Aaaaaaahhh…. exercise. Or should I say “Aaaaaarrrrgggggh!!! Exercise!”
It’s been a while, like. In fact, I can tell you exactly how long. I last went to the gym on the 2nd November. That, tellingly, is the day before the Evil Genius become my official boyfriend. Now, we can read into that all day; the fact that I instantly ditch the things that are important to me upon embarking upon a relationship.
Now, that’s gotta stop. Really.
The Ex Husband would probably tell you that when we were married I was, if anything, too independent (or maybe he wouldn’t?) by the end, and we both led very separate lives in many ways. I don’t know if this turn-around is a conscious attempt to fix what I did wrong in that relationship or whether my metaphorical balls just shrivelled up and dropped off at some point in the last year.
Hey ho, I’m going to do my best not to let that happen again.
Christ on a bike, though: I am painfully unfit. My knees are sore, I have wibbly bits all over (and not just in good places), and by 20 minutes into the FitBo class (I mean, seriously, FitBo? Is this what I’ve become?) I was praying for a merciful death.
However, I did it, I’m Muay Thai-ing tomorrow and I have set myself the beginning goal of exercising thrice weekly.
And now I don’t have boys to whinge about, I’ll whinge about my sore knees instead.
Time to get up. Time to get a grip. I’m worth more than this. I’m not just “sweet” and “fun”. I’m honest and loyal and loving and kind and funny and strong. And it’s time to stop believing otherwise.
I don’t usually delete posts, I wrote it and I meant it, but I’m sorry – it was pathetic and it doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.
And when this holiday is over I’m going back to training and somebody, somebody other than me, is going to get the brunt of this.
So, The Evil Genius dumped me today. This is not excellent.
One of the many things that upsets me about this is the fact I didnt see it coming at all. I thought we were in for a decent run. Seemingly I am utterly clueless, unable to read men, unable to keep one, certainly.
Being dumped makes me feel like a failure. I didn’t give him what he needed; I wasn’t good enough; not clever enough, not independent enough, not worth keeping.
I worried about this happening, knew it was just a question of time before he got to know me well enough to know I wasn’t right for him.
It’s becoming a fairly repetitive theme – I get attached, start to care about somebody, even fall in love but I’m doing it alone. My judgement is out of whack.
I’ll get over it. I got over Ali and I’ll get over this one too, but I really wish I didn’t have to.
(details of the family part of Christmas to follow in a later post – 2 posts for the price of one: I’m good to you Ewa… )
Christmas rolls around and it’s time to head to wherever your loved ones are, if you’re able to. Last year I stayed home with my flatmates and the wonderful Kal and had, far and away, the best Christmas of my life.
We made cocktails, played games, ate duck, opened presents and had so much fun that I was determined to do something similar every year. Plans changed, however: I moved to Berlin and felt like, this year, I ought to head to the family home in the North of Scotland.
I swithered about staying in Berlin but a number of factors swayed me: many of my Berlin friends would not be around although a few would, but I was scared an orphan’s Christmas this year would not live up to last year’s fun. In addition, my one remaining grandparent is now 90 (or 91- nobody, including him, is really sure…). It could well be my last Christmas with him around. Also, I haven’t mentioned (to be fair everybody who reads this knows me and almost certainly knows already) but I have a boyfriend in Berlin,
Hang on a minute – short interlude… what the hell should I call him on the blog? We have The Ex Husband. We have The Boy (who really needs a new name – I think that one makes him now sound too seminal, feel free to make suggestions). I don’t know if the new boyfriend reads this blog, or if he would object to being featured, so I’ll keep descriptions to a minimum: he’s a gentleman, intelligent, handsome, hilarious and generally about the best thing to happen in a long time- he gives pants-that-have-just-come-off-the-radiator-before-being-put-on a run for their money in terms of awesomeness. However, I think, in the fondest way possible, I’ll call him The Evil Genius.
Anyway, The Evil Genius was going home for Christmas and therefore couldn’t tempt me to stay in Berlin. After all, maybe a break away from the hustle and bustle of Berlin would be welcome? I could see friends in Edinburgh- it was, after all, my home for 10 years. Surely, surely it would be fun.
