The Road Less Traveled, the infamous self-help book of my youth, begins with “Life is difficult.”, a twist on the buddhist truth that “Life is suffering.” Some days I wonder about my emotional and physical pain thresholds. I figure the latter is much higher, too much emotional carnage usually produces a sea of anxiety. I’ve learned to walk away from that more and more over the years. Leaving Strategy two and a half years ago was the the tipping point where I started to recognize my problems with drawing a line in the sand and saying something was too much to ask of me. I recently got an email from a stranger asking for my opinion of Strategy, I’m still thinking about how to write the response.

I rode with pointy3 yesterday. It’s been a while. Between vacation, shmooocon, being sick and being busy working on chef, I just haven’t had many free evenings in a while. I decided I needed to though, get out on the bike and enjoy the outdoors again. It was a pretty decent ride, although as usual I thought drinking doubles was a good idea at the time. I’m still trying to figure out what I want from a relationship and this came to sort of a head recently.

A while back I was writing about how I hadn’t stopped to think about what a relationship should be now, expecting a sort of american dream post-high school path would appear eventually. I learned that lesson already, so it was a neat little line to draw. I can make a list of personality traits that someone I would like would have, but that’s as much who I want as a friend as who I’d want to date. I suppose I had this over-simplified conception that an ideal relationship would be the combination of someone I liked to spend time with, was attracted too, and shared some similar interests with.

Older, wiser folks have told me that as you grow up relationships are more about working with someone to share your life together. With an emphasis on the work part. I guess I haven’t accepted that. I still compare perfecting relationships to the way I learn other things, and that as I understand more and more pieces, the puzzle comes together. This may or may not be a good idea. While my heart is squarely drowning in romanticism, my head usually takes the wheel and I have no expectations of movie plot love scenes. However, my problem is that I’m still expecting something that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know what to do about that other than give it time.

Sometimes I’m not sure that I’m not crazy, or just depressed. I firmly believe smarter folks, apathetic folks suffer from this angst and it brings us down. So be it, for now I’m going to push through, enjoy some distractions, and choose a path on the other side.