What are you doing out here?
I’m dreaming.

For something like six months, I only drank on a couple of occasions. I’m drinking once a week on average now, and I don’t feel like it is a loss. Sometimes, I’m afraid, it does actually solve my problems. At least, going out drinking with friends makes me feel better.

I mentioned to Mom tonight that I felt like I may have come full circle back to feeling pessimistic. What a strange, yet unsurprising, long weekend. She asked if I had any projects. Its actually an impressive list. I love getting to be all, “and that is just what I’m doing in my spare time.”

I give up though. Tomorrow, I’ll start over.

I’m really sorry to be calling so late. I was trying not to call at all.

I have no answer to the opposition of giving space against ensuring nothing is left unsaid.

You’d let someone take care of you? I can’t see it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately; particularly talking with J, which has caused ripples of conversation with friends and family. Its rare, but I definitely let people take care of me. They tend not to try, which is understandable. As K said, I come off as pretty self-reliant.

I really miss being loved and thought about.

I guess that is where the romanticism of wishing for a past love to show up on the doorstep on a rainy day.

Friends tell me that sort of thing really happens outside the movies.

Can I summarize all of one nights thoughts? Not really, too tired. It is a good tired though. So many friends seen tonight. The sweetness of the drunken ones was great and wonderful. Seattle has been good to me.

I talked to K briefly, limited by the loudness of cakearokee, about lunch with Eric. I spoke of the uniqueness of seeing this caring human again after years apart and being grateful for his comments about how I’ve grown.

Scott showed up at the end of the night and asked about how the ladies were. Scott and I have meaningful conversations about that, but I giggle a little about how asking about my love life feels like talking about the weather sometimes. It has been over a month now since K broke up with me. I haven’t dated during that time and I’m not particularly motivated to either. Perhaps it is because we dated for four months, and I had made that willful decision to commit to working on that relationship and seeing where it went. J had made the point that if I was still in love with M there wasn’t room for anyone else. I did commit to trying, and I did try. I told M I wasn’t pessimistic about dating so much as tired. I told Scott tonight that I’ve just been doing other things. M mentioned the virtue of patience, and I guess I’m being patient, because I’m not pessimistic, nor am I indifferent, dating just isn’t a priority for my energy right now. Someone could change that, I’m sure, but I’m without the energy to devote to leading without something to go on.

It’s been years since I’ve seen Eric. Having noticed on Linedin that he was looking for work, I made lunch plans with him for today. We inevitably discussed the demise of our former common employer, and we talked about why I left. It’s interesting to compare leaving there, and leaving my last job, the only two jobs I’ve ever really quit.

I’ll never forget asking Eric to go out to his car to talk and me breaking down because of M. I joked with her a couple days ago, and I’m still measuring that.

I got a letter from my grandparents (fathers side) today. They’ve been doing some cutting on the old family farm, which is a woodlot now, and distributed the profit amongst the family. Meanwhile I’m looking at purchasing a woodlot myself, and I’ve been neck deep in reading zoning codes, forestry management books, and browsing real estate.

Eric and I talked about keeping busy. He had read the index to my website and commented on how much I’ve spread out and put myself out there since I moved here five years ago. It’s hard to remember that person that I was then. I realize I’ve been unknowingly talking a lot lately about finding new paths. Work is relatively interesting, but not really interesting, and more and more the challenges aren’t there. I’m not sure where that is going to take me, but I’m proud of the places it has so far.

My grandfather called me to today to discuss their impending intervention with my father regarding his health and his stubbornness surrounding his inability to care for himself. I can’t talk about interventions without thinking back ten years to when my friends all agreed our friend needed help. Somehow I ended up being the one to bring it up, and felt like a friend on each side of me took a step back when I did, as if I was overreacting.

There isn’t overreaction here though. I’m convinced that the speed at which we approach the end of my fathers life continues to increase. I’ve discussed the lack of my fathers living will or advance directives with others, but today was the first time anyone has asked me if I knew if he had burial plans. In early November when I spoke to MA’s mother on the subject, she brought up how her father had been convinced he was going to die but then lived on for decades. Having met him later in those decades, they were calm nursing home years at the end. There’s more to that. I’ll ask M about it. I thought about this, the slow aging process. I thought about it then, and I’ve thought about it before. I imagined my father stumbling around somewhere on oxygen. As the pace of the deterioration of this health quickens, I expect that less.

