On the ride in, I was thinking about the aggregate “should have a house, be married, have a kid” expectation, or something substantially parallel, that seems to be floating around as of late. I was fucking around with new OKC features recently and saw a question about if you would date someone who was smart but had never accomplished anything. I believe that all depends on what anything amounts to. Which is core to the question here. How important is it to you, or to those whose approval you yearn for, that you graduate high school, college, get married, have kids, da da da. How important is it that your career is successful, or that you help people, or win at sports or something else competitive?

Extrapolating on “I have a way? Is that better than a plan?” I’ve always had the approval of my parents when I’ve asked for it. Has that been enough to keep me from worrying? When I think about relationships and not being in a long term one, I can certainly show that I’ve tried and put a lot of energy into making that work while checking to make sure I’m not settling for something ultimately not right. While certain measurements of my progress may go up and down; socially, financially, my happiness, I can’t look back over any six month period and claim I haven’t substantially grown in some way.

Although, often the ways in which I have grown nobody sees, or few can appreciate. Perhaps I’m just floating on years of built up confidence in my own ability to work out of any rut, further up the climb. Hmm..

3:30am, giggling outside the kitchen window. I put down my chili and walk up to it just wearing my long underwear. Punk girl reaches out her hand through the window standing on the shoulders of a couple of friends, “Hi, I’m Jess.”

The lameness of showing up loud and bothering sleeping roommates aside, I was already awake so it was kind of nice to have friends stop by. I’m tempted to compare it to bike rides though. It’s fun, but how ultimately sustainable is it? In the balance of identity, how many people do I know that are accomplishing meaningful goals, but still stay out drinking all night? It becomes a matter of energy.

As I wrap up my first on-call week for ARC, I’ve been thinking about my drinking habits a little as I’ve been playing with them. I avoided drinking at all for the most part because of being on call, and when I did I tended to have a beer over the course of a couple hours.

A commented recently on the machismo growing up in Texas surrounding eating spicy food. Drinking has that. Bikes. I think about M’s comment about her GPA after a rare bike ride. I feel old. I feel tired of feeling like the only open and communicating person. I know I’m not, and I know I’m just focused on the people that matter, or have mattered to me, and frustrate me because they aren’t.

Chris let us know today that he’s moving out at the end of the year. Nym and Una are moving into The Bucket. Monstersorri has an opening in January. There’s a lot of moving. It feels restless and unsettling. Chris said he’s getting his own place. I think about that, and think about how I’ve ultimately never lived alone. I don’t think that is by accident.

Conversations lately have been about direction, moving on, putting past relationships behind oneself. Everyone seems to struggle with not wanting to lose all of a good thing, but not wanting the commitment of it either. Which feels… ironic?

I’m tired of thinking about identity, specifically other peoples problems with it. I feel like I’m doing most of the right things, but I feel unmatched, isolated by not having intimacy in which someone else is trying as hard. I’m just tired of the energy to return ratio.

Rode up to Fremont to catch some bike kids, ended up talking with S mostly as everyone had or was peeling off. Talked about the great girl-free November, how much energy seems to go into relationships. I mentioned my staying away from girls that may be uncomfortable around me, work, and volunteering as my reasons for not being around so much. I feel good about November. Just a few more days and I’ll reassess those goals and make some new ones for December. Everyone was surprised that I made a 10mi ride (20 RT) to just wander out. I had a beer with S, but nobody was around to pester me to drink so I didn’t have to bring up the excuse that I’m on call for ARC this week. Conversation with S about the girls I’ve given space to, I try not to give anything away. Not that I don’t trust S, I just really try to keep that out of bike rides. I don’t know, give more thought I may have said different things but I played it cautious. S talked about M and I didn’t say much. Yeah, things are fine with M. I guess. I can never tell with her. Or at least they seem fine, she just never tells me if they’re fine.

I think back to two years ago. Dating S, just started at Widemile, busing to work from the Awful Shark. I talked to M for a while tonight. Asked how she was, how the holidays were. She’s not even there. Talking to S tonight complaining about younger girls that think they have it all figured out.

Relationships are tough because there always seems to be something to not work out, but it seems like two people wanting to make it work out is all it would take. It seems like it’s always only one of us.

Sticking my arms like a plane out while riding at night reminds me of the Jared Leto 30 Seconds From Mars video and makes me feel awkward. Funny.

Dad called while I was at an HfH site this week and asked if I was going for volunteer of the year when I told him where I was. I realize the majority of my social group isn’t the volunteering type. I aim to change that.

Watching Star Trek for the second time in two days, I’m both reminded of being disappointed that I didn’t get to watch it with M, and how grown up I realized I’ve become since moving to Seattle. It seems I’ve always had more responsibility than is normal for my age, which has sort of blinded me to the change. Sort of makes me worry a bit about getting to where I’m going without too much cynicism.

And so it goes.

J had interesting things to say about a majority of my recent relationships being with people who were functionally stuck in some lifestyle. It isn’t really a plan over a way issue. I’m inclined to nail it to the wall with a label of perception.

If this isn’t where you expected to be, where did you expect to be? Why aren’t you there? This is a rhetorical question that aligns nicely with the swimming upstream cliché. However, this is not an indication that you should conform and go with the flow either. It’ll just go a lot easier if you stop fighting it.

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.