I have no explanation for tonight.

Tori and I biked to Anarchy Point for a crazy game of cribbage, then up to Smarty Pants for a little food. This was my second time there. In between Hillary had stopped texted me asking for a Georgetown recommendation since Squid is closed on Mondays. At Smarty Pants we ran into Ashok and company and joined them. Divide saw my foursquare checkin and popped by. We talked about bike hacking and rabbit costumes in parks for a while before he left for 9lb. Tori and I headed there next as our companions were pretty drunk and were leaving. We ran back into Divide as he was leaving, as I smiled and nodded to Jessie. Chris showed up, then Kendra, then John, then Lucia and company. Popped by Jarrod’s house on the way home, and I definitely need to find a warm comforter to snuggle at this point. So much social.

But I guess when I say normal I don’t really mean mainstream, but you just seem very comforting, like everything makes sense, like what normal ought to be if normal weren’t so wrapped up in stupid pretenses

holy crap, sage comments from a stranger 2500 miles away.

Woke up early today because Mom called for advice on car trouble, so I rode the new bike in. Man that puts a smile on your face.

While riding around the ‘hood last night, I saw in some high windows at Rainer Cold and saw a couple people practicing a dance routine on roller skates. Jarrod and Tori joked that it’s a part of Georgetown that only Dookie and I see.

But of course, there are more tall bikes out there. I pulled up to the 9lb and someone standing outside commented on wanting to ride a tallbike and I told him to have at it, just put it back when he’s done. I went inside and met Chris who had popped up from wherever he dissappears to. We were sitting at the bar talking about how he used to see more in Tucson, and Jessie pipped up about how a couple Dead Babys live upstairs with tall bikes. Outside guy came in, sat down with her, and every few minutes for the next twenty groaned about how falling while trying to get off the bike was going to hurt in the morning.

Life is pretty much back to normal. Well, I got an okcupid message from a far away land early this morning that leads with, “wow! you are like the most normal person ever, if normal was what I thought it was before I broke out of the bubble that was my sheltered youth.” Sarcasm? Huh? Who knows. Maybe I’ll ask.

But so life is pretty much back to normal. Except that one thing, but I’ve done everything I can there, it’s out of my hands.

Bizarre day. I was up most the night, mostly writing an essay on configuration management. The twitscape retweeted it a bit, the blog ended up about 100 visits above average for a Sunday at 248. That hundred is actually about the number of visits to that post. Jesse Robbins even tweeted a quote, which is ironic because a couple months ago I was trying to get a quote out of him for a slide deck. It’s a little heavy on rhetoric, but discussing it later with Adam we agreed that was what was called for. All the same, I spent some sleep deprived hours watching The Wire this morning laughing at myself.

I spent a bunch of time in the shop today. I’m going to stop calling it a garage, because of the people stopping by who assume it is a bike shop and it is really used as my bike/metal/wood shop anyway. I got the MIG cart built finally to carry the shielding gas. It looks really nice in the pictures (front, back) although they’re a big unfocused. The welds on it are okay/acceptable. It looks nice unless you look real closely because I sanded down the welds and painted it. It’s exciting to have this finished. With still having a bunch of metal stock, it’s time to do some more welding!

Tomorrow is another project day. A few people have talked about coming over, we will see who shows.

The worst part of sleep deprivation is how my motivations shift. I’ll keep those to myself, but I’m a real different person when I stay up all night than I am normally.

Chatting with Dylan today I mentioned that I don’t consider myself that social and he argued that I always come in to Squid happy and chatty. That’s likely true, and while that’s a good thing, it serves to underscore the differences between how I am perceived and why I make the choices I do. This is particularly important the last couple of months. While I lean towards saying too much, I’ve held back a lot because I’m unconvinced it’s wanted, that I’m wanted, even, in not as dire fashion as it sounds because I’m keeping secrets from you, that I’m valued. We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing.

Tomorrow OSBridge is an unconference. We’ll see how that works out. I’m jumping back on a train for Seattle in the evening. It’s Pedalpalooza in Portland right now, and I’m not seeing any of it. All of my social effort has gone towards hanging out with open source types and some evenings with Jason. I feel, perhaps, disappointedly overwhelmed by this. While riding with Adam, Joe and Narayan to get chili-dogs and drinks after the configuration management panel, we briefly talked about hobbies. So very, very much to do, and not enough time.

That’s part of the anxiety, and why I don’t want to go camping this weekend. I love everyone, but part of me wants to see more product coming out of my life than is right now. Maybe I’ll hole up alone this weekend, and see how that goes.

I forgot how sleepy conferences are. OSBridge is a neat effort, there’s a lot of breadth of topics. Some folks were complaining it’s trying too hard to replace OSCon, which was very vendor oriented, while Portland is more grass roots and the conference should represent that better. Also, it’s been said that the exhibit hall isn’t free, while it was at OSCon. This doesn’t matter a whole lot, because it’s pretty dead anyways.

