Ohmigod, a new post?!?!

Yeah yeah, I know. Long time no post. This was supposed to be a place to vent for me, and I sort of abandoned it. Once I got fired, there was nothing to vent about. I was home, not working, and a lot of my stress went away. And I already updated this blog about the relationship stress, which is better too.

What can I vent about now? Oooh, I know. I am feeling sort of isolated at the moment. Lately. Generally. A lot. Not from the SO, but from friends. Due to the relationship stress from last year with the chat "incident", one of my friends has firmly planted herself in the opposition of my SO. She has lost all trust for him and (it appears) has decided that he has no redeeming qualities and it is just a matter of time before it all happens again. She feels it is a pattern that happens again and again. And once a guy does something that is, I dunno, on the "deal-breaker" list, he will do it again and again. Never change, never really permanently anyway. She feels a woman who puts up with it at all is foolish and allowing herself to be a victim. (Mind you, I AGREE with her on all of that....but that is not my situation anymore, it CHANGED.) I think she believes I am making excuses for him. I can't really talk about him with her anymore because she gets this blank look on her face and clearly does not want to hear about any of it. Even when it is good stuff, she has that look, almost as if she is thinking, "You know he is feeding you bullshit, don't you?" Granted, after I was fired and that whole thing came to a head, I was pretty much home here and, due to the time of year, she did not come visit me until, as it turned out, things were a lot better with he and I. Only she did not/does not really believe it, I think. I had to sit down and try to convince her that things were getting better, and had gotten better. And she still is not convinced.

This has brought our friendship to a stagnant place. I procrastinate, she knows this. I am habitually late, she knows this too. She knows all my faults. So now, her responses to me much of the time are that I will be late, or that I will put it off, or that I would not be able to go someplace, so why ask. She is excluding me from her life, in short. She and a couple of other mutual friends are getting closer and I am not included in that circle. I am helping out one of those friends with some major personal life issues too, chatting with her from time to time online. But the three of them actually get together often and actually talk on the phone often and actually e-mail often. Just not with me.

So, whatever. Maybe this will pass, maybe it will not. It's hard for me to say. I would like to tell her to stop being so judgmental of me. It's like she has taken on the role of being my personal angel/devil on the shoulder. But only when we actually interact, which is notably less frequently lately. We don't have as much fun when we hang out, we end up doing things that "need to get done". She is either quiet, or talking to me about what I have not done or what I could be doing better or differently. And I don't feel comfortable talking about things that my SO and I have done, because I get that blank stare and no response. I can't really talk about a new addition to my household because she does not approve of that either. So what can we do? We see each other at the common activities we have. Maybe that is how it needs to be. I am not sure if there is anything I can do about this.

Have we reached the point where she is so frustrated with me that she just can't deal with me? Have I not made changes that she feels I should be making and therefore she has trouble being around me without yelling at me for those things? Can we actually have fun with each other anymore? I am not sure. I just don't know.

Another friend, who lives closest to me, is in the Caribbean getting married this week. So although we are much closer than we have been in years, she has that on her plate now and that will reduce the time we can spend together.

So I am feeling kind of crappy. Feeling isolated, feeling lonely. Not relationship lonely, friendship lonely. I need them both in my life - relationship and friendship. I normally would feel strongly about confronting an issue with a friend and facing it head on. But I feel like she is pulling away. So if she is, I don't want to push her further away, nor do I want to force her to deal with me when she doesn't seem to want to. It's ironic actually, I was just talking with my SO about friendship philosophy yesterday. We have some very different views on how we handle friendship, specifically with respect to conflict resolution. But I think this is different for me because there has been no specific incident that anyone has to explain or make up for. It is a general "shift in the wind", so to speak. And if she is drifting away from me, I am not going to force her back. I can't make someone be friends with me and I won't try. But I think I am getting ahead of things anyway. I don't think this is the end of the line. But I do feel the things I wrote about above happening. So I'll have to see how things progress from here.

Thank god it's Cinco de Mayo and I can get drunk tonight!!!