Author Archives: Dennis

Frustrating Over Dying a Friendship

Lately, it seems that Sam has nearly completely given up on maintaining a friendship with me. She has proven to be very unreliable when it comes to promises, even when she knows how much I would appreciate them, and even when reminded, she seems to have forgotten, shrugs it off and goes on her merry way. Last week she heard about my discontentment through Eva, called me, and wanted to talk about it. My pride (silly, silly pride) refused to remind her of another promise she hadn’t made good on, but I was willing to discuss her reliability as a whole. She seemed upset that I thought of her as unreliable and felt truly sorry about any inconvience she had caused by me relying on her while she had forgotten her promise. As we parted she said; “See you on saturday.”

Saturday.

So, on Saturday, I moved most of my belongings to my apartment. Only my clothing and computers remain at my mother’s. I’m intending to rely on her hospitality for a few days longer as I get settled in the apartment, and have the last of the inconveniences taken care of – like a working water-heater.

The move went spectacularly well, with DennisEdwinEva, Frank, Mark and myself working in almost perfect unison in daisy-chaining my belongings up the four flights of stairs. Special thanks go out to Dennis and Frank, who Schwarzenegger’ed both my sofa and matress up those stairs. I had a truck and everything, it was hella-smoothly. Sam was supposed to be there, too, but wasn’t because – so she informed me by way of voicemail – she had only gone to sleep at 5am after having had a really good date. It was all Kool and the Gang because I had plenty of people so there wasn’t much extra she could’ve done and she would’ve wasted her time, which is teh suq after nearly no sleep at all. And besides, she had a good date, and if there’s anything worth being stood up for by a friend, it’s a good date. So all was fine.

I had planned a dinner for all the people involved, but that kind of went awry as most people had other plans. Edwin, his lovely girlfriend Esther, Eva and I did have dinner, however, at Palladio, and it was great. I had, however, wanted to mention to Sam at the dinner how it was all cool that she couldn’t show, still thinking she felt a little bad about it.

Queue monday afternoon; I was on my way to my apartment, wanting to put some of the furniture in order (read: assembling my desk and putting the sofa in place) and perhaps unpack a few things. I called Sam to see what she was up to, because I wanted some company that evening. She was up for it. Awesome.

We talked a bit about Saturday, and I thought I had made it clear that I was cool with her not being there. Sadly she felt he need to come up with really silly excuses. Things like “well, you had enough people anyway,” as if she knew that beforehand. That type of evasion was still Kool and the Gang, but after a couple I got a little agitated, which perhaps wasn’t the best idea.

Anyway, I thought, and I asked her if she wanted to meet me at my apartment since she was still at work.

Quote:
Sam: “But you’ll make me unpack boxes.”
Me: “No, I won’t. You’ve proven inept at even carrying the boxes, or even showing up for the carrying.”

Note: I meant that jokingly, though I’m not sure if she interpreted it as such.

Quote:
Sam: “Well, technically I didn’t promise that I would help you on Saturday.”

That was just the straw that broke my back. The earlier excuses were mild and negligible, but this excuses had the density of a collapsed star and was plummeting towards the center of the earth. Perhaps I’m taking this a bit too seriously, but if you say you’ll be somewhere, right after a discussion about how unreliable you are when it comes to promises, then break your promise but feel enough commitment to call me to apologise, then don’t weasel your way out of it, especially when I’m already totally cool with you not having shown up.

Sam knows full-well how I regard friendships, but since she started maintaining a closer friendship with Richard, and now with Aden and Miguel, she has been less and less available, and more and more unreliable. She might think that friendships die and spring up all the time, but I don’t.

I need friends I can depend on, and if a person keeps going from friend to aquaintance in terms of reliability, then I can’t depend on them. What’s a friend who is unreliable but an aquaintance? It tears me up that this is where we’re heading after all these years. I look at Wai, or Marco, or Eva and I see the finest people that ever lived because of their staunch, dogged reliability. These people are continuity incarnate, and that’s why I call them friends.

Oil

$70+ a barrel. Up from about $45 in January. Time to sell my car, I think.

Assorted Thoughts

Sister
My sister has always been a little unstable. Perhaps certain people who know her won’t agree with my description of her instability as “little,” I’ve always known her like this, and thus it’s become more or less normal that she flips out every once in a while. The thing is, I hadn’t been there for about five years, until last night when I was accussed of all kids of things, some so blantantly untrue that it made me question whether I had understimated how disturbed she is all this time.

Apartment
The work on the apartment is going steady. The walls are now all painted, and the woodwork in the living room is mostly done, having had a second (and probably final) coat of paint. The quality of the painting is not great but it’s an excellent job considering all the people involved (you know who you are out there) were a bunch of amateurs and are now quickly on their way to becoming toxic fume-tempered, painting Gods!

Tonight I’m going to go and order the flooring that has to be put down on Monday. I just checked and both stores that I could get it at still have it in store, so that’s good. Hopefully I can get it delivered before Monday, or stored until we can pick it up on Monday. It’s 50 metres squared, which means about 18 or 19 pakkets of flooring, at 15 kilograms per packet. Muy heavy, so I’d rather not pick it up myself but have it delivered, or picked up by the guys that aren’t going to install the floor. We’ll see what’s doable.

( I just realised that I won’t have my passport on me to verify my ID for my credit-card. This sucks. This sucks real bad. Why don’t I have my passport on me? See Visum for that. )

Fatigue
I’m so tired it’s unreasonable. As much as I want to, I can’t seem to sleep properly while at my mother’s. Having all my stuff standing around in boxes is…well, it’s like living out of a suitcase, which is doable, but not entirely, since it’s not a very well organised suitcase. It’s decentralised, and sort of all over the place. Things make me restless, but the unrest only grows when that stuff is chaotically all over the place. Like for instance, I haven’t been able to find my earphones anywhere. Looking for it, I feel, is a big joke, because I’d have to go through all those boxes, which for some of them, means that I unpack them before I’m aware of what’s in them in the first place.

Upsetting.

Visum
Yesterday my mother joined me on a little trip to Den Haag, to visit the Indian embassy in order to get a six-month tourist visum. After getting horribly lost around the city-limits of Den Haag for an hour, I finally managed to find the embassy and, once there, things went hella-smoothly. I could even have my passport send back to me with priority mail when they were done approving me. I should get it back today or tomorrow.

My mother was questioned by a stern, unfriendly, and not too polite security guard, asking what she was doing there. My mother adopted an equally stern, unfriendly and not too polite tone in which to answer him, seemingly oblivious to the notion that we were now on Indian soil, to obey Indian laws and customs. Luckily the guy didn’t go Tian An Men on her.

Nicky Santoro

Casino wrote:
No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he’ll keep comin’ back and back until one of you is dead.

How do you deal with a person who is so driven that they will go to any length to get what they want from you, to the point that when you tell them to stop demanding things of you, or else…they will simply keep upping the stakes? What do you do for someone who is absolutely willing to go for broke? What do you do against someone who is willing to destroy everything in order to get your obedience? What do you do to stop someone who simply won’t take no for an answer?