GET THIS PERSON OFF THE INTERNET!

Someone called Susan Welch has posted MY post from last night. And it said “By Susan Welch.” Oh hell, no. Get the eff off my Creative Commons Copyright, you stupid cow. Timestamps on my server AND my Wordpress copyright plugin will prove in any court of law who published this first.

This page apparently lifts posts from all sorts of blogs and sometimes does and sometimes does not give attribution or trackback links to the REAL authors.

If you want to fight for bloggers’ rights and protection of the work we do and share, watch out for yourself and for people like this. Watch for IPs and find the emails of people copying you. Email them. Email their servers. The server that supports this stealing person’s site has an Acceptable Use Policy and it prohibits stuff like this. Bitch about it. Get Creative Commons licensing. Use those copy hunting things to search the internet for people lifting your stuff. Get the Wordpress plugins that make copyright stamps on your published posts. I’m sending a professional but nasty email to these bitches right now, demanding that they either take the post down or add attribution as dictated by the terms of the CC license.

If you’re working on Wordpress.org, get the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/ and it will allow you to block the IP addresses of spammers AND of people who do things like this. They won’t be able to come onto your page, let alone leave comments. A little research has shown me that this particular bot shows up a LOT and steals a lot from others as well. Go ahead and block IP 38<dot>99<dot>248<dot>249 right away.

Maybe they won’t do anything to fix this situation, but really? This is just wrong. I’m not putting this stuff in a book or anything (yet, hah!), but come on, people. This is mine. Yours is yours.

If they won’t share properly as we were all taught in preschool, then maybe they need a playground smackdown.

Fight!

UPDATED 5:30pm CST:

My post and others were lifted from BlogHer. Community Manager Denise Tanton said that this person has been a problem for them for some time now and they are working on the spidering issue. I removed the link here that I had placed to show you where my reprint was because it will link back to her and the spidering continues.

But to protect your own blog content – even though you can’t do this on BlogHer – put cupcakes<dot>pandadynasty<dot>com in whatever blocker or filter you use. That’s right. She’s giving cupcakes a bad name.

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I felt like I was underwater, pushing my arms and legs forward with concerted effort, unable to hear the traffic on the nearby highway. Everything around me blurred. Bending over, I nearly lost my balance as I reached for it. It was unmistakably his. And he had unmistakably lied.

——————————————

Sunday night E and I went out for Mexican food and had a lovely dinner, followed by a lovely evening at my house. We cuddled, did mushy kissing things, and engaged in pillow talk not unlike our previous conversations that week.

“You’re absolutely sure?” I asked him once more.

“Yes.”

“You’ve got it in you to do this right this time? For us to be together as a team?”

“Yes,” he said, looking right at me. “But I need you. I’m scared of a lot of things, and I love you, and I know it’s going to be hard but I need you to help me with that.”

“I’m scared too, babe. And I need you to help me with those things. I need you to reassure me a lot because I’m going to need it. I promise you, I will be downright neurotic about the way you treat me, especially after last time when you just stopped returning calls for three days, like Tim did. And I need you to not be like that anymore. I need you to make me, make US a priority.”

He nodded. “I understand.” He looked away for a minute, then turned back to me. “We’re going to do this,” he said firmly.

“We’re going to do it right,” I rejoined.

Monday morning I dropped him off at his house on my way to work. He was cuddly and affectionate all night, pulled me away from the alarm clock and blew raspberries in my tummy to wake me up in the morning. “I’ll call you when I get off work,” I said. “You’re off tonight, right?”

“Yep. When will you be done?”

“Four, four-thirtyish.”

“Okay, call me, we’ll see what’s going on. Have a good day at work, babe.”

———————————————

4:30 pm: I call. No answer, leave voicemail.

6:30 pm: I text. “Where you at, goof?”

8:30 pm: I call. No answer, leave voicemail. “Hope everything is okay, call me when you get this, I need to talk to you.” (His mom had been pretty sick so I was hoping there hadn’t been an emergency.)

