And now to go home, strip off this Shiner-scented shirt, and crash
I find myself with a distinct lack of romance right now. The one I offered myself to a while back turned me down definitively with a "I don't want to be in a serious relationship with anyone right now", which as always actually means "I don't want to be in a relationship with you right now, or ever". It was rather devastating at the time, and indeed I made a point of not being around her until after I defended so that I could be even partially functional. I understand her motivation -- I take so much longer than a girl to get emotionally invested that she ends up thinking that I'm not all that into her and knocking me down a rung or two on the ladder, if not moving me onto the friends ladder or altogether kicking me off into the abyss.
As a coping mechanism I threw myself into the fray, and of course it didn't help. Sure, I spent time with various people, had some nice dates, but nothing really sparked. However, job craptasticity, exhaustion, and switching to regular business hours seem to have done the job well enough for me to be functional. If the woman did decide she wants me, as of right now I'd probably take that opportunity and run with it. However, as far as I can tell, the probability of that happening isn't negligibly small, it's actually zero, so she goes into the backfiles* along with the other ones not meant to be.
Unfortunately, right now I mainly seem to be seeing a superposition of bodies and brains. I see them as separate and united, all at once. There's a lot of smart and very beautiful women at work, on campus, and on the floor. Say we're in training. If the person doing the training is cute, it's really hard to focus, like a TA crush. At the same time I find myself missing, well, pretty much everyone I've messed up with while here in Houston. (I believe with possibly one glorious and all-too-brief exception I've yet to date someone and not mess it up.) Sucks to be so picky you only pursue the highest quality of women -- they stay high quality, reminding you constantly of why they are so amazing, and they stay not yours. One of these girls I don't even run into except by the oddest of circumstances (i.e., when something brought her to my former "office"), which is sad and amusing since she was the first girl here that I decided was both worth going exclusive with and of marriageable quality+. Just before she broke it off...
On the one hand I'm sort of glad I don't see any of them regularly. I'd be too likely to pull out one of those backfiles and start asking "What if?" and "Maybe she might change her mind?" in spite of the fact that I know damn well what the answers to those questions are. On the other, I find one of them on my mind a lot over the last month. Smart, challenging, cute, laden with pheromones that instantly turn me on -- the girl rates rates absurdly highly on my scale, but I'm pretty sure she'd never consider being involved again. She's better at letting go than I am, I think.
But it's nice to imagine being like it used to be with someone.
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*There's a gigantic filing cabinet in my head, dedicated to locking away memories of those I treasured caring for, so that I don't have to recall these memories too often and be saddened because I am an idiot when it comes to women.
+The two are not automatically linked for me.