Duplicity

Alex has been calling me every weekend (even though he claims he has a love interest), and Nikolai reads my public blog every day, even though supposedly neither has an interest in me. Yeah, okay. The story of my life.

Basically, Nikolai and I are getting along again, though we did agree that space is still necessary if we're going to salvage the friendship. I got a chance to think over things a little more. Even though the situation and everything was still messed up, I could've done my part to handle it better. Besides, I have to be the mature one in a relationship in which one person readily admits to being immature. Although a casual friendship is fine, I think, I still need to keep my distance emotionally from him because it's just not healthy for me.

Backing away from everything, I'm not angry with Nikolai. It was what it was. I just think that we were working with ideal images of each other, and we expected too much out of each other. Then, when we started digging behind each other's walls, he and I didn't particularly like everything we found. He and I found out the truth about each other - we were human.

There's a part of me that is still attracted to him, and there is a temptation I've never had before with any other man to try to lose weight and look more "attractive" to impress him or even to snag him. But the truth is, I don't believe such an effort would even be worth it. First of all, if he would only give me the time of day if I were thin and "beautiful," he's not the kind of person I would want to be with. Secondly, making such an effort doesn't even guarantee that he would give me the time of day in a romantic or sexual way. And, honestly I don't think I would want to be with someone so duplicitous anyway. I think I was smitten by the idea of Nikolai, but the reality is that I don't know what aspects of him are real, what are imagined, and what constitute an act on his part. In other words, at the end of the day, I don't know him at all.

The Talented Mr. ______.

There's no way in hell...

Impasse

In the course of a week and a half, I found out that my parents are getting a divorce, an unfortunate and potentially life-threatening situation occurred involving me in Chicago, because of that incident (and other points of conflict) Nikolai and I have fallen out, and I found out that I am a diabetic (which probably was the cause of the incident in Chicago). And all of this three weeks before my comprehensive exams.

I think that some of this issues were just going to happen (such as my parents' divorce and my diabetes). Other things, such as the falling out between myself and Nikolai, were a logical result of me trying to work out this area of my life alone and without God. I knew that it wasn't going to work out with myself and Nikolai, even though I couldn't admit it to myself until the California trip last month. I saw the red flags...his pervasive and unrepentant sin, his utter lack of purity, my feeling when around him of being led away from mental renewal and into lust, his inconsistent talk regarding where he was spiritually...they were more like red flames.

But I didn't listen, because I figured if God wasn't going to fix my love life (as evidenced by my relationship with Alex), I was. Even after the California trip, I knew it wouldn't work out, yet I allowed myself to get too close emotionally. The day before the Chicago incident, I wrote in my diary that I sensed that I wasn't in control of my emotions regarding him, and that if I didn't get some space from him, I was going to get hurt. Something told me not to go with Nikolai and Katerina. But I didn't listen. In the end, God saved me from foul play or assault, God allowed for me to be with people who would do their best to take care of me, God kept me from falling into a diabetic coma, God kept me from dying. But I have to live with the consequences of my repeated choice to ignore the leadings of God. I can't blame Him for what happened between myself and Nikolai.

And so now I'm at a strange impasse. My friendship with Nikolai jumped off, hit its height, and crashed and burned in a period of less than five months. Apparently, this "going it alone" tactic doesn't work. At the same time, I dealt with Alex believing that God was involved in that situation, and I ended up wasting six years of my life. I've got three choices...still go it alone knowing I can't do it myself, give it to a God that honestly I'm not sure will even do anything with this area of my life, or do absolutely nothing. And sorting out this dilemma will have to wait until after comps.

Nikolai

My twenty-fifth birthday was really awesome. Nikolai and Brooke took me out to dinner and drinks across the river, and then later on Brooke and I met up with Katerina over by campus, and we had a bottle of wine. It was really cool to be able to celebrate with my friends...that's really what made it special.

