I love my brother, but...

he is one of THOSE people who hit the snooze button over and over again for an hour before he gets out of bed. These people mystify me as it's not really sleeping when you wake up every 8 minutes. But, whatever, do what you want.
IT IS A DIFFERENT STORY when you are an open door and 6 feet away from my head.

I have not really slept much now in the past two days.

He wants to visit me a lot. I am forseeing a new rule for houseguests.

I should go run....zzzzzzzzzzzzz

avoiding sleep

I don't know why I'm avoiding sleep, it sounds so lovely...

So we all know I miss Rob. That I think about him all the time. That I ache and fold in half because I miss him and then I start screaming at myself in my head all the shitty things he did to me. It's a little like alternately filling a big metal container with freezing water then boiling water (and we know how good that is for the big metal container)... So we know this, right? Well, yesterday I see he has changed his profile picture on facebook and it's this closeup of his mouth. I stare at the picture for awhile and the caption reads "the deed is done" and I can't figure out what he's done to his mouth (the tooth is still missing). I stare (pause) and stare (pause), and then it hits me:
he shaved his goatee.
His razor sharp jack sparrow goatee that used to shred my upper lip so badly that not only my friends and colleagues used to tell me to tell him he had to shave it BUT MY FREAKING MANAGERS would tell me I had to tell my boyfriend to shave because my upper lip would break out in these horrific blisters (that sometimes permanently scarred me) for 2 weeks after he'd visit me.
Seven years.

SEVEN FUCKING YEARS!!!!!!!!! I asked him to please shave it. PLEASE. Not because I didn't think it was attractive (because I did) but because IT CAUSED ME PAIN AND SCARRED ME.

and did he do it?
yes.
two months AFTER I break up with him he finally shaves.

I seriously felt like I was going to throw up.
And I've been depressed and weepy ever since I saw the photo.
yesterday.

I can't figure this out. I can't figure out why I miss someone who lied to me all the time and who ignored me and in now way treated me like a decent person. I can't figure out why "love" to me (the love in movies and literature and music) means Rob.
I don't know what it says about me that I have feelings for someone so lost.

Some moments I have hope. This honestly is nothing like the horror I felt when Jaime left (of course, Jaime was a great boyfriend and left out of the blue) and I don't feel much of anything when I think about Jaime now. So maybe, if I keep throwing time at this, I'll stop caring about Rob.
On the other hand, I was in love with Jaime for 14 months before he left and we're going on 14 years at this point with Rob.
dear baby jesus do NOT tell me I have to wait 20 years to get over Rob.

ok, this isn't helping.
I'm going to turn the computer off.

I will say this:
I have been a vegan for 2 weeks (I'm proud of that)
my brother is snoring in the other room :)
my cat is asleep on the pillow next to me
I have wonderful friends and family

that'll have to do until I stop feeling so freaking crappy.

xo

I'm home with a sore throat so why not update y'all?

so what has been happening since the last time I wrote (which I believe was October 21st).

Well, that guy I kissed turned out to be really annoying! He started texting me late at night (and ONLY late at night) to see if I wanted to hang out. The first time it happened (at 11:45pm on a saturday night) I was leaving work. I told him that I had church very early in the morning so no. Then I texted him and said "by the way, you might want to give a girl more than 20 minutes notice on a date." He apologized and said he'd just woken up (he has a client in Australia, he said, who has been messing with his sleep schedule). I thought: there, I nipped that in the bud.
nope.
The following monday he sent me another text at 10pm saying "are you done with work yet?" I said no. He texted again "do you want to hang out?"
bitch, are you retarded?
I said "no, I've been working a double today so I am going home to sleep. If you'd like to meet up another night this week please give me a call and we can set something up." Clearly existing on a plane where he does not have to register what other people say to him he wrote "come on, just one drink. I'll drive you home."
I was furious!! Who the hell does he think he is? Or rather, who the hell does he think I am that I am the kind of girl who after meeting someone can just be his late night booty call.
jackass.
I texted him "thanks for thinking of me. if you'd like to go on a real date some time please let me know."
didn't hear from him until thursday when he texted me at 11pm "you done with work?"
nope. but I'm done with you!

