naked alarm clock

[dragonlady7]

Last night I was reminded of just why I so love living with a software engineer who did operating system design as a sophomore and who actually understands computers. He's not a Genius, mind you; just last month his laptop wouldn't boot up and he had to take it to the Apple Store to have one of their Geniuses look at it. (Their support staff is actually called Geniuses.) The Genius mostly just ran a disk utility on it and yelled at him for having less than 2 GB free on the hard drive, but it does work now.
Last night I was looking at my hard drive and realized I've filled up all but 2 GB of it myself. "I have too many files!"
So Dave directed me to a seekrit archive of Things I No Longer Needed, explained why I didn't need them, and instructed me to delete them. I did, and suddenly I have 5 GB free. (For the curious, I just emptied my "Previous Systems" folder, because I really don't need a backup of my Jaguar system now that I've been running Panther for a year and a half. If I were going to need anything from that archive I would've realized it within the first three months at most of running the new system.)
So good for Computery Boy. Was much easier than actually going through the backups of my old computer and deleting the redundant files. Pff. Who wants to actually clean? Not me.

This morning I was reminded of just why I so love living with a boy full stop, but I probably oughtn't to go into detail. Suffice to say he has regained many of the points he lost in recent days. Though he could certainly use to gain more. I'm not that simple to placate.


Last night I also realized that his graduation party, being thrown by his mom Independence Day weekend, will coincide with the third anniversary of when Dave and I started dating. (We started cohabiting quite soon after that. Because I am an unsubtle and impatient bitch.)

Comments

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think wanting to live with someone counts as "patient." I sometimes hide from the people I date because I lack the patience to deal with them too often.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I've never actually lived alone. I think Dave would've been the type to hide from me but I didn't really give him a chance. Only recently did it occur to me that I really pretty much forced my company on him. But he admits that he's on the whole happier and better taken-care-of than he was. But still. I mostly just sort of showed up and was like, "Hey, why don't I just stay here?" and he was like... "Uh... Sure."

We do get along a lot better now that we've got separate bedrooms and are used to each other. What got us through the one-bedroom-apartment phase was, I think, exclusively the novelty of it. And Dave occasionally going off and sleeping on the couch. He's cured me of the fault of clinginess, which I suspect I at one point possessed, but in my defense I only possessed it because I thought it was expected of me...

But yeah, I've never actually lived alone. (This bothers me, now that I realize it. Except I'm just used to there always being people around. I'm sort of a loner but not very good at it, is what it probably boils down to.)

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Not sure you should call yourself clingy--that sounds so negative, and thing is, different people need different amounts of human contact at different points in their lives.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is all true. But I think I had a habit of being needier/clingier/more demanding than I actually wanted to be, because I felt it was expected that I should want to behave this way. I have never really been well-educated about gender roles, and in the flush of excitement of being heterosexual I veered over the line from being myself to being How I Expected A Girlfriend Ought To Be. (Which is pretty repulsive, really.)
I still do feel that tension sometimes, like I feel that i ought to be offended by things that don't offend me, or I ought not to care about things that bother me, or I really truly ought to want something that I don't particularly. For example, I know I'm supposed to want to marry Dave and have tow-headed babies by the horde (as my biological clock is ticking you know and gosh we've been dating so long!), but haven't been able to figure out whether my not wanting to is simple rebellion or actually the truth. I am, you see, not very good at self-analysis. ^.^ Or dating-- I think I can count the number of dates I've been on on one hand, because I don't do this whole dating thing properly anyway.

[tehta.livejournal.com]

You guys have been together for three years, right? That's not that long, in my opinion. I've had two relationships longer than that, and in neither case did I feel like it was enough time to base a lifelong commitment on. Also, it's perfectly possible that your biological clock simply isn't ticking yet. From what I hear, thirtyish is the time when it really starts up for many people. Not for me though, heh.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Three years in July, so less than that at this point, but not by much. We've lived together since that summer, though. So when I say 'together', I mean that's a lot of concentrated time spent in one another's company.
We're very good friends, just not quite as good at the rest of it.

My parents dated less than a year before they got married, and have been happy together since 1977, so it's not always the length of time you know someone. (And they didn't really know one another before they started dating.) Their relationship has always interested me because they just get along very well, and they disagree but never fight. Mom instigated them getting married: she said, "at this point in my life I either want to get married and settle down here, or I'm going to go and live by the ocean because I've always wanted to live by the ocean." And Dad sort of said, "Oh, hey, sure, let's stay here and get married." And it worked out pretty well. Mom doesn't really regret not living by the ocean.

Me, I dunno yet. But maybe I'll run away to Europe yet, one of these days. :) And then, maybe not.