I have such conflicted feelings concerning Nikolai, and I'm not so sure why, exactly. I consider him to be one of my good friends, and considering that, I care about him very much. He is one of the few non-family members I trust with my well-being. I have forgiven him for what he said to me in California, but I can't exactly forget because it says a lot about his character, and not in a good way. I have no interest in dating him or getting involved with him romantically, but there's something about him that I can't put my finger on, to where I'm very turned on by him sexually and I would probably sleep with him if I had the chance, but I know that it's not gonna happen. This is the part of my feelings for Nikolai that I don't particularly feel comfortable with, but I can't help who "does it" for me (unfortunately). It comes out in my dreams. I had a strange dream a few nights ago that he and I were running around naked looking for a room to have sex in. Weird.

I think that I need to talk to Nikolai, and soon. I'm wondering what is floating around in his head. Why? For a couple of reasons. Recently, I heard from Brooke that Nikolai had mentioned to Katerina that he wondered if I was angry at him. Secondly, when we were at dinner yesterday he did admit that when we were coming back from the California trip, he was angry at me because I was "on the phone" (although if one reads between the lines, and takes that day in total perspective, it is clear that it was more to his anger than that). Thirdly, I've been sensing kind of a weird vibe from him anyway. It's hard to explain, except to say that I've noticed a difference since the trip, and I can't explain it exactly. Now here's the thing. I know that he's starting to burn out work-wise, so it could be that, and it wouldn't have anything to do with me. But I just don't know. We haven't had a really deep conversation about his life since California. I wonder. But at the same time, though, I can't get drawn into any drama or anything that resembles what happened in California, because I have my exams in a few weeks, and I absolutely have to pass them - there's no other option. Maybe we might talk later on, when we go out of town to our next conference this coming weekend. I don't know - we'll see.

25

I'm going to be 25 years old tomorrow.

This birthday feels kind of strange. I don't think that any of my birthdays felt this strange. Not 16, or 18, or 21. This one feels weird. I think it's because right now, my life feels so different that I don't recognize it.

I look in the mirror, and I clearly don't look like a teenager anymore. I don't really look...old. But I don't look super young either. I am only a huge exam and two years away from earning my doctorate. The people I'm close to now are not the same people I was once close to. When I experience joy, pain, drama and trauma these days, Brooke and Nikolai are on my speed dial, people who weren't even in my same time zone three years ago. My best friends are still my best friends, but to some extent I don't feel as connected to them because we don't see each other in our day-to-day lives. Alex is sort of back in my life, but I don't want to be with him, and to be honest it seems like without that desire I am not too inclined to really be his friend either. And I'm kind of back in touch with a few old friends I had previously lost touch with long ago. My relationship with my parents is different. They treat me like their friend and confidante as well as their daughter. And it seems that they're finally divorcing, so that's another change. My time in college seems further and further in the past. It was probably the best time of my life, yet I don't wish to do it all over again, and I don't wish to go back. I don't like being in the desert of my life, and yes, it feels like the desert of my life. Yet there are parts of my life right now that I truly enjoy.

My dreams are no longer my dreams, and what I really want is so much more abstract. I don't want to marry Alex and settle down in Chicago with our 2.3. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not gonna happen. I just want to have devoted companionship from a man I can trust, I want to be a mother, I want to live somewhere beautiful, I want to see the world, I want to make my life count for something. Yeah, 25 feels different. Really different.

Twisted

"Do you ever feel like you're normal and everyone else is crazy?" I said.

Alex replied, "No, but sometimes I feel like everyone else is normal and I'm crazy."

This is from a lunchtime conversation I had with Alex about four years ago. I didn't get it then, exactly, but I think I get it now.

Last night I was talking to one of my good friends from back home. I was explaining to her two things: first of all, why I have this even stronger hormonal attraction to Nikolai now that I know he's a shallow immature jackass and I would never want to mess with him a million years, and secondly, why I have not discarded this friendship the way I discarded the friendship with Alex. In my head, I know that if the roles were reversed, I would have the same concerns as my friend. But I did have reasons, at least for why I didn't stop being friends with Nikolai. It is pretty simple, at least to me.

