This can’t go on, I realized earlier as I sat deep in thought by the window. If you’ve had this many doubts this often over the years about your friendship with Andy, then maybe it really is time to move on. 

It’s true. We’re just too damn different. Our only common ground is collecting photos, and our tastes in that differ as well. Never expected or wanted anyone to be a carbon copy of myself, but you gotta have at least some common ground, don’t you? He’s him and I’m me, but that’s so very hard for him to accept and deal with. He automatically assumes others feel, think, believe and do the same things he does, and I have to remind him that hey, we’re not all needy of this and that. We’re not all into the God fantasy or being chased by devils because we don’t embrace Him with open arms. We don’t all want tons of friends. We’re not all oozing with jealousy. We’re not all obsessed with weight and appearance. We may be when we’re younger, but most people grow up and quit worrying about how others see them. 

But if he believes the sky is gray and you say no, it’s blue, then you’re a liar. 

But it isn’t just about us being different. It’s about me being offended, frustrated and annoyed time and time again. I get tired of the insults. Tired of the negativity. Tired of his know-it-all attitude. Tired of waiting for him to catch on and get things. Tired of having to repeat myself, even if he may not be pretending to be forgetful as a way of mindfucking me and further adding to my frustration and annoyance. I understand his years of smoking pot led to severe memory loss and maybe even his ability to process and learn things. He’s not very perceptive and he can be incredibly paranoid, too. 

And no, he was never stupid. But he’d often say stupid things that just made me want to reach out and slap him awake one too many times. I will always remember and appreciate the good times, but I’m feeling more and more like it’s time to move on. I may not be perfect myself, but I’m tired of his negativity just because he’s so miserable and unhappy with his own life. I’m tired of the immaturity. I’m tired of the repetition. I’m tired of the stupidity, intentional or not. Again, not that he’s literally stupid, but more that he acts stupid at times and makes me feel like I’m talking to a 15-year-old. 

We met up for the second time in life when he was 26 and I was 22, yet I feel like he’s forever 26 while I’ve grown, matured and moved on. We all have an “immature” side of sorts. But his star-struck ways and dreamy obsession with celebrities, for example, is something you do in your teens and 20s. Not your 50s. 

I’m also tired of him thinking he knows it all where I’m concerned. Yes, he knows me very well. Give him a dozen dresses and ask him which one he thinks I’d like best and he’ll almost certainly hit the nail on the head. But he doesn’t literally know it all any more than I do and when he keeps insisting he knows something he doesn’t, that’s where I get annoyed and even offended. When you keep insisting something’s the other way around (especially when the other person should have a much better idea than you do of just how it is), you’re basically calling them a liar and that’s offensive. Like me insisting France isn’t in Europe. No matter how much I may believe that I’d still be 100% incorrect. 

Even though he’s apologized for the HORRIBLY mean and false statements and assumptions he’s made concerning my sleep issues, my driving phobia, my husband, the people that screwed me in Arizona, and my MIL, the hurt and anger have stayed with me. 

When you expect people not to judge you but then you judge them for the number of friends they have, for example, that’s not only offensive, but it seriously makes me question the value of your friendship. True friends don’t prank call the shit out of someone they knew was dirt poor at the time, stalk and harass them online, then claim they’re anti-revenge, then say the many mean, untrue and hurtful things he’s said to me over the last few years and insult my husband while he’s at it. My husband and I have never once judged or condemned him for the way he is. We’ve always accepted him as is. Obviously, I can no longer do that, but that’s the difference between him and me… he judges, critiques, condemns, pushes and tries to change those he feels should mirror his ways more than they do. I just walk away from them altogether. Period. He can be just as lacking in compassion and selfish as he can be compassionate and generous. So many times on Ask I’d mention doing this or doing that and would feel a little hurt when he wouldn’t ask me about it, or how a doctor’s appointment went. I felt like he just didn’t care at times and like it was all about him. 