In fact, I think I'm done with match.com for at least a little while. These dates are exhausting and depressing. I walk towards every one of them thinking "I wish I was hanging out with Rob." and then when they are over, the memory of him hits me so hard it feels like being punched in the stomach.

There might be someone on match.com that would be right for me, maybe even 2 or 3 of them. But to sift through 5,000 men one date at a time to try to find him seems like a ridiculously inefficient way to go about finding him.

And I still fucking miss Rob all the time.
I haven't called him. The last time I heard from him was a couple of weeks ago. It was a week after I'd admitted (via text) that I really miss him but that I can't just be chatty with him. That after what he did I can't just tell him the good parts of my life. That I feel so torn because I love him but that I suspect the version of him that I love is not the version of himself he's interested in being. But still, I said, missing him feels like lightening in my chest.
like lightening in my chest.
those were the last words I said to him.
he waited a week and then sent me a t-shirt about bacon.

lightening in my chest ... bacon.

I stand behind what I wrote to Tanya in 2002 "there's a very real chance that the man I'm in love with might be clinically retarded."

Church continues to be a genuine source of comfort and enlightenment. There’s a lot of anger and hurt inside me at the moment (stupid rob), but I don’t have the time/energy/inclination to excavate it. It’s fucking messy so I just let it sit there and go about my day. When I go to church it’s like (minister)Rob or Shana (whoever’s doing the service) reaches into my heart and gives me the strength I need to clean up a little bit more of the mess. Two Sundays ago, (minister)Rob was giving a sermon about what Thoreau called “the gospel of the now” but he started it talking about a boat ride he took in Boston harbor this July. He went into great description about the harbor and the water and I just lost it. I sat there and cried for the entire sermon. And, the most amazing thing happened: my friend Allison was sitting on one side of me and my friend Jessica on the other. When they realized I was sitting there crying, Allison wrapped around me from one side and Jessica took my hands from the other and they didn’t let go. For the entire service (not only that, they started the second service – since we have to sing twice each Sunday – by just taking my hands to begin with even before I started to cry). And I was so aware of the pain I felt over the past and how unbelievably lucky I was to have a place like All Souls to give me friends and support and insight as I move forward with life.

It’s also a place of a lot of activism. It’s one of the main tenants of being UU to be active in the political process and it IS DC after all. So there are big rallies and small rallies and protests and petitions to sign etc etc. And often our choir is asked to sing at these events. It’s just great to me to be surrounded by progressives who are extremely pro-active in trying to make the world a better place. *happy progressive dance*

Lisa and I have a standing date on Sunday nights. We usually go to the movies because she works during the day, but 3 weeks ago she had the day off and we went on one of our signature road trips. We actually started the day at All Souls (there was a visiting choir that day so I didn’t have to stay for both services), where we saw the STRANGEST man conducting the choir with every FIBER of his being!! Not kidding! By the end of the service he’d danced so much while conducting that HIS SHIRT CAME UNTUCKED!! It was crazy and beautiful and hilarious.
Then we drove out to Shenandoah National Park, only to find that it was closed due to snow and ice on Skyline Drive. We were sad. But they told us only the top half of the park was closed so we drove 65 miles south (and went to pumpkin patches and llama farms en route) and entered the park there… and DROVE INTO WINTER! It was incredible! The leaves were all yellow and orange and red but they were covered with snow and ice. I was doing cartwheels I was so excited to be in snow (and fall) after 3 years in Florida (and a summer in Central America).
It was a great day.

