LJ Idol Season 8: Week 11; Open Topic

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

- Anais Nin


Most of my friends know by now that I don’t watch TV. I haven’t had cable or an actual television for most of the last decade. I’m okay with it. I pride myself on the fact that I’m not addicted to television.

So what would be the worst possible gift for a girl like this?

How about a thousand-dollar flat screen TV? Yeah, my ex-husband got me one. Whenever we went shopping, he routinely mentioned his desire for one. I’d tell him I didn’t see a point in buying a television like that when he wouldn’t even let us get cable. I told him that it would be like getting a sports car and not being able to afford the gas.

With my birthday coming around, whenever he asked, I’d tell him a lot of different things he could get for me - an evening out for some fun, maybe a Wii if we could afford it. He said we couldn’t, so I dropped it. But then, he showed up with a flat screen TV as a gift “for me.” A gift which ended up being only used for him to play Call of Duty on. A gift he fought hard to keep in the divorce.

I’ve always been a very much an "it’s the thought that counts” type of girl. Even if he only made me a card, I’d totally love it because he really thought about me in making it.

We’d been together for 6 years at this point, and I realized that he really didn’t know me. Nor did he care to know me. He knew I always loved going to the zoo, museums, and doing other geeky things. He found these things incredibly boring, and always refused to try anything I liked. Whenever he planned an outing for us, it always involved things he wanted to do. Mainly just going out to eat because he loved food. There wasn't much more to our relationship than that.

I’m really not a big camping type person to start with, but his mom insisted that we go camping in the middle of fall – on my 23rd birthday to boot. James swore up and down that we were not going camping. He swore it on the drive all the way to his hometown. He SWORE we were dropping his brother off and going elsewhere. He kept promising and promising me an awesome surprise that was definitely not camping with his mom.

We went camping with his mom. We were the only people out there since the weather was so crappy. And as a special kind of suck, we got hit by a tornado before the trip was over.

I enjoy the little quirks in life, but I despise a liar. I also don’t like being taken for a fool. Had someone told me ahead of time so I could have prepared for it by packing proper clothing? I might have laughed it off later.

He often laughed about the activities I liked. He told me that "normal” people didn’t play Trivial Pursuit. He liked Rock Band up until the moment I decided I liked it, too. Then he simply refused to play. And all this time, I thought that there really was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I be like normal girls my age and enjoy getting wasted at the bar? Why didn’t I like watching motorcycle races over and over again like his friends? Why must I like things "normal” people didn’t enjoy like Trivial Pursuit and the art museum?

My ex wasn't a horrible human being, but I came to realize that we had nothing in common at all. We could never have fun together, and in the end that's what tore us apart.

Then I met my current boyfriend. The first time I met java_fiend in person, he brought a game of Scrabble for us to play. We were together in Southern California for the first time, and we chose to hang out in my hotel room and play a board game. Now, we play Jeopardy on the Wii so much that we have run out of questions. But best of all? We have so much fun just being together, talking politics, philosophy, current events or just goofing off for hours on end while snuggled up in bed. Definitely not something I could have ever done with my ex.

Not too long ago, java_fiend surprised me with a trip to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. We totally got into all the ancient Chinese art, and he didn’t freak out when I became smitten with the South Pacific headhunters exhibits. We shared a morbid appreciation for cannibal forks and finger cutters for grieving without worrying that the other person was bored or not enjoying themselves. We have fun together in ways I never knew were even possible.

And for the record, he’s taken me to not one, but two zoos in our time together. Both the LA Zoo and the famous San Diego Zoo were surprises from my sweetheart. We enjoyed looking at the animals and just being kids.

java_fiend and I have had so many adventures together — from looking for sea critters in Laguna Beach to urban scavenger hunts dressed up as the Cat in the Hat. We do goofy, quirky things that people often don’t understand. But that’s okay because it makes sense to us. It totally makes my life more interesting, and I love having someone who gets me. To me, that’s all that really matters.



For the visually impaired: The above photo shows java_fiend and myself dressed in our Cat in the Hat costumes during the San Diego urban race. There was a statue of the famous photo called V-J Day in Times Square with the nurse and the sailor kissing, we had to re-enact it for the scavenger hunt.