Great expectations

Humans never cease to amaze me in their capacity for ridiculousness and disrespect. If you've read my posts since August, particularly "Meet him at the Love Parade", you may have figured out that I had met 'someone special' (JD). And for 3 or 4 months, I thought I really did.

Something that started out so intense and strong somehow ended up going to hell in a handbasket faster than I could utter the words. Hmm where to start? Between August and mid October, it was like a dream. Between London, Washington DC, Amsterdam and Prague we existed on a parallel frequency. It was love at first sight, and attachment that seemed to promise a lot very soon. Sure, in the end it was a long distance relationship, and I was wary of the inherent dangers in that; but still I was convinced that with enough hard work it would at least bloom into something sustainable and rewarding...

I think the alarm bells began to sound in Prague, late October. We'd spent a fantastic weekend in that charming place, but, him having been away from the states for a couple of weeks, I noticed he was a lot more impatient and on edge than usual. Now I recognise it as a combination of homesickness and discomfort, but then all i felt was an odd sense of disconnection. We didn't have sex. We went clubbing a couple of times, and the fables of Prague's wild nightlife proved to be wild fiction. The city was beautiful but something was off.

I haven't seen him since. Two weeks after Prague, I get an abrupt phonecall from him on a tuesday morning asking me if I wanted to join him and his friends in Roma that weekend. That pissed me off. A) two weeks was the longest time we'd spent apart since august, B) clearly he'd planned this with his loser, white trash American hill-billies before speaking to me, and C) he wasn't even out to them, so what exactly would have been my designation in that scenario? I hung up, decided to ignore him. It worked, for a while.

Sunday, I knew he was leaving Italy, but wasn't sure what his next destination was. I had made it clear before our last phonecall that I would be in Paris for lunch on the 22nd of November, and sent him a message asking whether he would meet me there as promised.

No response.

Monday he calls from Barajas in Madrid, clearly already on the way back to the states. My patience ran out, and I sent him an email expressing concern. It wasn't nasty, it was very clear and in it I asked what exactly was wrong - he was acting strange and distant. I had fallen ill, my father had been diagnosed with an illness and was flying to london on Tuesday and he didn't so much as ask or care.

No response.

I was insulted. I decided that was it, this was clearly a failed endeavour. A disappointment of unusual proportions. In my mind, I lost all respect for him. And I have too much pride and self-esteem to even cosider someone so self-absorbed.

Friday, a few days after I'd sent the email out, I took to the London night. FS and I hit the Box, and a debut vernissage in the Adams Street priv club. I found myself in flirt mode. I was moving past this asshole, at any price. I must have arranged 6 dates in the space of the 3 hours I spent between those two places. Clearly, I was overcompensating (though at least 3 of the guys were really gorgeous).

Naturally, and as things like that often go, JD called right in the middle of all that. I wasn't expecting an apology, but I was expecting some acknowledgement of what transpired between us over the past week. I got none. He spoke as if nothing had happened. He spoke about the auto business in the US and the government bailouts planned *yawn* and had very little else to say. In the end, he asked me to call him back later.

Likely scenario.

I went home, took a nap for a few hours, and got on the train to Paris. There, I had a fantastic day sitting on corner cafes, roaming st germain de pres, le marais, and ending the afternoon with coffee at le fumoir with a few friends.

The next morning, in London, I turn on my facebook to find that he's still awake and 'sad'. In silly optimism that he may have actually grown a pair of balls for introspection, I called to check up on him. Of course, he was really 'sad' about the state of the economy, and what it meant for his business.

I managed to ignore him the following week altogether and until this day, Sunday. I do feel much more liberated now than I did the past weekened. I went on a couple of dates on Saturday, had sex (at last), and feel like I can finally refocus my energy, time and money on something more valuable and worthy - me!

I read somewhere the past couple days that part of loving yourself is accepting your limitations. Does that sound silly to anyone but me? Personally, I never thought there were any real limitations on what I could do. Only the limitation of time perhaps. But isnt' loving yourself refusing that any limitaitons bind your actions? I see a value in seeing yourself as human, and forgiving yourself for mistakes made, but does that necessarily entail reducing yourself to a mere frame? I hope not

Must-watch

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jEfVs6qaLSA

Hyperborea

(source: Wikipedia)

In Greek mythology, according to tradition, the Hyperboreans were a mythical people who lived far to the north of Thrace. The Greeks thought that Boreas, the North Wind, lived in Thrace, and that therefore Hyperborea was an unspecified region in the northern lands that lay beyond Scythia. Their land, called Hyperborea or Hyperboria — "beyond the Boreas" — was perfect, with the sun shining twenty-four hours a day.

Never the Muse is absent

from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry

and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.

Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed

in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.

(Pindar, Tenth Pythian Ode, Richmond Lattimore, translator).

Reaching such exotic lands is never easy; Pindar cautioned:

Never on land or by sea will you find

the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea.