magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

i finished last night with dvds. city of ghosts, legally blonde 2, and then, because i still wasn't at the point of sleepiness (getting into bed before i'm ready to just fall into sleep is only counter-productive, like staying in bed in the morning after the first rays of sunlight and thoughts of her have entered my consciousness), i watched most of legally blonde 2 again, with the audio commentary.

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talked with george online around noon. told him it would be nice to hang out if he didn't have other plans. he said he'd been up late and was running behind but didn't have all that much to do today. that's about as committal is george often is, so i sort of expected i'd be seeing him eventually. he logged off at two: 'showertime.'

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i hadn't been planning on calling stef back right away, if i could keep myself from doing it. knowing that she's happy, that she feels she doesn't need me in her life right now, it makes sense to wait a little for the reality to sink in. but when i checked my voicemail midday there was a message from her. 'i'm going to be around all afternoon, so call me.' she wasn't asking me to call because she needed to hear my voice, or because she wanted to ask me to come home, it was because i said yesterday that i wanted to talk to her some more and because she still has some logistical issues to iron out with me. but i called anyway.

and this time things didn't stay quite so civil. i still can't begin to understand how you can go from loving someone so much, and wanting to spend your life with them, to wanting nothing at all to do with them in such a short time. and that's basically what she's telling me, with no real sense of explanation: that she's done trying. that she doesn't miss me at all. that she doesn't care about the last few times. that this time she really means it.

and it breaks my heart to hear her say that she's thinking about giving our cat away. yes flora is being difficult, but really, it's stef's own damn fault. and she brushes it off with, 'of course i have no compassion, that's just who i am.' but it's not always who she's been. what is broken with her to make her so cold sometimes and yet thoughtful and caring at others? and what is broken with me to make me want to deal with those poles?

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i spent most of the rest of the day with poker. first stephen elliot's poker report. (just enough detail about the dysfunction in the lives of some complete strangers in the son francisco literary world to make me feel a little more comfortable about my own life, heartbreaking and soothing, or maybe just a distraction from my own heartbreak. either way i subscribed to the update list.) then poker for fake money online, continually hovering around breaking even. and poker for fake money offline with daniel, jeanette, and their friend mike, a stack of forty chips a piece and by the time it was all over the whole pile had found its way in front of me.

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i never heard back from george.