gaaaaaa

I've been thinking about Broadway a lot lately and wondering a lot of "what if I had stayed" types of questions.

The image I have in my head is from the last scene of The Breakup with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. The two of them run into each other randomly on the street, and you see the care and love that they still feel for each other in their eyes. The exchange is casual and lighthearted, and Aniston's character cocks her head with a sly smile while saying "Hey," almost as if she's more surprised at how happy she is to see him than the actual chance encounter. They exchange genuine pleasantries and mention how great it would be to hang out sometime. They then walk away from each other as the end credits roll up playing "I Can See Clearly Now That the Rain Is Gone."

I remember watching that movie in bed on my computer not long after I moved out of Broadway's apartment back in June. As the credits rolled, as tears flowed down my face, I wished that Broadway and I would eventually come to our own version of that scene. But that only made me cry more because at the time, the positive energy between Aniston and Vaughn seemed so far-fetched for me and Broadway.

Now, a few months later, it doesn't seem like such an impossibility. At the time, I just wanted out of the situation with Broadway because I felt so constrained and unhappy and daydreaming about HB. HB was the escape. But now, I want an escape from HB. Given how many warm feelings are conjured up when I think of Broadway, it seems that I now want to be with Broadway as an escape from HB.

This isn't the first time that doubts about leaving Broadway have popped up. In the past though, I think about things that make me unhappy such as what sex, or rather the lack thereof, with Broadway would be like. It was unbelievable how just that one thought would completely derail any inklings of reconciliation with Broadway. I guess that was the escape that HB, and our phenomenal physical chemistry, provided.

In a way, I feel that HB and I have already run our course. We'd always had a very physical connection, and while we certainly connected emotionally during the two weeks that he was here in Boston, there wasn't enough depth to sustain us through the past two months of being 7000 miles apart. We knew then that we would see each other again in October, when he comes back to the US for his sister's wedding. In fact, I booked flights so that I could be in Chicago for about a week to maximize the time we would have with each other.

But I fear that our time together will just be more of the same as our phone conversations recently. I will get easily annoyed. I will question his intelligence. I will wonder whether or not I actually respect him. The latter two were never issues with Broadway. Broadway and I were always intellectual equals (yes, I know I am horrible for feeling this way). So really, I am just going for a 1-week long booty call.

And yes, that is basically my motivation for going through with this trip. Honestly, without this trip coming up, I am very ready to tell HB that it is time we go our separate ways, call it quits, take some time to heal from this whole situation that started back in January and then decide what to do about Broadway.

HB feels the change in my attitude. He has asked so many times why things are different now. Why can I no longer tell him that I love him? Why do I sound so distant over the phone? He sees the week together in Chicago also as a chance to re-evaluate where we are, and if he still feels the same emotional detachment during that time, then he will have to think hard about whether or not this is the right road for him.

So maybe this will all come to a mutual end in just a short few weeks.

Things that annoyed me today

Things that annoyed me today

1) Playing tech support for HB.

Yesterday morning, HB called and had a question for me. The night before, we'd been talking about his internet connection. It's been rather flakey, and despite calling the service provider several times, the connection hasn't improved. While talking about it the night before, I happened to ask him if his roommate was having similar problems. He thought it about it a bit, and replied, "no."

Um. So why have you been calling the service provider? Obviously, if your roommate who uses the same internet has no problems, the internet's not broken. Something's wrong with your computer. That really annoyed me. It's such a simple and obvious concept that he just didn't get. So I told him to look into updating the driver for his ethernet ports and controllers.

So that was the question I woke up to yesterday, "How do I backup my existing driver before I install this new one that I downloaded?" First of all, I don't know, I'm not tech support. Secondly, I don't think you can backup a driver that's already installed. You can only back up the install file. And last but not least, I kinda doubted that he'd even downloaded the right drivers. But I wasn't going to mention that and be roped into a 10-minute conversation helping him to find the right driver. So I said I was late for a meeting (which I was), and hung up.

This morning, he called with a new question. He got a domain name and host and wants to make a webpage. Red flags immediately go up in my head. Ugh, new issue for me, his non-tech-support-tech-support. He asked what I use to make my page.