I was ready to drop him after the second offense, but the guilt of having dumped him after 11 years or so back in 1999 ate at me and I felt obligated to put up with it. But now I realize and remember WHY I cut ties with him in 1999 in the first place, and that’s for the very same reason I’m doing it now. I didn’t feel guilty for letting my abusive mother go and I’m not going to feel guilty for letting him go. Really, it’s ok to pick and choose our friends… without guilt. I can walk away despite the things I said and did wrong in the past. The past is the past after all and can never be changed anyway. Sometimes we really do gotta look out for ourselves and do what’s best for us, even if that means throwing in the towel and moving on altogether. But for a while, I couldn’t do this. Why? Because I felt so bad for dumping him 16 years ago, that’s why. I also knew his mother and sisters would take it hard if I let him go again, but you know what? I don’t care what they think. No disrespect to them, but again, sometimes we just gotta worry about ourselves and not what others think or how they’re going to take things. How they react or feel about things is up to them and not my responsibility to prevent or control. 

It isn’t just the big things, but the little things that irritate me as well at times. Maybe it shouldn’t as I realize this isn’t harming anyone, but when he’d post pics of teens or college kids flipping the camera off, for example, I couldn’t help but think how immature it was. I mean, this is the kind of silly thing a young person gets off on and finds amusing, not older folks. Again, I realize there’s no real harm in his doing this, but it does tell me a thing or two about his personality. 

It all started when I excitedly told him about the job I started and instead of getting a “Good for you!” or a “Good luck,” or an “I’m happy for you,” I get, “You’ll be sick of it in 3 weeks for cutting into your daily grind.” 

When I assured him it wouldn’t and why, he continued with the negativity and the arguing, insisting he knew me well. Yeah? Well, I know myself even better. This is the same work I did from 2005-2008 and I loved it (I told him I’m entering sweeps for someone else and a few other things when in fact Tom’s just giving me $100 a month to sweep for him which is a very decent amount). It also didn’t interfere with my day-to-day life at all as it only takes a couple of hours a day to do and I don’t even have to do it all at once. I only stopped because the economy went bad and I stopped winning. 

At the risk of sounding negative myself, I did tell him that I don’t think I can win for us. I’m going to try my best, but honestly, it’s not so much about the economy as it is about the competition. When I was supplementing our income, mostly in Oregon, by sweeps and contests, you typically had a few hundred to a few thousand entrants. Now you’ve got many, many thousands, and even millions in some cases. 

Win or lose, I can still write, read, listen to music, watch shows, interact with friends online, clean the house, care for the rats, spend time with my husband, take showers, eat meals, exercise, go out to stores, and live life. 

But everybody’s a liar to him. That’s just how he is. He may truly prefer his solitude same as I do, but did he ever think the reason he can’t get that many decent friends or a BF might be because of HIM? Just like blacks aren’t always shit on for being black, maybe he’s not shit on as much as he may think he is for being gay, but for being annoying. 

Well, he may know a lot, but he doesn’t always know it all and not everybody’s lying to him. He flatters himself too much if he thinks he has enough of a hold or any kind of power or authority over others that they would feel the automatic need to lie to him about things. As if he could use the truth against them somehow? 

I did tell him earlier that I was contemplating taking a break from him (though I think a permanent break would be best) and he went into his typical counter-attacking mode by saying something about me pissing him off 2 years ago for whatever reason, and how he almost thought of taking a break from me then as well. I don’t remember what he’s talking about and I don’t care. It was when I realized I didn’t care that I knew I was losing my desire to continue putting any work into our friendship, which gets to be more work than any friendship should be and a little too often. As they say, when you lose the will to argue, the friendship has worn off. Why tell him he’s the same exact guy he was at 26, minus the pot and ciggies? He’ll not only turn it around and say the same of me (though I wasn’t a pothead), but he won’t see what I see. I don’t know if he’s not smart enough to see that he’s never grown or matured as a person or intellectually or if he wouldn’t want to see it. I only know that one can’t make people see or believe what they don’t want to. It’s up to him to be the one to take a good long look in the mirror without bullshitting himself. No one can do that for him. In the past, I would at least let someone know why I was walking away from them, but as I said, I no longer have the will or the desire to argue, defend or explain myself to him. I’m just going to make a clean break. Any further messages, emails, comments, calls or postal mail I may get from him will go unread and deleted/dumped as soon as I know it’s from him or a name I don’t recognize. I will give him the journal copies I set aside for him since he’s always been afraid to go directly to my blog for some reason, claiming it’s “too hard” to keep track of where he left off that way. 