G and I chat. She says, “I feel like I can’t do a lot the things i want to do with my life until I’m settled with a partner.” We discuss this, I relate the conversations I’ve had with others about this, particularly with M and how thoughts and feelings have changed since talking to M about it in February of this year. What was some day then, is reading, researching, and exploring the possibilities in earnest today. Making plans.

MA and I chat. She says, “it is really good you have support though.” I wonder. I think about K saying, “i realized i don’t think of you as someone who needs help. whoa.” I feel bad that relationship didn’t work out. I think about MB being glad that I had friends to take care of me. Did I? Did she think so? Or did she not want to feel bad about not giving and loving? K would have been really good for me, in this circumstance, because she cared. She later said, “i guess part of my initial impression of you as the ultimate self-sufficient superperson has stuck around. so. attitude adjustment time. feel free to ask for and expect help from me.” I do miss K, and think she would have taken care of me if I let her. I don’t regret that, I’m okay, with the reality of finding a relationship that is mutual. The pessimism and patience talk.

Honestly, as much support as I may have, I think I rarely use any of it. My vulnerability is controlled. Perhaps that is as it should be. Maybe it shouldn’t be let down like I last allowed with MB.

MA says, “i really believe you avoid regret by having your actions guided by love, as corny as that sounds.” I don’t know what else to say to her. “[you] are trying to do your best by him.”

I got this somewhat recently from V. It meant a lot to me, but I don’t know exactly why yet.

Dewd, okay, this happened a few days ago but I’ve just now got internet and remembered to tell you. But if/when you have kids, you’ll be adorable. I saw this guy who looked like you but a bit older and he was cooing to his baby who giggled and then like, bit his nose (I think the baby was still figuring out kisses) and it was SO FRICKIN’ CUTE I almost died.

Anyway, so if you were ever worried about kids killing your image, heck no. They’ll only help.

I struggling to describe this tide that’s forming.

Some number of months ago I woken up in the morning, and, I wanted to have children with M. I was troubled by that at the time because I couldn’t really articulate it. The significance, in retrospect, was that I wanted it. I am not really used to that feeling. I am much more accustomed to deciding some activity would be enjoyable. I brought it up with M later, still not really knowing what this experience was, and she was quick to point out she had “no intention of bringing any children into this world.” I can’t say I was disappointed, I don’t think I knew what to make of much of it at the time.

I think that people often have a hard time distinguishing between their needs and their wants, while I have the echo of my father being clear about there being a difference from my childhood. Perhaps I have a harder time allowing my desires where most have a harder time going without them. There is certainly much of this in “M vs M,” as I’ve grown to accept the things that I want are going to be unique to me and not necessarily the best I could do by measure of virtue or culture.

I didn’t tell M about my experience because I wanted to go down that road at the time, but because she is meaningful to me, and it was something that had her essence at the core of it.

I recently bought two books for her, or at least, with her in mind; they were meant to be some kind of Christmas gifts but I swayed and decided I’d read them first and go from there. The first was Why We Run, and the second A Year in the Maine Woods. The first came from thinking about her solace in physical activity, and the latter as a way to connect my thoughts about Maine with her. I didn’t realize until I got home that they were both by Bernd Heinrich.

I’ve been reading the second, but decided to abandon it tonight. After about fifty pages the book is more a diary than a story. The pages consist of the birds and plants that Heinrich sees, the history of the land, and the passing of time. Its written very matter of factually, and comes near to being lists written as paragraphs. I set it down, having finished my dinner at a nearby pub, and just sat. The sound of the crowd was something I had never heard before. Why? Not because it was a different consistency, but, I suppose I sat in a way that I hadn’t previously.

A lot has happened during the last week….I think, talking to myself is making feel too alone.

Want / work.

I really want to build a camp. I’ve been wasting hours thinking about it, but then telling myself I should wait a year or two and sell some stock to pay for it. But then I am often feeling like I don’t stop, and I should. My weekends roll into weekdays, and back again. On the upside, it’s nice that my job is great and that can happen. I don’t know. Maybe life is too short to wait.

