writing – ooglykraken

Moving On

This past 27th of September was my birthday. I don’t really care about the ceremony of it as I’m no longer a child who receives gifts. To me, yesterday, tomorrow, and today are just days. Turning 33 doesn’t change anything for me, it’s just another day. However because of the cultural expectations I wanted to spend this day with my daughter. I have fleeting glimpses of hope for what my life can be and I’m still figuring it out, but what I want above all else is to be a good father.

I promised my daughter I would take her to the zoo and eat berry dessert with her. Since my divorce I can hardly eat or sleep but I couldn’t betray my promise to Zelda. For several weeks I only slept four to five hours at most and I thought about not being there. Instead I woke up around four, drove two and a half hours north, picked up my daughter and spent the next four-and-a-half hours at the zoo with her, her friend, and her friend’s mom.

Afterwards she slept for a bit, but woke up with maybe only 30 minutes of sleep. I had asked my Ex to pick up some berry-tarts from a local bakery, which she did. Thank you X. Afterwards Zelda and I shared one, though Zelda ate most of it. I don’t like sweets but I promised we’d eat it together.

Afterwards I spent some time playing with Zelda and just doing anything to spend time with her. When she wanted to sit on my lap and replicate my pose I felt really happy.

Later her mom came home from what I can only assume was a date, we prepared a dinner for Zelda. I helped as best as I could as I don’t spend enough time with Zelda to know what she likes now (writing that line makes my heart bleed, I wish I knew but her mom makes it difficult to spend time with her). While she did like the broccoli I made her, she really was invested in eating it when I promised to read to her. People are always amused when I say I can keep a toddler’s attention for an hour with books, but I use onomatopoeia, different voices, and engage her with questions.

In the end Zelda went off to do her own thing and my Ex and I spent some time talking. It was the most civil conversation we’ve had since she declared she’d started a divorce. It still hurts but I realized something recently.

I’m better off without her. She is selfish, non-empathetic, hyper-focused and apathetic to my plight. If I criticize her she gets angry. If I tell her she hurt me she plays UNO-Reverse and says its my fault. When I expose my vulnerabilities she just gets angry with me. So I just drank my pain.

She’s not a bad person inherently just selfish. As I’ve come to understand this, the love I’d held for her for over decade has started to fade.

I’d known she was like this the entire time, I just hoped she would change. It was during a trip in China to visit her family for Zelda’s first birthday I realized I didn’t mean much to her. I felt so alone and ignored. She didn’t understand when I said wanted more time with my daughter as everything was following Chinese traditions. I don’t know those, I’m not a part of them, I just felt like an outsider. It was just months of pain being an outsider, and she didn’t try to help. I even told her but she didn’t understand or care.

It’s this accumulation of apathy towards me I’ve realized she’s just not worth loving. I hate this. I hate that I feel I have to write this, but she ignored me and I loved her with everything I had. In the end it’s just a sad story.

More Useful Than I Think

My last post, Less Useful Than a Paperclip, has been deleted as it goes against the ethos of my intentions. I do suffer from depression and nihilism but I do not want to spread it, when I write I just want to spread understanding and hopefully good will. While finding my divorce was finalized has hurt me deeply I do not want negativity to pervade. It really sucks and I miss my ex-wife and daughter but that’s life, as Mr. Sinatra said. Life is not an easy undertaking but we all have our own cards to play and recently I’ve been misplaying mine and blaming the game. There is so much happiness and good to find, for most of us. It’d be disingenuous to constantly be so negative. For all of the pain and misery one finds in life there certainly is joy and happiness. I know not all people are as lucky as I am, I was born to a middle-class american family but striving for something better can avail something to everyone Srinivasa for example.

I’m choosing to write today because my last post is the least of what I want. I hope when you read my writing you connect to me in some small way and I do not want you to connect to my negativity. What I want is for all the world to be a good place, full of life and happiness. I’m naive so it is my nature. To not-so-subtly get to the point I apologize for giving in to my despair. Instead I started a Youtube Channel where I will be posting all child-friendly content. Mostly reading books and when I finish those doing puzzles and other similar content. If you’ve read a lot of my blog you know I have a drinking problem and other related issues but I will not allow that to bleed out into anything related to children. I have my failings but children deserve the best of us, and that is only what I will give them.

I hope whoever reads this has a great rest of their day.