I wish him the best of luck and I hope happier times find their way to him soon enough and that he will someday see life in a more positive way, work through his trust issues, and be less offensive to others so he can have all the friends he thought I should have. I’m sorry he lives in a shitty neighborhood and that the people he cleans for are homophobic sickos who shit on him as well, but I don’t feel the need to be all negative just because things are going well for me and not for him. Looking ahead at what may go wrong with a particular plan for the sake of looking out for yourself is one thing, but always being negative is another. The guy totally sees the glass as half empty. 

Lastly, I get tired of having to pick, choose and censor my words, be it directly to him or on Facebook, knowing how paranoid and sensitive he is, always taking things personally. 

Later… 

Just thought I’d do a private entry while Tom is out picking up our prescriptions at Walmart and getting a new passport. Well, now that he found the cards you’re supposed to use if you lose your old passport, he can at least get the process underway. Hopefully, it won’t take too long. If worse comes to absolute worst, we’ll just go to Florida only. 

I wish there was an option to do some private tweets instead of having to be all or nothing. I could use Histofme for the private tweets or just save private things for private entries. I definitely feel a sense of freedom in my writing now that I have cut ties with Andy, and I also don’t feel a shred of guilt for doing it either. I’m confident I did the right thing. Having to censor journals online is one thing, but I would also want to add things in for him or edit out certain things and it was a real pain in the ass. I did so much for that guy and for what? Because he was too stupid or too afraid to go to the blog? Maybe even too lazy? Even Maliheh would say she was “spoiled” into getting it via email. 

Anyway, I was a little surprised that while he didn’t deactivate his Ask account like I deactivated the one I used with him, he blocked me on Facebook. Then I realized it was probably because of Norma. This way he can do to me what he did to his brother and say all kinds of nasty things about me without me seeing Norma’s response to it. At least I think that’s why he did it. 

If it were five years ago I would worry about him harassing me and maybe those I’m close to as well, but I don’t see him doing that nowadays, to be honest. I sure hope that by now he’s at least above and beyond that kind of childish revenge anyway. 

His shit has really made me appreciate Aly’s friendship all the more. She has never falsely accused me of lying, made fun of my fears and phobias, come off as insensitive, tried to judge or change me, or argued every other thing I say. She’s never been pushy and she cares enough to remember the things I tell her and to ask about what’s going on with me. 

I got a friend request from a stranger. No, it’s not connected to Andy because the request came in before he knew I dumped him. I asked if we had spoken anywhere before and they answered in Thai. Google Translate let me know that they were spammers. Wanted to sell me some diet shit or something. The person ended up doing me a favor because I learned something from them. Facebook now has the option of making the message appear to be unseen unless you click “Accept” to allow them to know you saw it. I clicked “Decline” and I immediately thought of Doc C. I seldom get spam so I have no idea how long this feature has existed. All I know is that in the past if you wanted to read something it would appear as having been read, but you could run and mark it as unread once again once you were done. 

So she and Nane may very well be reading my messages after all. I haven’t sent Nane a message in a long time and I have no desire to in the future, but I still wouldn’t mind giving Dr. C a piece of my mind where the meds and anxiety were concerned. Maybe I should let her know just how much info Dr. D withheld from me and that she was wrong in blaming most if not all of it on me instead of where it belonged… on the meds. Not that I have anything against her or think she was a bad doctor in general. But maybe she can learn from me and it might help others she encounters who are going through the same thing. 

I still peek in on her out of curiosity from time to time, and she’s still with the black guy. In fact, he must be from DC because she mentioned that she went there and met the family.