I'm so sorry, Sean.

***

I went to the store to buy a leash (I'd been using a long tether, wrapped around my hand, which hurt), and I came home with a leash... and Whoppers. No Maltesers to taste test, sadly.

Laga, Smarties.

Ah yes. Thanks!

Wow. I think I just got the most awkward phone call of my life.

A few years ago, I started going to a Jewish study group. It's two hours, once a week, where the first hour is generally a talk on that week's Torah portion, and then for the second hour, some people have study partners who they study some particular text with, while other people who don't want to do the study partner thing will have a group learning session where they continue the discussion from the first hour. I stopped going about a year ago -- I was sick for a while, and then it was winter and I didn't feel like walking all the way over there all the time, and so on. I was planning to start going back next week.

So anyway. I just got a call from them, saying that they'd noticed that I hadn't come in a while, and wondering if I was planning on coming back. The person who called? A guy I went out with once or twice a few years ago. I liked him, but he said he thought I was a "cool person" but that we wouldn't work out together. We had a few more awkward meetings and talked a few times. When he called, I thought I recognized his voice, but I wasn't sure. He, who had my name in front of him, didn't recognize me until about three minutes into the conversation. (He did, however, remember details of a conversation we had like two years ago.)

This was weird. And awkward. And I told him that I'll be back at the study group next week.

He, who had my name in front of him, didn't recognize me until about three minutes into the conversation.

oh dear.

I (stupidly) just checked work email. One of the people who has dinged me for being all sorts of bad to her good over the past 10 years, although less so in the last several, just emailed asking after something we wrote for her that would allow her to pull a bunch of variables into a data set and also manage the set and export it, through a web page. No big deal, except that we wrote it so that she could stop creating static files with similar stuff that was rapidly outdated.

The gist of her email was "that file you wrote a while ago - can you tell me where it is? I can't seem to remember and I want to use it next week."

Dude. We wrote that for you FOUR YEARS AGO.

::blows bangs out of eyes::

also. Seekrit message to the state of Ohio: Neener! I'm not there anymore and all your pollen can go bug someone else. Love your Ohioistas. HATE your conifers and various grasses. I mean it. Shoo. Get outta my nose and eyes.

oh man, {{Sean}}

Sox, I don't miss Ohio's pollen sitch, either. Hope the Buckeye state was kind to you.

{{Sean}}

Owen's first day of 4K is tomorrow. The bus gets here at 12:37. I just emailed his special ed teacher and I hope things go smoothly tomorrow.

Not at all! I need the perspective from people who have been divorced, because, not having been so myself, I don't understand The Boy's P.O.V. on some things.

Hee. I can haz a divorced perspective too. That's so weird.

So, from my perspective, and in my experience too, yeah, from his side he's comfortable enough with you to be willing to share this stuff that hurt him so badly before. At a rough guess, he kind of hopes this will help you be a closer couple, and that what you get out of this is that he takes relationships seriously, and he's in a relationship with you, so you can trust him that he takes your relationship seriously.

That's what I reckon is maybe coming from his side. I would also say, in my experience, that he was wrong to pull out the wedding photos, especially in that context. I think your reaction is entirely normal on being confronted with this stuff like that. To quote Hec:

So the trickier part with the new person is that you do want them to understand who you are, and what you've been through. But there's no real safe way to express this huge, life changing experience to them. The life changing experience being the divorce - not so much the previous marriage.

I feel this too. Getting divorced is an event that exerts tremendous gravitational pull in my adult life, and in my self-image. (In fact, I feel mostly positive about it looking back, but that doesn't make it any less significant.) And I've remarried, and my marriage with Wallybee is so much healthier than my first marriage, and the experience of my first marriage has a great impact on the person I am in this marriage. But there's no safe way to talk about this with Wallybee. It's a part of me from which she will always feel left out. Unlike the rest of my past, she can't really picture herself in relation to it without feeling excluded from it.

She knows what happened, of course, and those have been the most delicate conversations of our marriage. But I can't see any way that pulling out the wedding photos could end well.

There is snow in the mountains of Utah. A very cold, wet storm rolled through yesterday, and it's going to be cold tonight.

They expect us to be in the 90s again in a week or so. It's time for colds to arrive.

t random

I like this recent pic of us: [link]

t /random