Blogging because I can

As much fun as the About Me series has been, and as much as I enjoy writing posts like the Soundtrack to My Movie and each Week in Review, the meat of this blog, its reason for being, has so far been found in the first two "Blogging..." posts. These are the posts where I discuss and/or rant about current events in my personal life, rather than reminisce about the past or review the 12 hours of TV I watch each week.

As an aside, it is worth noting that that is all the TV I watch. I don't channel surf; nor do I use the TV as background noise. However, I do spend a significant amount of time watching older TV series on DVD or on my computer. I don't consider this activity to be "watching TV," because I am enjoying these shows on my own time and my own schedule. I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I generally prefer watching serialized TV series over watching movies. I've spent a lot of time lately catching up on the hilarious Flight of the Conchords, but will soon switch focus to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and maybe try to get back into the bizarre True Blood.

So, anyway, yes, this is going to be another of those "Blogging..." posts.

Your honesty is better than your silence

So far, online dating has gone about as well as I expected it to: not very well at all. I have emailed a few women, less than half of them responded, and only one of them showed any potential of being what I am looking for.

In the first email, she quickly established a desire to meet in person, as she felt that online chatting was a waste of time due to the ease of lying. I was okay with that, but we agreed to wait until after the Thanksgiving weekend to make plans. In the meantime, we added each other as friends on Facebook, which was a pretty big risk on my part--have you seen some of the pictures in my profile? And then she vanished.

I've mentioned it before, but rejection in online dating typically comes in the form of silence. Silence is also often the tool of choice for online dating "break-ups." I personally never use that tool. If someone emails me and I am not interested, I will politely email them back and tell them that. I've only ever had to do that twice. (The most memorable time was when I actually knew the girl emailing me because she had dated my brother.)

One of the perks of membership on online dating sites is being able to see who views your profile and when. Thanks to this god-like power, I knew that the girl in question had viewed my profile again one day after my last email. I suspected a change of heart due to a more careful reading.

With over a week of email silence, I decided I needed to know what had happened. The "what happened?" email can be tough to write, so I took a different approach: pretend nothing suspicious was going on. My email just picked up where we left off, and I threw out some ideas for ways we could meet in person.

She replied quickly, confirming the change of heart; she now felt that meeting would be a waste of time. She apologized for not saying something earlier, which was nice, and then laid out the reasons for her change of heart. Some of the things she wrote were a little shocking, but ultimately pretty fair assessments from reading my profile. Most memorably, she wrote that she initially found my geekiness to be cute, but she later decided that she is looking for a "man's man." Some people might be insulted by that, but frankly, my ex-wife had the same complaint. I've had some pretty entertaining discussions with people about what exactly "man's man" means, but I know exactly what she meant by it.

Appreciative of her honesty, I wrote a short email thanking her and telling her that her honesty was better than her silence. As much as it sucked to read it, I am much happier actually knowing what went wrong.

Parallel to this nonsense, I was also in the middle of over a week of silence from my first online dating contact (ie. the first wink), which certainly made the situation even more frustrating. That silence recently ended and seems to have been a false alarm. However, no good explanation was offered, so the permanent silence may still be coming. I am definitely less confident now that we will meet anytime soon.

A divided/shared home no more

I meant to write something about this topic much earlier on the blog, but I kept forgetting. I still have lingering feelings in this area each day, so it's still a valid topic for a "Blogging..." post.

I'll start off by saying that I have a hard time sharing. This has always been the case, as long as I can remember. So, it was hard when my ex-wife first moved in with me into my apartment condominium. Suddenly there was this person constantly in my personal space and using all of my stuff. Ha, I make it sound awful!--it wasn't at all. I adjusted pretty quickly, because I wanted her there with me. Importantly, it was equally hard for her, because she also has a hard time sharing. I'd say it was even more of an adjustment for her, because she had to deal with my decorative and design choices.

So, it made twisted sense when we bought a new house that we would divide it up. We divided up the floors; I had free reign in the basement, but she would handle the decor for the main and second floors. We divided up the pantry. We divided up some of the shelves in the fridge. Not so atypically, we divided up the walk-in closet. Most notably, we also divided up the bathrooms; she would use the en suite, and I would use the second floor guest bathroom. Sharing the one bathroom in the condo had apparently been a challenge.

Before my ex-wife had even fully moved out of the house, I started taking over some of these formerly "shared" areas. The walk-in closet was first, the pantry was second, the fridge was third. This was a good exercise for coming to grips with what was happening; I was at least getting something good out of it. No more sharing!

In terms of the house's decor, I have more or less left everything the same, because ultimately I liked what she did with the place. And I wasn't completely without say on the main floor and upstairs decor; I certainly helped select the furniture. There are numerous decorative ledges where plants used to flourish (or not) which are now hastily decorated with books; that's pretty much the only change I've made. The house is cleaner and more open, partly because some furniture is gone, partly because there are less pets running around, but mostly because my ex-wife was a far messier person than I--I might even go so far as to call her a slob. She might also slug me the next time I see her.

The biggest adjustment I had to make was with the bathrooms. For two years, I was completely fine using the upstairs guest bathroom as my own, and staying the hell away from the en suite, as per strict standing orders. To make sure I wouldn't go anywhere near the en suite, my ex-wife kept it the messiest room in the house.

I spent the first two days of my first week in the house alone doing a thorough cleaning of every room. The last room I dared enter was the en suite. My ex-wife had expressed a desire to clean it herself when she came back in October, but I wasn't going to let it sit dirty and unused for a whole month. The en suite was/is my bathroom now.

And I love it. It's a far bigger and brighter bathroom than the guest bathroom, with much more shelf space; it might actually be big enough to share with someone, if you are into that kind of thing. The shower stall is surprisingly excellent; my ex-wife stopped using it a long time ago, so I assumed it sucked, but I have no problems with it, and it is way easier to keep clean than the guest bathroom's bathtub. I can also keep the guest bathroom pristine and clean for guests, because it isn't used daily.

But yet I still feel weird using it. Throughout the first week, every time I went upstairs to get ready for bed, I would walk into the guest bathroom, quickly realize my toothbrush wasn't there anymore, and then move to the en suite. I'm well past that; I only use the guest bathroom to wash out beer making equipment. But I still feel a bit like an intruder every time I walk into the en suite. This room was off-limits for two years. Now it is entirely mine to do with as I please. That takes some time to get used to.

There could be a problem here for the future. The longer I have the house to myself, the harder it is going to be to consider having someone move in with me--the harder it will be to share the house again. It is entirely possible of course that my house will never again be shared. I may live alone until I die. I may move into a smaller place at some point. If I meet someone rich (please!), I may move in with them (yikes!). We may decide to start fresh in a new shared place together. Who knows? All I know is that I suck at sharing.