Erm… no. Largely not.
My parents live in a very isolated location in the North and getting there necessitates a 2 hour flight to Edinburgh, a 3 hour train-ride to Inverurie followed by an hour’s drive to the house. I could have done it all in one day but I decided to stop off at either end of the journey for a night in Edinburgh, my previous home.
I didn’t have any particular feelings this time about visiting Edinburgh – I wanted to see Kal and other friends, but I deliberately didn’t tell The Boy I was coming: seeing him, ever again, is not on my agenda.
I realised Edinburgh feels like a dead place to me now. It feels like everything here is the past, and some of that past is pretty grim. Very few people know how low I got before I came to Berlin: the breakup, following on the heels of a divorce and some very tough circumstances at work all took quite a toll. Just being here brings it back. I don’t like to think about the things I did, the things I thought and said about myself and about my life. Further, it makes me sad to think how many of the happy memories are now fogged, if not obliterated, by the events of the last year or two.
I made some of the strongest friendships I could ever hope for here, was married to a great man and had a lovely home and some fairly major personal successes. I hope that in time those memories will be stronger again than the bad ones and I’ll be able to visit Edinburgh with happiness.
For now though, I’m extremely relieved to be heading back to Berlin in the morning. I didn’t realise before, but to me, now, it feels very different to Edinburgh: it feels like the future, and it feels like home.
Since the Breakup of Doom with The Boy I’ve not exactly shied away from the single life.
Goddamnit, I deserved a bit of fun after that clusterfuck!
If I’m honest, I’ve never in my adult been single before. I flitted from one relationship to another from the age of 16 to 19 when I met Paul the Ex Husband and was in a committed relationship then marriage with him for 7 years. After him there was The Boy and July 2009 was the first time since in 10 years that I had been really, properly single.
It’s been quite a shock to the system.
Aside from the marriage, the divorce and the relationship from hell, since I moved to Berlin, it’s been a progression of no-strings fun, some-strings fun, dating to now a relationship. It’s taken 4 months to get me from suicidal to “ready for a relationship” (if, indeed, I am) and I finally gave up on The Boy in every sense. It’s really hard work stopping loving someone, but at least I know it can be done.
So, for your delectation and delight, here are my thoughts on my experiences with Boys in Berlin.
No-Strings Fun.
Ahahahahahaha. Ha.
No. Such. Fucking. Thing.
So, you go out and you meet a good-looking, confident guy who seems ideal for the task at hand: arrogant, in no way interested in a relationship, hot and knows it, and someone with whom you have next to nothing in common. Perfect. All the better if he’s moving to Azerbaijan next week.
You get pissed enough to fake some confidence yourself and you pick him up. Yup. YOU pick HIM up. Let’s be clear.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, let’s say he doesn’t in fact move to Azerbaijan and then you have to look him in the eye each and every time you pass him in public.
Even worse if, let’s say, just for example, it wasn’t that great.
Then not only do you have the mental anguish of “oh God! Why did that happen? Did he not find me hot? Is it me? Am I a disgusting, hag of a woman”.
Let’s then, hypothetically combine that with seeing the guy around all the time, hitting on other, hotter women and agree that maybe one-night-stands are not, whilst empowering, everything they’re cracked up to be.
This can easily start off as the example above and move into murkier territory. Perhaps you had some stuff in common with this guy, and he did in fact seem interested in you as a human being. You realised that with or without sex you could be friends and, hell, why not throw the sex in there too to sweeten the deal?
Except it really, really doesn’t work that way.
Ok, in my experience you can get away with it two, maybe three times before one of two things happens:
1 – you go off each other/meet someone else/get bored
2- one of you Gets Attached.
Oh, god help you if you get attached. It’s at this point you start to think “Hang on just a minute… this looks like a relationship, has all the same stuff a relationship has.. maybe…. maybe…”
But NO! Bad girl! No biscuit! In your bed! (Alone, preferably)
It is NOT a relationship, and if you think it is, you’re in it all by yourself. If it really were a relationship at some point both of you would have said “I don’t want to do this with anybody else, let’s be exclusive”.
