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WTF?!

One thing i do not like to do is ask people why they do certain things. I'll let curiosity kill me first before i beg or demand answers for things i do not comprehend. Chances are, if i get an answer to a rather puzzling situation, i would get even more puzzled. Perhaps a prototypical example of this unique attribute of mine is when my ex-wife asked for a divorce. I did not ask why, i fought like hell to salvage the marriage but i never asked why. The curiosity as you can imagine consumed me for a very long time, spent many restless nights trying to find answers in my mind, but i never allowed or gave her the satisfaction (haha ya i know-- very stubborn). I suppose the reason why this attribute of mine exist is not because i do not care for answers but rather i am not interested in the commonality of many things... Like why couples resort to divorce; my idea is we should all be given pamphlets that explain such things; Category A, B, C etc... When i got tired of being asked why i became divorced several years ago, i just started citing "General Error".

My ex-girlfriend and i have a very tricky but healthy friendship. Tricky because she is now a single mother, healthy because we hardly argue about anything plus the lack of expectation and obligation doesn't hurt (which is to say No Drama). Going out to dinner is our favorite thing to do. But because she is a single mother, scheduling is quite an ordeal. Most of the time it comes down to the last minute whether dinner is on or off. Not so bad really if the channels of communication remained open, and that is just it, with her it was never open. Most people are easily capable of communicating when plans change. She relies purely on assumption; she'll presume one figures plans have been cancelled because she didn't call. She means well but sometimes you get the impression that she doesn't care that people await her because she is so neglectful. She does this to everyone (drives her mother crazy)... Last Friday for instance we had dinner plans, nothing big-- just dinner. She suggested that we go out shortly after work. A bit early i thought but she is a single mom working full time and going to school part time, how could i argue with that? When i called her shortly after work she was at the Mall with her mother, said she would call me when they finished (this was at 5 pm). I specifically asked her to call and let me know whether her mom would agree to baby sit or not and she agreed (a fair favor i thought). At 9 pm i was almost on my way to a Poker Game because i figured she wasn't going to call. However, being the gentleman that i am, i called and asked if she had forgotten about me, not why she didn't call. She said that she didn't forget about me but figured that i figured her mom couldn't sit the baby, hence; she did not call, although i specifically asked her to call me either way haha. Worse yet, the Poker Tournament was cancelled too fuck...

On the same night, my sister, who's asked me to help her move on the coming Sunday, suddenly decided to change moving day to Saturday evening (i found out from my dad). First off, she never actually asked for my help, secondly i was never asked if rescheduling was actually okay. I had plans, coincidentally enough... She and my parents i'm sure just kind of assumed i was okay with it. Well, even though i am old now, i am still the youngest member of this family, thus, i get the Rodney Dangerfield... So although i wasn't very happy about it i sacrificed my Saturday Night for my older sister (mostly because my mom would kill me if i didn't). So I drove a Uhaul out to El Segundo on a chilly Saturday Evening, a Uhaul that probably was Two Sizes too big for her things. When everything was loaded we might have taken up 30% of the space. The wasted space almost saddened me. I suppose it's like a large living room with too small a TV... Anyhow, her treadmill wouldn't fit through the vestibule so i had to come back the next day with tools so i could take it apart. It was kind of annoying that potential problem didn't occur to her, but, she is a girl so i didn't say anything. Still, i couldn't help but think about the grief she would have saved me if only she checked things out... What is annoying though is the fact that she ask to borrow my truck on Tuesday, I didn't ask why i just handed the keys over... Evidently she had more stuff to move. I was very close to asking her why we didn't load everything in the Uhaul in the first place but i knew no answer would ever be good enough. "I forgot" would be stupid, "I didn't feel like it" would seem too impertinent, even for my sister, so why ask, right?

So to save me the possibly insane answers for such inexplicable things, i leave it up to my imagination. It's like those movies with equivocal endings, you know what i mean?

Posted by: Marc Gabay
Monday, November 13, 2006