#biggest obstacle is its an idea my ex came up with and i helped flesh out so

[lemonlimetoast]

Thinking of resurrecting a podcast idea from 2020 for maybe something animated or just a chance to grow my writing and voice acting skills, everyone place your bets onto how well this'll go

[asenseofagency]

3/26/17

It’s raining off and on, so the hike I had planned for today will probably get pre-empted for some other day. Just as well, I guess; I’m not totally against slouchy sweaters and tea and lounging with a couple of half-finished books.

I’m taking a second crack at Stanislaw Lem, having loved Solaris many months ago when I read it. Unfortunately, most of Lem’s (mid-20th century) books suffer a glaring lack of characters that aren’t white dudes. The women and POC that (vanishingly) appear in his books are environmental in a sense: when they appear at all, they serve the plot with, generally, the least investment of humanity possible. Meanwhile, white men are explorers!, administrators!, and scientists! capable of profound depths of thought and expression. I cut at ran the first time around when I got to a line in Return from the Stars about women being ill-suited as astronauts because of... their inescapable childcare responsibilities. It’s the price of admission to so much classic sci-fi. Shame.

But I was tempted to come back again, because Lem’s themes are so creative, so philosophical, and so exhaustively explored that they’re sort of irresistible if you can only force yourself past the sexism and racism of his time. I’m glad I did. I just finished His Master’s Voice which may now be, without exaggeration, my favorite book. An absolute masterpiece.

I find myself today in those doldrums familiar to anyone who has just finished a really, really great book and, having given your consciousness up to it completely for several days, you find yourself struggling to reassemble the wreckage of your life. Good thing I have a pile of a few more that I need to prioritize finishing. :)

Meanwhile, Real Life is a mix. I’ve more or less settled on a grad school/PhD program and, in the moments I allow myself, I am beyond excited about that next phase of my life. I’m a little scared too, as it will be the largest leap I’ve made outside my comfort zone in a while, and necessitate, at least for a while, a whole lot of solitude. I can tolerate a lot of solitude but where the boundary is between healthy solitude and isolation/loneliness... that’s not something I’ve had to negotiate in a while. Let’s hope my social sensibilities are still intact. I think they are.

I had a great conversation a few nights ago with a friend I haven’t had a sit-down with in a while. She isn’t in a awesome place, although her situation has been basically unchanged for years, but I haven’t got the first idea how to relate to her condition either, unfortunately, so we just sort of... abide...

The topic of a former mutual friend came up. Friend 1 is a smoother-over. She’d like to see us all re-establish the closeness we had years ago but I think our lives are too different for that now and that’s OK from my perspective. The break came when I spoke my mind about a topic I knew Mutual would have a stridently inflexible opinion on. As has happened before, she saw my dissenting opinion as an attack on the validity of her personal judgment - and I did get personal, in the sense that I brought up specific experiences involving people close to her to illustrate my point; there was no other way to ground my claim. I knew at the time that I was crossing a line but in my opinion, then and now, it was a line drawn by immaturity and fear, a line that ought not have been there at all.

To be less vague: Mutual had become close to a lot of people who were and are, in my opinion, racist and sexist; she denied that they were guilty of these things and when I pointed out instances of those behaviors, she, being loyal to her loved ones above all things - her best and simultaneously most compromising quality, again in my opinion - saw my scrutiny of her other friends’ behavior as mistaken and an overstep.

It is was it is. We had been drifting apart before that and maybe she’s found a real sense of community in her new circle. I wish her the best, I really do, but I think we’re fundamentally incompatible at this point in our lives. I’ve begun to separate myself from people who I feel are rigid and uncompassionate in their thinking or with whom I feel I can’t be totally honest. In my opinion, our relationship had moved into this territory even before the break happened.

Still, it’s strange to feel, as you attempt quite purposefully to improve yourself, that you’re finding the distance between you and others grows all the time. Maybe it’s the nature of the political climate. It certainly feels as if there’s a need to choose sides, with which I have no problem, and the compassionate choice is straightforward to me, but I find myself surrounded by people on the other side, the side of self-interest and the status quo. In a social sense, there really is no reward for polishing your conscience.

My ex, with whom I’m still obligate roommates for the time being, is having his own issues. He’s jumped immediately into dating again, which speaks to a need for attention he wasn’t getting in our relationship and with which I, in my current total self-absorption, honestly take no issue. He’s made the odd choice to start seeing a much younger coworker. Her parents tolerated this at first but their misgivings are boiling over just as that relationship gets serious. He’s visibly irritated about it and broached the subject with me briefly last night. It was the first time we’ve talked that we really haven’t been able to hit upon much common ground. I regretted this because that intimacy of conversation has been the one thing we’ve maintained through this breakup - that sharing, that confidence. This problem of theirs seems... inevitable from my point of view. New Girlfriend is young enough and financially dependent enough upon her parents still that she’s beholden to respect their opinions to some degree; that’s just courtesy. Their displeasure may make that relationship unworkable but pursuing a much younger person, who is also a coworker (for God’s sake!), just seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

People just don’t act rationally, man. I don’t get it.

Those are incidentals though. The biggest weight on me at the moment is the house. I’ve got to decide whether to sell or refinance and while I’m vacillating between my two opinions about it, time creeps forward toward a deadline.

Selling the house makes sense for me, financially. It’s in my name alone but my ex and I both have money invested - me, maybe twice the amount he does by virtue of a big difference in income. If we sell, we’d split the profits, but that would leave him looking for a new place to live and he admitted he didn’t like his options and he’d like to stay here.

Refinancing - only slightly less cumbersome a process than selling - would make the monthly payments more manageable for him on a single income but it would mean I’d be continuing into my new life without seeing any kind of payout of the money I’ve got invested in the house. Also, I wouldn’t be transferring ownership. I wouldn’t be out of the financial picture, which worries me.

So there’s the rub. Do I effectively evict my ex, try to sell the house at an aggressive price within a window of six months, and hopefully have a small nest egg and the luxury of going fully financially clear at the end of the process? Or do we refinance together on the basis of our shared income, establish co-ownership - I leave Ex paying the mortgage when I move for school and transfer the house to him during the proper divorce proceedings a year from now, losing my investment?

It comes does to money versus, I suppose, compassion and convenience. Money inclines me to sell. Compassion and convenience would indicate that I essentially hand over the house to him, though it’s likely I wouldn’t ever see again the money - thousands of dollars at this point - that I’ve paid toward the principal. With my impending return to broke student life, I could really use some savings, and I’m leaning sell. My ideal scenario would involve selling to him, obviating the need for a realtor. We’d be in the same boat of having to go through loan negotiations, a lawyer, and a closing but if I could sell the house to him at a small profit, both of us might benefit: I get a little spending money and am out of the picture and off the deed; he gets the house well below its ostensible market value and doesn’t have to move.

That hinges on his suitability for a home loan though, on the basis of his single (modest) income. There’s the problem: even if I “sold” him the house at below market value, whether he’d qualify for a loan of an amount that would make it worth my while is questionable...

I’ll have to think more on that. Maybe I can better flesh out that plan and we can work out a solution together. One thing that’s been a helpful adaptation through all this is having developed the ability to shelve tricky problems for a few days and come back to them with a fresh perspective. I used to be awful at that but it’s become so necessary in unsticking the many complex obstacles I’ve encountered over the last year’s transition that, though I never thought I’d say this, I’ve gotten very good at that small, impersonal, step-wise approach!