Blame Ira Glass

I had a little forced walk down memory lane today. In a bout of good/bad timing (I'm really not sure which it is) I find that I am leaving my day job at precisely the time that my department is moving locations. And not like, down the hall, but to a building around the corner from here.

So the whole "cleaning up and cleaning out" process is happening not only at my desk but everywhere around me. Which does allow me to slip away a bit less noticeably. I like that.

Anyway, today I set out to email all of the word documents, jpgs, pdfs and emails that I have saved on my work computer since spring of 2005 (yes, I've been here too long, I know) to my personal email account. I probably shouldn't have saved these on a work computer in the first place, but I did, so be it.

A lot of them conjure up good memories. Especially the ones that are show related and have happened in the past two years. I have had some great theatrical experiences over the past two years.

Of course the negative side to that is it has sunk me into a place of "What now?" thinking. A place of "How can I top this?" thinking. An "I am not as far along as I should be by now" mindset rather than a "Celebrating what has come so far" mindset.

Shit.

Ehhh, maybe it's not the clean out that's doing this, maybe it was just time to come around to that again. It happens, it happens, it is sure to keep happening.

Be gone dismal bitter thoughts. Deep dark pit of disgust, indeed.

And of course, reading the old relationship emails that can now be viewed with the knowing lens of retrospect are delightful. Finding an email that was exchanged a month before everything started to go wrong, reading my "Should I meet you in XXXX? Or at XXXXX? Or just call when I get out and see where you are?" which really meant, "I want to see you all the time and you don't seem to want to see me any of the time but just throw me a life line, please, because I don't know when this started happening and I don't know why I didn't notice it."

Yeaahhhh.

This is all Ira Glass' fault. He got me thinking about all of this.

Right. So, listening to This American Life yesterday one quote which stuck with me, more than the actual stories about break-ups, was in the introduction. Ira Glass is speaking to a young woman who is in her fourth week or so after a break-up. She's raw, you can tell, but articulate and perceptive.

Ira is talking about how aware Recent Break Up Girl is that everything she is experiencing is exactly what you expect to go through in a break-up, and how that still doesn't make it feel any better:

Ira: ...Everything she was going through was a cliché. A cliché that she was forced to go through.

Recent Break Up Girl: That's the crazy thing about it is, breaking up with someone is literally the most common thing. Like everyone you know, broke up with everyone they ever dated, until maybe the person they're with right now, if they're with someone right now. But when it happens to you it feels so specific. Like, I don't want to say I can't get over it in like a flippant way but, you kind of can't get over it, you're like, "What? This is what's happening? It's so shocking."

Ira goes on to talk about the complicated math that RBUG has done to compute exactly when she will be completely over the break up. I would argue that we don't ever completely get over a break up. We adjust to it, we put it into perspective, we move on and leave it behind. But it is a part of us, just as the actual relationship will always be a part of us. Until we find a way to erase all memories of the beginning, middle or end of a relationship from our minds (ala Eternal Sunshine) then we don't ever altogether "get over it".

Maybe I'm just talking semantics here.

Anyway, tomorrow we move on to another topic. I promise.

(P.S. My last post was number 500. Mercy!)