The Collapse Pt One – The Golden Age

If the title seems odd, it’s only because I think reading, no matter the subject, should be enjoyable. This dramatisation that persists in my writing is intentional, if it’s found to be in poor taste I apologize but i’m not going to change. My words are not hyperbolic, I am not stretching truths or making light of these topics. I would name it “Flowery”. I use flowery language because I like to use flowery language. Read How Fiction Works by James Wood if you feel the same or want to understand why. And yes flowery language is pretentious, but fun.

Tensions between my wife and I existed long before we were married. We met by chance when I found the only off-campus housing I could afford as a college student with my only job being a non-graduate teacher’s assistant. Don’t remember my pay otherwise it would be explicitly stated but I do know rent was about $600 a month + utilities. There were three (then eventually four with some ingenuity) roommates here to split the cost of our three bedroom, one bathroom apartment. One was an American-born white guy, myself (another American-born white guy), and then my Chinese-born soon-to-be-wife.

Her first impressions of me were of mild fear. I listened to death metal and didn’t talk much, but we met in the kitchen. I learned basic nutrition in high school for effective weight control in wrestling and have cooked my own food since. This means we both spent time in our 80’s patina kitchen. It was in those rare moments where we were both cooking that we connected. The conversations started small and became bigger over time. Then we started spending time with each other outside of the kitchen. This led me to ask her to accompany me on my family’s annual trip to Tennessee for the winter holidays which she complied to. One night we were all just sitting and talking and my father, recognizing our closeness, placed a blanket across her and my collective laps. We were sitting alone on a couch (actually a bench but hey) and this blanket combined us. Then later that night my parents took my younger sister to watch Frozen in theatre which had just come out. X (my wife) and I stayed behind. By the end of the night I was watching the film adaptation of Solomon Kayne and while she texted or scrolled social media. She was starting to come around to the romantic interest between us but it was uncomfortable for her because she kept calling me “white devil”. This is because of the cultural separation which very obviously distanced us while she dealt with her feelings of attraction.

From this point it would be honest to say we were “dating”. Nothing much changed but we both intended to spend more time with each other and eventually I started sleeping in her room (nothing happened, we were just physically and emotionally closer. Get rid of those dirty thoughts!). This meant conversationally sharing things, cooking together, bike rides together and all those other activities couples do. However my job didn’t provide a properly sustainable income combined with my first attempts at budgeting. She had to help with multiple months of my rent because I was a little short. I always paid her back but a certain seed was planted. One semester my family couldn’t afford tuition and I didn’t receive enough scholarship funds to compensate so I spent it just working and figuring out my life (which I obviously still haven’t done well enough). This agitated her to no end and she continued to pressure me into accepting a loan from her to resume schooling. I didn’t want to accept her money then, but eventually and begrudgingly I complied. I still think I made the wrong choice agreeing to it. I skipped one semester and had my following one subsidized by my girlfriend. This is where the cracks in our future foundation would become beyond obvious.

From here we would find another apartment together, the fact she and I continued to live with each other caused her father distress knowing we were now entangled despite not explicitly telling him as much. This was the time where our relationship was solidified. Thanks to her urging I started working in several varieties of game development, my then-at-the-time goal.

However she was a graduate student and I was an undergraduate. She already had a bachelor’s degree from China while pursuing her Master’s at IU while I was still an Undergraduate, she’s two years older than I am. Then came the dark times when after this year she graduated while I still had several semesters to finish. We were together for two years and for me she was the “one”, but she was also my first serious romantic partner. My inability to keep up with her (across multiple vertices) led to us separating for some time. This time lasted almost more than a year.

During that time she started dating someone else which absolutely broke me. I exercised so much I was probably in the best shape of my life but ran so much I fractured my fifth meta-tarsal bone (this has more to do with the type of shoe I ran in and less about my persistence; always run in good shoes). The upshot was I had a lot to talk to the ladies of the natural history building about since I’d fractured my 5th-meta-tarsal and my 5th-meta-carpal within a year which was unusual. It’s really because I don’t emote well and turn my frustrations upon myself resulting in real long-term physical damage. Exercise is good for you but we need more than that for healthy coping.

Eventually I was just three credits from graduating so I moved to California while I finished my degree online. Believe it or not I moved in with my ex and shortly after, we were together again. For fun, we met at a fancy Italian restaurant and exchanged feelings, deciding we could live together again. For more fun she bought me Fallout 4 on PC (just released recently in 2015) that night as a gift. If you’re starting to create a through-line, yeah she was better off than me for a variety of reasons. While she could offer a lot, all I had was me which is now obviously not enough.

After this our relationship accelerated as we both started our careers and began to live our adult lives together.

If the question of why I would post this arises, it’s because it’s much easier to look back now and see how things could’ve been different with the understanding of today.