Thanks for the Freedom, Whit!

Oh, and Whit gave me my Christmas and birthday presents while I was there. For Christmas I got this lovely scarf/hat/glove set. I just love those things! They are the only decent thing about winter as far as I'm concerned, and this one is gorgeous, carefully selected by Jenn and her to match just about every color in my wardrobe. For my birthday I got the Harry Potter DVDs. This is by far the best birthday gift I have received. Why is this so, you ask? Since surely being the huge HP fan I am, I must already own them.

Well. you are right. I do already own them. Unfortunately, they have become a hostage in Greg's sick and twisted determination to force me to be his friend. See, he has on numerous occasions told me that I must come to his house to get them. He is keeping them, he says, so that I will be forced to visit him. And yet he has not invited me over and almost every time we talk we get into fights. It got to the point where I stopped initiating conversations with him.

Why then, you might ask, don't I just block him on AIM and not answer if he calls? Well, he doesn't call so I'm spared that but I just, well, I can't block anyone. I didn't even block that lying friend I told you all about. I have an absurd need to never stop talking to anyone anymore.

Sometimes Greg is really mean to me. After the first time (a long argument about how much I used to like him), I sent him an email with examples copy pasted and said I didn't want to talk to him right now. That night he IMed me and did not even bring up how mean he had been, just said I "misunderstood him," a favorite thing of his to tell me. When I said I really wasn't wanting to talk to him still because he had been quite mean, he said, "Oh, just ignore last night. I was overtired." Never apologized. That was the day that any remaining thoughts of oh, maybe down the road one day . . . vanished. The lust scale was officially at -3.

Until this point, I thought hey, we can be friends and blah, blah, blah. But now I had seen a new person: A quite pompous and egotistical boy who, when confronted with anything not to his liking, blames others. Yet after I cooled off I did still talk to him (whenever he initiated) because he is funny. Perhaps this is the only remaining redeeming quality I saw in him. Well, that and the fact that I was eventually going to have to see him again if I ever wanted my DVDs back.

So the other day another argument was sparked off his desire to do some sort of dating website with a male and female perspective, which I had agreed to do awhile ago. I said sure, whatever, and he sent me his first post that I was supposed to respond to. After a few days when I was bored I did. Next day he sends me this list of things that I'm going to need to change to conform to his vision for the site. (Almost all of which, I can tell you as someone who spent years in undergrad studying writing, he was completely off on.)

So I told him I didn't think I could do this since he represented himself as looking for a partner and now he was talking to me as if I was an unpaid employee, a situation I am not interested in pursuing. Oh no, he said. He wanted a partner, so long as she completely agreed with everything he said and thought. Earth to Greg: That is called an employee. No one on a level playing field agrees to everything Sir Gregory says. I restrained myself the entire time to the best of my ability and had many such thoughts but did not share them with him.

My reward? Being called "emotionally immature" by this 23-year-old little shit. Did I say, well yeah, of course I am, or else why would I have ever hooked up with a 23-year-old? Why would my friends almost uniformly be younger than me? I have repeatedly admitted in my blog and to the world that I am now living through my twenties in a way that I did not get to do previously.

And did I say, Yes, I am. And you, my friend, are a pompous ass? No, I said none of this. I did not sink to his throwing out of cutting remarks because the fact that I knew but couldn't bother to share with him is that no matter how emotionally immature I may be (a title I wear proudly; it's even in my profile. See?), anyway, the fact I knew is that while emotionally immature I may be, I am not as emotionally immature as he is. I can rise above this crap and I never after we split up took things out on him the way he had been on me lately.

And of course I found his comment twice as amusing because before he ever even said that I had been telling my friends that while yes, boys his age might make fun toys, I could never again actually attempt to date anyone under 26 at least. (Of course, this revelation didn't stop me from having a fun little New Years with a 21 year old. But that was fun, not dating.)

So that's not the whole shitty story of Greg and me in the last month but you can see how long all that was. I'll spare you the rest. Unfortunately, poor Whitney needed to suffer through it all, and every time she'd say, "Just stop talking to him," I'd say, "I can't. He has all my HP DVDs." So now Whitney has given me the bestest birthday present ever:

I am free! I have my DVDs and I am free!!! Whitney rocks!