First of all, when we had our major argument, while what Nikolai said was unnecessary and really mean, he was giving his honest opinion, which should count for something (that's better than anything Alex ever did). Secondly, despite the fact that sometimes he annoys the crap out of me, there are still things about him that I like, and I do still consider him a friend. Thirdly, I had always felt that if nothing else, I wanted to stay friends with him, even before the California trip - I had never schemed to date him or be his girlfriend. I just felt that if it happened, it happened, and if it didn't, it didn't. And as it turned out, it didn't, for a lot of reasons I won't print here. This is not Alex Part II - Slavic Style. In addition, I was still (and am still) making sense of mixed impressions. On one hand, he tends to put me on a pedestal and think I'm a better person than I am in reality, but on the other hand the things he said that precipitated our argument gave me the impression that he doesn't perceive my worth as a woman coming from anything outside of my physical appearance. I don't know what to make of that. Finally, to sever the friendship before truly knowing if that is what I wanted to do would make things problematic logistially. Nikolai and I have some of the same friends, we're also colleagues, we might be roommates next year. I'd better make damn sure I wanted to end the friendship before I did it. And since I decided not to, that's the end of story. I basically figured I know how he is, and I can deal with that. And I have forgiven him, although I have not forgotten. My name is Jaye, I never forget.

However, the first issue is not as easy to explain as the second. Apparently, I am emotionally masochistic...I like assholes, and I like pain. And with Nikolai, I've got plenty of both. For some reason, him being an irreverent, immature, shallow, miserable excuse for a human being is a turn-on. I guess I thought he was kind of hot before, but now a part of me just wishes I could have the craziest, wildest, roughest kind of sex with him imaginable. Just once. I know it cannot and will not happen. He is not going to sleep with me, and in all actuality, I am not going to sleep with him. I don't believe he sees me like that, and while it would be a temptation for me, going out like that would be a whorish thing to do, and I could see him losing respect for me (even though sex takes two). Also a few religious/spiritual considerations. And if any "accidents" happened, well...I'll put it this way, he is not the kind of man I would want to deal with in case of "accident." So getting screwed by Nikolai - literally - ain't gonna happen.

But why it would cross my mind? I am not really sure. And it's messed up. My friend said that I hadn't been "right" since December (because of Nikolai). Honestly, though, I haven't been right since college...as a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever been quite right. I think twisted thoughts, I do stupid things, I have a thing for unavailable men, and I tend to concern myself with men that are too blind to see my worth as a woman and as a human being. What the hell is wrong with me?

Crisis

I've moved from the "crisis of faith" to the "quarter-life crisis." But either way, my emotions are just messed up.

In the last post, I talked about how I still had some feelings for Alex, or at least I felt like he was still in my heart. The whole situation with Nikolai really demonstrated to me that on some level, I wasn't completely "over" Alex. Nikolai could never replace Alex...the feelings are of a different nature.

So earlier today (technically yesterday) I called Alex to see how he was doing. So he called me back a little later, after eating dinner, and asked me to go to the coffeehouse with him. So I did that...I figured that would be fine because I hadn't seen him in almost a year. We caught up on our lives, we swapped war stories, etc. It was like old times, but it was also different. I felt more comfortable in my own skin, I was more assertive, and I felt more confident in my interaction with him. Besides, while I still care for him and he still has a place in my heart, the feelings overall are no longer there like they used to be. Seven months without communication did wonders for us. I think we can be friends again, though I think the dynamic will be totally different.

But here was the strange thing - as I was talking to Alex, I could not stop thinking about Nikolai. I had to make sure I didn't call Alex the wrong name. I don't know exactly what that means, because I know that I am not in love with Nikolai, and I don't feel the same way about him as I ever felt about Alex. I don't have an interest in dating Nikolai or being anything else other than close friends with him. Yet, here I was, spending time with a man that I love, and in spirit I was somewhere else.

It's the weirdest thing. Brooke thinks that Alex has feelings for me, but he can't admit it to himself for whatever reason. And all things considered, I think she's right. The fact is that after I cut him off, he kept following my life by reading my other blog, and he admitted that he was at first angry at me for how I ended things. In addition, after purposefully not speaking to him for seven months, I call him and he is excited enough to ask if I will hang out with him right then and there. What man does that?

