Things fall apart
The center usually holds well enough, but you know how K generally resists attempts to make him travel? Well, when he absolutely, positively has to travel, like because he's going to lose access to my job-provided housing in a week, that's when things get a little squirrelly.
When we were moving from London, he waited too long to book his flight, couldn't get a ticket on my flight, and then -- get this -- was afraid to tell me, didn't tell me throughout the super-frenzied trying-to-make-cat-arrangements last week, and casually let it slip the day before I left. And used my anger at his lying to justify ("justify") why he didn't just tell me in the first place.
This time around, I tried to get him on my flight a couple months in advance, back when the fare was really surprisingly good. K doesn't yet accept the doctrine that airlines raise their fares as the travel date approaches, or the corollary, that one can get good deals by booking in advance. I've noticed that most guys have something like this. With P (he of "no one should travel" fame), it was a dogged resistance to the notion that laundering red clothes could cause the dye to bleed and hence that there should be separate "reds," "darks," and "lights" loads. Oh, he humo(u)red me, and abided by the house laundry rules, but maintained a principled objection, even when I showed him pink lint.
I digress.
K did not book the fare when it was cheap. K has, in fact, still not booked any ticket at all.
This morning, he initiated a "relationship conversation." Now, maybe I'm missing some chick genes (I'm also clueless about putting my hair up, even into something as simple as a ponytail), but I hate "relationship conversations." Seriously. I always feel as though I can't breathe. I generally prefer my conversations to be goal-directed, unless they're explicitly of a speculative sort, which are also very good, but in that case I prefer them to be about things like "Who invented cardboard? And when? And what did people use for packing material before that?" (We are a Wikipedia-loving household.)
But I knew it was important to him. So I gasped my way through a "relationship conversation," which, to my mind, went in endless circles and lasted for approximately two weeks. Eventually,
with me on the point of anoxia, it seemed to come to an end and K seemed to think something was resolved vis-a-vis his anticipated travel back and forth between Washington and LA even though I couldn't really tell that we'd done anything productive at all (though I kept that to myself lest he want to start up again).
Then, this afternoon, K mentioned that he planned to remain in India.
I could not, and I mean just absolutely could not, get K to see that a week prior to departure, with me still madly attempting to wrap things up at work, was not a brilliant time to tell me that I would be finishing the move entirely by myself and especially that I suddenly had no means to transport one of the cats home. And even more especially since a few weeks ago, prompted by an unusually cryptic remark from him, I asked "you're not planning to stay behind and travel around India, are you?" and K emphatically said something along the lines of "geez, no. Why would you even think that?"
K now claims that because I asked him whether he was planning to stay behind and travel, whereas he actually plans to stay behind and do some writing (with any travel purely incidental), he wasn't lying.
I don't quite see it that way.
Anyway, our planned trip this weekend to Agra is now off, what with things being a little tense around the house and me figuring I'll need the extra time to try to find an airline-approved kennel for one of the poor little kitties (how will I ever choose which one gets to go in the cabin and which goes in the hold?). So, please don't ask me -- and please dissuade others from asking -- "oh, you've been in India for a year and a half. What was the Taj Mahal like?" You/they are really not going to want to hear the whole story.
When we were moving from London, he waited too long to book his flight, couldn't get a ticket on my flight, and then -- get this -- was afraid to tell me, didn't tell me throughout the super-frenzied trying-to-make-cat-arrangements last week, and casually let it slip the day before I left. And used my anger at his lying to justify ("justify") why he didn't just tell me in the first place.
This time around, I tried to get him on my flight a couple months in advance, back when the fare was really surprisingly good. K doesn't yet accept the doctrine that airlines raise their fares as the travel date approaches, or the corollary, that one can get good deals by booking in advance. I've noticed that most guys have something like this. With P (he of "no one should travel" fame), it was a dogged resistance to the notion that laundering red clothes could cause the dye to bleed and hence that there should be separate "reds," "darks," and "lights" loads. Oh, he humo(u)red me, and abided by the house laundry rules, but maintained a principled objection, even when I showed him pink lint.
I digress.
K did not book the fare when it was cheap. K has, in fact, still not booked any ticket at all.
This morning, he initiated a "relationship conversation." Now, maybe I'm missing some chick genes (I'm also clueless about putting my hair up, even into something as simple as a ponytail), but I hate "relationship conversations." Seriously. I always feel as though I can't breathe. I generally prefer my conversations to be goal-directed, unless they're explicitly of a speculative sort, which are also very good, but in that case I prefer them to be about things like "Who invented cardboard? And when? And what did people use for packing material before that?" (We are a Wikipedia-loving household.)
But I knew it was important to him. So I gasped my way through a "relationship conversation," which, to my mind, went in endless circles and lasted for approximately two weeks. Eventually,
with me on the point of anoxia, it seemed to come to an end and K seemed to think something was resolved vis-a-vis his anticipated travel back and forth between Washington and LA even though I couldn't really tell that we'd done anything productive at all (though I kept that to myself lest he want to start up again).
Then, this afternoon, K mentioned that he planned to remain in India.
I could not, and I mean just absolutely could not, get K to see that a week prior to departure, with me still madly attempting to wrap things up at work, was not a brilliant time to tell me that I would be finishing the move entirely by myself and especially that I suddenly had no means to transport one of the cats home. And even more especially since a few weeks ago, prompted by an unusually cryptic remark from him, I asked "you're not planning to stay behind and travel around India, are you?" and K emphatically said something along the lines of "geez, no. Why would you even think that?"
K now claims that because I asked him whether he was planning to stay behind and travel, whereas he actually plans to stay behind and do some writing (with any travel purely incidental), he wasn't lying.
I don't quite see it that way.
Anyway, our planned trip this weekend to Agra is now off, what with things being a little tense around the house and me figuring I'll need the extra time to try to find an airline-approved kennel for one of the poor little kitties (how will I ever choose which one gets to go in the cabin and which goes in the hold?). So, please don't ask me -- and please dissuade others from asking -- "oh, you've been in India for a year and a half. What was the Taj Mahal like?" You/they are really not going to want to hear the whole story.
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