Internet, you distracted me there. Let’s see.

Happy Birthday Scott! Good times were had with your friends and the navy pilots, circumstances being what they were.

I can’t really remember what I was thinking about on the ride home, but it was related to M. Oh well. Perhaps some day I will have to start holding my feelings against myself? For the most part, nobody cares. Which is hard to say, because people want to care, or want to believe they care, but just don’t care anymore. And I have to wonder what they think of me if they think this is some kind of active choice that I think is a good idea.

Oh. So nearly fifteen years ago I had a conversation with my step father about dating. He was sure I was going to do more of it any day now, and I wasn’t so sure.

There will be someone and it won’t be M. But someone with the same type spark. Just hope you aren’t searching for her. You may miss an opportunity for something even more.

The combination of these two make for scary shit.

Usually isn’t, actually, but I do anyway.

but really, I’m talking about sleep. I think I got maybe a half hour. To drink coffee, or to try to recover?

Why is it that finding people cable of recognizing how they feel, and communicating about it is so hard? Fuck. I mean. I know. It’s just not that important, yet, to people my age. Bleh.

I’ll probably feel better if I put some miles on a bike and find the warm smiles of some friends.

what a weekend. squeezed in mowing the lawn, now I need a nap. more honk and alleycat photos to come later.

Brian from MSS and I were talking while driving to Snoqualmie yesterday about saving up vacation for ARC DROs. I use most my floating days off for HfH, and otherwise I’ve just been thinking about using other vacation for Remote Medical training. What is it about “normal” vacation that’s so boring to me? We loop back around to that conversation with M about just not having a partner in my life worth that time.

Worth. I guess that’s the hard part, not feeling valuable to someone.

In any case, I have a couple personal goals ramping up for when this summer gets settled. We’ll see. Just waiting now. Sarcastically chastising people for not actively listening, thinking they know what’s best. And waiting.

Volunteering trifecta this weekend. Honk volunteering has been super chill, and after hanging with Colin in the CD this morning I just arrived home to catch a call from ARC. The MFU had been up near Snoqualmie pass supporting SAR personnel looking for a hiker that been trapped in an avalanche and needed to be resupplied. A collegue from MSS and I met our lead at the chapter, loaded up supples and delivered them. As simple as it was, it was nice doing something useful. Which ultimately is probably why I volunteer altogether. Once home I joined back up with Honk in Georgetown, helped out some more, and organized the exodus to Hazard Factory. Tomorrow, more Alleycat Acres work on the farm on Beacon Hill.

Colins expanding his shop and the possibility of sharing some space came up again. Although this time it’s more complicated by M. After more initial “everything will be fine” thoughts, I next felt like blowing the whole thing off. I want to wait to absorb my feelings and talk to J, but I feel responsible to drop M an email about it before it comes up. I don’t think she’d be too upset, but I don’t know she’s really come to terms with her feelings and she’s more likely to be volatile and blow them off than really not care. I feel bad about the school year not being out. We’ll see.

I ran into S again tonight. She was quite friendly, but we didn’t talk again later. I don’t know where that is, and that’s fine. M’s friend mentioned her on the bike ride back from HF, and I just laughed. Oh well.

Anyway, I guess I feel good about the volunteering. And the other stuff? Well. Still out of my control.

yay, it’s here! I hadn’t really considered that the natural small talk with other volunteers would be how we got involved in honkfest. As much as Honk brings back happy memories, I didn’t expect to be talking so much about old flames tonight.

So an old friend from Maine got a job for a company that uses Chef, my name came up in the process. While a lot has changed, I’m still stuck on thinking of myself as a kid building treeforts in the woods.

You deserve to be with someone that you can know completely.

Anyway. Everything feels upside down for good.

Sometimes, when I need something to read while I eat or whatever, I browse the list of paradoxes or list of fallacies on wikipedia. Tonight is one of those times, as I sit at the former Denny’s on fourth. It’s now the 4th Ave Diner, still 24 hour, but a little more of a dive, without being as cool as the places downtown. Further, it’s just the right distance from downtown, as I can drink cofee and see downtown from here, filling my love for cities at night.

I tried to explain tonight how the more I think about the meaning of life, the more abstract and further away from meaning I get. She was a bit argumentative, missing my points, and I considered for a while if I was being arbitrarily stubborn. The more I think, the more possibilities I see, the more angles. There used to be some public television show I watched as a child that pointed out that “a point in every direction is not a point at all.” I’m still behind this thought. I feel like this is a blurry combination of logic and emotion that is forming into a connection to the world.

The headaches kinda scare the fuck out of me, as much as those things do. As much resolution as will come to that part of my life by July, it’s no fun that they’ll have no affect on this. I can deal with this level, I just hope it doesn’t get any worse.

