I think a lot about identity, and how it affects people. While I am particularly interested in how technology affects identity, honestly the majority of my musings do not fall into that category. All the same, it is interesting to see where how your peers categorize you. I’ve uniq’d the twitter lists I’ve been added to into themes below. At first I wanted to aggregate them, but whatever list I made lost too much because I took too much exterior voice away, so I’ve only manually sorted them and added a couple links to further information instead.

• friends
• sympaticos
• seattle-friends
• seattlepeople
• burners
• devops
• operations
• web-operations
• seattle-web-design
• human-to-be-wary-of
• hackers
• point83
• point83riders

Late nights lately. Since I haven’t been drinking, they’ve been? Late. Funny. Good.

Told A I didn’t know if I have had it in me to really commit this year. I don’t know. Mostly I feel at the call of feelings out of my control. I told A I felt like my life was on hold when I spent time her with. I enjoyed the time, but it wasn’t what I wanted. We kept falling back to the practicality of that, and I always felt like doing so was missing the point.

Which reminds me of how M felt. Which makes me feel a gross acceptance that feelings often lose out to reality. And that’s just how it is.

Nice ride back to Georgetown from the Shark at 3am. Thought about how I feel, my desire for companionship. November has been the crystallization of spending the last six months struggling to find that. So hard, so much energy. With exception, I’ve felt like I’ve been outpouring energy and only feeling insecure as a result. Like when people bless you when you sneeze, sometimes I may need blessing when I care.

I dreamed of M last night. It was happy and satisfying. I awoke and wasn’t all that disappointed it was only a dream.

I’ve made everything else more important than relationships as part of my recent goals. It is working, but I shed a tear, so to speak, feeling that is unfortunate.

I told A, “I always forgot that most people don’t know me very well.” I always think of Mal on Firefly, “You don’t know me son, so I’m going to say this once. If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” I always assume that people in my life already know my patience, sarcasm and my compassion. The latter of which is deeply rooted in much of what I do. I wish I could go back to every moment that M was angry and mean and have someone whisper in her ear, “he cares.”

Usually when I shower, I notice the scar on my leg from a scab that didn’t heal right. I first noticed it about three months ago, sitting at the bar at Squid with M. This was also when I first started noticing my general skin issues as of late. She commented on having better scars.

M once exasperatedly and sharply said “you think I’d want to marry you?” I was talking today about feeling blamed for a lot of her issues. While talking about slowing down, M2 admitted being kind of hurt by the implication that we couldn’t get married. M3 probably wanted to. In the end, it wasn’t until recently that I feel like I had this all figured out.

I’m thinking lately about being unsure how to help A. There’s always that part that feels like I should back away, not run away, and not out of fear, but that my absence solves more problems than my presence. It certainly seems that way for M, M2, J (hah, S, H, :P). Granted, that’s not the whole spectrum, but enough to prove a point. I’m not afraid I don’t know how to best help, I just don’t know how to best help. I feel like I’m wandering around on a sunny day where you get a little wet now and then and look up to see if it is raining, but you’re not convinced it is. That rain is our communication.

I was comparing M, M2 + J today, with J2. Mostly sorting out Why M2 and I get along so well. J2 thinks I prefer passionate independent people, and that those types of people tend to have emotional instability. You never know. Maybe. Do emotionally unstable people fail at sitting down and openly communicating with you? If so? No, J is really open with me, or was, when we were close. The lack of black and whiteness in this world is stew-pid.

And thus to run with it, we talked about my excitement, and how I end relationships when I don’t have that excitement.

Why is it so hard to find someone that both challenges me, and comforts me?

On the ride home at 4am in a light rain I got thinking about how those moments, that feel so much longer than moments, where you are close to someone and feel like it’s okay, you can stop trying, and just be okay. That’s what I want most from relationships.

Spilt milk under the bridge (Andrew?). It’s sort of amazing how terrible M is at expressing her feelings. I recall her complaining about bad communicators, and I wonder if she could recognize the line between what she feels and what she has decided to do about it.

HfH orientation tomorrow. sleep.

I saw an article recently about the relationship of intelligence to search queries. My memory recalls it connect what people were searching for with how adept their use of language was. Sometimes I wonder if I ever got into “lol”. I must have, although more likely edgy alternatives like “rofl”. All the same, when I see people use “lol” heavily, especially when writing profiles about themselves, it is a red flag. Interesting though, a good friend says lol a lot in chat, but she’s also incredibly smart, so it’s obviously more complicated than that. Mostly a nerve has been hit and I’m ranting.

I’ve been drawing a big circle in my mind in pencil thinking about how “we had a fling” and “I didn’t want to date him, date him” align with me and my self-image. Emotionally, not all that great, but as always, stable enough. I’m still pretty withdrawn and cautious in my interactions lately.

The long days at work lately don’t hurt either.

“Lafeyette be telling me how tired he is, and I always ask him this because I made a mistake with Terence once,” LaJoe said. “Terence used to tell me he was tired, but I used to think he was tired from just being tired and I’d say, ‘go lay down.’ But Terence didn’t mean that. Terence meant he was just tired with what was going on. So that made me in the habit of asking now when they say they’re tired, ‘What you mean, you tired?'”

One thing I’ve picked up from crowd hopping, maybe just from life, is the sense of how different everyone’s perceptions of reality are. People get strongly bonded between their social identity and their beliefs. I’m wondering how much I can leverage that experience to change the course of mine.

I’ve been thinking lately about my feelings for people not always being as in line with their actions. This year has been hard, the hardest in years. Perhaps, that’s a call to reshape a few things, reshape my values and my personal feelings toward people that exceed my compassion.

