Tarraguña's Blog

Last Sundy the husband and I “worked” at the Radiohead concert. I put work in quotations because it is not really work. We sell lemonade, kettle korn, snow cones and cotton candy to the concert goers. We get paid. Cash. So it is work but it is so different from my day job and any other job I have had. It is fun, there is no stress and you get into the concerts for free.

While I was walking to another stand I caught the glimps of an old friend. I quickly turned and pretended not to see her. Besides, did I really see her at all? Ok, yea it was her and she would totally go to the Radiohead concert. I guess I turned away because I did not want her to see me. Then she would feel obligated to be all “hi, how is it all going? what are you doing here?” and I really hate the fake conversations. Part of me would feel obligated to continue the facade. The other part would want to reply “uh, why did you come over and talk to me. You have been unresponsive to emails, phone calls, and text messages sending the message we are no longer friends, so why make the effort now?”

It has been about a year since I last talked to her. I am over it but I will never understand why she had to be so careless with my feelings and with our friendship. We were good friends for a long time then she changed. She stoped contacting me. I was the one always calling her to hang out. Then one day she told me about how one time lately she had been feeling so down that she almost ended it all. I asked her why had she not called me. She did not have a reply. She internalized and analyzed everything.

I confronted her about not making an effort and she said sorry yada yada she didn’t realize she was doing it and that she would work on it. But nothing changed and then it became a pattern; her not making an effort, me confronting it, her saying sorrry yada yada. Then I decided to let it go and see if I never called her would she call me? She did not. So after a year I called and we hung out. Frankly I was surprised that she answered the phone and then on top of that she suggested we hang out. Right so then we hung out and talked a while. I remember spectulating to myself that maybe the reason that she was so depressed was due to the fact that she was so self absorbed. I mean she brushed off the fact that we had not see each other in a year and then she started talking about all the stuff she was thinking about. It was not even that fun hanging out. She was so oblivious to us as a communicative unit; our friendship; the moments ticking by as they happened while we existed in that moment. She was somewhere else.

Yea, so I guess I made an effort to avoid seeing her at the Radiohead concert because I knew that she was always somewhere else. She was not present talking to me when she was talking to me. She was a shell. We probably were never really friends. I know that is a depressing way to end it but if I am truly honest with myself I will say that my life got a lot better without her in it. She always had a way of being a sucking consuming force.

Not all old friends should stay in the past. There are some that I would love to run in it. Just not this one.

Last Friday night my husband and I were telling a friend about a geographical location that we will be going to some time soon.  This friend proceeded to speak very negatively about this geographical location.  He went on and on about how bad it was.  Then with his last sentence he said something like, “well I have never been there.”  I did not even have to ask that obvious question he just ended the rant with it as if it were a punctuation point. 

The next time someone takes aim at a geographical location that I am looking forward to visiting I will just deliver a swift upper cut to to their jaw.  This will stop them from talking out of their ass about something that they usually know nothing about.  Thus I will aleviate myself from listening to their five minute rant and I will also save myself the agrivation of trying to make sense of their maddness.

Ok, you are right.  Violence is not the answer. Next time I will just get up and walk away. 

Two days ago, Wednesday night, Rij left a long voice mail explaining why she had a few days off work and at the end of the message Rij invited me to meet her for lunch on the following Thursday or Friday.  Thursday morning I sent a her a text message stating that Friday would work best for me and I suggested a time and a place.  Thus I got a little excited.  I started to look forward to it.  This week and next are the busiest weeks at my job so I am working about 50 hours a week and love any distraction to break in and wake me up.  Thursday night Rij called left a voicemail saying  that she might not be able to meet for lunch due to her not having any money.  In the voicemail she said she would call me back after her night class.  I never heard from her and actually did not think about it enough to call her later Thursday night.  Anyways so today is Friday and I left my house thinking we were going to have lunch today.  I did not pack my usual sandwich to bring to work as I will be going out for lunch.  It happens so infrequent that I really made too big a deal out of it. 