A and I sat in her car in the rain, talking about volunteering and working in emergency and disaster services, pondering plans for the future, the flux between joining up and running off. I talked about my feeling that some day someone will convey to me that I’ve done enough, and I’ll finally slow down and find myself a porch. She hoped not.

I just made my first pot of coffee for the night. An optimistically small one. I’m on plan ‘c’ of rebuilding a Microsoft Exchange infrastructure before the sun rises. In the interim, OKCupid and I are pondering the uniqueness of people, while I uninstall many years worth of java updates from this workstation.

I’ll be in Maine in less than a month; I thought it was more like two. I’ll be there for a shorter period than I planned on, but this has been such a busy quarter at work. Maybe I’ll go back after the next deployment, after July. I can’t tell you exactly why getting through July is my goal, but I’ve already spoken about enough bits that make sense to hold it up against too much inspection. As I nudge servers along, solving one little issue at a time, drinking coffee to keep me nudged along, I’m listening to Sarah McLachlan, which makes me reminisce of Surry and my father.

I was waiting outside the building for A, and I picked up a WSJ lying in front of the bank. I noticed this article.

The family income of the Johnsons is a fifth of what it used to be. And the children are about to feel the pain. Mr. Johnson’s two oldest are attending his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, at an annual cost of $50,000 apiece. And his youngest daughter, 15 years old, recently began her own college search. Mr. Johnson isn’t sure whether he’ll be able to help her to go to college, or even to get the older kids to graduation.

Further expenses such as first homes and weddings are out of the question. “They’re going to have to elope,” he says.

Really? This is the upper-middle class struggle? I always assumed I grew up in an upper-middle class family, but let me tell you, my “college savings” weren’t anything near $50,000, let alone for four years. I think I spent most of them on flight training for my private pilots license (which I still need to finish) anyway. Maybe it’s my bias against the path of school, school, school, college, maybe more college, (* change the world), job, marriage, house, kids… my sarcasm recently engaged a facebook thread about this that was apparently only funny to me… but, hey, crap-tastic entitlement. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m lucky, most people can’t get jobs without college degrees, but I’m still unconvinced that if they had started working as young as I had and worked as hard as I have, they wouldn’t have had more to show for it. I’m fairly certain I’ve been making more money the last couple of years than my father ever did. A asked me what class I thought I belonged to, and I realized had never stopped to consider these matters. I’m not against college, if that isn’t obvious. I just sense something really wrong in the way we’re finding out what to do with our lives, and the money we spend in between.

Anyhow, *grumble*.

Sometimes I wonder if I can leverage reminding myself that which emotionally upsets me now, won’t in five years, since the good things don’t really feel like I pendulum quite so far that way as well. But then there’s me, bouncing up and down on my touring bike last Sunday purely at the thought of fries. Is that happy? Silly? Crazy? Oh, bother.

Oh, exhausted.

Over in Bellevue today, thinking about three years ago when I worked here. I keep being reminded of different periods in my life like this. Interactions, or attempts, with the past have been across the board lately. I suppose I always knew there were people in my life I don’t talk to anymore because we drifted apart, “Tried to be Just Friends (again). Epically disastrous. We never spoke again.” has got me thinking about the people I don’t talk to anymore for different reasons.

Facebook tricked me into reading Goodreads today. For non-nonsensical reasons my heart was briefly ripped out. Also, Honk is coming up. Same rules apply. It’s too bad sometimes that I can’t not care.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I’m pretty sure it was in an email to M the last time we were talking.

I walk into my room and I have two laptops on my bed. Why do I need two laptops, let alone in bed? I have lots of reasons, but they’re technical opinions and aren’t all that interesting. Anyway, I see this and think about how much of a dork I am. Then I remember I just racked up a fixed gear bike in a garage filled with a few others of mine, and how I just spent two days biking around the city for fun with friends. Because I’ve had this conversation with myself before, I recognize this thought pattern and remember that I’m not any one thing. My identity isn’t tied to any one group, and the older I get the further the lines blur together.

This weekend was exhausting, surely partially physically, but I had enough. I can’t decide if I should be waiting or moving on anymore.

Current mood: Lucero – Nights Like These

Saw a rabbit on 6th Ave S in SODO tonight. Rode the Resurrection 3 Alleycat today. I finished, somewhere in the middle. I had fun, but I got bothered by the people at the checkpoints leaving because it got cold. This reminded me of the MFG Cross race where I didn’t get to finish because I was lapped 100 feet before the finish line on the next to final lap. Thus, I felt for those who didn’t get to finish, especially those who hadn’t raced before. Life’s hard, I know, but that’s poor advocacy.

Many of my bike friends are going to another bike friend’s birthday dance party tonight. Another friend invited me to a movie night at her house. I just want to be around what’s comfortable tonight, ‘in my own element’ I said. So I’m biking more and drinking at the 9lb. Funny element you have there, sir.

I live for watching the trees in the street lights at night now. I think I’m going insane.