if my relaxed approach towards our dating ... was not a reflection of my personality but an attempt to not smother you. When I truly like someone, I do not want to suffocate those initial green, budding shoots of a relationship; to be too strong and too demanding in my feelings and actions.
'I cannot say much more because I'm honestly upset by all of this. I absolutely liked you - so much - and was even already thinking of what was to come in the near future.
'Despite your very detailed and honest messages, I still feel you have given up too early and made decisions based upon feelings skewed by the mysteries of still discovering someone early in a relationship.'
He went on, but those are the salient bits. What else was there to do but cry and rue another mistaken passing up on a good man?
There was something else, of course. Tell him that I want him. Stop hiding behind words of sophistry, cold rationalisation of purely emotional responses, stop holding back and state it plainly and clearly, in plain and clear words that would be impossible to misunderstand: 'I want to try again.'
'I hope it's not too late,' I added. 'Let me know.'
Two hours later: 'We should meet and talk in person about all of this :)'
Is he real? Is this real life? Is he an actual real person? I cannot understand his response, his wanting to keep seeing me despite all the shit that I have done. I am confused, but in a good way. If we manage to talk things through on Sunday, I am never going to give up on him so easily ever again. Even if I have to move to freaking Florida, I will be in it for the long haul.
*
The first step towards that is to finally delete Tinder - or rather, the first step to get myself out of the Tinder mentality is to delete Tinder. I have finally done that. I should have done that weeks ago.
I ended up falling asleep again when the heating came back on. Alas, I woke up at about 10am and eventually got up at 10.45am. I was too groggy to make lunch so I had a huge bowl of muesli for lunch. At least that keeps the fats at bay, I guess? I've been eating so much lately - and by that I mean I've been eating all these sweet things, totally breaking my one-sweet-item-a-week rule. I went to formal at Pembroke last night and had cake; I went for dinner with Jay and his friend on Tuesday night at the Rainbow Cafe and had a delicious white chocolate and pecan cheesecake (sorry John, it wasn't vegan); I had a defective Kit-Kat Chunky (with no biscuit) at some point a few days ago because I was hungry; and I had a chocolate cake from the cafe at the law faculty a few days ago too because I was hungry.
Just stop eating, yeah? Let's not get fat, please. After all, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
(Is it worrying or wrong that I actually genuinely believe that? I love food and all, but I love looking good even more, so...)
For the avoidance of doubt, by 'stop eating' I mean stop stuffing my face with all these sugary things which I so love but which my waistline so abhors.
Anyway. Formal at Pembroke last night was fun. Pablo invited us - us being myself, Ivan, Josh, Raffael and John, who replaced Raffael's girlfriend Giordana, who couldn't make it from Oxford as she was ill. Unsurprisingly, conversation over dinner was nerdy. Raffael and Josh went on about some paradoxes from some ancient Greek dudes, then Josh mentioned Bernard Williams' theory on when it's rational to commit suicide, and because I'm interested in the philosophy of suicide, I was all ears. It was actually ridiculous. Basically the idea was that suicide is rational when you have run out of unconditional life plans to pursue - and these being the kind of life plans or goals that you would bring yourself into existence to pursue. This contrasts with conditional life plans, which are plans that you pursue because you're already alive, so you might as well do X, Y or Z. But it seems to me that the unconditional life plan is inherently conditional upon the fact of my existence. If I weren't alive, if I didn't exist, how would I know what kind of life plans are worthy of pursuit? Sure, it's a thought experiment, and as is the case with most philosophical thought experiments (or philosophy simpliciter), it has no connection to reality. I get the point about how some life plans are so meaningful and transcendental that one could say that the worth of their pursuit are not conditional upon existence...but no, that's just silly.
Later, we minus Josh adjourned to the common room where tensions ran slightly high when John kept asking (I'm being polite here by using this word) Ivan to bake a vegan cheesecake. It was entertaining but also rather uncomfortable because I could feel the simmering tension which did not sit well with my non-confrontational nature. But it all blew over and it was all good, and we walked back together in the lightly falling snow.
Oh, the snow. It is pretty when it settles and when I am indoors, but it totally fucked with my plan to go to the faculty yesterday. It was snowing quite heavily when I'd finished lunch, so I thought, okay, I'm just going to stay in my room. I then took a shower, and when I was done, the sun was out, so I changed my mind about staying home and started blow-drying my hair, the first step of my getting dressed. When I was done, it'd started snowing heavily again. That was when I decided, screw this, I'm just going to stay home. Half an hour later, the sun came out.
