I went out to dinner tonight with Chris. At a fancy restaurant. {everybody oohs}. In fact, it was so fancy that I:

A. Did my hair in curls. It looked slightly freakish, but with mousse and holding gel, I got it tamed to something resembling waves.

B. Put on makeup. An accomplishment.

C. Wore contacts. The late night stayups watching M*A*S*H and X-Files have not been nice to my eyes.

D. Pressed my dress pants. Okay, they were extremely wrinkly and I would have been mortified to step out of the house in them, but wow!

All in all, a rather amazing and different experience for me. It was fun, getting the opportunity to dress up. {everyone ahhhs at Pretty!Julia} Chris, gentleman that he was, helped me into my coat and held the door for me. He was not so gentlemanly that he offered to pay the whole bill, however. 😛

We had a great time, talking again about traveling and international experience and long term career goals and dating. I mentioned my current love interest, where he raised the valid point of “are you sure it’s dating that he’s not interested in, or not dating you?” which made me frown a bit and took me back. He didn’t mean it as a insult, I think, but I’m not sure that I really want to think about that.

I think he’s backing out on our Mexico trip. Well, not so much the trip as he would still be doing it, but me doing it with him. “I think it might become a family trip” was the proffered excuse. I’m hurt about it, I really am. I mean, geez, I knew it wasn’t going to be just me and him – we’d kill each other in two days and hello, do you think I want to have the fulltime job of distracting him from remembering that if things hadn’t gone badly, he would be getting MARRIED at that spot, on that day? I knew that it was his parents and brother and SIL going down and that it would be me hanging out with them and that was going to be cool–I like all of them from the few times that I’ve met them. It was going to be our last trip, our last hoorah. He leaves for Asia the day after my graduation, and I’ll be gone before he gets back. We’ve never travelled together, ever and I saw it as one of those “never again” opportunities that he’s always telling me to seize.

I just… I’ve been struggling with a lot of self-esteem issues recently, exacerbated by the fact that I’m bored and actually have time to think about these things, but I’m really not liking myself very much right now. And this just feels like another slap of rejection, a poorly veiled excuse where he really means “yeah, Julia, I just don’t want you there”. I’m feeling very vulnerable and knowing that I’m leaving–I get panicky that this is a great excuse for him to just slip out of my life. I was really looking forward to this trip. I thought he was too.

You would think that after all of this time, I would be getting used to rejection. I just hadn’t expected it from him.