I sent a text message to confirm out lunch meet and she sent a reply saying she will have to take a rain check.  My first impulse was to reply with a  WTF text.  This whole lunch meet was her idea and then she finks out on her own plan.  Do you realize how much energy was put into negotiating these plans only to be at my office with no lunch and no lunch plans.  I have another friend who also pulls stunts like these and then blames it on her busy life style.  They only support my theory that when other people are involved it is better to just be impulsive instead of make any plans.  It takes too long to negotiate the plans and the other party usually decides not to show due to their inability to manage their time or inability to not do something or inability to manage money.

In life there are no rain checks.  You just miss it as time passes you by.

A veces pienso que es mejor no tener amigos en vez de tener los peores.  Pero no sé. 

I think that as you get older, at least as I have gotten older, I have gotten better and more precise with telling people what I think.  I used to keep it all in.  If someone hurt my feelings I would just bottle it up and move on, usually never or very infrequently speaking to them again.  Now I have lost a lot of that filter. 

I remember when having friends meant hanging out with people and doing something fun like playing soccer, surfing, watching a movie or talking about neat stuff.  Now sometimes it just feels like I am in a competition to see who can have the most drama in their life.  I ALWAYS loose because as I see it, I don’t have any drama because I don’t have any unsolvable problems. 

I live in the USA now and I have some things that I own and I have other things that I would like to have just like everyone else in the world.  When I studied at the Universidad de La Habana in Cuba I went without a lot of things.  Thus I learned that there is not much that you really need in life.  Yea there are a lot of neat things out there to buy and use but as far needs go some food, clothing and shelter go a long way in meeting needs.  Now I am off topic of what I started writing about.

I had a group of girls that I hung out with in High School and the some random times after those High School years.  There were not really my BFFs but they were really fun sometimes.  Other times there were the most self absorbed biatches that I ever met.  Since I don’t really talk to any of them and I am older and don’t care anymore I will not even pretend to use their fake names.  Writing is more about uncovering the truth sometimes so why hide it with BS.  So anyways Ana and Kristin smoked (cigarettes) in High School, Kathy would start later and quit a few years after starting.  I don’t know if she is back at it or what anyone’s smoking status is to date. I also started, mostly because it is so much more fun, social and culturally acceptable abroad, and I quit over a year and a half ago and have not looked back.

I remember Meg, a non-smoker, always giving Kristin a hard time about smoking.  She usually did it in a joking but we all knew she was serious kind of way.  Honestly it got kind of old after a while and I was not even the one she was picking on.  I was keeping my mouth shut at that point in my life so I did not say anything.  Years later Meg would go on to marry none other than a big chain smoker.  I knew her still then briefly.  She had stopped trying to get Kristin to quit smoking. 

Sometimes I only remember the good times and wonder what it would be like if we all lived in a similar geographical area or if we all hung out again.  I don’t think any of us would really get along.  If we did it would be because someone was keeping their mouth shut.  I don’t think I could do that anymore and thus we move on.

Before you can answer the question, you need some background information.  The question is in regard to a conversation with a friend of mine, Austin.  She called last week and told me all about her physical symptoms.  She was unable to keep food down every time she ate.  She also stated that what was expelled appeared to have not been digested at all even though it had been 9 hours since she last ate.  She was thinking that she had no digestive juices.  My Fiancé and I were talking to her over speaker phone and since he is in nursing school he asked some questions that a nurse or doctor might ask while doing a complete medical history.  Since we know some medical background in regards to some of her lifestyle habits we advised that a doctor might advise her to stop taking so much Advil (she takes at least two 200 mg pills a day), eat a blander diet and try to sleep a regular schedule like 5-8 hours each night and try to lower her stress level.  She works full time, goes to school full time and has a son.  Her work schedule is sometimes days and sometimes nights so she frequently goes without sleep.  She advised she has a GI scheduled in the next few days.  She was going on and on about how it couldn’t be her lifestyle that is bringing on this symptom.  She pretty much argued everything we said.  I tried to explain that if she had no digestive juice i.e. no bile secretion then she probably would also be losing weight.  She has not lost any weight. 

