Today was the FHR, and it was epic. That uhh, other bike club that was out there seemed really friendly, despite an internet full of old curmudgeons. I suppose that’s why we made the internet though. I have a few before and after photos. None during the ride, because I only stopped once and didn’t have the energy to grab the camera the two times I walked up a hill.

best moment, “pull up your pants or get off the boat” coming over the ferry intercom.

Mother and I spent some time yesterday tuning up her new bike and ended up building another bike from parts in the garage. I’ve got to fix a front derailleur issue, but otherwise I’m happy with it. I’ll probably ride it to work tomorrow.

I called my father for our regular sunday chat a bit after arriving at the afterparty on the pier in Bainbridge. He asked why I was out of breath, and after I told him about the race he said that he was a bit younger than me he used to get on his road bike and “ride and ride and ride”. I wish I had been able to know him before the smoking/drinking/health/depression/angst all settled in. It’s sad that these moments are getting to be so numerous where I feel that I’d like him a lot if I had the opportunity to.

I’ve been working on some couchdb / Java stuff at work, and I’m getting pretty frustrated with how classes and libraries (jars) work. Or don’t for that matter.

I came out of a cave again recently in regards to being distracted and not thinking about life. Not as deep as back in November thankfully, and thus much less anxiety ridden. Hindsight of course gives me the opportunity to look at the choices I made and the people I made them concerning and have clearer view of what was happening and why it was making me feel the way I did.

On one hand, I feel like spending more time alone than ever, but at the same time quite the opposite. It’s possible with spring here that I’m ancy to get out, and my lack of patience is making leaving those who aren’t as eager behind. Adventures are meant to be shared, but with the right people. I’m feeling the need for a trip to Vancouver. I wonder how addicted to love Barner is at the moment.

In short, I’m not ready to grow up. That hinges in how you define growing up. I don’t want a white (or green) picket fence. If anything, I want a warehouse or a pile of containers. It’s not that I’m irresponsible, or want to be. I definitely have no interest in prime time television (short of course of BSG and anything of Joss’s),  it’s that this American Dream seems so placid. Perhaps our education system is tuned to producing laborers and our entertainment industry has found the best way to make consumers of those people. I escaped that system with only minimal emotional scarring in exchange for many good lessons learned.

I’m absolutely fucking tired of having to convince people to get out of their house. I just don’t care at the moment if they rot. Or even stay in their house, but read something non-fiction, or learn or get involved in anything. I hate the concept of being spoonfed. From my okcupid profile, written sometime in the last couple of years:

But, if you’re easy going, cute, simple, quiet, adventurous, you want to live in a treehouse or a warehouse. you like conversing online or in real life but such conversations amount to things other than politics and music. you should have a unique personality, trying to be like anything you’ve seen on TV doesn’t count.

[elsewhere]

I’m much more drawn to people that I don’t have to tell “the top is JUST around the next corner”, and I tend to marry people who take me canoe camping, or live in a van-ing, or whatever.

I’ve dated people that wanted to be the kind of person that did things, or at the very least wanted to be around the kind of people that did these things. Perhaps there were self-esteem issues at the core of it, but they simply didn’t do anything. What I did this week amounted to dishes, pets, and if they were lucky some reading.

After many years in Maine of dragging people together, trying to mediate stupid fucking social group issues, and doing all the heavy lifting in the name of building a community that did something, Seattle has been a god-send for me. Finally I can get up on a Sunday and go on an awesome bike race on an island with one hundred people, a good handful of I see semi-regularly, and not have to organize the whole thing myself. An old cohort from Maine recently asked me why I don’t hang out with another friend of ours that moved to Seattle. Forgetting how terrible a roommate and employee he was, especially as a friend, there are other people here who build ideas and software of value. Here there are interesting minds who have provocative opinions, perhaps who also drink heavily, rather than simply the latter.

I suppose with the Internet I can have all that from anywhere, but the human contact makes a difference. It was bizarre going from having read about SeattleWireless on the internet, to hanging out with them, joining them, drinking with them, and becoming friends with some of them. Nothing was what it seemed, but while what I expected wasn’t, I met some great people. Similarly I had a hard time getting a start in the industry in this city until people started to get to know me (well, the certifications got the start, but those don’t matter much anymore for what I really do and have the opportunity to do now.)

Where to? Like I started to say, I’m not ready to settle. I’ve recently learned that I’m not ready to think about settling either. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, but any sort of expectation of where I’ll live or where a relationship should be is literally anxiety inducing in a deep dark from the cockels sort of way. I worried for some time if I had commitment issues, but if you drew a line between commitment and settling down, the uncomfortableness exists totally to the latter side of the scale. I’ve questioned the possibility of having some kind of serial monogamy social disease at times. I think the reality is that trying and learning from my mistakes is how I’ve always figured out life. The trouble has been it’s much easier to debug broken code than mend someone’s broken heart. I’m unskilled and learning another way.

It’s not that I simply want adventure, or want to picture myself as the type of person that would, or want to be around people that do. The same drive that upsets me when I take the same route home that I took outbound defines who I am. I won’t simply say I want to be challenged at this juncture, but I’m not going to be the same person tomorrow I am today. Better get on board.