Spontaneous drinking and socializing late Saturday night threw the rest of the weekend a curve ball, and after some napping in the evening I’ve been up most of the night.

I’ve been off the forums since I ran into her on a ride. This has proven interesting still being on the edge of the social circle, because I still hear a lot and usually get to make a funny face and move along, except when I sympathize with a friend over it. A friend who offered to give me some bike parts some time ago asked tonight if I would be on the costume ride on Thursday or not, and I told him I was avoiding drama. “Old drama or new drama” he said, to which I replied the former. Granted, there’s plenty of new drama I don’t want any part in, and somehow as A once said after escaping a whirlwind of it at M’s once, it seems to find me. Or I seem to find it. Is it because I keep putting myself out there?

I’m torn over where to go from here. I’m still solidly of the opinion that my newer endeavors deserve the focus of my energy, having more meaning and merit. There really is no reason to continue to make myself vulnerable, to put so much of myself into worrying, caring, contemplating what the right decision is, in return for nothing. I do that, I operate that way, giving without expectation of receiving, but it does keep getting me hurt. Much of it is out of feeling, so it isn’t going away any time soon. I don’t have to worry about everyone acting solely on what is best for them, being “self-full”, and it causing a bunch of short term throw away relationships. My heart naturally works otherwise.

normal: Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical

When I think of normal these days, I think of the social situations where I’ve noticed myself making assumptions that don’t feel quite right, that sit uncomfortable with me, that I’ve gone up to and poked with a stick to see how they move. I’ve had a similar distrust of the academic and artistic worlds because I always conjure images of a disconnected evaluation of reality that feels convoluted. I’ve discussed this a little in regard to chatter about my taste for pop music being shallow. It is interesting to compare how deeply important observing and discussing feelings is to me, but not music, or other traditional forms of artistic expression.

The original Star Trek is supposed to have most episodes rooted in some discussion of the human condition. As I watched some episodes of House tonight I kept thinking about how often I was thinking about my own life’s parallels to the underlying human issues being discussed. As I made T sit through an episode of Kenshin named ‘The Legend of the Fireflies”, I thought back to trying to get M to watch a few episodes. I’ve told the story once or twice, about how she fell asleep, and folks are usually pretty dismissive about the whole thing. That I’m still thinking about it means the point still hasn’t gotten across. I was talking to J about it recently, about how important it is for someone you care about so deeply to care who you are, and about what is important to you.

The theme for House this season, or that which I kept picking up on, was that you have to be vulnerable and connect with people. I suppose that my problem continues to be balancing how much I can give, and as J has been underscoring, that I find a relationship where if I am giving as much as I tend to, I’m getting nearly as much love and support in return.