I’ve been thinking about what I want for celebrating my upcoming 40th birthday and it better be good because I can feel a freaky very out of character drama queen event coming if it isn’t. I just don’t know what it is I want. So I’m pretty much bound to react badly to anything that happens. Give me this, and I’ll have wanted that. Give me that and I would have wanted this. I can feel it coming. Seriously I have no clue what I want. Oh it could be one of half a dozen things, but I can’t decide.
Holy crap, I’m shit testing myself.
Anyway the whole day has been seeing that phrase “What Do You Want?” in various forms. I’ve seen it crop up in emails, in private messages, on other blogs, and it’s been repeating all day.
Here’s a private message from LIL via Talk About Marriage…
(From Me to Him but Quoted Back at Me) “Figure out what it is that you want.”
(From LIL) “I think this is good advice Athol. It’s also sort of fortune cookie nebulous, but it’s good advice nevertheless. Have you figured out what you want yet?”
Ugh, I love it when people quote my own crap back to me when I want it least. That being said LIL didn’t even know about the whole 40th birthday thing, and was asking about something completely different. That one I’ve figured out what I want and despite it being painfully complicated I’m making progress on it. (I really can’t talk much more about this as it work related and I’m on my real name here.)
So no, haven’t figured out what I want for a party, or non-party, or thing that I want for my birthday LIL. No clue.
On Sex With The Wife the question of the day was “What Do You Want?”
“Asking my wife directly what she wants just ends up starting a spiral of self-pity about how she doesn’t know either, and why do I expect her to know.”
So my general advice to that is, don’t worry about what someone else wants if they can’t decide what they want. Trying to make those people happy is like building sand castles below the high tide mark. Pretty shortly all your efforts get washed away and it’s all for naught.
You’re much better off figuring out what it is that you want and just plowing ahead and getting what you want. That way at least you will be happy. They aren’t likely to be happy no matter what you do, but they might end up happy if you’re happy because you got something you wanted. If they are angry that you are happy and they are not, just say “I asked what you wanted and you didn’t know, so I’m not wasting my efforts trying to make you happy when you don’t even know what makes you happy”. Then you ignore their tears.
Of course if what makes you happy is them being happy, you get caught in a relationship gridlock where everything circles around in a cycle of decreasing happiness until ultimately you cross the event horizon of the black hole that is forming and either blink out of existence or get served with a restraining order and divorce papers. The black hole visits joint checking accounts first by the way.
Oh hang on… I must have told LIL that exact same stuff in my earlier message to him, and he quoted it back to me.
Oh frak! The timeline is looping! If only I can get a message back to me somehow in the past, maybe all this can be avoided. I just have to let me in the past know what it is that I want and all this can be avoided….
… holy crap I still don’t know what I want for my 40th…. A strip club? A surprise party? The thing with the jumper cables and the butter?
So what do you want?
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