Long time, no write. Well, not here, anyway. This was supposed to be the Year of Win, but, as always, life started kicking everyone’s ass and just about everybody I know has had a piece of shit year.

Well, something amazing finally happened.

I got an internship.

I’m going to learn to make ice cream like a badass.

I wrote a letter to our local ice cream maven and basically begged her to let me work for them for free, so I can learn to make excellent ice cream. (This so that hubs and I can, in the future, head back to sunny CA and open a scoopery of our own.) (Yeah, I just coined the word scoopery.) I met with the head of production at this excellent ice cream shop that I won’t name but that you can probably figure out, if you’ve been paying attention and know where I live. He, luckily for me, is a real kitchen guy, a cook who worked in kitchens for over a decade before moving into his present job–that’s lucky for me because 1) he values free labor, 2) he understands that hands-on is how we learn in a kitchen, and 3) he and I will understand each other beautifully. In fact, we got on very well at our breakfast meeting, which leads to the fourth reason that I am lucky, in that I don’t believe at all that I will have work-related panic attacks in this environment–good because I eventually have to go back to work and get a paying job if we ever want to see this ice cream shop in action.

(And fingers crossed I will do excellently at this internship and it will turn into a paying gig someday. Oh, bliss.)

I haven’t had a real job since 2007. I “worked” for one quarter doing work study, but let’s get real–most of that time was spent checking my Facebook and doing homework because I had precious little else to do. (Believe me, I asked–if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s to be at work not doing my job.) Another lucky break for me, actually–since I am working for free, I was able to be totally forthright and admit to the kitchen/production manager that I haven’t worked, so he’s starting me on a wee bit slower pace. And because I’m not a paid employee, even my slow starting pace will be a benefit to the company. By the time a job opens up, I hope I am back in the swing of things, able to power through work like I used to do before that pesky little nervous breakdown I had.<

I am excite. Finally.

Adults cannot legally be interns. Internship lost. I am not excite.

(Not me.)

As you may have noticed recently from my chattering on this blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Fitocracy, and possibly elsewhere, losing weight is extremely relevant to my interests right now.  I’ve been going to the gym, and I gave myself my first really good beat-down on Monday, after something like two weeks of warming up to it.  (I’m still recovering.)  Being a brand new fitness nerd, I’ve been hanging out a little on the Fitocracy forums; I came across a post that delved into the questions of motivation–specifically, finding where you have misplaced your motivation.  We chatted a bit about setting goals; from my experience with gaming and my husband and I theorizing about addiction and smoking, I gave her a tip about setting small goals to stimulate your reward center in your brain.  That got me thinking about goals, rewards, and instant gratification.

See, I seem to have found myself with a shitload of long-term goals somehow.  I would like to lose a significant amount of weight.  My husband and I need to save a significant amount of money because we would like to start our own business.  What I am finding out is that long-term goals suck–but it seems like I used to be able to set goals and keep them more effectively.  I’m wondering if, instead of it just being me and my sucky lack of ability to keep goals–because it’s not just me and I know it–maybe this instant gratification culture we have is contributing to other things.  Like, the obesity epidemic.  Like, the big box corporate takeovers as small business dwindles.  Like the media circus with the political ringleaders.  Like the floundering economy.

In the culture of now, people don’t like to wait to win the prize.  Who cares if you run your whole company into the ground if you can get paid today?  Oh, you mean I have to go through a long and crappy period of working hard if I want to lose the weight it took me years to gradually amass?  Having to achieve something over a long period of time has always sucked in terms of endurance and lack of short-term rewards, I grant you, but in past times, we didn’t have nearly as many distractions from obtaining those distant, attractive objectives.  Now, I can not only trigger my neurological reward centers in a hundred different ways, I can indulge in activities that do that and also distract me from reality so that I forget that I’m fat at all.  I can be a willowy elf in a video game where I can complete one task after another and be rewarded; or, I can write a blog (cough) that will be instantaneously published to the world, and from which I will receive very rapid feedback (one hopes) compared to the older processes of publishing and communicating.  I can go out and buy something, because we have a hell of a lot more disposable income these days–most of which we almost literally throw away on dumb shit–and immediately have that perky feeling of having acquired something new.  Buying is far more enjoyable than saving, even if it only amounts to a mountain of garbage in my house.  I can even shop from my own home, without changing out of my underwear.  Who needs hard things? I can keep my brain happy and be a totally blissful slug.  I even get social stimulation from the internet, which has freed me from doing the hard thing and putting myself out there–but the thing about the hard things is that they’re the most satisfying, and I’d like to have some of that satisfaction in my life.

Frankly, I find it wondrous that people are doing anything significant at all these days.  Kudos to people who are doing hard things, or at least trying your best to do hard things.

So, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been de-friended/blocked by not one but two people.  [Author's note: This was relevant a few weeks ago, before I got totally sick and diseased and couldn't write.]  I’m not exactly crying in my beer about it–actually, it made me laugh a little, in the way that you laugh at yourself when something that is so very you happens.  Honestly, I know that I’m not very likable by some kinds of people.  And I’m getting ever-closer to figuring out why.

For one thing, I can be a total bitch sometimes.

I don’t mean to be a bitch.  And, in fact, I’m not a bitch because I am mean.  You guys know I’m not a mean person.  My bitchiness comes from another place entirely–it comes from impatience and from a complete lack of social aplomb.  It’s not that I’m socially awkward (although I can be); I actually scored extremely high on the University of Cambridge Autism Centre adult Autism Quotient. By extremely high, I mean that “normal” is a 15, and I scored around 38.   While I’m not a huge proponent of self-diagnosis–my doctor gave me some tests but we didn’t get to follow up on it by virtue of my finding him a tiny bit on the incompetent side–just knowing that I have these tendencies has helped me understand my relationships to other people a lot better.  One of the things I have noticed is that my “bitchiness”–or what other people perceive as being bitchy–directly correlates to my lack of knowledge about some common social reactions to certain situations.  I tend to be, for example, confrontational when many people would “let it go.”  Arguing my point seems to be the logical thing to do to me, but I’m starting to realize that most people interpret my desire to hash out an issue as–well, I get a little fuzzy here, but it makes them upset and unhappy, like I’m fighting with them for emotional reasons when I’m really just trying to get to the truth of a matter.  This is often perceived as “bitchiness.”  While I am responsible, of course, for my own actions, I can truly say that my lack of ability to understand social norms isn’t malicious and isn’t from a lack of trying.  Some people are incredibly generous, understanding, and forgiving during these times; some, not so much.

Other times, I’m not entirely sure what has happened, and that’s the actual problem, I’m sure.  I’m just floating along, being me, and there are certain types of personalities that don’t take a shine to me very easily.  A woman unfriended me recently–not only took me off of her Facebook but kicked me off of our Etsy team–and I honestly have no idea why.  I was never mean to her, or rude–I had the audacity to have opinions about things that she seemed to disagree with, but otherwise, I’ve not a clue.  Overachievers generally don’t like me–I’m not sure if it’s because I am quite capable without being an overachiever, or because I don’t bend under their need to be superior to me.  I’m only guessing here, honestly–I don’t go out of my way to be unpleasant to people, so I can only surmise that their negative reaction to me has something to do with their own insecurities.  People who can’t deal with their emotions sometimes don’t like me very well, either.  The older I get, the more rational and less emotionally involved I become in drama (besides the emotion of total irritation), and I’ve had a few former friends accuse me of being, I dunno, inhuman, robotic, that sort of thing.  Shallow and superficial people tend to dislike me, but that’s probably because they can tell I dislike them, so I don’t blame them.

This sort of thing used to bother me a lot more than it does now.  I used to lose sleep over why a particular person didn’t like me after An Incident.  The people who do like me somehow flew out of my mind when faced with a person that I couldn’t charm.  Something magical has been happening over the past couple of years, though.  I have developed the ability to let it go when someone doesn’t like me.  I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to know, really know, that you’re doing the best you can and that it’s not your problem when someone doesn’t like you.  (Of course, you really do have to be trying your best to get this peace of mind–if you feel this way and your MO is to allow your bitchery to go unchecked, you may be in denial).  Once, I would have obsessed over losing friends; now, it rolls off my back.  That’s not to say that I feel nothing, but the pangs pass quickly.

This seems like it may sound a little heartless, so I guess I can put it another way:  I’m far more focused on being me and being happy than I am on being liked just for the sake of being liked.  I have lovely, wonderful friends who like me, just as I am.  People who have fallen by the wayside because they put no effort into our friendship, because they went from friendly to vindictive, because they weren’t able to keep their own drama in check, they can all stay by the wayside at this point, as far as I am concerned.  I truly do wish them the best in life, but our paths need not run alongside.

Is this something you’ve experienced in your own life? Is it a side-effect of growing up (something that I’ve found some people have yet to do, even into their 30′s)?  Tell me about your own experiences: is it important to be liked? Or is it more important to be liked only by those who are inclined to like you so you can be yourself?

Click me, I get bigger. (Oh my . . . )

For the moment, that’s all you get. ;-)

Friendship ebbs and flows, like tides, like seasons.  People change and the world marches on, and so do our relationships (excepting family and, if you’re damn lucky, marriage and a precious few lifelong friendships).  Friends drift away, move away; friendships that are forged in deception or self-deception break; unhappy unions crumble.  Friendship is a living creature and, sometimes, dies.

