catharsis

i feel like i need to purge australia still...i never blogged about the non-frisbee stuff, which is what i need catharsis from. it feels like there is this poison still in me, and i'm not sure how best to cleanse my system.

things were fine up until about thursday of the second week. first week was spent in sydney with frank, hammer, kris, miles, & steve. i was getting a little sick of some people by the end, but it was manageable. shared a room at the hotel in perth with frank, hammer, and steve, and began to become aware of feeling excluded from them. steve flirts with hammer, frank flirts with hammer, no one flirts with me. i guess "flirt" maybe isn't the best word for it. gives physical attention to, is a better description. anyways, i was aware of it. i became sensitive to them getting "sick" of me. was i being annoying? too controlling? too bossy? too moody? too clingy? too needy? was i tagging along too much? did they hate me? that sort of thing. very reminiscent of grade school through high school, when i didn't have a stable group of friends and so was acutely aware of how i was being received by others.

but things weren't bad until later in the second week. and then ben complicated things. met him saturday. flirted with him until tuesday night, when he came back to the hotel with me. hammer was not happy with me the next day, but was able to get over whatever it was that was bothering her, and we were back to being friends by the end of wednesday. around thursday or friday, it become apparent to me that ben was not interested in hooking up with me again, and in fact was avoiding me. it was hard to accept this and go through this -- especially while still hanging around him and his team, and watching him interact very closely with other women. including lauren casey and later, hammer.

hammer claims that she was not flirting with him -- just getting to know him since she wasn't able to earlier in the week. (apparently he told her she was "trouble" and would pass messages to her through other people so he didn't have to talk to her directly...wtf?) the problem is, it's hard to know when hammer is just "getting to know" someone vs. flirting with them, since her default interaction with someone of the opposite sex is flirtation. this was monday after the tournament (beginning the 3rd week), when we were all hanging out at the beach. it bothered me that she then later tried to absolve herself of this, and purported to have some sort of understanding into his psyche. as if she had gotten to know him so well in the past 4 hours that she could now explain him to me.

further, the night before, she managed to weasel herself into sharing a bed with McT -- another guy picking up with Brass Monkey -- while getting me to believe, or at least accept, that it was for the best i try not to sleep with ben. she claims there was nothing going on between her and McT -- he was 36 afterall, and she only 22. but the next day, he was hugging and kissing her in this weird date-y way.

it bothers me that she can do this. that she can get away with this: flirting with nearly any guy she chooses, and getting a response, the response she wants. she is cute. she is petite. she is skinny. she is good at ultimate. she dresses like a girl and wears jewelry and does her hair. all this bothers me, because she is what i want to be, and she has what i want. i am jealous. she is competition.

but usually i am OK with all of this, because she will be my friend. she will confide in me, choose to spend time with me, tell me things, get excited about things i am excited about. but she wasn't doing that after the tourney, because lauren was there. and she is apparently really good friends with lauren -- better friend with her than with me, or so it seemed to me.

i don't know what to do about this. should i say something to her? stay angry in my silence and wait for her to initiate contact and hope by then that i am over this? or should i say nothing, and quietly accept that our friendship is forever altered, changed for the worse, and will never be the same. or should i say something, give her a chance to redeem herself -- give her a choice of saving our friendship. but really isn't "saving" our friendship up to me, since i am the one with the problem? so then it comes down to what i need to do to forgive her.

i also need to examine why this experience has been so persistent in staying with me. i've still been dreaming about australia and what went on there. i need to forgive myself for what happened with ben; i behaved in an understandable manner given the circumstances. i should not feel stupid. i can feel angry at him, but i should not blame myself. above all, i should treat this as a learning experience -- i.e. next time, what would i do differently?

as for hammer and my feelings regarding our friendship...i don't know. i don't like what it says about me. to view it in a positive light, this trip has shed led on the qualities i would like to change in myself. which is never a bad thing -- learning more about yourself.

a trip of self-discovery, then! i may not have liked everything that i found, but that's life, and that's OK. however, i should keep in mind that i exhibited many admirable qualities during the trip: taking care of miles (and cleaning up his puke) the night he got sick, making sure kat gome home ASAP when she wasn't feeling well, being there for steve when he needed advice about his girl, sitting with my team (miller, greytak, miles, sean) instead of brass monkey at dinner, comforting kris when she was upset over being injured, listening to fi when she was having guy issues (again), and countless other instances of soldering new and old friendships. i guess i'm not such a bad person afterall :)