Aside from hanging out with Lisa on Sundays, I try to hang out with one or two of my other fabulous DC friends. Sometimes I fit in more. This past weekend I went to Allison’s Halloween party after work on Friday night and spent the night – Allison who is a PhD student in religious history at Catholic University but who also spins FIRE and did so at the Halloween party dressed as a burned heretic. Then Saturday afternoon I had brunch with Terry (who I might get an apartment with in January) at a brilliant Ecuadorian restaurant in our old (hopefully future) neighborhood, then went to work and was promptly released for the night (not a whole lot of reservations at the fine dining restaurant on Halloween night) so I hung out with Ricardo and died my hair red and watched AWAY WE GO and ate Halloween candy. Sunday morning was church, then my friend Angela was giving a concert in the afternoon and then Lisa and I saw PARANORMAL ACTIVITY at night.
Lots of friends. Lots of laughing (very little sleep after the indie terror flick, but it was still fun!).

And on the subject of work? Van is almost done w/ the website (it's really close to done, you can see it at http://jennifersassaman.com/ ) and Johanna is almost done with the DVD. The business cards arrived yesterday. So very shortly I will be sending out my info packets (dvd, resume, cards, letters of intro) to the 73 different theaters in the DC area and introduce myself and try to find ways into these companies (also, sending the same packets to the theater schools and universities in the area).
In addition to that, the University of Maryland is hiring an acting and voice teacher for next fall (though when I wrote to Deb Hale[voice professor at fsu] to see if she’d write me a letter of recommendation – which she offered to do after I was the assistant voice coach for SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER and substitute taught her classes when she was away for 2 weeks—she kind of rudely just said “I know the voice person there now and they’re looking for someone voice certified” which it does NOT say in the ad). I don’t really want to teach (spoken) voice, but I do want an actual grown up job. I’ll still apply.
Also, I got an idea for a movement based Viewpoins-y theater piece about dreams that I told Ricardo about. He is really interested in staging it with me, and even has a studio we can rehearse in for free (I need to find about 9 more people though, I think, for the piece). I think we’re going to try to do it for the fringe festival in 2010.
ALSO – and I think this is the most promising – Ricardo is on the board of The Actor’s Center here in DC and they’ve just lost a board member. He told the president about me and she just emailed me to set up an interview. I feel like this would be AMAZING! Like taking the express elevator right into the heart of the DC theater scene. Hopefully I will be meeting with her early next week.

I guess the other big thing some of you might already know about b/c of my facebook status earlier this week, but I think I’ve just become a vegan. This is not just because of the stats I read on Monday (which included the bit about chickens routinely having their beaks cut off without anesthesia, and how male chicks are deemed “useless” in laying farms so that 200 million of them are dropped LIVE into grinders on their first day of life etc!) ( http://www.goveg.com/factoryFarming.asp ) it’s something that’s about 12 years in the making. I’m not that big a fan of meat in general – I almost never buy it when I’m cooking for myself, though I will order it in restaurants. At first it was just because it was more expensive than other foods, and then it just started looking like the animals I dissected when I was in grade school. For years I have often had to actively shut down part of my brain while eating meat to be able to disassociate it with something that had once been living. Then in '97 I went organic (until grad school made that virtually impossible) then in January I kind of stumbled into realizing that a raw foods vegan diet gave me more energy than I thought was possible.

So when you combine all those years and realizations with the stats that I read on Monday, I just realized that it HAS to be a political statement for me. I can in no way countenance what is being done to animals or the earth (or the way humans are basically being lulled into buying something 2 shades above poison). I have to be against it. So my plan is this: I will try to be vegan in my every day life. If I am in a situation where vegan food is not available I will settle for vegetarian. And, occasionally, I may allow myself to eat some (healthily, humanely raised) meat products (because let’s not lie, bacon is fucking delicious!)(I could easily never eat a bite of beef, chicken, fish, or shellfish again but pork is a different story!)(actually, I think it will be harder not to eat cheese or butter than any actual animal products, and I’m not 100% giving them up).

But maybe I’ll find I need to stay away from eating meat. I was just watching FOOD INC. and they show an organic farmer killing a chicken (and it’s free of cruelty, and the chickens have clearly been living a happy farm life) and I still burst into sobs when I saw it. Perhaps if the reality of the death is too much for me, then I shouldn’t be eating the products from a removed distance.

Of course, when the zombie apocalypse comes; all bets are off!

that's enough for now I'm guessing :)