channonyarrow | The very first song of my day.

I tried to make a witteh post about the rules of the Song of the Day that

spamcola coaxed me into starting. I thought about pointing out that it's not really going to be a Song of the Day because I'm not online every day. I tried to justify why not everything I listen to is teeny-tiny Canadian alt-country bands or Ukrainian rock bands or French/African Pygmy techno collaborations or Uighur pop. I tried to think of the right mix of unusual songs in my collection to make it really worthwhile.

In short, I tried to justify why what I like, a whole lot, is the songs that get played on the radio.

And then I thought about it and decided to start with the song that I once hated more than any other and now makes me cry every time I hear it. There are things wrong with it; one of them is the fact that everyone and their dog, particularly if they're British, knows this song. At least when I was in England, everyone sang it, everyone played it (I once heard it played on guitar, spoons, and upturned rubber garbage can, rather memorably).

Everyone listened to it so much that the soul left the song and went somewhere else, and I hated it, hated it, hated it - for its banal lyrics, its whiny vocals, its droning guitar, and its omnipresence.

(Feel free to comment and tell me at what point you figured out which song I'm talking about.)

I'm not sure when I started thinking about the song and realising that really, it wasn't that bad. Overplayed, yes, always. Stuck in the shadow of some of the other songs on the album, yes. Overpowered by the band's collapse in hatred, certainly.

But not, really, all that bad.

Then I left England.

I cannot, cannot - for I do not have the words - ever describe how much I hated that day. How afraid I was to go there in the first place, and how little I could believe that I had to leave, that it was all over, that everything was done and everyone was moving on and it wasn't going to be me and Dot and Verity and Liz and Matthew and Raeli and Ranty and Pedro and Chris living in a big house for the rest of our lives. I will never have the words, for I am not that gifted a writer, to give you my pain and my love for that time period.

I left England the last week of September, 2003. I have been home in the US now for over 3 years. I have a satisfying job, a life, friends, things that make me happy. I am no longer a student, nor do I want to be one.

I am still crying as I write this.

Three years and it's as if I'm still on the plane that I came home on, crying all the way, getting concerned looks from the flight attendants and the people in my row. I scared

jkivela so badly, once, with my depression about the whole situation that he asked me what he could do to get me home. I burst into tears again when I realised he wasn't talking about my home fifteen miles from where I was at that moment but my other home.

But one thing I never did in that glorious time - for it is, it is preserved in my memory now as a glorious time of everything being new and learning the whole world again and finding friends because they were and are amazing, wonderful, powerful, loving, exhausting, magical people. One thing I never did.

I have said it before and I will say it again. You might wonder why someone as avowedly an attention whore and drama whore as myself, who always must be the centre of attention and who can become deeply upset at someone else exhibiting those tendencies - why I do not ever show pictures of myself. I did it once and the main thing in the pictures was my sword. I don't post pictures, I do not have an icon of my face (or my breasts) and I try very, very hard to avoid showing myself, arguably the thing that most people interact with first, to everyone I know online. It's not because I have taste.

I am not pretty, nor beautiful, nor even handsome. I have many, many flaws, some of which I could help and choose not to, some of which would require plastic surgery to fix. Some I am trying to help and others I have learned to accept and to cope with and to make part of me rather than something other than me. But it is still true that though I love my height (6'4") and accept my weight (280), if I had one wish from a genie, I would wish for beautiful skin. It wouldn't even be a question. No amount of money is worth that wish, ever. That is what I want, and what I will never have.

I will delete any comments that tell me what I can do to get that. Don't fuck with me, this is bad enough.

I lived for two years with someone who I could consider my soulmate, if by that statement you mean the person who finishes your sentences, the person whose sense of humour you understand perfectly, the person who has the same evil ideas as you and helps you carry them out, the person who everyone learns to know is the harbinger of your coming, or you of his, because the two of you go everywhere together, certainly all social events. He snuck me into his department's library so I could get a book that I couldn't get through my own department, I gave him free booze to DJ the bar so that people had fun. He held me together - literally - when I got screwed over by my college and someone I'd thought was a friend, then got me drunk and led me home, the first time I'd been on a bicycle in five years, going to a new house for the first night. He laughed with me when I came home at six in the morning from a long night in the bar and he was in the kitchen ironing his shirt to go to work. He played Risk with me over an entire vacation when everyone else was out of the country, took me to synagogue, taught me to cook Arabic food. I smashed his fingers making hummus with a wine bottle, picked up his cues to taunt bus passengers with, went to the Cotswolds with him when he tried to scare me by driving a hundred miles an hour in a car we'd essentially stolen, went to Tesco's with him in the same car and argued about pears versus apples, found a house that he could stand that we could all live in when he decided that he did want to move in with us. We both went to the market on Wednesdays, looking for the Mad African Stall with the candy and the weird looking food, we both decided to buy ten pounds of potatoes and ten of carrots and twenty five pounds of rice because they were on sale. We tried to crash someone's 21st birthday party when we were bored. We nearly killed each other (and several other people) with a punt.

I never told him how much I loved him, how I'd had a crush on him from the moment I saw him, and how I'd never, ever thought that we could be the friends we were, walking through Jericho to Port Meadow, talking about everything and nothing, looking for a house together all over Oxford, planning to live together the following year in London if I got a job in the UK.

The cool kids never liked me, and he was so very, very obviously a cool kid that he could never even consider liking me.

But most of all I never said it because I was not pretty. He is and was magnetic. All of my friends that I admired loathed his ability to get any woman he wanted, because it is an incredibly demeaning trick and a demeaning activity. And he used the skill ruthlessly. We had jokes about it - the puppies that followed him home, the trash slide and the skip, the mine field and the gun, and many, many more. We discussed it seriously, we discussed it jokingly, we didn't discuss it at all, everything, and never once did I say that I hated seeing those women come over because it upset me.