Here is what my life currently comes down to. I have a man in my life who lives in a good neighborhood, drives a somewhat flashy car, and is currently in school for a profession that will potentially make him a relatively rich man in a few years. If this man can get his act together (and I'm not betting money on this), we could possibly date or marry at some point in some future life. But at the same time, I can't stop thinking about another man who lives in the ghetto, drives an old beater car, and is currently in school for a profession that is difficult to break into and will only make him middle-class at best. This man and I are not compatible because we are too much alike, and due to mutual considerations and certain life circumstances chances are that we will never be anything other than good friends.

This weird situation probably proves two things about myself. First of all, financial security is apparently not a major consideration in my dating/relating choices :-). Secondly, I am one emotionally messed-up human being.

But then again, maybe it all makes sense. I think that probably I think about Nikolai more because he is someone I understand on many levels. Even though he can be aggravating at times, and there are certain things in his life I don't agree with (and there are things in my life he doesn't agree with), I truly believe that beyond the complexity of his life, I "get" him in a way I don't think I will ever "get" Alex. And that counts for something. I borrowed the below excerpt from an anonymous prose piece on the "quarter-life crisis" I found on the Web. It summarizes this situation better than I ever could:

You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you or you lay in bed and wonder why you can't meet anyone decent enough to get to know better. You love someone but maybe love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you are not a bad person.

Friendship

I stayed angry at Nikolai for a number of days. Then I chose to go ahead and forgive him. A lot of what he did is stuff that I should've seen coming. He sometimes has this fault of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and expecting that others will understand him for what he meant rather than what really came out of his mouth. I guess I'm still trying to figure out exactly what he meant. Some of the things he said the night before we returned to Cincinnati do not match up well with the way he has claimed and continues to claim that he sees me. It might just be immaturity in action, perhaps. In any case, I'm not devoting a lot of time to figuring him out. I think I've made the mistake of messing around with another overly complex man.

I do have more clarity in terms of knowing where I stand with him. We are friends, and that's the extent of it, for the most part. That's a mutual decision. But the boundaries within the friendship are not drawn very well, I don't think. And in California, I think that we both did our share of crossing them. I'm not completely clear on how Nikolai sees the friendship dynamic, except to say that I think he sees us as closer friends than we probably are, and I don't think there's a whole lot I can do to make him completely change his perception of me as damn near close to moral perfection. On one hand, I don't like being on a pedestal, but on the other hand, it's an odd sense of security, and I know I can trust someone who does think highly of me.

As for myself, while I consider Nikolai a friend, and I trust him more than I trust a lot of people, especially men, I recognize that we have only been getting to know each other better for the past half a year or so. That said, the only way you get to know someone better is to ask "why" questions, and sometimes that means inadvertently crossing some invisible boundaries. I also find that, like Alex, Nikolai's life is too complex for his own good, maybe even more so than Alex. When creating a statistical model, the trick is to make it parsimonious (includes only necessary variables) and fulfill its purposes of explanation and prediction. The problem is that Nikolai has placed too many variables in his model, yet he expects it to fulfill its purpose. Unless he makes his model parsimonious, he will not be able to make it do what he needs it to do. I can and do accept him, even with his character faults and issues...

Speaking of that, the strange thing is, what I found over the course of this week is that although I have every reason to hate Nikolai, I don't. Even though there's not a lot about him for me to like these days, I like him anyway. Not as someone I desire to date (ain't gonna happen), but as a friend I would like to keep around in my life for a while. The truth is that, even though I don't let him in on this, I really do appreciate him for the mostly positive influence he has been on my life since I've been getting to know him better.

Yesterday, I had a flash of wondering about Alex, so I messaged him on his blog. Chances are, he probably won't get it, and even so, he probably won't respond. Maybe it was a mistake. But honestly, I've gotten to the point where I don't care anymore. I'm living each day as if it is the last day of my life. Honestly, to an extent I think that Alex still has my heart, but I think that the friendship as it had been was destructive, and I do not regret cutting him off. It needed to be like that. I might call him today, maybe not. If I did, I don't know how he would respond. But then again, does it matter? I'm in a forgiving mood :-).