Addictions

I have done nothing tonight but feed my addictions. I'm watching Halloween cake decorating contests on the Food Network, playing word games on Yahoo, and eating Chocolate Peanut Butter Chex Mix (Oh my god, have you had this stuff? It is heaven in snack form: peanut butter flavored Chex, chocolate candy, pretzels...I think I had five servings tonight at least, and I finally had to hide it from myself at the very back of the cupboard to make myself stop eating it for a while). To further feed my addictions I considered a) going out for a few drinks and b) sexy phone calls, but neither of those things happened. Yet, anyway. Well, the drinking thing isn't going to happen at all because by the time I decided I wanted a drink it was already after 11 and bars close at midnight here. I may still make a phone call later. Or I may just sleep semi-early. Whatever. Both of my Thursday classes got cancelled today and needless to say I didn't do anything productive. I don't do well with a lot of free time because I just waste it. Oh well, at least it was relaxing.

Actually, it's a lie to say I wasn't productive today at all, because I did do a few things. I went to rehearsal for my friend's production of SubUrbia, for one. I'm playing Bee-Bee, which I'm enjoying mainly because I get to die at the end and be carried off stage in dramatic fashion. Yes!!
I was late to rehearsal today because I was having plumbing issues with my toilet and had to figure out how to fix it. Happily, I can report I fixed the toilet. By myself!! How's that for being self-reliant?! Anyway, I got to rehearsal just in time to hear my friend telling my castmate, "He told me that he loves me but he doesn't like me anymore." Turns out her boyfriend (who is supposed to be playing Tim) had opted to sleep through rehearsal today and she was ranting about a fight they had last night. As if that comment wasn't awful enough, she also said that he told her, "I wish we had been friends before we'd started dating, because if I'd known you better first I never would have started dating you." Isn't that rotten? The crazy thing is, she's only considering leaving him. You'd think after comments like that it would be easy to say, "This guy is bad for me, I need to get out of this." But instead she was rationalizing it, saying things like "I think once he finds a job and goes back to school it will be better. He'll feel better about life and stop taking things out on me." And the thing is, as easy as it is for me as an outsider to shake my head in disgust wondering why on earth a chick as sweet as her stays with such an asshole, every girl I know has made that mistake at some point. Some of them do it over and over again. Even I have done that, and I like to flatter myself that I have high self esteem and am good at getting away from people who are draining. It's amazing the things we'll rationalize away just because we want to be in a relationship, any relationship. I know I did it with Mike for a while towards the end, telling myself, "This is just because he's having a hard time right now. He'll get over this rough time and things between us will be better. This really has nothing to do with me." Until one night I realized I was fooling myself. It did have a lot to do with me because I was the one who was being hurt. I was the one hiding her head under the pillow and crying at night. It was time to get out. In the years since then Mike really has gotten better, and he is still one of my best friends. He actually did get over his rough patch as far as I can tell, and things between us are really, really good these days. So it can happen. Still, I'm glad I didn't stay in the relationship to wait for that to happen. I'm glad we ended things before I got really messed up. And I hope that my friend realizes the same thing: that her boyfriend really might be a wonderful person, but as long as he is telling her hateful things she needs to get away from him until he gets his life back together, however long that takes. Sigh. I worry about her. It's amazing the things we women will do for men we're convinced we love (and vice versa, I suppose, although I can't really speak for men). I've let guys get away with things I would never, ever dream of letting my girlfriends get away with. It's sad, really. Too bad it's so hard to really, truly feel confident being alone. Because that's what it all boils down to, I think. Whether or not they acknowledge it, in many people's minds a tenuous, strained relationship is better than no relationship at all. Ugh.

Changing the subject, my mom just now called to tell me that my dad broke his ankle! His bar has a softball team that he plays on along with one other older guy and a ton of my brother's friends. Tonight they were playing in the championship game and my father-for reasons only he understands-decided he needed to slide into second base. So he slid, and broke his ankle. Actually, I haven't heard confirmation that it's broken yet, but my mom told me it's twisted at a 45 degree angle so I don't see how it couldn't be broken. Poor Dad. I feel so bad for him. I personally don't understand why a man that just turned 49 needs to be running around on a softball field trying to keep up with a bunch of 20 year old kids anyway, and everyone warned him over and over again that he shouldn't be attempting to slide (let me add that he already horribly ripped up his knees in another sliding incident and injured his hand earlier in the season, too), but still. He doesn't deserve something like this. He just got a new gym membership, too, and was working out all the time and had apparently lost like, ten pounds and was starting to get in good shape. And now this happens. Now that I think about it, this family has a bad record of getting hurt right as we're getting into shape. It happened to me last year: the new year started, I was determined to get into a good workout routine, I'd been working out hard for three weeks and had just started to see some good results when I fell and sprained my ankle and was hobbling around for the next six weeks. Same with my grandma: she was walking to get exercise and she fell and broke her knee. Maybe we should acknowledge as a family that we are not meant to be overly athletic and buff and should just stick to eating relatively healthy food and walking on the treadmill supplemented with some light weighlifting once in a while. Anyway, I feel really sad for my Dad. Although maybe in a small way this will help him. As much as I love having parents that act much younger than their years and can go out and party with the best of them and stay in good shape physically, they should probably acknowledge that they're not 25 anymore. I worry sometimes about my parents getting carried away and bad things happening, and this proves to me that I'm not worrying entirely without reason. I just hope that even if it is actually broken it's not too bad, and that he'll get better quickly.