Sometimes I feel like a character in some coming of age film. You know... the unpopular girl who just doesn't know how to hold a conversation (as if that were my only problem! at least it seems to be the only one Jev notices). Now if only some benevolent soul would come along and teach me all the right things to say, all the great topics of conversations, and make me exactly what Jev needs me to be. I wish.
It's times like these when I feel like such a failure. After reading my entries from the past couple weeks, Jev seems to think that he has to completely stop trying to get me to talk. And then he turns around and does exactly the opposite. I'm left feeling confused, frustrated, and downright stupid.
Yesterday, when he got back from his flight about an hour early, I was in the process of typing up my journal entries that I hadn't posted in a while. He didn't want to talk on Netmeeting (I keep my journal stuff on the Zip drive, and so it and netmeeting don't get along well), he wanted me to type up my entries and post them, because I say things in my journal that I don't tell him about when we talk.
I felt like a real flop, and I went on typing up journal entries (I'd shut down my journal stuff when he showed up so I could talk to him, only to have him say he'd rather I typed up the entries). Later, we got caught up finding airplane tickets... I should say, he did the hunting for me, because it felt too much like work (and he always has better luck anyway). And after all that was done, he headed off to bed.
Now tonight, he says how he doesn't want to push me to try to talk and make me unhappy, and then he goes into this thing about where I want to live. I tried to explain to him that either place that he's been considering is fine with me (big city, decent climate), and I don't really have a preference. But that wasn't a good enough answer, and he kept pressing me on it, until I got so frustrated that I just out and out told him he wasn't listening to me. Strike one.
So, since he thought we couldn't have a decent conversation, he said he'd just climb into bed and let me put him to sleep... which he did, more or less, while I sat, starting to feel stupider and stupider. Strike two. By the time I started talking, saying that I was feeling very stupid, he was too sleepy to seem to notice or at least not to do anything about it, so I let him go to sleep. Part of me felt like calling him back in netmeeting and saying, "Look, I need you to wake up and talk to me and tell me I'm not stupid." But that's too inconsiderate for me to do, and so I've just been sitting here, dwelling on it all. Strike three. I'm out.
I wrote a rant earlier, but I'll delete that part before I stick this online. I'm still unhappy, but it's my own damned fault, so there's no use in griping about it. I'm no brilliant conversationlist, I never will be, and part of me has always wondered if maybe our relationship will eventually fall apart because of that.
Why don't I talk? I'm afraid of being thought of as stupid, or saying something wrong. I did it yesterday afternoon, when Jev was telling me about how his flight pulled away from the gate and then got called back for a guy who was hard of hearing and had missed the gate change announcement. I said that was nice of them to go back for him, not realizing it caused almost an hour delay for the flight (which was still an earlier flight than Jev originally had anyway). He went into a rant over how the airline probably only did it because the passenger was hard of hearing, so they wouldn't get sued, and on and on, and I just felt stupid. The way I saw it, if the airline hadn't bumped him up to that earlier flight, he would have just been taking off from DC at 2:45, instead of getting off the plane in Roanoke like he did, even with the delay. But what do I know....
