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2004-05-14 - 7:17 p.m. I don't know why I'm in such a damned good mood. Probably because it's Friday ... even though, for me, Friday means an hour and 20 minutes of stop-and-go traffic (I got off early enough to actually get stuck in rush hour) followed by complacent exhaustion in my apartment. Where is my urge to party? Dunno. My urge to party extends about as far as urging M to order chinese takeout and falling asleep watching a video ... BORING. Oh, and speaking of videos? A detective in Florida mailed me an episode of C0ld C@se Files based on a murder his department solved. (I interviewed him about the case a week or so ago for a Sunday feature I wrote on identical tw1n murders.) It came today. AND I FORGOT TO TAKE IT HOME!!! I am so pissed! I love crime shows. The other reason I am in such a good mood: my attempted murder trial started today. I also love trials. I led my story with the victim's sister's call to 911 -- sobbing -- "My brother-in-law was here, and he had a gun, and he shot it..." then she goes inside to see if her sister is okay -- "San? San? San?" (scream) "Oh my God, San, he hit you, he shot her in the back, please ... please ... please..." Then there was the testimony from the neighbor who had had to use his EMT training for the first time that day, the first cop on the scene, the blood-stained yellow cotton shirt pulled out of a paper bag and displayed to a jury, photos of blood running down the front stairs of the cute three-bedroom home in a residential neighborhood. Also, the defendant almost got ejected from court for his outbursts. Altogether, a good day. The case is being tried by the state's attorney, one of the ugliest and most brilliant women in Connecticut, and a bright but somewhat whiny criminal defense lawyer who reminds me of Santa Claus. They both make a lot of objections -- something I used to find excruciating boring when I was a rookie covering courts. I now find it fascinating. It's like watching a tennis match. Not only are the lawyers much better than where I'm from, but the laws are different, so I spent the whole time with chin in my hands, elbows on my knees (when I'm not writing), trying to memorize subsections of Connecticut law regarding admissible and inadmissable testimony. (Not to toot my own horn, but by the time I quit court reporting in Vermont, I used to privately score the attorneys on all the opportunities for objections they missed and note the grounds on which they could have made the objections. It depressed me that you could be so slow on the uptake and still make a killing.) Anyway, this is a lot more fun. This is fastball. The other thing that makes me happy, on sort of a weird, constant way, is my Matt. They say that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I'm not sure I'd agree. But if you're going to fall into it a second time around, having loved and lost before makes it all the more poignant. M is brilliant (how many people without college educations become a newspaper editor at 21, or executive editor of a small chain at 25, or run a political campaign at 18?) and a born leader ... watching him talk to people he works with always gives me the heebie-jeebies, because he's so damn good. If you want to sell ice to an Eskimo, Matt's the man -- but he'd undoubtedly rebel against the whole idea, saying he's not paid to screw people over, and then revamp the company to create a Hawaiian ice business and an Alaskan sauna business. I've never seen him be intimidated by anyone, ever. At work, at least, and in a lot of life, it's like he doesn't know what worry and fear are -- "So what?" he says, before doing something off the charts. "So what are they going to do, fire me?" "Brilliant" is a word I've heard applied to him more times than I can count since we both started working in Connecticut. He's also been described (in order of occurrance) as "upward-bound" (or derivatives thereof) charismatic, gorgeous, workaholic, smooth-talking, gentlemanly and suave. I'm pretty smart, but in a lot of ways M is smarter than I am. He has a frightening ability to recall everything he's ever read, seen or heard, and likely what page it was on in what newspaper. He wins arguments with me, which no one ever does. And he has that je ne sais quoi that enables him to come into a dump like the newspaper he's at, rip it to shreds and rebuild it, inspiring reporters to write better stuff than my paper does even though it's 12 times the size. If he had gone to college for business or law, or gone to college at all, he'd probably be a millionnaire right now. (I don't care either way, but I think he probably will be anyway. He's talking more seriously about going to school now ...) I admire M immensely -- as someone I can match brains and drive with. But what I really admire about him is that he is the nicest person I have ever known. This strikes me more than I like to think about. I have a fast temper, and I get irritated easily. I've cooled down from the days when I thought it was okay to curse someone out for being in your way, as my family did, but I still snap and say, "Will you BUZZ OFF ALREADY??" M, being the ultimate gentleman, tends to ask me things like, "Do you mind if I use the last of the salsa with some tortilla chips?" Sometimes, he