My stomach, and thus appetite are still broken, and the anxiety continues to mess with my ability to get a full nights sleep. Parts of my brain have found the sign that points to “enough is enough” land, but the balance of my heart keeps me a martyr. It’s one thing to simply be someone who won’t think about their life, I’m uncertain how to approach the lack of time to do so.

It’s nice to bike around Portland at night, as well as see Jason and Andrea again.

Not Me: You should come camping. Hike. Talk Rest.

Me: No, need to stop being distracted already and get back to who I am.

Not Me: Okay. Make plans to get out of sad. Hug.

Me: Some day it’ll come. Big loss in my opinion.

Oh, hi Portland. I’m Bryan, and I don’t like great things not working out. Off to social network all the same.

Whatever his occupation Dennis is endowed with an enourmous capacity for enjoying life. Like many rural men in Maine, he’s a tinkerer. Some part of every day he’s under the hood of his aging Suburu coaxing life into the engine. He typifies characteristics associated with the native Maine man: independent, resourceful, at home in the natural world, the hills, and the woods

This was harder to find than it should have been.

Ray: “Oh my God….It’s my father…My God! I’d only seen him years later when he was worn down by life. Look at him. He’s got his whole life in front of him and I’m not even a glint in his eye. What do I say to him?”

I don’t think about the future a whole lot. That sort of what lead me to spending a whole lot of time and stress six months ago figuring out where I wanted a relationship to go and what I wanted to get out of one. I’ve had a pretty good idea where I haven’t wanted life to go, which is to become cynical. I over-quote dad saying “I don’t like people, but there are people that I like.” I’d like to say, that I like people. Granted, in a city of over 600,000 people, it’s easy to carve out a huge niche of people that I like. But I’m not cynical about humanity as a whole. I don’t want to become old, tired, distrusting, alone. I fight hard to not be alone, to sit down friends and remind them that they’re valuable to me and appreciated. This is more important to me than most, and a photograph of my father happy in his twenties hangs in my house to remind me that he once was, before I knew him.

There really isn’t a right way to live. We sort of figure this out as we grow from what life has thrown at us. The tangible comes and goes, I value the impact I make on others lives more than anything I could acquire. Learning makes my mind happy, other lives make my heart happy.

It’s entirely possible that I open my mouth too much. Which is to say, that it’s become habit for me to often talk about what I’m thinking about, which presents itself as a conclusion rather than a process, by social norm.

I decided to ride to work today without music. I can not finger the last time this happened, it would surely have been the result of a dead ipod battery rather than a choice. My stop at All City found me with relatively intense anxiety in my stomach, which cleared up when I got back on the bike.

“We’ve already been through this.” Yes, and I’m still not satisfied with how it’s turned out.

Further reading last night and this morning in the previously mentioned Changing Lives. I’m about halfway through the book, and most of the stories cause such emotion in me to bring me to tears. There’s are repetitive threads, kids coming from ‘the county’ where theres nothing to do but pick potatoes and work in the woods (is there even that anymore in the post-NAFTA era?), which ultimately leads to drug and alcohol abuse. Broken families from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse.

Persevere, hold on to what good you can, one step at a time forward.

I’m off to Portland tomorrow for a conference and won’t be back until Friday night. There’s a number of camping trips this weekend, and I don’t think I want to go on any of them. I need more time for myself. Being social doesn’t come naturally to me, and as much progress as I’ve made in it I easily forget how hard it is on me.

Ten years ago I returned to a brief stint at PC Tech, under new management, doing computer repair again. A family business then, one of the sons, I think Ben, told me he regretted spending as much time in high school partying rather than learning. In hind sight those remarks are always easier said, and perhaps can be used as leverage to achieve more at the time for some people. At the time, I don’t think I knew any other way to be. Today, perhaps I’ve pushed so hard to grow in so many directions at once that I’ve forgotten who I was a little.

I’ve been thinking a little about how the people in my life identify themselves, and what communities they’ve chosen to represent who they are.

I feel better after this weekend. At a party last night, Jarrod asked me how I felt, I told him that I felt better in my heart, but not physically, and we’d have to wait and see about that. I’m probably pushing myself too hard to deal with too many internal struggles at once. We’ll see.

Probably the difference between honesty and sincerity is that the latter contains more soul. Not just feeling though, you can be honest about how you feel at any given time, but more than that. All that is you.

“Wheel never stops turning Badger.”

Being broken. There’s this idea that something being broken requires fixing. Being broken is the human condition. Can change be a singular event? Something so transcendatal that you wake up one day and what wasn’t okay, is? Time, is often described to be the cure. Sometimes coping is a mechanism to make time pass. I think change happens with time. When you wake up one day and realized you’ve changed, it wasn’t that day that it happened. It happened along the way, bit by bit, and you didn’t see it coming.

An ex once told me she liked me for who I could be. Ignoring the obvious terribleness of this, it’s who you are that’s important. The good, the bad and the ugly, as they say. Broken and all, we are who we are, with time, we’ll be different, maybe better, maybe less broken in the ways that we consider ourselves broken now. But this journey has no end, just the paths we choose to walk along the way, and who we share those with.