Sven's life in Oz

Oh, man, was I ever into him! “What happened?”, you may well ask. Well, he moved to China. There’s always something, isn’t there? After digging myself out of the iPhone debacle he went off and passed his exam, then decided to take a career break and travel around Asia for three months or so. I saw him once before he left. He told me in the first two minutes, and I spent the rest of the evening wondering why he hadn’t just told me over the phone and saved me $50 on dinner out. Naturally I was my charming, witty self throughout and by the end of the night I was satisfied that it was definitely his loss. Quite honestly, he was hard work.

How did I get so crazy over this guy? Yes, he’s hot with moments of fun and excitement, and yes, he had the most gorgeous fingers I have ever seen. However, I let all that go to my head: I put his timidity on our first date down to nerves, but really he just didn’t talk very much. He was a profound conversational recalcitrant; I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and ended up creating a complete fantasy personality. We had great dates because I didn’t actually go out with him – I was having dinner and drinks with my imaginary Dr Boyfriend-in-waiting. It was doomed from the start.

After the China revelation, I was working so hard on maintaining my enthusiasm for his trip that I couldn’t keep the make-believe personality going too – there’s only room for so much crazy in my brain. Without the pretend version, the real Dr Lego was exhausting. I’m not exactly verbose – I prefer to listen lots and speak when I have something to say – but next to him I was verbally incontinent. My efforts to keep the conversation going led me to more and more desperate topics. At one point I may actually have asked his preference of mattress manufacturer. Eventually I realised that my dignity was worth more than his comfort and I just gave up. I may never find out what material surgical scrubs are made from.

At the end of the night we went our separate ways and promised to stay in touch. Start submitting conversation topics now – I may end up needing them.

Last week I announced on Twitter that I neither relished nor resented Valentine’s Day this year. I have been working so hard and avoiding the shops lately, so it has rather flown under my radar, but as the big day approaches it is slowly seeping in through the virtual windows of my life: updates are appearing on Facebook, tips on buying flowers are dropping into my email more regularly, and the Valentine hashtags are becoming a permanent feature of my TweetDeck. The day itself, thanks to the wonders of time differences and universal connectivity, will last about 36 hours on Twitter as the sun rises on 14 February around the world, long after it began to shine on Australian lovers.

This will be my first Valentine’s Day as a single man in over a decade. I keep my old Valentine cards – not as an ego trip, but to remind me when I’m down that people have cared. It’s good to remind yourself that your are lovable, especially when you don’t feel it. And if this post sounds melancholy, it really isn’t: I’m actually quite chipper. Things are going well – work is good, I’m making new friends all the time and laughing more and more each day. I’ve been on a second date with the blind date – Dr Lego, as he has become known – and the latest one (last night) was great. So why am I sitting in bed, typing paragraph after paragraph about a date on the calendar I really care nothing about?

I was pottering about, doing things that needed doing, when I caught myself wondering if Dr Lego would call. Of course I knew he wouldn’t, but sometimes these thoughts just pop into your head. It’s frustrating and distracting and after a while it can drive you crazy, but underneath all the “will he, won’t he?” and the “I’m not thinking about it”, there’s a tiny light of excitement, a little glee in your heart that says “this is what it is like to be alive”.

Now, I’m not mad enough to think that two dates is any kind of basis for a relationship – he might turn out to be an axe murderer or seal clubber or a mime artist – but the beginning, the trepidation, the exicitement and the unknown are all the things that Valentine’s Day celebrates. Even when I check my postbox on Sunday morning and find it predictably empty, and even if he hasn’t called me back because he’s drowning puppies in a sack under a bridge somewhere, I won’t mind too much. Landing on your ass with egg on your face is the tails side of the coin, and sometimes it comes up heads.

As I eat my french toast alone on Sunday morning, I will remind myself that I can feel the things we all feel, that they are waiting for me when I least expect it, quite suddenly, without warning, and not just on one day but on any day; and they are all just wonderful.

Heart like a swinging brick? Whoever heard such rubbish?

So, yesterday while I was sitting at home tearing my hair out about how I’m going to write a communications strategy for a five-year project in less than a fortnight, the nice enough chap was outside my apartment building anonymously returning some DVDs that he borrowed back when we were seeing one another. Clearly they were such compelling viewing that he felt he needed hang onto them for three months since borrowing them and then calling it a day. He dropped them in my letterbox and sped off into the night, then sent me a message on facebook telling me that he had done so, and inviting me out for a Christmas drink. Now, call me old-fashioned, but that just seems a bit odd. Why not just ring the bell?

I was far too busy working to pay it much attention, but on the trip into work this morning I got to wondering (as you do on a train ride when you finish your book much sooner than you expect) about what it could all possibly mean. Why didn’t he ring the bell? Dumping and running is the kind of thing you do when you don’t want to bump into someone. But why then send a message at all? I would have known they were from him. How many other people would leave two series of The Tudors in my letterbox? And why invite me for an “xmas bevvy” too? Is that some passive aggressive way of ‘being friends’ without being the one who says “let’s not”? How should I respond? Should I be cheerful and up for a drink? Should I simply say thanks and kick the meeting into the long grass – new year’s drink, Easter drink, never? Should I simply say “thanks for the DVDs and have a great Christmas”?And round and round we go.

