The Fake Stripper

Aiden is looking for my thoughts on his latest blog entry, which details another of our meetings that occurred yesterday. It involved coffee and a small park and makeouts and wrestling, and was pretty much exactly like all of our other meetings.

I'm not exactly sure what he's looking for in the way of thoughts from me, but I suspect he's hoping for the same thing everyone else wants from me, the one thing I can't give: a definite, in terms of anything. The way I see it, I don't want to make any big decisions or changes right now, in any direction. Not until I've managed to get some kind of hold on this horrible directionless, depressive outlook. I don't want to make a big change now and then come out of this funk later, look back and go, "Shit. What the fuck was I thinking?"

He keeps saying he's sorry that I feel guilty. I think that's both silly and pointless, as it's my problem either way. He wants to know what my plans are, what I'm doing for the summer, what I'm doing for the fall, when or if I'm going to dump Kevin, where I'm going to be living. Kevin wants to know the same thing. So does my mom. I'd like to know those things too.

"Are you still attracted to me?" asks Kevin, and I have no answer. I have no libido at all, one of a collection of odd changes I've noticed in my body over the last few months. I've definitely undergone some kind of chemical modification, and I need to find the cause.

Chemical changes can cause depression...but depression can also cause chemical changes. It could be a vicious cycle feeding itself, or it could be just way one or the other. Kevin's blaming my pills, and I suppose he could be right, but I'm reluctant to give up those particular ones, because they're a three-month pack. Then again, if that really is the cause and I have to get rid of them, I'll do it. Being here sucks.

On another topic, I made a decision and felt good about myself for doing it, since too often I tend to let other people decide things for me. Then I let someone else unmake for me, and now I'm treading water again.

I hate not having a job. I also hate the thought of taking another stupid churn 'n' burn corporate factory job where my boss will act like he loves me and then suddenly fire me without warning and for no concrete reason. (Yeah, I'm a little bitter at The Man right now.) So I made the decision to go back to the clubs. I used to be a stripper, and I had a ton of fun doing it. I got out of it when I went to work in a club that had gone so far downhill from what it used to be that these days it's unrecognizable. I made next to no money because every other girl there would sell herself, any part that anybody wanted, for a Champagne Room, and I have more self-integrity than that. I was a stripper, never a whore.

So I worked six weeks in a gas station, three months on a helpdesk, and two months in a diner. I've now been unemployed for over two months, and Kevin and I are both flat broke and I'm going fucking crazy. I told him yesterday that I'm going back to dancing, and the response began with, "Oh, please no!", continued until he was in tears, and ended up with us barely speaking to each other for two hours while we tried to make dinner. Eventually we made up, in a way, but while carefully avoiding the subject at hand.

We're speaking again, but giving each other the horribly-not-okay "okay."

"Fine, do what you want, I'll just try not to think about it."

"Fine, forget it, I won't fucking do it."

Not exactly the result I was hoping for, and now I have no idea what to do. I was expecting protest, but I was expecting the more standard variety that I get from everyone else, which runs along the lines of, "Be careful, there's bad guys, there's drugs, don't do anything stupid, I'll worry about you..."

What I got was not that, which I can deal with, but instead, "We haven't fixed our own intimate relationship, and now you're going to be selling that sense to someone else, even if it doesn't mean anything to you. I have feelings too, and now they're hurt. I can't even get the fake version!"

"It would be an insult to you if I faked it." I gave him my biggest, and most obviously fake, smile. "If you'd like the fake version, I can arrange that!"

Of course, that too was insulting and "snide." I just can't win.