How You Live Your Life

You are honest and direct. You tell it like it is. You tend to avoid confrontation and stay away from sticky situations. Your friends tend to be a as quirky as you are - which is saying a lot! You tend to dream big, but you worry that your dreams aren't attainable.

How Do You Live Your Life?

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

How Do People See You?

It's the little details that kill me, like the garter belt with the folded bills.

I'm self-absorbed and uncaring

This is no epiphany, and nothing new to me. I've always known that I'm not moved by passions and emotions in the same way that most other people are. I just can't get worked up over things. Whether it's anger, joy, jealousy, or despair, nothing people do really gets to me. I also can't read people's emotions very well, and when they tell me how they do feel (having given up on hinting), I'm surprised and baffled. Family and friends have been pointing all this out for years, so I've come to accept it, and mostly shrug it off. The problem is that lately I feel embattled, forced to concede that there's something wrong with me, rather than with all these irrational people who keep wallowing in hormone-induced emotions. And I sometimes resent the stereotyping and occasional snide comments. My ex used to drive me crazy (I lie, it was only mildly annoying) by going on about how I should be more spontaneous, I should express how I feel (ie, be clingy), and I could be more considerate. I wasn't demanding enough, would you believe? So I've developed a complex about this, and the only time I do get irrationally frustrated is when someone demands that I talk to them about how I feel. My heart starts pounding, palms get sweaty, mouth gets dry, the whole nine yards. I frantically search for something, anything, to throw out and appease the questioner. I've learned that it doesn't even matter if what I say makes sense, and in fact the less sensible the better! By hearing something neurotic and unjustified, people feel as if they've been given insight into the core of my being. They go away satisfied, I go away relieved.

The problem is my current boyfriend. I love him, I really do (yes yes, ceeb calayk nayaa). And I know he loves me in return. But there's already this tension that arises when he asks me to tell him what I'm really feeling. Or he says that I get lost in my own head, or that my responses are a little cooler or slower than his. So I feel a little tense, unable to be fake with him because he makes me want to be myself, and yet worried that I lack depth of feeling and my shallowness is off-puting. What I like about him is that occasionally he'll take a step back and admit that maybe, just maybe, he's not being entirely reasonable. We haven't known each other that long, I'm still getting over the ex, and we don't even see enough of each other anyway. But we don't see enough of each other. Surely I could be a little more open and honest to make the best of the time we are together. I try, I really do, but there's this niggling feeling that I'm going to lose him because I'm self-absorbed and uncaring.

Living in Sin

Adrienne Rich

She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging. Not that at five each separate stair would writhe under the milkman's tramp; that morning light so coldly would delineate the scraps of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles; that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--- envoy from some village in the moldings . . . Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes; while she, jeered by the minor demons, pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found a towel to dust the table-top, and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove. By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly but throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

Steve Irwin (1962-2006)

Steve Irwin, the Aussie zoologist better known as "The Crocodile Hunter" died today. He was filming stingrays off the coast of Queensland and one stung him through the heart. The loss of such a sincere, exuberant person is a real blow. I've often watched his show with bemused affection and assumed, like most people, that he'd never actually be killed while while whispering passionately about one dangerous creature or another. His family must be devastated.