you'll break

Went to Nookie's for late lunch yadda yadda, perhaps you can read about it in other journals, like nineinchlovely, masscooper, glitterdyke, freakysparks, or eveandodd. I hope a nice time was had by all. I was a little out of it, but still managed to enjoy myself.

Then I finally saw the movie A.I.. Loved it, loved it, loved it. Totally and completely flawed. But interesting and scary and strange and thoughtful and bizarre. Tomorrow I will be seeing Resident Evil. At least they're so completely unrelated I won't be tempted to compare the experience.

So my g.e.'s best friend's ex-boyfriend called our house tonight (got that?) and was trying to reach the Melanator, and I informed him of her absence. He introduced himself to me, which was a little strange, and then acted sort of disheveled and friendly on the phone (can one's voice be disheveled? well, it was). He then asked if I was gay. I sort of stammered on the answer, then asked why he wanted to know. Then he asked if I wanted to "go out" with him this evening. I was strangely flattered and shocked. I told him I had friends in town, but thanks for the offer. Then I felt dumb for being flattered since any desire for sex was based on my name and ability to say "would you like me to take a message". And probably based more on his desire to just get off. But perhaps I was still feeling flustered from the beautiful boy who was in my apartment earlier in the day, with his rumpled dark hair and intense blue eyes. Who cares if he was someone's boyfriend and I don't have the skills to land someone like that -- I can still enjoy the view.

Someone actually posted something in her journal today about a topic I had briefly noticed before, and I hope she won't feel weird about me talking about it here as well. She had commented last week about a schoolmate (I love that word) asking her out for lunch, and we discussed whehter he was pursuing her and whether he understood that we were together. And we both acknowledged how attractive he is, which I noticed since she doesn't often comment on her being attracted to many men. And I was thinking about how I hadn't necessarily commented on anyone in awhile, in a genuine way (other than comments about people on TV, which don't really count).

And then I drifted towards the feelings I have when I think of other people and finding them attractive and comparing it to how I feel towards her. And how I definitely feel more jealous these days than I was before. And by these days, I think I mean the last 8 months. So I'm trying to piece together a couple of reasons behind my shift in thinking (i.e. becoming a jealous person).
One, I think I just slip into old habits easily and my brain recites the party line taught to me throughout culture ("my partner is noticing other people because I'm not attractive to them anymore"), but also by forgetting about how if I'm able to feel sexually in different ways towards different people and it doesn't diminish my attraction towards her and desire for being with her as a whole, then chances are she has that ability, too. Greetings, Captain Obvious, it's a pleasure having you on the show. AGAIN.

Secondly, the more secure I'm feeling in the relationship in general, the less jealous I feel about anything, whether it's sexual jealousy or jealousy of general time alotment. And there've been some questioning and rough moments in our relationship, despite the general lack of major drama or problems -- such as, the temporary but significant absence, the presence of another person being in love with her, the adjustment to living together, my own issues with levels of intimacy and need for alone time. So there's been a lot of periods when I wasn't feeling totally comfortable enough to cope with outside attentions, no matter how minor or insignificant they were. And let me repeat this, lest I misunderstand myself at a later date: I wasn't feeling comfortable. Not "I was crippled with frustration" or "I was wounded beyond belief". I was just uncomfortable. I was creating issues that weren't necessarily there, or blowing them out of proportion, depending.

But my third point is something I recently started pondering. The idea of patterns that get established early on. I think since our relationship started very intense very early on, and we got very close and focused on each other, it can have this appearance that being focused on others later on means we're not as close, or it's changing, and change is always a bad thing. According to supersition and conventional wisdom. So my point is, I probably didn't do a good job of preparing for transitioning our relationship, so to speak. And then I was forced to change against my will last summer. Now, I often feel very whiny about last summer, and I'm not trying to make this again a "poor me" or "it was so hard so i'm owed" type thing. Again. But the reason it keeps coming up in my mind is because something wasn't quite rectified in me. And I'm hoping this might be it. Sure all the other stuff I've talked about before prior to this entry were true to a certain extent on an individual problem basis. But I think this larger issue might be the scab that's not healing. I started a pattern of insecurity in my relationship. And I've done virtually nothing to change this pattern. This pattern has little to do with behavior and most to do with trains of thought and emotional responses. Which explains why attempts to deal only with behavior didn't completely fix the problem.

So now what. Not sure. Probably realizing the pattern is half the battle. I guess now I should do some thinking about what my expectations really are and whether they're getting met. They probably are, it's just something in the language and in my attitude that needs a minor adjustment. A way of thinking about things must be flipped.

And this is not even some huge problem that's been looming darkly over me the whole time. It's more like a low-grade gnawing with occasional flare-ups. And it's linked to fluctuations in my self-esteem in general, and probably my libido. So I'm all for picking out specific strands -- much like the challenge of untying a knot.

This post turned way longer than I expected. So much for writing about the movie. Maybe I'll just go read about it instead, since I avoided most press when it came out.