-Wordpress.

-But I don't want a blog.

-Okay, but wordpress can do pages too, and it has an easy interface.

-But it's still blog-based.

-Fine, most of the themes are blog-centric. You can try Dreamweaver or another editing program.

-Okay, I'll go download Dreamweaver.

-Umm, Dreamweaver is not free like Wordpress. You'll have to either buy it or pirate it.

-Oh.

I just don't have the patience to sit there and walk him through making a webpage. He claims to know simple HTML. Yeah, I bet he knows the bold tag or something, which is obsolete. I didn't want to even start getting into FTP or stylesheets or tell him that back in the day, in the age of static pages, I coded my own site. I don't want him asking me any more questions about webpages.

Funny thing is that if I were actually there, his internet connectivity problem is one that I probably wouldn't mind figuring out for him (FOR him is the key, not WITH him). I'd spend an evening or something looking up drivers and screwing around with his network settings to see if I could improve anything. (But I wouldn't do the webpage for him, unless he wants to pay me).

Ultimately, I am repulsed by his general lack of tech-savviness. It really really bothers me. I have to constantly remind myself that he is different from the people around me here in grad school. He has other talents that I need to learn to appreciate, like being able to pick up a musical instrument and pretty much pick out an ad-hoc tune. Actually, that's the only talent of his I can think of right now. I'm definitely entering negative-HB mode.

And damn it! He's the guy! He's supposed to be MY tech support, not the other way around. Broadway was always so good at that.

2) Being told "I wish I could pull off short hair."

My labmate came up to me and said, "Man, I wish I could pull off short hair." My response: "You can." To which she said, "no way, you have no idea."

Umm, have you ever chopped off your hair? You probably haven't, in which case, you have no idea whether or not you can pull off short hair. Stop saying that to me just because you don't have to guts to go short.

I've gotten that a few times since chopping off my hair about three weeks ago. My friend buzzed the sides of my head (not completely, maybe left 1/4 inch or so), and we left the top at about 3 inches so I could spike a mohawk. But day-to-day, the longish hair at the top just sits, and I look like I have a punkish boy cut.

I like it. It's different and actually kind of empowering. But I get really annoyed at comments like the one my labmate made.

His cities

San Francisco will forever be his city. I won't be able to visit Dolores Park without thinking of him, canvas bag slung over his shoulders and hanging low below his waist, overlooking his city. Maybe he's thinking about his childhood home. Maybe he's thinking about me. Maybe he's thinking of which coffeeshop to visit for his afternoon espresso. Who knows? He just looks peaceful.

He already knows that I will leave two short months later for an internship in Beijing, but he's trying not to think about that. He is lost in the moment, in the city he loves, to celebrate his newly-acquired "doctor, but not the kind that helps people" status with his new(ish) fiancee. He doesn't yet know that Beijing will be the beginning of the end.

In a way, Boston is his city, too. He grew up here. His went to school here. Twice. He met and lost his love here. Twice. The second times, both times, were much more difficult than the firsts.

But Boston will never be San Francisco. Boston is where things are broken, where the world beats him, where he remembers the corners he retreated to because he had nowhere else to hide. San Francisco is where things heal, where the world embraces him, where he can hide from the pains in Boston without hiding from the world.

There are many other cities along the way, too. Some, he will always associate with me; others, he might only have the kinds of memories that fade easily because they struggled to imprint heavily on our minds in the first place. A gourmet burger place in downtown Hollywood might cause him to pause a second longer than usual, triggering a vague pang that he finds hard to pinpoint, but that which suddenly brings my image into his conscious thoughts. Or perhaps a dolphin's glide in the waters of a coastal city conjures up the sounds of uncontrollable laughter from a different time (and perhaps even a different city) as he pulls out his aviators to cover up the glint of the water. Similarly, a pickpocket in a foreign country might remind him of a story told on grassy fields amidst a group of giggling frisbee girls whom he tried hard to capture on camera.

Three years of cities. Three years of memories. Three years of promises of faraway places we will have to visit during the rest of our lives.

Three years became just three years, and three is not forever.

But San Francisco, San Francisco will forever be his city. To him, and more importantly, to me.