failure weblog

i had to go to jury duty today. this is the first time that i’ve ever gotten the summons and not been able to get out of it because i was in college. so i had to get up earlier than i normally do so i could get to the courthouse downtown by 8am. then i sat around in a room of 1000+ other people for a couple of hours until my number got called. then we walked over to another building where we waited outside the court room. i was assigned to a criminal felony case. but i never got to find out what it was because before we started jury selection the baliff came out and said they’d settled without us and so we could all go home. so i got to leave around 11am.
even though i wasn’t too excited about having to go to jury duty, it was kind of a letdown to not get to go through the selection process and see what happens there.
i talked with tamara sunday night for a couple of hours. i just don’t really know how to deal with things. i want to be able to talk to her and maintain some kind of cordial relationship, even have meaningful conversations of a reasonable length — but talking to her kind of forces everything that’s happened and what she did to the forefront of my mind, which makes it difficult to have a reasonable conversation with her…especially when i’m trying to have a “normal” conversation with her…i mean…things are not normal by any stretch of the imagination. so it sort of makes me think about that fact.
i wasn’t supposed to have to deal with this sort of situation. i married a person who i thought had strong moral convictions and could honor her commitments. i married a person who had been cheated on and treated like crap and had been committed to the relationship even in that kind of sh!t situation. i married a person who was rational and intelligent, and a person of conviction.
i married a person who betrayed me and committed adultry.

jokes like that don’t really work in print. so much for cleverness.
i’d read the first chapter or so of Torn Asunder: Recovering from Extramarital Affairs by Dave Carder on thursday night when i got it. last night i read the rest of the book. stayed up until about 4:30am reading through it.
what to say…the guy sounds like he has a lot of knowledge of how affairs work, how each person involved reacts and deals with stuff, and the phases that each person tends to go through.
unfortunately, i feel like the methodology tends to be along the lines of: the “infidel” (that’s what the carder book calls the person who committed infidelity) knows what they did was wrong, so you shouldn’t condemn them or attack them mercilessly on it. but you should be angry because they need to know how much pain they caused you. then you need to get over that and figure out that the responsibility for the affair lays in your lap as well. there was some emotional needs that weren’t being met in the marriage, things you knew about or should have known about, and eventually the infidel found someone else to meet those needs. so you need to accept that and figure out what the problem was and try to deal with it.
the previous book i read (Hope for the Separated: Wounded Marriages Can Be Healed by Gary Chapman — the author of the better-known The Five Love Languages) seemed to take a similar angle. in fact, it said the cheater would feel confusion about what to do because they’ve created this fantasy world where the person they cheated with is seen almost completely positively and there’s this desire to feel good and be in that mindset — so it said when the person reveals this to you you shouldn’t get super upset and condemn them or anything, but that you should instead be affirming and say something along the lines of “i know you’re confused right now, and i understand because i feel confused about things right now too.”
in both cases, i’m thinking “fsck that sh!t!” the person who got cheated on wasn’t having all of their emotional needs met either (i’d assume in most cases, i know it’s true in mine). but i didn’t go out and find someone to have an affair with. i didn’t have an emotional affair, i didn’t seek out anyone, i didn’t flirt with anyone, i didn’t do anything. so why should i give any kind of justification or legitimate reason for the action that was chosen? and saying that i understand how they’re confused because they want to run back to the person they broke our vows with, because i’m confused dealing with the fact that i just got completely fscked over by the person i thought was my friend and companion? yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
both of these books had me thinking that basically i get to feel like crap for what was done to me, then i get to feel like crap because i enabled it and/or caused it to happen and was thus not behaving properly as a good xian. but if i choose to not reconcile then i’m not being a good xian and doing what G-d would want.
i’m still confused by how exactly it is that i’m not the one that had an affair…but i get to be blamed for it and told if i can’t handle it and divorce that i am going against G-d’s desires. doesn’t the fact that i was trying to figure out what was going on and was committed to the marriage have any value? why is it that i have to both accept what she did to me *and* shoulder blame? it seems like based on these books, no matter what course i take i’m getting the short end of the stick. that’s just great.
i guess in both cases the books are hoping to be dealing with people who got cheated on that are now committed to reconciling. i guess once one has committed to reconciling it doesn’t matter that they got fscked over as much, as they’ve had to just accept what happened and try to move on and learn from it. i guess i’m not at that point, huh? complete betrayal, lying to me and hiding all of the stuff leading up to this, and being able to fsck someone else just doesn’t seem like something one should accept.

