Sunday, June 27, 2010

Rejection, After Rejection, After Rejection


The excuse I get from people is always essentially the same. “It’s hard.” You know what’s hard? Going through life without anyone saying “yes” to you. I am tired of being rejected. I’m tired of applying for jobs I never get, sometimes because I’m “overqualified.” I’m tired women ignoring me. I’m tired of waiting for people to get back to me who never do, so I just feel like I’m waiting for Godot. I’m tired of writing about it. I’m tired of being tired of it. I’m certainly tired of talking about it, because people just say the same damn thing like they don’t know any better. “Cheer up, things will get better.” No they won’t. “You just need to lower your expectations.” To what? I’ve already come to expect nothing now. Isn’t that fuck up? I don’t know why I keep trying when I just expect to fail. I don’t WANT to fail, but I expect to. Or they say “you’re trying to hard,” or “you’re not trying hard enough,” or “you expect too much” or “you don’t have enough confidence.”

The theatre I was volunteering for kicked me out for no reason. They’ve made a ton of excuses, none of which have anything to do with me, but I’m the one who gets rejected. That girl that kissed me ignored me all week-end. I haven’t been with a woman since 2007, and that woman rejected me after a one-night-stand. I got laid off from my last actual job.

I suppose I’m not being entirely fair. I was accepted into a grad program. Unfortunately, that doesn’t start for two more months, so it isn’t much of a distraction.

I lost count of how many new messages I’ve composed to women various dating sites over the last 3 or 4 days, and I’m usually careful to consider that I’d be what THEY want. How fucked up is that? That I don’t even think what I want is relevant anymore. And they just ignore me. Even though I know some of them have been logging in every day for years. Obviously Mr. Darcy isn’t coming along.

Two women got back to me, and one of them won’t even be living in Ottawa for another month. The other one gave me a one-line response to a question about her own interests. I was reminded of a crappy response I asked Scrapbook Girl when I asked her what she was working on these days. “Lots of things.” What kind of an answer is that? It’s a blatant I-don’t-want-to-talk-to-you answer. Which is baffling, really – a poet who doesn’t want to talk about her own poetry. So I told this other girl sorry for asking her a dead-end question. But what the fuck does she want to talk about? I asked her what she made of the G20 summit. If people can’t talk about what they like, get them to talk about what they hate. She said she’s been down ever since a bad break-up, and now she hates her job. No we’re getting somewhere. So I asked what cheers her up, and she says, “singing.” Then she asks what makes me happy. And you know what I did? I agonized over what to say to her until I passed out from exhaustion. Because you know what I’ve realized. I don’t know what makes me happy. Nothing really does. Every now and then I see a spark of something that would make me happy in a woman I know, but she’s usually pretty quick to put that fire out. I meet so many people who want something, and they have this sense as to what it is. A dream, if you will. Some people want to go on a dream trip, some want to write the perfect song. Me, I get discouraged from writing my own screenplays and poems, and from my other obsessions because I just don’t see anything happening anymore. I start asking “even if I succeed, what good is that going to do me?” In five years, I could really be somebody, in some field, or I could not, but by the end of my life, it still isn’t going to matter. Nothing really matters. And the know this from the outset, well, it kind of makes the whole journey seem pointless.

You know what I spent my week-end doing? Moving old furniture around and watching my grandmother Depressia potter around with old garbage that she should just throw away. Even she said she wanted to just throw it all away, so I insisted that she do so. And I drove all the way out to our cottage with my dad and auntie Flo, just so we could move an old, ugly piece of furnature into storage there, instead of just throwing it away. My dad has this hope that his uncle, now 82, is going to come and take it, because he says he wants it. He lives in another province; it’s never gonna happen. What we should have done is leave it on the curb. Let some poor student take it. Fuck!

So right now, I feel like my purpose is to wait around for all my relatives to die, one by one, so I can help them move around all their junk into less and less space. I don’t get to start a family or career of my own, because no one wants me, but my family wants me, because I can drive them all around. (My dad can’t drive anymore, because of his eye problems.) My grandmother even want to give me money towards a car – but I know it’s just so I’ll visit her more often, which I wish she’d thought of before moving to that lodge on the other-ass end of the city. My life until 30 has been a series of school, volunteering for people who just use my good-naturedness, babysitting other people’s kids, helping make their family life easier, and moving old garbage around when I should just throw it away! That girl, (or should I say woman of 27), asked me what makes me happy, a question I asked myself 8 years ago when Karma Chameleon dumped me. And I still don’t fucking know. All I can think of is either all the bullshit that I have but don’t want – the endless about of clutter in the warehouse that is my (parents’) house, and on top of old relatives dying or moving to smaller rooms, my father and sister continue to buy assloads of junk. And yes sis, you know it’s junk. I know you do – or the things that I want but don’t have – namely a girlfriend and paid work, inching towards the whole family and career goal. And why would I even want either of these? Well how should I know? I barely remember what they feel like. So I can’t even answer that.

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