How does one deal with the weather that is more volatile and capricious than a PMSing woman? I guess one ignores it in the same way that one ignores the irrational and hormonally imbalanced rants of a PMSing woman.
So yeah. It's been really, really freezing cold the past few days, and it makes me tired. I even took a nap yesterday because I was so sleepy - and I never take naps. It's interfering with my plan to finish Chapter 1 by February. It's now 1 March and I've only written 6000 words - which is maybe a third of what I want to write. I have all these things to do but it feels like I have so little time in the day. It's terrible.
*
On another note: against my will, without any intention whatsoever, I'd somehow managed to turn a simple 'met this guy on Tinder he's nice he seems to like me I like him let's date' scenario into pure drama. I don't even know where to begin, or what to think, or how to explain why I have been acting like a crazy psycho bitch, why I have let my insecurities get the better of me and almost let a really good man go.
I said in this entry that the only thing that would make my budding relationship with Thomas go south faster than his impending departure was me: my insecurities, my need to control everything, my freaking out like an irrational person when things don't go my way. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But how tragic that, despite having the foresight to know precisely how I would cause it to go up in flames, I did it anyway.
I would say 'in my defence', but as any first-year law student knows, intoxication is not a defence, just a mitigating factor - and a poor one at that. I wasn't even upset when I went out for drinks with Kaara and Milhan on Saturday night. Sure, I was confused as to why Thomas had been completely silent, and sure, I was thinking in my head that maybe he wasn't a good match because he didn't seem to think that my making myself vulnerable to him when I told him that I have genital HSV1 warranted some sort of a response, and no doubt I'd thought that his complete silence and the fact that he hadn't responded to a message that I'd sent at 11.56pm the night before was pointing towards the conclusion that he'd changed his mind about me. But I'd adopted a rather calm attitude towards it - calm, that is, for my standards. I wasn't so hung up on his disappearance that I couldn't focus on anything. I did some work, had some dinner, and met my friends because I'd wanted to, not because I'd needed a distraction from him.
Despite my promising Raffie that I would give him until Monday to get back to me, despite fully intending to keep the promise, three drinks at Novi later, I found myself in bed at 1 in the morning, my phone in my hands, noting that he'd read my message an hour ago but didn't reply. I would like to think that, had I not been rather drunk, I would have kept my promise to Raffie and left it and put it out of my mind, put my phone away. I really hope that I would have done that, because I am blaming, and will always blame, the horrible text messages that I proceeded to send to him on the alcohol in my system.
How is it possible for someone who values rationality, who tries to treat others with respsect, who thinks about what is the right thing to do in difficult situations, who professes to be an ethical deontologist, to end things with a man whom she'd purportedly like over a drunken text message? What the hell was wrong with me? It wasn't just a text message; it was a drunken text message, full of anger, saturated with accusations, utterly unfair, and as it turned out, utterly wrong. First, I accsued him of ghosting me. Then, I said a bunch of shit which I don't even remember about how disappointed I was about the way he'd handled this stupid herpes thing. I wish I could go into more details about the horrible things that I said but I can't, because I don't remember, and I am too ashamed of it to go back and read it. But I do remember that the text message had ended with, 'I'm done with this and I mean it this time. Good luck with everything and goodbye.'
But here's another puzzle. How is it possible for someone to have received that message to still want to date the fucking crazy person that had sent it? Is he actually Saint Thomas? I am flabbergasted as to how he didn't completely write me off after that. Was it the apology that I'd sent a day later? Or was it my massive email that I sent just last night, in an attempt to clarify his fundamentally mistaken view that I'd dumped him simply because he didn't reply to me in a timely manner, and his presupposition that I'd known that he'd liked me and yet had decided to drop him anyway? He was, of course, wrong on these two counts, and I couldn't let him think that I'd ended things with him over a pure triviality; and neither could I let him think that I would drop him just like that despite knowing that he'd liked me. That was the whole problem: I didn't know, I wasn't sure, and this uncertainty was magnified by the alcohol and made me go crazy. He'd chosen the worst time ever to disappear for more than 24 hours, and his silence following the herpes conversation led my insecure and anxious mind to the conclusion that he didn't want to see me anymore. He hadn't understood what I'd meant by our defective communication in my rational, apologetic text, in which I'd said that, while I was sorry for falsely accusing him of ghosting me and for treating him with disrespect, I'd thought that the general point still stood: that we didn't seem to be able to communicate with each other very well, and that a relationship premised on poor communication is doomed to failure.