The signs of a relationship are clear: you agree you’re in a relationship.
If that is not the case, and you have feelings? Out, get out!
Dating
Ah, now, dating. More complex by far than the options above.
At least both No- and Some-strings sex start out with the assumption that there are no expectations.
However, dating implies you’ve both agreed you are interested in one another and possibly for more than sex, otherwise you’d just cut out the food/movie/drinks part and go have sex, right?
Dating is a minefield of hopes, expectations and fears. You don’t know the other person well enough to ask what they think of you, so you have to guess. If you liked them, you’re worried about whether they want to meet again or did you make a total arsehole of yourself?
If you were the one not into it, how the hell do you let them down gently? How many dates before sex? And that one works both ways – many women feel that after a certain number of dates they almost owe sex. Now, that’s not healthy, but I guarantee you most of us feel that way. After two dates, really, there’s an expectation you’ll have sex and it takes a strong girl to resist the weight of expectation.
Then there’s what happens if you’ve been on dates but decided not to go out. Does that or does that not warrant a Clarification Discussion? Or do you just let it die?
Man, I hate dating. No more of that, please.
Relationships
Aaaaaahhhh. Nice, comforting, sensible relationships. Safe, wonderful respite from the evil world of Single Uncertainty…
Personally, I think I have a mild form of Bipolar disorder. When I am down, I am DOWN. There’s no getting out of it: it’s like being hit around the head with a big, dirty raincloud, the type that would exist above Beijing, say.
But the way it works for me is that I have, of every 7 days or so, 2-4 days of DOWN, 1-2 days of being on the way down, and 1-3 days of being fucking amazing.
Today, I feel fucking amazing.
I can’t write you a good post because when I feel like this I just want to sing around the place and do stuff, or even if I’m not doing stuff, I’m just enjoying not feeling like shit.
It is the one blessing of the whole mental illness malarky – I really, REALLY have a basis for comparison. I really know what happy can feel like because I really, REALLY know what sad can feel like.
It’s not quite worth it, but it’s compensation of a sort
Bats are falling out of the night sky, fluttering and crashing to the ground: wet and sloppy, dry and crispy bats describing various, unwholesome trajectories to the ground.
The wet ones crash suddenly, slappily, sticking to car windows, bike tyres, upturned faces. They are kamikaze corpses, smacking into any flat surface too slow or too stationary to move aside. Their slick and slippery vengeance is taken for the crime of being under them when they fell, and they adhere to the perpetrators like guilt.
The dry ones float crazily, spinning and whispering, bullied by the wind currents that the wet ones refused to be dictated to by. Watching them whilst travelling is an invitation to disaster and injury: their route is unpredictable, unknowable and too beguiling to watch.
So many are falling, more each night, that every bike ride and walk in the rainy, windy evening is a bat-corpse slalom, the strangest dodge-game I’ve ever played at night, in Berlin
In some respects I could be regarded as a person who has been independent for a long time. I moved away from my parents’ house when I was 16 and went to boarding school in Edinburgh for 2 years before returning to Inverness to live in my first flatshare. After that I went to university in Newcastle, then Edinburgh where I met and moved in with my ex-husband. I got my degree, my marriage certificate and my post-grad, got divorced, got my heart broken and moved to Berlin, all by the time I was 26.
You can, and probably have, looked at that in one of two ways:
a) I’ve done alot of stuff quite quickly
b) I’ve fucked up alot of stuff quite quickly
Anyway.
The one thing I hadn’t done thus far was lived alone. I’ve lived in a boarding school, university accomodation, flatshares and a marital home, but this is my first, official home of my own.
Ok, I don’t own it. And, ok, none of the furniture or contents actually belong to me. But, I pay the rent and the bills by myself and when the heating fucks up I’m the one who has to deal with it. In German.
When my ex and I split up I never wanted to live with any random people again. A co-habitation relationship is one thing, iI miss alot of stuff about that, but a flatshare is different – I hate other people’s dishes, and hearing the sound of the key in the lock when you’re having a cosy night in on the sofa. I hate noticing somebody finished the last of the milk and didn’t buy any to replace it. I hate coming home to questions about where I’ve been, who I was with and lengthy stories about somebody else’s crappy day. I also hate the subtle or not so subtle judgement of flatmates about the fact that maybe I chose not to leave my room all day, or I’ve just eaten nutella on bread for dinner AGAIN.