Anyway so basically we told her if she took better care of herself then it would be easier for a doctor to pinpoint what is wrong, if anything.  She would have diminished or eliminated the effects of not sleeping, taking too much Advil, being over-stressed, over-worked and then if there was actually something wrong maybe a doctor could diagnose it.  Does no one else realize how gray the practice of medicine is?  Nothing is exact.  You don’t just visit a doctor and they know what is wrong.  Mostly they start with the most obvious and start eliminating until something fits.  I bet she did not tell her doctor about her poor life style choices when she went to scheduled the GI test. 

 So the day of the GI test came and went and I did not hear from her.  All this drama before the GI and she finally has the test and now she doesn’t call with the outcome?  She is like that though.  She will talk in circles about her dramas and then the next time I talk to her she won’t mention anything at all.  It is like pulling teeth trying to get her to tell me what was the resolution.  Anyway so today I bite.  Our conversation through text messages is as follows;

Me:  how was the doc appt?

Austin: ok he is putting me on two scripts and I have to go back next week.  How r u?

Me: what scripts? We r good here. Cept my cousin in hospital.  We will prolly visit her tonight.

Austin: medicines

Me: uh yea duh that is what scripts are.  If you don’t want to say what they are just say that you don’t want to tell me.  The evasiveness is unnecessary.  Anyway I hope they help.

Maybe I was a little too direct but it felt good to write it.  It felt good to just come out and say it.  She has me listen to her drama and she always tells the longest version of the story.  She can’t ever give me just the facts.  Any resolution I suggest she argues with me about.  And then after everything she resolves it her own way that I usually totally disagree with and that’s the 12% of the time that I even know how she resolved it.  Normally it’s like watching the whole season of an ongoing mystery show and then missing the last episode and thus missing how it all ended.  It makes it feel like such a waste, investing all that time in paying attention to the plot, scenery and characters and then just having a big question mark in your brain as to how it all ended.  Uneasy

We had lunch with our friends Creighton and Bobbi today. It was nice to see them again. Over the last semester I had only seen Bobbi once. Back when I was in university with everyone I used to see her almost daily. Our friendship has had to re adjust to our differing schedules; her being a student and working nights on the weekends and me working in the 9-5 world. I watched the show Numb3rs today. I really love how they show a group of mathmeticians gathering and figureing out problems together and bonding over math and being on the verge of discovering “it”. I always wanted to have a crew of really smart sort of nerdy people that we could all gather and banter and be on the verge of something big. It has not happened yet. It is hard to get 2 people I know to clear up an hour so we can meet. Everyone is too busy buying stuff and working for the stuff they just bought that the commercial just convinced them of fullfillment if they only buy it. Pretty soon people will hire people to have fun for them as they have to be working all the time. The new OUTSOURCING, fun.

Ramona, mi compañera del trabajo, me acuerda de la amiga Kristin del colegio. Debo alejarme de ella. Creo que quiero enfocarme en la soledad, para pensar y contemplar. A quien le importa si no tengo amigos y no me invita. No tengo amigos entonces nadie se lo va a enterar.

I was feeling down about leaving the coast, la playa but I was excited to return to my apartment. Now it is sunday night and I am really feeling down about having to return to work, and not just any “work”. I have to return to a negative and boring environment. But I really do not want to write about work and explain why I don’t like it, it is a long story. I have noticed that I have too much stuff. I won’t be giving away all of my earthly possesions like the origional buddah did years and years and years ago but I will be getting rid of those things not used everyday. I have started to feel bogged down by my belongings. I should own them not the other way around. I feel liberated just thinking about who I will give some of the things to and what I will donate.

I found some interesting blogs today; Boing Boing and An entirely other day and Cultured