i managed to get into a xian bookstore without being attacked or flying into an uncontrollable rage. the fact they had two copies of the david carder book i was looking for helped. i bought them, went back to the house, started reading some of it, called tamara and let her know that i procured a couple, and she came over and got hers. we talked for awhile, but as with most conversations we have i don’t know that it was really any good for either of us. i both want and don’t want details, both want and don’t want to talk. she’s not in any sort of decision-making seat — other than to leave me — so if she doesn’t want that then she sort of just has to sit around and wait for me to do something.
after she left i broke down and cried for awhile. at least that’s happening less often now.

so tamara came by this morning to pick up a few things. she listened to the devil makes three while here, and liked it. i didn’t talk about anything related to our marital status.
i can’t read her anymore, it feels. i feel like she’s a different person. well, i guess she is, pretty much. while driving to work i passed her on 59 and she was smoking while driving the element. it’s like she’s no longer someone i would think of as cool…she drinks and gets drunk, she smokes, she’s…she’s a juvenile college student who is living life without really thinking about consequences and living moment to moment. or at least sometimes she seems to be — i think she’s fighting it to some degree, but if it wins once that’s too often for me. i wouldn’t have married such a person. and i didn’t. i don’t know who this is, or why she is wearing my wife’s engagement ring and wedding band.
in other news, i got paid $60 to listen to 6-second snippets of 650 mostly crappy country songs. took about 3 hours. some marketing thing. i guess it was worth the $60…i suppose it’s better than getting paid nothing to sit and stare at the wall at home. that’s a close call though.

as apropos as the title may be to my current marital situation, it actually refers to a cd that i mail-ordered that arrived today. the devil makes three is a group of three twenty-something white kids (two xy, one xx) who play alt.countryish/bluesy stuff. www.monkeywrenchproductions.com. it’s a great cd, imo. 10 songs, 30 minutes…a bit shy on length, but boy is it a grand 30 minutes. i’d heard three or so of the songs on boot liquor the last month or two and was interested enough to look into ’em and order the cd. definitely a good choice. the lyrics are dark and depressing and wonderful, and the recording is fairly stripped down and not over-produced. i very highly recommend it.
not much new today in relationshipland. i went to a few stores looking for the carder book _torn asunder:…_. looks like i’ll have to darken the doors of a xian bookstore if i want to have any chance of getting it without having to order it. tamara will be coming by tomorrow morning to pick up some stuff she needs/wants: transcript, knitting yarn…don’t know what else if anything.

i went over to jack and sue’s last night to eat supper and watch saturday night live. jack and sue have been good to me, calling me and having me over and basically just making sure that i’m not about to do anything too stupid or slip into insanity.
while there, sue mentioned she was supposed to be going to church with tamara today (to a new church for tamara, and she didn’t want to go alone). sue hadn’t talked to tamara so she called her to make sure what the plans were. afterward, she said tamara said she was having a real bad night and that she didn’t feel like going to church the next day.
me being the idiot that i am, i suggested that perhaps they could call her to see if she wanted to come over and watch snl. after the counseling appt on wednesday, she’d mentioned that outkast was going to be on snl and she had sounded like she was looking forward to seeing them. and i’d had supper with her and that’d gone okay, so i figured we could be in the same place and get along okay. so jack called, but tamara declined. jack said he’d call back in awhile to make sure she was positive. he called back about 15 minutes later and she declined again.
i was kind of concerned about her, because from previous conversations i know she is pretty (quite) unstable sometimes. so i told jack maybe he should try calling her right before snl started to try one last time. i used to be depressive, so i know sometimes you both want and don’t want to be around people, and someone being gently persistent can help you to get over your bad feelings that make you want to be alone and thus give you what you’d wanted deeper down which was to be able to talk to and/or be around someone. jack called and she declined.
about 20 minutes later, i decided i should call her and check on her and see if i could talk to her about anything. turns out she was annoyed by the persistent calling…she wanted to be left alone.
anyway, i ended up talking to her and she admitted she didn’t want to go to church because she was in a bad state and was really pissed at G-d. this is sort of a recurring issue for her since the miscarriage this summer. i told her i was concerned, but since i have a tendency to try to solve problems and not listen passively i probably wasn’t much help.
well, tamara sent me an e-mail today saying she appreciates my concern for her well-being. i had told her a large concern of mine — after learning about her problems with drinking at the oct 31 supper — was that she might go get drunk or even worse based on addictive behaviours from her past. unfortunately, the way the e-mail she sent was worded, along with my lack of trust in her honesty toward me, made me think she might be having some drug issues already.
so i called her and asked her about it, explaining why i thought it was possible. she said she hadn’t used anything other than alcohol this whole time. so that’s good.
assuming she’s being honest. normally i wouldn’t doubt that, but these days i’m not really sure what to believe. but i’d like to believe it’s true. that’d be a bad thing to tack onto the list of problems that already exist.