Living alone offers a really liberating opportunity to do exactly what the fuck I like for a change, even if it’s only within these 52 square meters. And if somebody finished the milk I can only be so pissed off, because it was definitely me.
Of course, there are things I miss about living with somebody else, like watching TV with somebody or having somebody right there to share your day’s stories with, but I’ve had that for 26 years and the pay off of true independence is worth a little bit of loneliness from time to time.
So, I’m off to sit around in my pants and eat Nutella from the spoon.
I gave up my crappy gym job partly because if I didn’t I was going to end up taking somebody out with one of the dumb-bells and partly because I had accepted ajob with the police, working in the cells.
I’d been thinking about joining the police for months and had gotten pretty far in my application for the volunteer police (Special Constabulary), but sadly my terrible eyesight and history of depression had seen me rejected at the last minute.
Working as a custody security officer seemed like a nice way to be involved in the force in at least a minor way. However, right after accepting the offer, I was offered this teaching post in Berlin.
Choosing between Berlin and Livingston…not that hard. Not that easy either, mind you because I knew if I left the The Boy and I would be over. However, even at the time I knew that was sort of the aim of applying in the first place: to put a pillow over the face of our relationship, like euthanising a dog with terminal cancer, which just lingers on and on, crapping itself, slowly starving and starting to smell.
However. I digress.
When I was offered the job here I had already handed in my notice with the gym and had to tell the police, with whom I should have started straight away, that I wasn’t coming any more. And I found myself unemployed for 3 months.
At first it was great. I was knackered from trying to sell the house, the separation with The Ex (Husband), had hated working at the gym and wanted to chill out, say goodbye to people, and spend what time I could with The Boy while there was still time.
By August I was bored out of my brain. Ok, the heinous break up with The Boy in July did pass the time to an extent; dreading the move made the time fly; going out of my mind totally put being unemployed in context
Look on the bright side, that’s what my mum says.
Every cloud, etc.
The first 3 weeks of August were just a big Berlin holiday – in amongst the secret crying and missing of The Boy, I made some awesome friends, built a social circle, found a flat, set myself up with bank accounts etc and started getting to know the city, so now that work has begun again, I feel well and truly out of the World of Work.
I miss not having to talk to people all day if I don’t want to and being able to stay up all night if I want to. Ok, I miss being a directionless bum: I admit it.
But it’s good to have a little structure, I admit that too.
The Sunday night feeling of “Sigh. Work” had become unfamiliar but, what do you know, I think it’s back…
In Berlin, the primary 1’s/ erste Klasse/first graders, whatever you want to call them, start a week later than years 2 upwards giving the rest of the school a little bit more time to settle in before unleashing this world of uncertainty and change on the poor little bastards.
Before they come on that first Monday (which for me is next Monday), they come on Saturday to a small ceremony called the Einschulung, which is to let the first grade see their new class, meet the bigger pupils and the teachers. There might be songs, speeches and a gathering afterwards. In our school, they will also go to their new classroom, sing a few songs, have a story and open their Schuletüten -’ school cones’.
Random cone filled with sweeties and school things: kids go crazy for them here
No, I’d never heard of them either.
But, it’s a Big Fucking Deal here in Germany – almost as exciting as a Christmas stocking.
Anyway, at the moment I’m much like a first grader, everything is new, lots of uncertainty, change and excitment. And, like a first grader, I’mfucking knackered at the end of the day and often in dire need of a reasurring cuddle. Sadly, my mum is nowhere around and the only other person up to the job resigned.
So, unlike most first graders I’m doing my best to do my own comforting.
And the beer helps, so that’s a bonus.
Ha- fuck you, cute 6 year olds- no Heffeweizen for you!
Look on the bright side, eh? Perhaps what I really need is a nice, quiet story, a bit of quality time with a colouring in book and some playdough and I’ll be right as rain?
Either that or I should introduce Weizebier for the kids….
