Tyler Durden: Now a question of etiquette; as I pass, do I give you...?

today is one of those days i write because ... to be honest i'm not sure. more than anything i need to vent i guess...
i went down to san diego on sunday afternoon to go visit topgungirl and dantheman. i'll start off with the fun stuff i guess... i got to hang out with dantheman pretty much all day yesterday which always makes for a chill day. nothing special, we lazed around the apt till 11 or so, wandered over to the movie theatre to see if there were any movies that we could catch. not happening so we went and blew a few bucks at his fave store (ross) and mine (best buy) and went back and watched die hard and jammed on guitars all afternoon. probably doesn't sound like much but its days like those that i love the most. nothing pressing to do, cracking up, telling stories, coming up with ideas on how we can change the world... the usual.
then comes last night. you know things are off to a bad start when you're in the living room of a girls house, she's coming down the stairs, and a family friend asks her as she's coming down the stairs, 'so who's this guy you've been bringing to church?' and you're not that guy. i should have bailed right then. but, being the idiot that i am i decided to stick it out, i mean, i came down from simi to see her, i'm not exactly going to give up that easy, at the very least i should see what's going on. mistake number two. flashback to my last semester of college and sr. philosophy, we' re debating 'gimpel the fool', where gimpel is referred to as the town fool because he does not know what is going on around him. the question is, is it better to be ignorant and happy, or aware and not? tough one, and evidently man has been wrestling with this for ages. back to topgungirl's living room. i know this has the potential to be a train wreck, but why not, i figure i'm due. so we go out to eat at her favorite dive and get to talking and everything is copacetic until she drops the 'i'm seeing someone' bomb. here's the list of things that are going through my head at that moment: 1. check please! 2. this is one of those things that you should mention on the phone before a guy makes plans to drive down to see you. 3. is this some sort of twisted punk'd episode? 4. keep your face still and your mouth shut. and 5. don't laugh at the lettuce in her teeth. so she just mentions this new guy in passing, as one of many details about this tutoring project she's been working on, and now i'm looking at my watch realizing that it's going to be a while before i get home and i have a long week of lectureships that i'm going to have to endure. i manage to pay attention for the most part and try to be a good conversationalist while pushing this whole new guy thing to as far back in my mind as i can. it works for a while, long enough to make it through to the time when i need to get headed back on the road. so we end up talking while i'm on the way back home and she pulls out my all time favorite line, 'i never really thought of us as more than friends.' what? since when do friends hold hands walking down the beach? since when do friends kiss each other goodbye after an evening at disneyland? since when do friends drive a hundred miles to see you face to face when they could very easily call you on the phone? then she pulls the whole long distance thing into the picture, which at the very least i can understand, sorta. but that doesn't make up for the fact that this information would have been a lot more useful before i had made the trek down to see her. then it hits me, i'm totally clueless (cue the fountains). i have no idea what separates a friend from a boyfriend. good for her, and good for this new guy that they figured it out, i'm driving back to simi clueless. she said something about always looking at me as a friend again, and i told her something, i'm not really sure what... at that point it just hit me like a ton of bricks that this whole friends/ big brother (the other popular comment) thing i get is lame. the thing that really got to me though is that there has always been potential on the horizon. like i always knew in the back of my mind that there was something that could possibly be there, and that's gone. it's times like last night when you don't feel like driving home. you don't know wether to throw on the mellow christian cd to get your focus back, or to throw on metallica's black album and vent. i went with metallica, and fortunately i didn't see any cops on the freeway last night, or at least they didn't see me. it's nights like last night where you ask God questions that really can't be put into words. and it's nights like last night where you have to question what you know about yourself, not because you want to, but because you have 100 miles to go still before you can crawl in your bed and make the day go away. needless to say i'm a wreck today. not so much that she's going out with someone else, but that i had the whole situation so misread. i realize i've done that a lot. my mind is full of memories of ones i thought got away, but i realize now i never had. hmm... that's hard to look at on screen.
so now the question is how do i put my game-face on for this week? when i see all these people that are coming into town for the lectureships and they ask how things are going do i tell them the truth? that i feel like garbage and i have no clue how to read people, and its eating me alive, or do i smile and put on a happy front and spare them the sob story. what do you do when being yourself isn't what you thought it was? hmm.... i think today i understand why whiny emo bands are so popular.
oh yeah, other side-note... we were talking about self control a few weeks ago in our small groups and the challenge was given to me to give up caffeine for a month. i'm on day three and i feel like garbage. more updates as the month goes on.
well, time to go get my mind on something else.
one love, one heart.