My second dick pick

The problem is, we were discussing meeting for a cocktail! It's rude to send a picture like that in the middle of a conversation. It's rude to send a picture like that period. 

This guy acted like he wanted to have a date but he really just wants a hook up. He doesn't want to expend any effort at all. That's the deal breaker for me, the laziness, the apathy. If you just want to fuck, pay for it like a normal person. Don't go on a dating site and pretend you want to date.

She says "if you like his company" but that's it, right - I never spent any time in his company because he couldn't be bothered. He doesn't see me as a person, just a walking talking vagina.

Say what you want about North Dakota...I never got a dick pick the whole time I was there.
 

Dysfunctional partnerships

 Darling daughter and I have been talking lately about partners, because she had some trouble with her BF recently (they've worked it out), but it got me thinking about how many of our relationships and connections, even tenuous ones, are basically partnerships, with norms and expectations. I'm even including my landlord and my terrible neighbor who shares my building. So much of the frustration in life seems to me to come from these dysfunctional partnerships - where people violate the norms or cause puzzlement by their behavior. It's been helpful to me to think of the situation this way. It makes it easier somehow to cope with the disappointment - that people aren't necessarily mean or rude, but rather, don't know how to operate effectively in a partnership.

Connectedness

 Darling daughter said she's in her loner era and I thought about that, because I don't mind being alone. But I don't think that's my vibe really. I need to feel connected and I'm so grateful for her and for my friends who are willing to chat on the phone - they have saved my sanity over the last year. Having someone reach out to check on me, to care about my day, to listen when something is bothering me, and to let me into their world too, has been more important than ever for me. I genuinely could not survive without it.

Red flag

 It's astonishing to me that men are still putting body types in their dating profiles ("HWP" means, are you ready, "height weight proportional"). If you don't like the way a woman looks in her pictures, or you meet her and you don't like the way she looks, don't continue to date her. Easy peasy. But a lot of women are gonna take a hard pass if you list slim or fit or petite as a requirement (even if they are!)

Toxic money

 Just having the weirdest start to January 2025 - so many conflicts over money all happening in the first week. What is the universe trying to tell me?

PhD student whose dissertation I edited this past fall didn't send the payment for many weeks, ignoring my emails, and finally told me that she would pay me only half what I charged (which was criminally low already) because I missed her deadline and caused her stress. I told her that the amount she was offering me was insulting, but I would take whatever I could so I don't have to continue dealing with it. We will see if I get anything at all from her (I doubt it). This is especially galling because I had to work on her paper when I was in the middle of moving, and it was super inconvenient for me, but I did it anyway because we had made our arrangement many months earlier, when I had no idea what would be happening in my life. So my integrity was rewarded with her complete lack of any.

When I asked my landlord about moving the epic amount of snow from the weekend snowstorm, he got super pissy and said he could raise my already below market (!) rent if I wanted him to cover snow removal. We got in a pretty good fight about it after he informed me that the other woman in the building would not be helping pay for the driveway to be cleared because she works from home and doesn't need to go anywhere (I guess ever, it's 10 below zero, this snow will be around for at least a week). My neighbor and my landlord are willing to go to the mattresses over this, and DAMAGE our relationship, rather than chip in a FEW DOLLARS for someone to shovel. If we split it 3 ways, it would have been less than a tank of gas for each of us. Truly bonkers. Now I feel super uncomfortable living here, not because of the snow issue, but because of their conflict style. My landlord lets Jordan live for free in the building next door, even though she has behaved very erratically, with apparently no consequences, but he's taking a super hard line with a very responsible renter, over a tiny issue. I suppose he would be more pleasant and kind if I was a pretty 30 year old...

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Just had the realization of this being the strangest coincidence: the amount of money the student withheld is exactly what I paid for the snow removal. What???

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Oh, the upstairs neighbor moved her car on Tuesday, after I removed the snow in the driveway, and shoveled out the snow the city plow pushed in front of the driveway for a second time. I'm fuming!

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The Universe saw fit to give me a chance encounter with the neighbor on Wednesday morning. I said, "You said you didn't need to move your car." And she said, "I had a family emergency." (I doubt it.) I said, "That's why you move the snow!" She said "Well I apologize." So I guess that's that. Though she noticeably did not offer to pay her share of moving the snow...

Measuring sticks are dumb

Demi Moore won her first ever acting award at the Golden Globes tonight and gave a tremendously great speech about how you'll believe you are good enough once you put down the measuring stick (see pull quote below). But the irony is that the award she's holding while she's saying this is a measuing stick.

I'm super happy for her, and though I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm sure she was incredible in it. But the message of her speech is a little muddled. I like what Taylor Swift said (and yes, she's won lots of awards): that the work is the reward.

Most of us work in fields with no awards at all and we must be content with the satisfaction of worthwhile work well done. 

“In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’”

Wait there's more

 Spent another three days trying to arrange a meeting with this gentleman...