26 October 2006

Before we get to the man, a little on what I have been up to ...

#1 The ex-boyfriend and I parted ways due to him uttering a racist comment in my house that made me feel a little sick that I had been sleeping with him. Intolerance is not an attractive feature in a man!

#2 I have seen the making of movies from behind the camera now - one of my friends is in the film industry and I was her assistant on set for a weekend, it was fascinating.

#3 Started my study and realised that I wouldn't have a life for the next two years and that I didn't want a life apart from travel and study, nothing else interests me at all!

#4 Tom and I have turned into Nannas, staying home on the weekend more than we go out. However that is not so bad now that she is going out with a *cough* young man who keeps her occupied and while I had Nathan to play with infrequently too, I am anticipating a more constant entertainment unit for my bed soonish (once he graduates!)

#5 Summer is here and it is going to be a HUGE summer with lots of friends coming back home and my brothers, sister and I having a lot of partying to do!

And now a quick rundown on why he is the perfect man:

#1 Good Irish Catholic stock, my parents will love him,
#2 Can do a pitch-perfect Irish accent, it makes me want to jump him right there,
#3 Loves English History as much as I do, if not more,
#4 I suspect he is actually better than me at it - he is actually completing an Engineering degree in two weeks, but he does History Units as his electives (almost unheard of in the Engineering Faculty, Engineers hate Arts) and his marks are better than mine *phooey*,
#5 He is SO jealous of me doing my Honours in History that he literally gets green with jealousy when I talk about it,
#6 He reads Hemmingway, Sun Tze and Machiavelli,
#7 He bought me chocolates for no reason other than I was always smiling when he came to talk to me in the office,
#8 He gets red stripes on his cheekbones when he sees me, it is adorable,
#9 He can't control his breathing, his speech, his eyes or his body when I am around, it is PERFECTLY obvious how I affect him *smirk*
#10 We finish each other's jokes and make the most obscure history jokes possible and sometimes we can't stand for laughing at each other.

HIS ANCESTRY VISA TO THE UK! Four years is SO worth a wedding :)

His entire class and my boss have known for FOUR months that he has a crush on me and have watched in amazement as I only started having the same feelings a month ago - Treehouse Friend assures me his feelings for me are the worst kept secret in the world. It is so sweet.

More news from the frontline ...

Well, I tell you what, this is going to give you a laugh!

At the moment I am the sanest I have been since the day after my graduation when this entire affair really started. I am sane because I have to be - it appears that the moment of reckoning for the two of us is going to be next Wednesday night, which I had hoped would not be the case, but I cannot ignore the impetus that this affair is lent by the people watching.

You see, there are 58 very tired, stressed and emotionally shattered students who are gearing up to hand in their thesis' on Tuesday and party on Wednesday night. And to my mounting despair, it appears that too many of them, most with whom I have barely shared three words, are watching and discussing me with unsettling fascination. Today I got three different comments about MY honours from students who had not even BEEN at the event at which I discussed my studies with only four students. The fact that the details of my life are so well known confirm Treehouse Friend's assertion that while I am in the eye of the storm caused by the year's worst kept secret, I have to be very, very careful.

They are so young, they are so raw from stress and excitement that I can read them like a book. I am becoming a focus for them because I am so close to them in age and experience, I am so empathetic because I am the one emailing them to remind them of deadlines and I am the face they see when they have problems. I am good at making people like me anyway, but in their state, I am becoming something too important. Add to that the fact that it now appears that they (and Treehouse Friend) have known for FOUR months that He has had his eye on me, and there is a drama starring a reluctant Max shaping up for the Final Year Dinner next Wednesday.

Tuesday was SO embarrassing I kept getting aftershocks of whole body embarrassment *gloom*

Let's recap: from the first time I met him and for the three months subsequent it took me about three hours to be able to think after I had seen him, but I was in control all other times. Then a month ago he started stepping up the contact and my recovery time after seeing him escalated from a day to days, to weeks now.

THEN I started getting hot knees when he wasn't around, then I started forgetting the rest of the world when he was around, then I actively ignored the rest of the world when he was around.

Today I actually reached the worst level yet in this saga - when he arrived in the office my knees actually wobbled, I stammered, I was so nervous I just ended up not saying anything and then, well, for the first time when he was actually there, I flushed to my hair for no other reason than he was teasing me. It was like I was fifteen and in love with the Trinity Head Boy. I was in NO WAY a 25-year-old woman, I was a lovesick teenager.

My only consolation is that while I may have been all too aware that my face was singing the paper on my desk, I was not talking (from terror that I would mess up a five-word sentence for the fourth time) and so was able to watch his entire face heat up as red as his cheeks always are, he actually went redder than me and looked like he was sunburnt. I have NEVER seen such a pathetic pair as the two of us.