Poor old Peter, my long-suffering office-roomie, got the quandary right between the eyes when I finally reached my desk. He seems to have grasped quite quickly that I can disappear down a mental sinkhole at the drop of a hat. Before I had even concluded the cycle with a plaintive “what does it all meeeeeean?” he had cut in.

“Don’t read so much into it, Sven. It’s probably nothing.”

He was right. I replied tonight with a witty, self-deprecating note of thanks and a “give me a shout when you are free”. Turns out he was parked across the driveway and someone was waiting to get into the car park.

We’re having that drink next week.

So, remember when I said I was a reboundaholic? Yeah, well, didn’t we all know that was going to end badly. Before I left for the UK I was sliding into some kind of pseudo-relationship with a nice enough chap (a little arrogant, perhaps, but sometimes that’s not a bad thing, is it?), and everything was going swimmingly because he was a nice guy and I was completely ignorant about what a bad idea this was. Anyhoo, I went to England, realised that this had disaster written all over it and, upon my return, attempted to end it face-to-face with an “it’s not you, it’s me” type of thing. So far so sensible, and it turns out he had also decided a similar thing. Sadly, his method of dealing with it wasn’t quite as direct as mine, and by that I mean he stopped returning my calls.

Anyone with a modicum of mental reasoning would simply have thanked their lucky stars to have avoided the awkward conversation and left it at that, but we all know I’m not like that. I’m an ego with legs: people never just don’t call me back. Besides which, I think I’m worth an explanation at the very least, even if it is just to say ‘thanks but no thanks’. Imagine, if you will, me raging about for a fortnight of “why hasn’t he called me”, except that if he did call me I would have arranged to meet him just to dump him. Isn’t that just the craziest thing you ever read?

Rebound is nuts. It turns you into some kind of masochist, where the very worst idea seems like the best plan. Common sense plugs its ears and assumes the brace position as you go merrily on your way like a drunk in charge of a bus. Even when it was obvious what was going on, I still stuck at it until I finally got the message – via Facebook(!) – that it was over. As I read it I wasn’t angry or bitter – I just felt a strange, instant relief and got on with my day.

Did I need those two weeks of ranting and being totally crazy just to get them out of my system? Perhaps I needed to be unceremoniously jilted to validate my newfound singledom. Maybe, having been the one to start the end of my last relationship, I need someone to dump me just to complete the set and help me move on.

I can’t think of a clever way to wrap this post up. Whatever it was, I feel much better now. Life is strange; emotions are weird. It’s all good.

This cupboard is older than I am.  It’s probably older than my mother, too, since my grandparents bought it long before I was born and my mother had me at quite an early age.  Since I was born this cupboard has been in every bedroom I have ever had, more or less.  I think I only inherited it because no one else wanted it; indeed, everyone seems to loathe it and whenever I move someone asks me why I still have it.  “Because I love it,” I say.

When we were very young and my sister and I shared a bedroom, we used to watch a show on television – Choc-a-block or Bric-A-Brac, I forget which – where the presenter would drive in on a little car and pull a bench out of the wall like a drawer.  Then he would sit down and tell stories.  Kara and I would run upstairs, pull the drawers halfway out and read to one another until our mother caught us one day and put and end to it.  I remember her being cross that we would break them but I’m sure she was worried we would hurt ourselves too.

After that, the cupboard came with me wherever I went – across the country to university and around the town as I moved from halls to share houses and dingy flats to beautiful bargain-priced apartments with friends and lovers.  It kept my clothes safe and dry even when the whole flat was dripping with damp.  Once while I was going through a particularly awful break-up at university I stuck positive messages onto the doors so that when I woke up the first thing I would see was “You are a GOOD person” and “Things will be all right”.  The marks from the sellotape still remind me to be happy even though the messages are long gone.  (Where they went I don’t know: one morning I woke up to find that a flatmate had replaced them with a note that read: “You smell like a sardine’s minge”.  That was the day I realised I was over it.)

Now that cupboard is with me in my new flat on the other side of the world, and I must confess that I have been lying to everyone for years.  That cupboard is a pain in the ass.  It is an odd size and height, the cupboard part is too large and there aren’t enough drawers.  The shelves inside are either too far apart or too close together for whatever you want to put in there, and the finish is a disaster.  It is pointless in the extreme, but despite all that I know I will never get rid of it.

Every time I move I find something new about it that makes me hate it and love it all the more, like the sawdust in the drawer slots where the drawers are wearing out, but the half-visible chalk marks of the price (or is it an order number? or a reservation date?) on the back panel.  Even though it is worn out and almost completely useless, I keep finding some way to give it a purpose.  It’s like an old dog.  Yes, it’s embarrassing when he farts in front of company, but you don’t get rid of him just because he’s lost control of his bowels.  I put up with its awkward, outdated uselessness because it reminds me that I am a GOOD person who smells like a fish’s fanny.

I think I do love it, after all.