My father told me today that he was proud of my compassion. I shake my head thinking of how enigmatic our relationship is, and has been. I’ve been thinking tonight about my accomplishments that I tend to undervalue, and about reshaping my feelings of success around them, hoping to lure some of my disappointment about relationships away. I can’t help but think of my father in this case. His comments about feelings. His obvious efforts to avoid feeling them, the drinking, the hermit tendencies. At some point, I feel like there are feelings I simply need to stop speaking of. It doesn’t matter that I feel them anymore, the are nonreciprocal. I’m afraid of the darkness, the isolation, the internal torment. It very well could be my imagination, but it’s presence haunts me all the same.

Busy few days! Thursday and Friday were filled with starting a deployment at work to a fresh datacenter. Every redeployment is an opportunity to put a little more love in that I didn’t have time for previously. Saturday morning was more ARC training, taking a class on how to drive a van as a matter of fact. This was a little silly of course, “how does driving a van differ from driving your personal vehicle?” Yeah, right. But it is a prerequisite for next weekends driving emergency response vehicle class. I’ve never driven anything in an ambulance configuration (feeding truck though) before, although I used to own a step-van so I’m sure it won’t be any different in the end. Saturday evening Tori, Mom, Tim and I got out for art attack, and went down to MasterMark/Equinox to hang out with Colin for a bit, before meeting Andrea and Jasper back at the house for some good old fashioned horsing around. I finally got to read my vegan children’s book to a child! And then today, the final MFG cross race of the season. The most fun and muddiest I’ve had yet. I was too cold to wait around long for the prelimanry results, so we will wait for them to post the final results to see how I did, but I got a number of “way to go” comments from other races at the end. One of them called me “lumberjack.” Is it weird to collect so many nicknames from strangers?

Otherwise, oh, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot the last week or two about those people that reach out to me, who put effort into spending time with me. I’m generally aligning that with an “actions speak louder than words” cliche. I’m coming to terms with my last few intimate relationships having been flings more than relationships, even though some solid friendships (relationships, granted) may still develop into more. It’s always hard wanting more and it not working out, or not making sense. Disappointing. Part of me feels like I need to make it through 2009 without any more dating, but mostly I want to make it through 2009 without another relationship that lasts less than two months. Since there’s less than two months left in the year, that pretty much throws the baby out with the bath water.

I keep forgetting to write this, and I dont’ have time now, but I don’t want to forget this again.

Talking to T the other day about missing _, and she got irritated and said “There are much nicer girls than _.” I quipped about not knowing where they are, as it hasn’t been for a lack of trying to find them. I still laugh thinking about demonizing, I forget so easily that most of the people I’ve dated never got the chance to understand how I feel, and thus can’t seem to grasp that I’d be supporting them when they’re not present. I’ve been having a conversation lately with B where he keeps implying that he is saying things that upset or frustrate me. B doesn’t know me anymore, if he did, and I can’t help but feel wise and zen about offering advice to him across the tubes.

Talking to J about missing _ and she asked if I missed her, or what she represented to me. I said that we fit well. What it represented not withstanding, I’ve had other opportunities for to fill that, that I’ve passed up on because they didn’t fit right. Also discussed how all of my introspection lately seems to be serving others much more than myself. It isn’t solving my problems. Although, I suppose, that’s not really the point. J recommended I take a look at The Mindful Brain and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for hints on reshaping and redefining my emotional associations with loneliness away from intimacy. We’ll see how that works. I sense a huge book order coming when I get paid.

A asked me if our conversations felt like therapy and I told her not at all, because they’re conversations and not therapy. Combined with another comment about helping me, I’m feeling a flashback to M but without the arrogance. I feel like being social is getting me pent up again, complicated. Complicated takes energy. Taking care and being mindful of others takes energy.

Talked to J a lot recently about long-term goals, measuring success, how to live. I don’t really having that many long-term goals, beyond having decided recently that I want to keep living in the way that I do. While I acknowledge it is a good idea to have something to look forward to, I usually more focused on the now and the later works itself out. That is worth comparing to driving by looking in front of the bumper rather than down the road, as an analogy. I may be over-correcting too much in life. All the same, some of these I’ve started within the last month or two, but the majority are really November items:

• Take a break from dating + girls
• Cut back on coffee (no sitting around drinking coffee all [day|night] at [work|bar|restaurant] mostly)
• Cut back on juice + soda (cyclic sugar crashing rather than eating)
• Spend time more meaningfully, less horsing around:
  • Read more non-fiction
  • More volunteering, currently doing ARC.
  • Contribute more to Open Source
  • More projects: bikes, around the house
  • Finish the CX season.
  • Plan a talk with thesethings
  • Build more intimate relationships with friends/family that want it

That feels like plenty.

Even for those claiming emotional detachment from sex, how much of sex is physical and how much is an emotional connection, being close to someone? Todays topic of conversation is when someone sleeps with you, but is uncomfortable kissing you good-bye. The latter feels like affection tied pretty tightly to emotional attachment and connection. Oppose that to making out for instance, which seems more casually accepted as fair unattached physical interaction, depending on what circles you swim in. I’ve met many who pride themselves on saying that they wouldn’t sleep with someone they didn’t have feelings for or were dating, but have no issue making out with whomever. That line feels entirely self-drawn, but it’s completely affected by the social norms of that persons social identity.

I’ll be manipulative and ask, in a world where people “disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs” how much of this line drawing is getting our physical needs satisfied without having to face the responsibility of the emotional consequences of our actions? To oversimplify to make a point, “it was just making out, it wasn’t serious.”