10:15 pm: I call. No answer, leave voicemail. “I’m going to bed, babe. Don’t know why you haven’t called me when you wanted me to call you in the first place, but whatever.”

10:16 pm: He calls.

“Hello.” My voice is flat, emotionless.

“Hi honey,” he says nonchalantly. “How are you?”

“Where have you been?”

“Well, I’m walking home from Jean’s house, and I was hanging out with James and Duke for awhile earlier. How’s your day been?”

Hanging out, he says. Just “hanging out.”

“Did you get my voicemails?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t call me back?”

“I’m calling you back now. What, what’s wrong baby?”

“I told you not to do this,” I say, my voice starting to waver. “You know what this does to me. You know I have the worst possible time trusting you right now and you know I can’t take when you do this.”

“Honey, calm down, it’s not a big deal. I was doing stuff.”

“And you couldn’t give me two minutes for a call or even a text to acknowledge me, say you’re busy and that you’ll call me later?”

“Baby, really, you’re being silly.”

“Do NOT start this again with me, E,” I fume. “This is what I asked you for and what you said you’d give me. You said you’d call and when you didn’t I was worried that something bad had happened to your mom, but here it’s just because you were too busy ‘hanging out’ to respond to me. That’s bullshit and you know it. You did this to me when we broke up before. You know Tim did this when he left me. You KNOW not to do this.”

“Look, I’m sorry.”

“This will not continue. This is an incredibly stupid way for you to treat someone you claim to love.”

“I do love you.”

“Then f*cking act like it.”

The conversation continued in this vein for another fifteen minutes, in which I calmed down a bit and asked him about his day and how his mom was, and we talked about work and so on. I was still angry, still hurt and frustrated, and it must have shown in my voice.

“You’re still upset, aren’t you?”

“A little,” I admit. “I hate feeling like I can’t trust you and already you’re making it worse.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“I’ll come pick you up.” I really did want to see him. We can never have a productive discussion on the phone.

“No, I’ll call a cab,” he said quickly. “You really want me to come?”

“Of course.”

Five minutes later, he calls me back. “Cab on its way?” I ask.

“No, I canceled it,” he mumbles. “I called and ordered one but then I called back and canceled it.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t really think you really wanted me to come over.” His voice is getting smaller, like he’s shrinking into himself. Something is going on.

I try to lighten the mood. “Well of course I want to see you, goof,” I say cheerily. “I’ll be there in a few minutes, forget the cab.”

“No, I’ll call them again. And I’ll call you right back.”

“Sounds good.”

——————————————–

8 phone calls, 3 voicemails, 5 text messages, and TWO HOURS later, I called the cab company he usually uses. They confirmed that they’d not had a call for a cab to his address.

At one o’clock in the morning, I get in the Jeep and drove over to his house. The door is unlocked as usual, and I quietly go upstairs to his room and find him fast asleep on his bed.

“What the F*CK are you doing?” I practically yell. He rubs his eyes blearily and looks at me, jaw dropped and confused. I lower my voice when remember that his soon-to-be-ex-roommate is there, but he’s probably stoned and counting cracks in the ceiling so it’s unlikely that he cares. “You said you were calling a cab and then calling me right back two hours ago!”

“I tried to call you back, I didn’t really feel like coming over after all so I thought maybe we could hang out tomorrow.”

“You did not call me back. And why did you suddenly not feel like coming over?”

“I just… your phone said it wasn’t receiving calls.”

“I called you EIGHT times.”

He points at the pile on his nightstand. “It didn’t ring, I don’t know why…”

“And you just suddenly didn’t want to come over. E, what the hell is going on with you?” He grabs my arm and tries to pull me down to lay on the bed next to him. I push him back and sit at the foot of the bed instead, and he stares at me blearily. “Speak,” I demand. “You had better explain this.”

