My Boy Toy

Back when I was 30, I started seeing a guy who was nine years younger than I. Whoo-hoo! What an ego boost! We met through mutual friends, and I was flattered when I learned that he was interested in me, because he was funny, young, and ..... drop-dead gorgeous. I swear, this guy could be Brad Pitts' twin, except with darker hair. Really. If you put a picture of the guy up next to a picture of Brad Pitt, they looked exactly alike. Ok, ok, you get the picture.

So! Cue "Rock Me" by Liz Phair. We started seeing each other. Not really dating, because I was not interested in any kind of commitment at that point. Let's just call it "friends with benefits", to be blunt. And then we started spending more and more time together, and then he started, well, irritating me. It seemed like he was always at my house, always hanging around, and even for his young age, he was pretty immature. So eventually we had some kind of big fight, I stopped returning his calls, and that was that. Until about a year or so later, when we started hanging out again, he started irritating me, and the pattern would repeat. This went on for about four or five years.

So! My point, and I do have one. Looking back, when the guy was at the "irritating me" stage, I could be pretty rude to him. Pretty blunt, and pretty impatient. I didn't really care to hear what he had to say, and I wouldn't return his calls, and blah blah blah. And it struck me that I never would have been that rude to someone I actually cared about. Someone I had feelings for. So if there is someone in your life who is treating you poorly, who doesn't seem to really care about you ..... they probably don't. Care about you, that is. And you can justify their actions any way you choose, by saying, "Oh, he's just really busy", "Oh, she's going through a bad time right now", etc., but trust me, if he/she really cared about you? They wouldn't treat you like that.

That's my little diatribe for today, and I think it would be a good idea if I re-read this post from time to time, because this little cautionary tale is mostly directed at me. I tend to excuse people's poor treatment of me, and I'm going to try not to do that anymore. Because life is too short to have assholes for friends! And if someone is irritating the crap out of me, I will let them down gently and sever the ties kindly instead of being a jerk.

I think I'm going to dye my hair copper-color this weekend. And I'm definitely going to make a rum cake because I'm jonesing for one. And the weather's gonna suck again this weekend (hellooo, Sunday snowstorm), so I'll have to invent some other indoor activities to keep me occupied.

Have a good weekend!

P.S. When I was seeing this guy, I used to immensely enjoy skeeving myself out by doing the arithmetic in my head, as in, "Let see, when I was eighteen, he was ....... nine. (shiver)".