He'd taken that to mean some arbitrary standard of the length of time it should take him to reply to me. Of course I am not as unreasonable and crazy as that. In my long email, I detailed - detailed - all the ways in which I didn't know whether he'd liked me, or how much, and that was what I'd meant by bad communication. I'd finished it a couple of nights ago and had wanted to send it, but I didn't have his email address, so I had to wait till the next day. The next day, while I sat down to send it, I read it over...and the tone of finality didn't sit well with me. I'd said that, even though I'd effectively ended things while drunk, it was the right thing to do for me.
In all honesty, the main thing that had prevented me from retracting my drunk message was my pride. The other thing that prevented it was a fear that he'd tell me to sod off, once and for all. In all honesty, then, I did quite a bit of ex post facto rationalisation, just to cover up the regret that I'd felt when I woke up at 5am and realised what I'd done. But I was mostly convinced of my conclusion: that we communicated terribly with each other, that something was wrong if I couldn't feel that he'd liked me despite his saying that he did, that something was also wrong if he didn't think that I would need some words of reassurance from him after I'd put myself in a vulnerable position to disclose to him that I have a stupid and insignificant STI.
Mostly convinced; but not entirely. I thought about taking it back, stating explicitly that I would like to try again, and this time, I shoved my pride aside and thought, 'What have I got to lose? I've already done the worst that I could possibly do, and on the other side of the scale is a man that I was considering going to Florida for just a week ago.' Whether or not I asked for another chance shouldn't be contingent on what he was likely to say; it should depend entirely on what I was willing to fight for.
I ended up changing the last part of the email. In my mind, I left it open and asked explicitly, 'Am I wrong to reach the conclusions that I did?' But I didn't make explicit that I didn't want it to end because, if what I'd thought to be the facts were right, then I didn't have much confidence that trying again would be a good idea.
I woke up this morning - at 10ish am - to a long message from him that made me cry. In yet another instance of miscommunication, he'd taken my email to be a seal of finality on this 'relationship'; he'd thought that I was committed to giving up. I don't need to point out how ironic it was that I'd actually changed the last part of my email to remove my commitment to giving up.
'I was hoping for a message that was a clarification but also an opportunity to try again,' he said. 'Through all your points and paragraphs you still committed to one thing: giving up.
'You can craft many deductions and apply reasoning. You still cannot understand that I really liked you and wanted to continue with this. I did not care about what you told me that evening before you left; I cared in that it obviously affects you but it did not affect how I felt towards you.
'Never did you wonder if my relaxed approach towards our dating ... was not a reflection of my personality but an attempt to not smother you. When I truly like someone, I do not want to suffocate those initial green, budding shoots of a relationship; to be too strong and too demanding in my feelings and actions.
'I cannot say much more because I'm honestly upset by all of this. I absolutely liked you - so much - and was even already thinking of what was to come in the near future.
'Despite your very detailed and honest messages, I still feel you have given up too early and made decisions based upon feelings skewed by the mysteries of still discovering someone early in a relationship.'
He went on, but those are the salient bits. What else was there to do but cry and rue another mistaken passing up on a good man?
There was something else, of course. Tell him that I want him. Stop hiding behind words of sophistry, cold rationalisation of purely emotional responses, stop holding back and state it plainly and clearly, in plain and clear words that would be impossible to misunderstand: 'I want to try again.'
'I hope it's not too late,' I added. 'Let me know.'
Two hours later: 'We should meet and talk in person about all of this :)'
Is he real? Is this real life? Is he an actual real person? I cannot understand his response, his wanting to keep seeing me despite all the shit that I have done. I am confused, but in a good way. If we manage to talk things through on Sunday, I am never going to give up on him so easily ever again. Even if I have to move to freaking Florida, I will be in it for the long haul.
*
The first step towards that is to finally delete Tinder - or rather, the first step to get myself out of the Tinder mentality is to delete Tinder. I have finally done that. I should have done that weeks ago.