That night and Wednesday morning we were emailing a little. Then I took the bull by the horns and I emailed him and asked him to come in and see me. He left home before he got the email, so when I ran into him on the stairs 50 minutes later we were both at a distinct disadvantage - I thought he was ignoring me, he did not know that I was determined to tell him AGAIN to pull his head in.

We rounded a corner and literally ran into each other, brown eyes meeting brown eyes with unmistakable pleasure and pain at the unexpected meeting. I had my thoughts in better order than him, at one point he uttered a sentence that was gobble-de-gook from start to finish - the words entirely jumbled up. Terribly endearing until the flush of his embarrassment creeps up his cheeks and I just wanted to tell him that it will all be over sooner than we can imagine.

I knew which class he was going to, so I commanded him to come and see when it finished and he was very good and turned up on the dot of 3. He and I took a stroll down to James Oval, him dragging his feet and warning me that he was not in the best headspace to hear what he thought I was going to say. I was uncaring. In the middle of James Oval, I told him that he was distracting me, that he could not expect me to continue to be as outgoing as usual with him under the gaze of others and I asked him if he had not noticed that he made me flush when he was around.

Despite these comments - as forward comments as a woman could ever give a man - he gave me nothing in return and I was getting nervous that we had ALL misread the signs. We parted well and as I went back to work I realised that despite his silence, I was finally feeling better. And indeed I felt so much better, especially when Treehouse Friend sat me down to hear the story, and when she heard that I was happy with the outcome, told me that he had been exactly the same with me from the very first meeting - it's just that after four months I had finally come to see his reactions with more and more clarity. She assured me that it was not imagination.

Late that afternoon, as Treehouse Friend and I were debriefing, he arrived in the office again and I do not know which part of 'leave me alone' he has a problem with, but it seemed to have only incited him. I was ruthless in enforcing my request from earlier that afternoon and he only escalated his familiarity each time. In the end, I cut him off and walked away, finally convinced that he was not in control of his reactions. It is overwhelming for me when he is around, I am so frantic for any contact that I can barely keep a skerrick of air between us without concentrating stupendously hard on not plastering myself against him.

My last comment to Treehouse Friend was that I knew exactly what was going to happen next - Gidget was going to be in before the end of the week and she was going to ask me if I had a boyfriend. And in the manner that is now characterising this affair, I was right on the money - today Gidget was in and her entire conversation was crafted to ask me about my status.

Now, Gidget - I have only mentioned her in passing, but she is the wild card in this game. She is half Japanese and what must be Malaysian, an extraordinary looking girl, she is short and slender and is very distinctive and cool.

In my five months here I had only met her one week before the symposium, but that first time she was with him and I immediately realised that she was a very close friend and he was reluctant to talk to me too much in front of her. The second time I met her, it was after the first day of the symposium and she came up to him and me in the middle of our first really flirtatious conversation. She stood, she listened for about ten seconds and very bluntly asked us 'what the hell are the two of you talking about?' She then dismissed me completely and told him she was ready to go - they live down the road from each other and he drives her to Uni and back.

From that moment I knew that I was now dealing with two people, and sure enough the next day, at the symposium lunch, Gidget had been told what was expected of her and she fell in line with the rest of the boys and was utterly friendly and went out of her way to talk to me. And goodness me wasn't *I* on my best behaviour with her too - I knew I had to keep her onside.

From then on we have had this strange relationship in which we talk on the surface as if we are getting on like a house on fire (I genuinely like her), but we both know why we are talking. When he does not visit, Gidget is in to talk to me. Lately, she has not even bothered to use the flimsy excuses that she used to use, she just comes in to talk to me. And all our conversations end in her fishing for my boyfriend status, what I like in men, etc. I have been dodging the questions, but she lost her patience today and asked me straight out.

The problem with her is that I am also fishing for answers to the same questions she asks me - I want to know if I am being screened, or if I am being sized up by the opposition. My first instinct was that she was the opposition, and if she is I am not scared! My subsequent thoughts have been that she is screening and that they are just friends - she has been too clearly making friends with me and her questions and mentions of him are too closely correlated to my conversations with him that I cannot conclude anything but that he is telling her everything.

*sigh* There are two main opinions on Gidget, from Treehouse Friend and Elbow. With plenty of experience in the male/female friend thing, Elbow says she is ensuring that I like her, so she will see enough of him if he does go out with me. Elbow's wry comment was that female friends waited on the girlfriend's pleasure in such matters. Treehouse Friend, with her greater life experiences, just warns me that some women will use anything to get their man, and I should not trust her at all. I am utterly divided myself, I cannot read her at all.

So today she was in to talk to me and from our conversation, I can conclude that he wanted a clear answer on my status and that she is of the opinion that he would be making a move on Wednesday.

