i am really not this down

"M/V COUGAR ACE" disabled in the Pacific Ocean, originally uploaded by Tidewater Muse.

reading my last post makes me sound all down on alaska, which isn't the case. at the same time, i'm not packing my bags to move here just yet. it's hard; things with the fisherman are really good but i don't love my work enviornment. (the work itself is fine, i have no problem with that.) i don't know that i've ever gotten along this well with someone. what i like about him is that when i do get fussy, when we do fight, we can do it big and loud for three minutes and then it's over. it's the same way we fight in my family, and i love that he never has to have the same conversation over and over again. you can actually resolve shit with him in one go. plus, he's cute and the making-out stuff is super rad. if you asked me to tell you exactly why i like him so much, why being with him makes going through all this other shit worthwhile i don't think i could give you a good answer. i'm not even sure i could make a good list, and lord knows i'm good at listing shit. there are things i don't like about him, sure, but they're small things. part of me doesn't want to talk too much about the whole boyfriend part of alaska, but that doesn't seem fair to you or even to me. the fisherman is a big part of this, and when he left and i came with it was simply because i wasn't ready for whatever we had going on to be over. i thought a few weeks on a boat would cure me and i could go home but it isn't that simple.

we might not grow up and get married and have kids, i might go home after this and we fail miserably at the whole long-distance thing, or we might have a good story to tell at family gatherings. he makes me happier than i thought was possible, and he makes me crazy in a way i've never experienced. this is the first time i've ever lived with a man, and with anyone else i think i would have killed them by now. we still share a stateroom, and that's saying something. in some ways it is a bit of an adjustment going from happy spinsterhood to this, but everyone is surprised at how well i'm doing, including my mother and the fisherman. being in a relationship with someone was never important enough for me to make any changes in my life, be they little or big. i never moved in with anyone, i never changed the way i did stuff, i never gave anyone the key to my apartment or let them drive my car. this is totally foreign to me in a lot of ways, but i think any new relationship with anyone is filled with uncharted terrain you have to navigate. for me, it's just a bigger area.

in conclusion, i'm not totally unhappy and mopey here. i think i'm suffering from a case of burn-out and needing to vent. this week hasn't been great, and neither was the last week i got to talk to you, but there have been good times in between. i'm curious what i'll think about all this in hindsight, but right now i'm glad i made this decision. if i could get off the boat tomorrow, i probably would, but it wouldn't change the way i feel about my fisherman or our relationship. if anything, i think it would make it better. i can't do that though, so i'm sucking it up for another month (fuck!) and making some more money.

*it might be another month. it could be two weeks. it could be in between. who knows? our plans literally changed three times today. every time i hike up the hill to use the port-o-pottie i come back to new information.