goes very overboard -- I make dinner, and he says, like a little kid, "Can I have some of that? Can I? Can I?" Anyway, the other night I was trying to light the grill on the front porch and get dinner ready to go on it -- M, for all his talents, can't light a grill or hammer a nail or fix a cabinet door or put oil in his car to save his life, so I wear the pants around here -- and he kept asking me, "Can I smoke one of your cigarettes? Do you mind if I..." I was busy with the damn wet charcoal, and I snapped, "You can light the house on fire, for all I care. Just STOP ASKING ME STUPID QUESTIONS!!!" The next thing I know, M is sitting wilted in the kitchen, an unlit cigarette (he doesn't smoke; he sometimes steals my cigs and coughs) between his fingers. I say, "What's wrong?" He says, "You yelled at me. I hate it when you yell at me. I hate when you're pissed off at me." M never gets pissed off at me. Ever. And he never snaps at me. Ever. Sometimes we fight, but all he ever does is defend himself. I've asked him why he doesn't get mad at me, don't things I do irritate him? He says that things that irritate me, like a messy kitchen, don't irritate him because why would they? Why does it matter? So the other night ... we were talking in bed. About sex, specifically. M, like most men, is very interested in sex. He is probably far more interested than most men ... anyway, me, I'm ambivalent. I used to think it was disgusting, I now think it's a very good time you can have with someone you love and trust very much (for me, there's one person who fits that description) but if you were to ask me on any given night, "Do you want to have sex?" I'd have to re-center from my mulling of crime or M@ry-Kate and the dishes that need to be done to say, "Um, well, sure, doesn't matter to me, okay." Anyway, to make a long story short, I've been waiting for M to fall asleep before I go to bed recently, so I can go to sleep. I said I didn't want to disappoint him -- believe me, sex is all he's thinking from the moment I hop into our antique high-headboard painted bed -- and I find it easier just to stay up till he's zonked. He said, "sure I want to have sex with you, but you don't disappoint me. Because I don't expect anything." I said (note conversational styles here; they're pretty accurate): "Sweetie, that is a load of crap. Of course I disappoint you, whether you 'expect' anything or not. It's the nature of people and relationships -- there's a lot of disappointment." He said, "You don't disappoint ME." (Meant in a broader sense. Like, you don't disappoint me EVER.) I said, "Then you're putting me on a pedestal, which is ridiculous. Of course I disappoint you. Of course I'm going to disappoint you." He said, "You don't." Which sounds ridiculous, but it sort of says everything about Matt -- where most people would get pissed off and frustrated that someone else is inconsiderate, or doesn't understand, or whatever, he takes two steps back and sees what they're thinking and tries to make their day better. It's ridiculous. It's saintly. I live with a fucking saint. (In some ways.) M was going to be a pastor before he got derailed by journalism and his own agnosticism, which really isn't that... it's cynicism about the Christianity he was raised with. P> In the morning, M and I get up at different times -- usually me first -- and we have a ritual, either way. I get ready for work, and before I leave, I sit down on the bed and hug him. I wrap one arm around him and hold his hand with the other hand and put my cheek on his and he half-wakes up and says (he always says this first, even though I mean to), "I love you so much." Sometimes I say, "I love you too" and sometimes I don't say "I love you" at all, because I'm not yappy like that. I just hug him and say, "Have a good day at work." And then I'm in Mi1ford, chasing cops and trials, and I sit there in my car watching ducks crossing on the green and I see M in his t-shirt sleeping innocent in our very tall and very old and very positively karma-ed painted bed. With the sunlight strewing through the blinds and the birds singing. I think how M has deflated me of anger and it makes me happy. And I'm desperately afraid of losing him. And I think how we're too much alike in many ways -- money skills, impetuousness, flouting of authority, flouting of college, coup d'etat leadership, general social irresponsibility and failure to register cars or pay bills on time - and I think I better straighten MY ass out if either one of us is going to go anywhere. But it's the weirdest, sweetest thing. I still can't get used to it. It's been almost two years, and I still can't get used to it. I always thought relationships were supposed to be trite. You can't have two non-trite relationships in your life, can you? � � Insanity results 5/30/06
Insanity results for 7-11-04 ... gee whiz, I have a new disorder!!
insantity results 10/31/03 ... see below for 9/02 and 5/02
my most recent insanity results--9/19--see below for 5/01 |
| Disorder | Rating |
| Paranoid: | Low |
| Schizoid: | Moderate |
| Schizotypal: | Low |
| Antisocial: | Low |
| Borderline: | Moderate |
| Histrionic: | Low |
| Narcissistic: | Low |
| Avoidant: | Low |
| Dependent: | Moderate |
| Obsessive-Compulsive: | High |
-- Click Here To Take The Test -- | |