He, of course, set me up entirely, by saying that he'd never had a friendship with a woman that had been a friendship that hadn't revolved around sex and/or her attraction to him - so I kept my mouth shut.

I may be an ugly girl, but I am a good one, too. I learned that lesson a long time ago. If you don't do what men want, they leave, and there is nothing worse than their leaving. My father taught me that lesson, and so many of the men I valued at one point or another in my life are frozen in my memory, with their backs to me.

Leaving. Always leaving.

And there were other lessons. The death of a fifteen year friendship (not mine) because the man in the friendship didn't know that the woman had had a crush on him for years and wanted nothing more than for him to ask her to prom and tell her he felt the same way. As far as I know, they never spoke again. The friendship where I did, in an act of incredible boldness, say that I loved him, offered to not go to college for him, and got told no, he didn't feel that way. Even though to everyone we knew, it looked that way.

There were others, and I defy any woman to tell me that she never was taught that lesson.

So I never said anything. The crumbs I could have, I would accept, even if I wanted far more. That was his to give, not mine to ask for. If I were pretty, that would be different. If I were shorter, thinner, and above all prettier, that would be different.

I never said it. I supported him to my friends when they (quite reasonably) pointed out that he's really a bit of a shit. I panicked whenever it seemed likely that somehow he was about to realise what I felt, how important he was to me. I put a perfectly innocent one line statement on my web page, then deleted the whole thing when I realised he might have read it.

If he reads this, that's not my problem. I'd not like it pointed out, but there's only one person on my flist still in touch with him. You know who you are, and you know I'll nut you if you point it out.

So. The very first song of the day,

channonyarrow-stylee, is one you all have, and you all have heard a million times. And perhaps you loathe it. But if you can bear it, download it, listen to it again, and think about it.

For Raeli, my wonderwall.

I said that maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me, cause after all, you're my wonderwall.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I am quite certain that you will not be surprised, knowing what you know of my life of late, that this entry touched me on a very deep level.

And made me burst into tears at my desk.

Yeah, well, I burst into tears at mine reading the comment replies.

I'm glad that it touched you. I sort of worried that I'd throw it out there and everyone would run in fear.

:hugs:

still would help you if I could :)

I know. You are a total sweetheart and a special person in my life - don't ever forget that.

to quote a sappy movie...

"Ditto"

:)

Ghost!

You are just a big ball of sap. *g*

not quite as sticky, least not right now

I came to your blog via

skibinskaya. Thank you so much for having the courage to share your experience with the world like this. Your entries are powerful and beautiful and I have added you. I hope you don't mind.

Just wait, it'll be all shallowness again soon! But you're welcome to come along - and I'm glad that you found this entry powerful. Thank you.

And am adding you back. (How could I pass you up after reading about you in

skibinskaya's journal for so long?)

We're a little bit of everything, aren't we? That's what I love about blogs. Their content is so varied, you can hear a person's voice through the entries, whether happy or sad.

I'm glad you have added me back! Welcome to the... I was going to say the epic trip, but it's taken a rather more personal thought than I intended when I first began cataloging Peru. It's wonderful, though, to see a country permeate your life and go from being a subject to an active participant in your life.

That said, welcome to the mesh!

Is it a permanent switch to Peru? I'll be very interested in following your entries - given how England impacted me, I'm curious to catch up and watch the ride. And I'm glad to be aboard for it!

Nothing is really permanent with me. It's just... where I am. For now. ;)

I think many people have played the ugly one, but the story often goes untold...

I think it does. I think it shouldn't, that we've harmed ourselves enough as a society by setting an arbitrary standard of beauty - but it also feels very frightening to start stepping out of that.

It's amazing how much the relationships that never go where we want them to affect us so deeply for so many years afterward.

*raises a glass* To our Wonderwalls, indeed.

*raises glass back*

And I really did hate it, initially. But now - as you say. The relationships that never went where I wanted them to have more impact on me than the happy relationships.

Actually, I think they have just as much impact. By nature we're beings that dwell on our greatest regrets, and for relationships that never develop to the fullness and (in some cases) grandeur that we assign it in our minds there is always that lingering "what if" or "damn me to hell, what the hell is wrong with me?!?". We all have them, we all let them affect one or another. You'd have to be lacking a pulse to say you haven't had at least one in your life. And so it goes...

Oh, easily more. I love

lordjavac and

jkivela to snuggly bits, absolutely, but those ended well. They're not hanging on in my life, unresolved, particularly not by my own inaction. I never told Raeli how I felt - so my mind wanders around wondering what might have happened if I had. And that makes it easy to blow them out of all proportion to what they should have been or would have been if they'd gone where we wanted.

That did make me cry... I had a nightmare about Oxford last night (I hardly ever have dreams but only nightmares about that place) and I think one of the reasons why it was a nightmare was that you and Hilarity and Lzz and Wizardman were not in it. I used to love the place so much - when you were there. And they were. I think, after you left, it just fell apart. It was you who kept us together - or at least that's what it felt like.

Still does.

Yeah - I wish that I were still there, because maybe then we'd all still be together. Chris said the same thing, that time we met in Oxford when I went back for a visit, and maybe it's true - because I hate that you and Verity and Matt and Liz aren't all still together and waiting for me to come home.

I wish you were. I wish it would never have ended.

*hugs*

The very first song of my day.

Here's to our Wonderwalls...

Re: Here's to our Wonderwalls...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject