Sunday Stories: Sour Sixteen

It made me feel the pain all over again. To be a shadow in the company of men is not even to be a sentence without a proper verb form. He is as I was: a latecomer. Coming late only comes into its strength late in life. Early on it is just falling short. It may well have been the last time he really cried. That is as it still should be. Tears should form as condensation on the inside of the skull to form the bitter taste of tacit condescension. And then one starts to read.

The cat may be dead as well. It all blows over, chilly, until it is over and he turns to cool. Don’t we want our kids to be as cool as we never were? Cool enough to have ignored us when we were the kids who still cried and moved frantically when moved. She may well have frozen to death. The nights are cold after all. She was getting old.

Was?

Another dating classic

This is especially for the married couples and/or live-togethers … one partner asks/tells the other to do something (clean the bathtub, take out the trash, etc.), but seemingly goes out of their way to do so when the other person is doing something else (reading, watching TV), and then gets mad when the task is not performed RIGHT THEN, at that very moment.

Another dating classic

“Every complaint you raise about me, I suddenly also have about you to an equal or even greater degree — though of course I can’t remember any specific examples.”

A dating rule

Let’s say you contact the person you’re dating, leaving some kind of message, and then that person fails to respond in a length of time you think is reasonable. If, despite not knowing what is keeping that person from responding, you send a follow-up message along the lines of “or, you know, you could just ignore me, because that’s cool, too,” you should be subject to immediate break-up and ideally some kind of monetary fine as well.

Proposed new terminology

Dating quantum physics refers to situations where you are in a relationship and want to know something about your partner’s future plans, anticipated level of commitment, etc., but you can’t ask because you’re afraid that doing so would disrupt the balance of the relationship. In other words, you can’t measure the situation without changing it — like in quantum physics.