For about twenty minutes, we go back and forth, him mumbling things along the lines of “I just got scared, I love you but I’m scared to do this” and me biting back with “You don’t hurt someone you love like this, and if you’re so scared you should never have asked to come back into my life,” and so on.

“I’m tired,” I say. “I have to get up in less than 5 hours and I’m going home. This is a completely pointless conversation, you’re half asleep and you just don’t get it.”

“Sleep here, stay with me.”

“I don’t want to stay with you. I cuddle with you when I feel close to you, and right now you’re on another f*cking planet. Call me when you feel like it.”

————————————–

Then on the porch. The drowning feeling. And I stomped right back upstairs.

————————————-

“I figured out why you didn’t answer your cell phone,” I said, shoving it in his face. “It was on your porch, sitting on the steps. Eight missed calls. Wonder who THAT was.”

He looks at it incredulously, and I grab his chin and pull his face toward me, “You didn’t call the cab, did you?” He shakes his head slowly. “You liar,” I say softly. “You are a goddamn liar.”

“Baby, wait.”

“What a stupid thing to lie about, E. I don’t care how scared you are, I don’t want to know what your problem is. Here’s mine. You are treating me like shit already. I did not put my heart back out there for you to do this after giving me ONE. GOOD. DAY. You don’t respect me and it hurts and you don’t even care!”

“I don’t want to hurt you – ”

“You KNEW this would hurt me and you did it anyway! You deliberately hurt me, AGAIN!”

“I wasn’t thinking – ”

“You’re never thinking about anyone but yourself! You’re all pretty words to get me back because it’s what you want, and then as soon as I say I’ll give it a chance, you have what you want and you don’t care about me anymore! What the HELL happened between this morning when we were fine and tonight when you’ve become an idiot again? Who got to you this time? James? Your dad?”

“It’s not anyone, it’s all me, I’m just so…”

“Scared, yes I know,” I say mockingly. I throw the phone on the table. “Two days into what you say you want so desperately and you have 99% killed this already, E. I have tried and tried to give you what you say you need, to be there for you when things get overwhelming, and when I ask you for honesty and respect, you can’t give me anything. So just call me when you feel you can talk about this like a man, and don’t you ever f*cking lie to me again.”

I stalk out, and as I head for the stairs I hear noise in his room as though he’s getting ready to come after me, but I don’t slow down. I get in the Jeep and drive for about five minutes when my phone rings. I think for a moment about giving him a taste of his own medicine and just letting it go, but for some reason, I don’t.

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have let you leave.”

“You didn’t LET me. I left. And I told you not to call me till you can be a man and talk about this reasonably.”

“I can, I’m ready.”

“You’re still half-asleep and I doubt you’ve grown your balls back in five minutes.” God, I’m mean when I’m angry.

“Then please talk to me tomorrow. Call me after work, come over, we’ll go for a walk. I’ve been an idiot, I need to talk to you.”

“Are you going to pick up the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll call you.”

——————————————

I’ll finish this story tomorrow. It’ll probably need a Part 2 and 3 to just get through those 24 hours.

Wow, good start, E. Way to lie about being done lying.

Keep up like this and when I kick your ass no jury of women in this country will convict me. They’ll effing applaud.

(More on this later.)

It’s 6 am and I’m in my study, tap-tapping away at my keyboard while E snores. I can’t sleep.

Twelve hours ago, I turned my phone on vibrate as I was getting ready to go to dinner with a cute coworker I have been sort of dating for the last two weeks. More on him some other time. On my way home, I discovered I’d missed a text from Mel, followed ten minutes later by a call from her husband.

“Call me asap,” she’d written. Mel does not overuse ASAP. I phoned her immediately – she said “I’ll call you right back” and disappeared. Something sounded wrong, very wrong. I waited ten minutes and called her husband instead.

“Ben?” There’s silence on the other end of the line but I know he’s picked up. “Ben, what is it, what’s going on?”

“Melissa’s out.”

“Out? Out how? What?”

