I Will Not Yield

I want to say something, but I can think of hardly anything that isn’t a complaint.

This week:

I came home from work last Monday ready for exercise. What I got was a crashed computer that took me all week to fix. I even bought $50 worth of cables to get my external drive up and running so I could back up my info. Two days after I fixed my hard drive (on my own, due to my expansive technical expertise and advice from my father, thank you very much), my external drive crashed. There’s no going back, it’s deader than dead. I could have put the $50 toward a new external drive that comes with cables.

Tuesday I got in the mail a notice that on my financial aid application the name I gave doesn’t match my Social Security Number, and needed to be corrected before It could be processed. Both pieces of information were already correct.

Last month I got a $250 credit from my new leasing company. Thursday I got a notice in the mail that they weren’t supposed to give that to me, so this month I have to give it back.

This weekend was good – I made some real headway trying to impress a woman who’s letting me try to impress her. After several weeks, I’m finally to a point where I can be near her and not exude desperation the way the sun emits light. I’m finally in a place where I can show her the side of myself that, if she had seen while we were still together, I’m confident we would still be together. It earned me two kisses that I didn’t even have to ask for.

Today I got in the mail a rejection letter from The New School. I guess New York isn’t going to be my home after all. It’s one thing to be rejected, but they still have two more rounds of auditions before they make their final decisions. It stings being told I’m not as good as all the people who are getting two more chances to prove themselves before being denied.

My conclusion for the week is that I should stop checking the fucking mailbox.

I need a victory. I need an honest-to-god, dyed in the wool victory. Cold-blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. I’m doing okay at overcoming new problems, but every one of those I solve elevates me back to staring up at the old problems again, those overbearing giants who threaten to grind my bones to make ye bread (fee fi fo fum). Some problems must be whittled, eroding flaws as time erodes a stone. Sure, fine, great, thanks Buddha. Fuck all that, now. I need a victory akin to firing a shoulder mounted rocket launcher at a gopher. I need to defeat a challenge like Muhammad Ali beating up a scarecrow. I need to earn something substantial that won’t dissolve with the next strong wind. Something that I can’t lose more easily than I gained.

Maybe I’m fighting the wrong fights. Maybe I’m reaching for that which I have no right to grasp. And maybe getting smacked around is just to toughen me up for the bigger disappointments I’ve not yet been strong enough to face.

"There were only two things I could have done. And one of them would have been to just lie down and never get up again. It's like how many times can life hit you? When do the blows start to hurt? When do you just . . . stop?" —Lyta Hall