i had arranged on wednesday to have supper with tamara last night. i chose a pizza place called the flying pig. it was a place i went to with eric and sarah a few weeks ago. that time i had called tamara to see if she wanted to go, but when i finally got in touch with her she told me she’d had a lesson cancelled and was hanging out over at alistair’s.
of course, now i know she was already having a sexual affair with the fsck at this point, so it’s hard not to think about what was really going on when i had tried calling her multiple times and then she declined when i finally got in touch with her. at the time i figured she was just over there drinking and smoking.
anyway, i mention that because after we’d been there a bit she asked if i’d ever been to this place, and when. she didn’t remember the phone conversation we’d had. but boy i do. i wonder how she forgot that, since she loves pigs and at the time i talked about she said “oh, i’d like to go but i’m already hanging out with alistair and [someone else, i forget]”. i guess she was occupied, and maybe didn’t appreciate the reality that i represented butting into her fantasy world.
so that sort of set the tone for much of the rest of the night. we actually ended up hanging out for a number of hours, standing outside after they’d closed. i also learned that tamara is drinking as an escape and seems to sort of know that it is a problem. that was yet another wonderful thing to learn.
it seems like pretty much every time i talk with her it’s because i have all of these questions in my head…questions that i don’t feel like knowing the answers to will really help me with anything other than just knowing. i have a really hard time not talking about the stuff in my head…it’s sort of like the pink elephant in the room, except the thing is knocking me around and against the wall and i’m trying to keep from mentioning it.
sometimes i’m surprised by how willing i am to talk with her and interact with her, and be concerned about her well-being, after what’s happened. not that it makes me want to reconcile — i just don’t want to see her completely destroy herself.
of course, at other times i am surprised at how much hatred and rage wells up inside me. so far i’ve managed to keep from destroying anything, but i’ll admit that a few times i’ve almost broken a number of things within reach. i think i may have chipped a knuckle bone a couple of weeks ago when i slammed my hand into something (i don’t recall what or when exactly).

