Bethanie's Brain

I hate it when there are alarm bells going off in my brain about someone and I can't quite place why or what the problem is, or therefore, and perhaps most important, what the hell I should do about it. I have somehow managed to become entrenched in such a situation and, if you hadn't guessed, am failing to manage to extricate myself. [Insert disgruntled emoticons here...] These are the details, without going into... overmuch detail. (erm... ha.) I have this "friend"... OK, "acquaintance" would be much more congruent with reality, but I think she considers me to be in her "friend" category as she probably considers everyone she's known for more than 5 minutes to be a "friend". (Yes. One of those.) I met her through work and got sucked into an outside work thing that she's doing and.... well.... I want out, because she's actually really fucking crazy. Worse, in a way, she's supposed to be teaching me something -- something ...

I like my space. I like it red and dark, quiet, because there is no one else here to speak, loud, because I have the music up as far as it will go, messy, because my children have been here, clean, because they've gone again. I like the way the stain on the bookcases I bought matches the stain of the wood on the floors. I like the way my books look when they're out of their boxes. I like the things I nailed to the walls wherever I wanted to without having to ask anybody if it was OK to put them there. I like having no TV and a good espresso machine and excellent beer and my clothes put away. I like that I fixed the doorbell by myself and rearranged the den four times before I was happy with it. I like that I'm here by myself but not lonely. I like it a lot. .

Someone sent me a thing Ann Landers said -- about people who drown their sorrows forgetting that sorrow knows how to swim. It made me laugh. Yeah, I know. It wasn't meant to. But I'm a bitchin' swimmer. Way better than sorrow ever hoped to be. Way better. No, seriously. I am. I get suffering. I've been there: 4th grade: All the way home (I was a walker), some jackass and his buddy making machine gun sounds at me, because they found out my family was German. (I had no idea what the hell they were doing or why, but for the very first time, I understood that being German wasn't the awesomest thing ever.) 7th grade: Gym class. Er...I don't actually need to go into detail, right? 9th grade: Another jackass, a different jackass from the 4th grade jackass (I assume), this one spit on me. Other jackasses called me names for no reason (well, other than I wasn't tall and blond and beautiful) or felt free to call out insults about what I was wearing or had done to ...