This I cannot allow because the 24th of November is the very earliest I can entertain anything at all, ethically. So I have come up with a cunning, cunning plan. On Wednesday when we are mingling he can monopolise me as much as he wants. When it comes to sitting down to dinner, I am sitting with my other good mate Tad. Tad is the only student that he is in awe of (he is actually a little terrified of Tad!), because Tad is the clear intellectual giant of the group.

From all the interactions I have witnessed, I currently get along famously with the respective leaders of the packs. Tad is the intellectual alpha male (he is 23, two years older than the rest of the class), and his group consists of the very cleverest students and the international students, all of whom I made friends with when I first arrived and are my very favourites. He is the social alpha male (he is 24, as is Gidget) and his group are the beautiful people (my GOD you should see his two best mates, I get all silent around Filip he is so hot, and Daniel is utterly gorgeous).

Neither talk much to each other, but three times now I have been standing between the two of them as they watch each other closely while competing for my conversation, and it has been a very strange experience indeed.

Tad has an utterly gorgeous and charming girlfriend, a 2nd-year med student, whose name is Claire and bears a striking resemblance to me in both looks and personality - although I would effortlessly say she is light years ahead of me in charm, poise and looks. Treehouse Friend met her the night I did, and since then she has been very blunt with me about our resemblance and how well Tad and I get on. Each time she sees me with Tad she tells me off afterwards for doing something that would make his girlfriend worry.

I tell you what, I hope she is misreading Tad as well, but Treehouse Friend hasn't been wrong yet.

As these days start speeding up, as the tension builds, as the people involved get closer to a letting off of steam I am getting tenser and tenser - this is the very last situation I thought I would end up in, but it is getting to an unbearable and frankly dangerous pitch.

And now I am here to say that each time I think that things couldn't get worse in this affair, it totally gets worse.

The new pinnacle of discomfort? Tonight he was an anecdote around the table at the Bell Sunday dinner ... and the anecdote was told by Romeo and it was not a good one. How could this be I hear you ask?
Let me explain ...

Romeo was one of the six finalists for the WA Rhodes Scholarship on Friday. He lost to a lawyer and since he came second he is going to Canberra in a month to compete for one of the three National Scholarships. I talked to him on Friday afternoon after the announcement and we discussed quickly the guy who won it, Travers, and Romeo quite liked him.

Saturday he emails me to admit that his thesis was getting done slowly because he had been drinking all night - WITH HIS BEST MATE TRAVERS WHO HAD WON THE RHODES SCHOLARSHIP.

I felt like I had been kicked in the guts - this was TOO FUCKING close to home now. I sent him a reply answering his other questions and dropping in that his mate had beaten my brother. That was all cool, it could have just been something else to talk about.

But then this evening as Romeo and Elbow came to pick me up to take me to the parents, Romeo mentioned that he had gatecrashed the UWA Law Final Show on Friday - with Travers and his mates. You can imagine how nonchalant my voice when I asked him if he had met a friend of his.

*sigh*

Romeo: Him? Yeah, actually, tall footballer with big shoulders?
Max: (melting) Yup, that's him.
Romeo: He was a bit of an arrogant fuck actually. He couldn't believe that I wasn't upset about losing to his mate. He wouldn't let it go, I got a bit pissed off.
Max stares out the window thinking 'fuck fuck fuckity fuuuuuuck, this is not good.'

The dinner was spent dissecting the Friday announcement and Romeo told the parents about how Travers had treated him afterwards - apparently he actually ruffled Romeo's hair later at the Law Show in front of people - you can imagine how that went down with the Bells around the table! And then Romeo told the story about him and I just, well, I just felt sick. What a fucking mess. Sometimes I really hate Perth and how small and arrogant everyone is.

So I make another prediction - he will see my email after a bender of a weekend and he will suddenly remember his conversation with Romeo. I have a feeling that there will be a very interesting conversation when he comes in to hand me his thesis.

As for me, well, I feel sick because I am not interested in having to toe the line with a bunch of arrogant lawyers and footballers. I was so tired of the constant Australian arrogance of first boyfriend and his football mates, and his friends are older, more successful and, judging from his Uni friends, pretty much the beautiful people. And to be perfectly frank, those kinds of people bore me to tears.

I know he is arrogant, but I don't mind arrogance when it is disabled in my presence because he is so smitten. But I do not want to have to swallow my pride and start being nice to arrogant Australian pretty boys *shudder*

And let's not forget that I am not a skinny blonde, which caused enough trouble with first boyfriend to keep me sorted for the rest of my life, thanks.

I am pretty much permanently nauseous these days with anticipation and dread. I am not sure how much worse this can get.

And now that I have said it, it's going to get worse, guaranteed.

*in a very special Perth hell*