Real friendship requires real effort.  If you stay away from a friend, if you are constantly busy, if you are always promising a tomorrow that doesn’t flow into today, if you place your friends outside of the circle of your inner life, the friendship will weaken and crumble.

Genuine friendship thrives on communication, honesty, vulnerability and compassion.  If you can’t talk to your friends about how you’re feeling, you’re not truly friends.  If someone needs a shoulder to cry on and you don’t offer–or you need a shoulder and don’t receive–not friends.  Acquaintances, perhaps.  If your friends have no patience for you when you’re down, those are not friends, and the reverse is true.  A deceitful friend is not a friend.  If your fortress prevents your friends from truly entering, your friends are not truly your friends–nor you, theirs.

Facebook is not a substitute for friendship.  Or Twitter.  Or (name that social media here).  This isn’t to say that you can’t make friends online or use these tools to keep in touch.  I have great friends that I have known for decades that I have only known via the internet (like my dearest Dawna).  We have talked for hours and hours, not just through link-sharing and Facebook comments; the written word is powerful and should not be taken lightly.  Before the telephone and more advanced technology, famous friendships and even love affairs were conducted through ink.  But comments on status posts does not a friendship make.  There must be more.

Friendship demands mutual respect.  Your friends will not always see eye-to-eye with you; much like a marriage, give and take is required in a friendship.  Sometimes they go to your wine tasting, even if they hate wine.  Sometimes you go to their taco truck, even if you’re dubious.  Sometimes you admit that you were wrong, even if you don’t think you were.  Sometimes they’re the first ones to apologize–sometimes you are.

You can deceive yourself about friendship.  A person that you thought was a good friend can turn out to be a toxic friend.  Likewise, a person that you often neglect can be the most loyal friend that you have.

This week, I had to do a hard thing.  I will admit freely that I didn’t go about it maturely, but in my defense, I laid out my heart for this person some time ago and saw absolutely no effort to rectify a serious rift between us.  I was hurt, you see; when I was up, my friend was always by my side, but when I was not doing so well, my friend was nowhere to be found.  I was there for him when he was down, but when I was down, when I was crumbling, when I was in the darkest places my heart will go, from him I received a deafening and deliberate silence.  I relayed this information openly and honestly–for this, I had to screw my courage to the sticking point, because my friend is not a Communicator.  My friend is an Ignore-It-And-I-Won’t-Have-To-Deal-With-It-er.  My friend Knows What Is Best and it’s difficult to convince him that another point of view might be perfectly valid.  He reminds me of my father in this way, and I didn’t want to replay the Daddy rejection scene with my best friend.  After I lay this out, my friend told me that he wasn’t there for me because seeing me like this hurt him deeply.  I sympathized with him, because I know he did care for me deeply; I tried to meet him halfway, but I was left hanging.  ”Too hurt to deal with it” only worked for a relatively short period of time.

I started taking stock of our friendship as the complacency wore thin.  And you know, this friendship that I had treasured for seven years, when I started poking at it, the whole damn thing fell apart.  It felt ugly to me.  I won’t go into the lurid details; that’s not appropriate, and some of it extremely private.  It had begun to gnaw at me, though.  My supposed “best friend,” I hardly ever saw–untangling my life from his would be far from difficult.  I have made new friends, have different interests, and move in different circles.  But what do I do about social media?  I didn’t want to see his posts anymore; I didn’t want to be heartsick anymore over a lost friendship that was never what I thought it was in the first place.  The adult thing to do would have been to lay it out for him before I did what I did; having known him for so long, though, I knew that would end badly.

So I did what his fiancée messaged me and informed me was the passive-aggressive, cowardly thing:  I deleted him and his fiancée from my social media without a goodbye.  Poof, gone.  And despite the brief fallout, I can say that I feel the relief that you can only feel when an urgent pain has been immediately and permanently relieved.  I have removed the thorn, I have extracted the sore tooth, I have taken off my pinching shoes at the end of a hard day–a brief pain of removal and then bliss.  I am experiencing a maelstrom of emotions, but I have to admit that relief is one of the forerunners.  Considering the nature of the fallout, which was mostly vitriol and bitterness from their end (over removing them from Facebook, no less–I didn’t get drunk and egg their house, or make a scene, just took them off of my social media), another prevalent emotion is confidence that I did the right thing.

Even though this was difficult, I feel that it is a vital step in achieving my goal of making 2011 the Year of Win.  I can’t let things drag me down anymore; I need to focus my energies on building healthy relationships.  Also, I’m making “Year of the Win” both a tag and a category; if anybody else wants to use it so we can keep track of the awesomeness that will be 2011, please do use it!