A mostly free day is a glorious opportunity to fill it. Mom and I took the light rail to Colombia City for a nice brunch, then cleaned the house for a while. Kyle showed up and I spent a few hours helping him get started on a tallbike. A few people asked him who was going to help him, and his stories about how people acted when he told them I was made me laugh. For all intents and purposes, I’m still a dorky kid living in the woods in Maine; to be known as anything else is usually unexpected. A neighbor asked me how much it would be for me to weld some cracks in his lawnmower and when I did it and wouldn’t accept any money he mowed the lawn for me. How fucking wonderful is that? Not only do I get to poke around on the welder and got my lawn mowed, I felt great about how it worked out that way. Then over to the ARC chapter to help out in a generator test. I seemed to have the most experience with generators and be the most comfortable with the mains in the group. This made me somewhat nostalgic for Towers; walking into cold war era telecommunications buildings deep in nowhere, looking over the infrastructure and throwing together a plan for salvage operations.

I realize I haven’t written any meat in a while. J asked me recently if I wanted to still have feelings for M. I told her no, because I can’t do anything with them. Friends are definitely tired of hearing about them, and every couple of months mom reminds me that we only dated for a fraction of the time that I’ve had feelings for her. Mom and I had a long talk last night about this where she tried to point out that my feelings couldn’t possibly be for who she really is, as I wasn’t given the opportunity to discover that. While true, I came by that angle some time ago. The problem being is that I believe my thoughts and my feelings are only coupled in a raw place. My feelings can certainly be engaged by people who I feel exist and are in such a way that I think is important or meaningful. However, I don’t decide to like them or not.

A while ago I saw this dilbert comic at the EOC at ARC. At the time, I remembered the date so I could it up, but then later realized the date on a comic calendar can’t be the date the comic was first released, because you’d have to make 365 comics in advance. Duh. I saw it again tonight on another office at ARC while testing the chapter generator with a few others and took a photo this time.

Today I had a choice of doing something important that no one would ever realize, or doing something useless that would look like an accomplishment.

I was talking to Tori recently about how I rarely go other to friends houses for movies anymore. If I’m looking for down time, I’ll either see something new in the theatre or watch something at home. The only exception seems to be dates.

Talking to Mom last night, I recited the current version of my story about how difficult it is to meet people my age, especially girls with other enamoring qualities, who want to do something meaningful first and have fun second (or along the way). I proceeded to self-defend against the old M argument that I have more opportunities than others [that I haven’t created for (prepared myself to take advantage of) myself].

I can’t believe it is only Saturday.. it was a long week, dealing with the law, and I consequently felt awfully lonely. I took Friday off and spent most of it at Colin’s shop helping him build a run of bike trailers. However, drilling holes in metal leaves me too much free mental capacity to have thoughts and feelings about those who have disappeared.