The section on Love of God in The Art of Loving was perhaps the most moving piece in the direction of God I’ve ever read. Having first read The Road Less Traveled as a teenager, and multiple times since then, I’ve always felt that the chapter on grace was out of place. I wonder if I would feel otherwise if I read it yesterday, or now. Fromm engages the concept of God as something undefinable but through the paradox of defining what God is not. Through the discussion of many subjects the idea is drawn, “… to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.”

In other news. Today was the start of another two week sprint at work. At one point, hours into the planning process, I realized just how much time was spent working. A while ago, sorting through a relapse of disappointment in the ability of educational systems to teach, I was looking at two year or shorter programs. Not really that I thought I could take them, because I’m convinced that the time constraints of these programs won’t ever fit into my life, nor my lifestyle, but I was pondering that. I was interested in some kind of forestry management program, and trying to figure out how you achieved such education without spending two years of your life in school. On one hand, two years isn’t a horribly long amount of time for something you could do for the rest of your life. I looked at the Commercial Driver Training program at South Seattle Community College and wondered what exactly one did for 11 weeks, or 360 hours. As I currently hold a Class B CDL, I was dumb-founded.

Some time after I dropped out of high school I was considering what to do with my life now that I had chosen to take responsibility for it. Eastern Maine Technical College (EMTC), now known as Eastern Maine Community College (EMCC), has a new computer networking program coming up and I was planning on taking that. Since it was new, it wasn’t until late in the planning process that I got a hold of a program syllabus. I was pretty disappointed to find that the fourth quarter of the second year would bring us around to discussing the TCP/IP model. At the time, I was reading about that in TCP/IP illustrated. This was good stuff, but seemed far from the pinnacle of two years of education. In retrospect, as I’ve now taught dozens of peoples about networking, they were doing it wrong and this was definitely a sign of failure.

What could I do with 360 hours? The point is a lot. I can’t sit still, not for long.

Spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming.

When I read my email on my phone in the morning, it makes getting out of bed and sitting down at my computer to read my email a bit disappointing.

Oh, hello there Monday. Are we going to build some awesome today?

My father listens to NOAA weather radio every day. I have a bookmark in Delicious for the NWS Area Forecast Discussion (AFD) for Seattle. This is how times change.

Sleep has been strange and my “positional vertigo” is still worse after sleeping than any other time, although relatively innocuous compared to the strength of symptoms the first day. As I continue reading The Art of Loving I paused and looked at my over my white-board. At one point I captured a quote from the television show House where Cuddy says to House, “I love you. I wish I didn’t but I can’t help it.” I’m tempted to spare the explanation of the circumstances, but I realize they’re somewhat relevant in a moment. I think I wrote the quote down because I identified with struggling with who I had strong feelings for. It hasn’t been for the most convenient or, more specifically, those who I’ve felt have had good relationship qualities like strong communication skills, reasonableness, and patience.

In House, Cuddy convincingly tries to date a man who is reliable and would make a “good” father for her child. He is the “good” things that House is not. Yet, in the end, or at least at the end of the season I watched, she leaves him for House. Perhaps because drama retains viewers and viewers sell advertisements, but I often think there is a “Star Trek” kind of humanity in good television. When I had saved the quote, I identified with being frustrated with having little control over who I had strong feelings toward, but tonight while reviewing the white-board I realized that there was a much larger commonality.

I’ve had a change of heart lately, or perhaps, a decision has been made about my life hence-forth. I’ve roughly labelled it pessimism, but mostly because that term is swooping and is easily at hand. I’ve had great conversations about the importance of finding someone who fills a good deal of the roles I’m looking for in a partner. Yet, I’ve realized those are more, intangible. More so, they are niceties and not deal-breakers. It is funny to consider a checklist of what I think a person should be like, since I’m mostly indifferent to these traits being particularly important otherwise. I suppose that is significant. As I’ve dated women who I consider intelligent, caring, and motivated, those who have been well balanced and whose lives aren’t all that different from mine (although, hmm, I do feel so alone still in ways. That’s worth considering further.), I still haven’t felt great about the relationships. This has been framed as “I shouldn’t be dating people I should be friends with,” lately. So my change heart is that I am no longer convinced that finding a great partner is a matter of finding a great person measured by socially ideal traits. I have. They were all great. It wasn’t, apparently, right.