“She’s leaving me. She told me she wants out and she doesn’t love me anymore.” His voice was tiny, I could hardly hear him, I must have misunderstood because that did not add up at all. I swerved into the parking lot of the nearest gas station.

“Say that again. Please tell me I heard you wrong.”

He says it again. “She says she’s been thinking about this for six months.”

“No no no, she can’t have been–” I choke on the words. “Ben, she never said, she couldn’t have–”

“She says she didn’t tell anyone.”

I pull back onto the road, forcing words out. “Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Where is she?”

“On her way to work.”

“Do you need me to come over?”

“Tim’s here. My brother is on his way.”

God, how I love the two of them, Ben and Melissa. They’re my family. Their families are my family, their parents and sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews. They live half a block away. They grill out every weekend during the summer. They have an 18-month old baby. They love each other, they have the marriage Tim and I always said we envied. They just had their five year anniversary. They’ve been together for ten years.

And she left him. I keep thinking I misunderstood.

By the time I got home, I was in hysterics. Mel hadn’t called back. I needed to talk to someone, and I don’t know how to explain it except to say that I needed to talk to someone who knows me and who knows my relationship with them. Tim, of course, was with Ben, but in all honesty the first person who sprang to mind was E.

E called me over the weekend, I hadn’t gotten around to posting that. We talked the other day for about forty-five minutes, a conversation full of apologies (his) and acceptances (mine). If we hadn’t had that conversation I don’t think I could have called him – I don’t think I would have called anybody. But I did call him, and he called a cab to come over.

While I was waiting for him, Mel called me back. We spoke for about twenty minutes and it began to sink in that she didn’t just storm out. They didn’t have a fight and a huff. I’d heard Ben right, she knew exactly what she was doing and it was real. Not “I’m thinking of leaving him” or “I don’t know how much more I can take,” it was simply “I’m done.”

“You’re really on your way to work like this?” I asked. She’s a cop. She can’t be even slightly off for a minute.

“Never let them see you sweat,” she said tiredly. “I have to.”

“I know. Call me at seven when your shift ends. I’ll take the day off, I’ll be with you, we’ll talk or listen or anything. Call me as soon as you’re off.”

She started to cry. “I will.”

“I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you too, B.”

I had almost regained my composure when E showed up. I hadn’t seen him for over three months and I just fell against his chest, sobbing when he walked through the door. He held me for a long time. We sat out on the back porch and talked for hours about Ben and Melissa, about other friends and our families and catching up, and about us. It was not an ideal night to have that conversation but it’s another one that just spilled out. Divorce is a topic that has always made him cynical – he’d always say things like how he doesn’t want to get married or have kids because everyone’s marriages fall apart, blah blah.

Tonight he threw cynicism to the wind and said he loves me, never stopped, lied because he was scared, and wants another chance. He said he’ll do anything for me to take him back, that he wants us together for real, to make it work, to raise a family – holy shit, did he say that? Ladies and gentlemen, he did. On the night when the relationship I thought was my aim in life is crumbling around the people I care about, E says the things I never thought I’d hear. I used to hold Ben and Mel up to him as an example of how people could get married and balance time together and time on their own, how they could have a baby and still have a sex life and a social life as a couple. I’d say look, just because you’ve got friends who’ve had screwed-up marriages doesn’t mean every marriage is like that – see, Ben and Melissa make their life together work, they do it right.

What the hell did I know, anyway? What did any of us know? They’re my best friends. I had no clue, Ben had no clue – and although I know it’s been on Melissa’s mind and heart for months now, I know it’s something she never expected either.

The marriage I wanted and never had is falling apart. And E wants to get back together and build toward that relationship he says he’s finally strong enough to have. He wants what he said he didn’t want. Melissa wants what she never thought she’d want. Ben wants what he can’t have.

My alarm just went off to wake me from the sleep I didn’t get to start the work day I won’t have. Am I even oriented enough to think about what I want right now?