got back into houston around 1:00am. went back to work today. i feel pretty out of it at work. i’ve told stephen about things, but then he’s known what was going on the whole time pretty much. i told my dept manager last week because i was worried that management would notice the recent downtown in my productivity and attitude and such. so i wanted him to know what was going on and why my work might seem to have slipped recently and may be that way for awhile. he was really understanding about it. but then he’s a “yellow” (color designations for personality types based on a program called insights…don’t ask), so caring about others is what he likes to do.
the trip went okay. i completely lost it trying to load the motorcycle in the pickup by myself on saturday. i dropped it over once and broke a passenger peg, then i couldn’t get it started, then it started raining on me. it was too much for my fragile state. fortunately, about an hour later jack was able to come over and help me get it loaded. so i took off several hours later than i’d planned.
i got the motorcycle dropped off at my brother’s without too much incident. he had said his driveway was steep…i consider mine fairly steep and it’s maybe a 15 degree slope. well, i got to linc’s (first time i’d been to this place) and his driveway was like 40 degrees or something. it was crazy. after several scary manuvuers in my pickup, i ended up driving into the front yard and we unloaded the bike onto the porch and then moved it down into the carport.
the time home was somewhat awkard but not too emotionally traumatic. the awkwardness was because my parents and i never talked about the situation until the last night. it went about like i’d expected it to. my dad had sent me a couple of e-mails so i already knew sort of what he thought, and my mom had sent me numerous e-mails so i already knew where she was coming from.
surprisingly, the conversation with my grandmother went well. she wasn’t super strongly opinionated about much and i learned some new things about my family history. i’m sure it was troubling for her to hear though, and i hope that she can deal with it okay in the coming days, weeks, and months.
on monday i spent most of the day with my dad, going out to our land and shooting some guns. i had done neither in a long time. it was good to go out and try to reconnect with some of my family heritage, but it was also sad because i’ve not really been out on the land in a long time and a lot of things have fallen apart over time. a pecan grove almost completely died a few years ago during a long drought and hard freeze…i hadn’t seen it before. almost all of the trees were dead and falling down. the old “roads” (two dirt tire-tracks) on a lot of the land were barely visible, if visible at all. and pickly pear has taken over the places almost completely. it’s amazing. it makes me wish i lived closer to it, or on it, so i could do more to make things better. of course, that’d take both time and money, and neither my parents, nor my brother, nor i are very wealthy. and i for one am rather lazy, so time doesn’t really do much good for me either unfortunately.
while we were out and about, we also stopped by an old small cemetary out by the llano river off a dirt county road. some of my leifeste ancestors are buried there — several of whom are the ones that came over from germany. i was sort of overcome with emotion and had to choke back some tears. but then i’m not really in the best mental state these days, am i?

i’m going back to brady saturday and am taking off work monday and tuesday. it’ll be nice to get away from here. although it’ll probably be somewhat emotionally draining because i’ll be seeing linc and ash in austin, then my parents and my grandmother in brady.
i’d not talked to ash much in some time. both he and my brother have called me numerous times since the friday i found out. i had a lot of good times (and some not so good times too) with ash since we met in college. he and i get along well…it’s just pretty comfortable. there aren’t many people i’ve run across in my life that are like that for me. i miss some of the good times that he and i shared both in college and when we were both working for lockheed martin down at nasa/johnson space center.
i’ve talked with linc quite a bit since this happened. i know through the years he’s wanted to be closer to me, although i don’t think either one of us are all that great at being close. he’s better at it than i am though, i suppose. maybe this will facilitate some new level of friendship/brotherhood.
my parents…well, they’re my parents. they want the best for me, and they don’t want to see me hurt. it kind of makes sense what position they’d take on this matter.
and my grandmother…haven’t told her yet. i guess i’ll tell her this weekend. that should be interesting.
i’m also taking my old motorcycle (1994 kawasaki vulcan) to my brother. it’d be worth about $2000 if it were in good shape, it’s worth about $1000 in the shape it’s in, and it’d cost me at least $1000 to get it in street-ready condition. so i told my brother i’d give it to him if he wanted to take on the task. he’s wanted a motorcycle for some time, so he chose to take it. i sure hope it doesn’t turn out to be an albatross around his neck. he said he’d found some people who would help him work on it, and he’s take the motorcycle safety course to get his license. i hope it works out for him.

i sent an e-mail today. i had written some earlier, but after a day or two i was able to rewrite them and remove a fair bit of the hatred and rage that was in them. or least i was able to get rid of some of the more caustic sarcastic comments and most of the cussing (of which there was a great deal).
synopsis of e-mail: i’m fscked up. i can’t trust anything you say to me or have ever said to me. you need counseling. i don’t know if i could ever want to reconcile — how could i ever trust you in the future? and you say this guy is still your friend? fsck that. i think my taking money out of our joint account was quite reasonable, and i think the amount i left was quite generous. so screw what some lawyer-friend says about the fact that such things look bad in court. i think they’d understand. i think she’s still going out and doing stuff with the people she has said were wrong for her to be doing.
anyway…what a fscking joke.