Winter Storm 2008 here in Seattle. It started in the early morn with something called Thundersnow. Very little happened yesterday as the roads were snowy and icy. Seattle doesn’t get much snow, so it’s pretty slow to react to these situations. Later many of us braved out on bikes to Greenlake for the .83 December Race and the Race of Champions.

I’m a little dissapointed in myself for not having written in a couple weeks, moreso about anything that means anything. As it is, I’ve been pretty busy. My cast is off and I’m down to using a brace sometimes. Most things wrist related are back to normal so I’ve been resolving being stir crazy and been out again more.

I got myself into a bit of relationship mess about a month ago and I suppose I’m still settling from that. Sitting here thinking, I probably haven’t backpeddled as much as I should and I definitely haven’t thought (written) enough in the aftermath. But the anxiety is mostly gone, I bought myself a used Bianchi Volpe, did some “charity” work and some “work work“. I need to do more of the latter I think in my off time. I’m not entirely sure when that is. I leave Sunday for the better part of a week in Maine to see the family.

I had a bit of a conversation with Eric this morning upon getting into the office about people getting uptight and stressed out about the weather. I’m fortunate that nobody gives me a hard time if I come into the office late. Although part of that is from the type of work I do, and part is from having a boss that understands that, a lot of it is because I do work hard and do get work done.

It’s a reminder to not let life get too complicated. I last thought about this while reading The Last Viridian Note. Which is… important…. Which is why I feel at the moment I need to find some more time to not do anything. But when? Not now. Got to get some work done before vacation.

In the midst of emails about breaking up, anxiety, and life being generally hard, gmail gives me this advertisement:

Girls: Just Been Dumped? – ExBoyfriendGuru.net – Get Him *back* in 7 ½ Days Flat. Dirty Psychological “Mind Tricks”.

Fuck you google.

I’m down to 400 comics of cyanide and happiness left. Which means I’ve read over a thousand of them this vacation. I used to try to explain to people about how soda is a “heavy liquid”, but nobody got it. I’m glad someone finally did.

Thanksgiving was fine and all. We somehow had a lot of Ayn Rand discussion, I blame Wendell. So it was funny that “Atlas Shrugged: Updated for the Current Financial Crisis” came through my feeds today.

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is available for download. I haven’t read it yet, but want to soon. In the search for a way for your life to leave a mark on the world, I have pretty strong feelings about technology and the public domain. If you happen to not be familiar with the concept of open source, I urge you to spend some time thinking about it.

I’m all caught up in reading and uploading photos from Thanksgiving to facebook and flickr. So it’s super late, so I don’t know how much I’ll have to talk about at this point.

I’m not as tired as I was when I was reading unfortunately, since it’s late and I should be sleeping. It’s been a very difficult day for me. The worse part about relationships is the risk of hurting someone’s feelings. I don’t take that well. Mother says I agonize because I have a good heart. I suppose. It’s difficult getting to the point where I’ve come to terms with the consequences of my actions. I don’t think I ever can convince myself that the collateral damage of making the right choices is acceptable enough that it doesn’t still bother me. Today’s movie marathon included Serenity, and I think about Mal’s character talking to Shepperd Book at the fire about digging his own holes and it not making sense.

Book: You got a plan?
Mal: Hiding ain’t a plan?
. . .
[Mal mentions that he could have left River behind.]
Book: It’s not your way, Mal.
Mal: I have a way? That better than a plan?

And that’s pretty much where I am. Keep reading that over and over ’till you get it.

Holy crap. I went back to read changing tides to see what I last wrote of consequence… weeks since I posted. Wrist is still broken, I expect months for it to be healed still. It’s bizarre, because I’ve thought so very much since then. The majority of it has been in the form of conversations with people though.

I’ve made many references lately to when I dropped out of high school. It was a pretty hard, radically life changing period from me. I went from following what I belived was the prescribed course of life to coming to terms with simply living.

I’m going through that again, but rather with relationships. I’ve worried where things are going, and how I’m going to know when I get there too much. It’s taken me a lot of hurt to come to start realizing that I need to let myself live in this department as well and let life take it’s course. It’s much harder I think, because I feel so strongly. The cost of the choices feels more painful.

I’m pretty independant, and in high school I had less concern about what others thought and felt about my situation. I wonder if I would feel differently now. Would I worry about my parents feelings? Their worry, or concern, more? Somehow I don’t think so. So it’s tough to evaluate why I’m more apt to feel dismay in the matters of relationships.

The lessons I learned from life about being patient and thoughtful now have to be applied to relationships, and my feelings. I feel like this is a significantly more difficult struggle and likely one with no destination… just a path.

A friend of mine describes herself as an existenialist. Those be fancy fightin’ words Pa?

Existentialism is a term that has been been applied to the work of a group of late-nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.

I’m reminded of saying recently that relationships aren’t something that can be captured solely by a formula.

[the starting point], a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.

Sartre defines angst and despair as the emotions people feel once they come to realize that they are responsible for all of their actions.

There is no pre-stablished morality

This sounds a lot like things I’ve had to say. On Saturday I wrote:

As I find my lack of having made choices steering me in and out of uncertain seas, I have to remind myself that I can hold no fault against any other than my self for the course. You risk getting down on yourself in this realization.

Who knew they’d write a whole bunch of books about what I think and start teaching it to college kids.

While reading some more about Apatheism, I came across an interview with Jonathan Rauch. I identified with it a lot, and followed up with reading Caring for Your Introvert. Which is required reading for humanity.

I would be interested to see the results of this questionnaire. Prerequisites: having taken a Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, and having an OKCupid account [in Seattle] (because that’s what made me realize how widespread poly people are).

1. Are you an introvert, or an extrovert?
2. Are you polygamous or monogamous?

Let’s ignore the “relationships are complicated” and more the “I can only deal with one woman at a time” banter. I was thinking while reading a remark about introverts wanting human contact and company, but not necessarily interaction. Maybe I was reading in to that too much because that’s what I feel. To tie back into what I was thinking about last night; I desire companionship, and while many things affect that there is a strong feeling that it’s more about what is unsaid than what is said.

Today is a day of reading, thinking, watching movies. Some unwinding is needed, because a many things are wound up inside me at the moment. The article speaks of friends falsy assuming something is wrong if you are quiet. When you stack on top of that the idea that with me, nothing is ever wrong, but something is always wrong, I’ve found a way to respond to that question to people’s satisfaction. That is, there are always things on my mind, but they’re not usually the reason I’m quiet. Sometimes I’m just quiet.

It’s been some time since I sat down and thought. Therein lies some of my troubles. What have I been up to? Working and learning, shooting guns with Ry, wandering about the penninsula, there was the awful shark halloween, playing about on farms. Lots of wandering around and staying busy. Distracted? I’m not sure. Spending time with people, doing things, living, but not thinking. It sounds good and all, this living, but some bits have slidden. The wrist is still broken, in a couple weeks we’ll get another xray, after halloween. Mom is settled, with a job managing a recovery house in Tacoma. I’m unsettled. What do I want to be unsettled? Someone asked me recently what I want….

I want to live, to experience. I don’t want to get too caught up in money or capitalism. I want my medical/school/etc debt paid off, to save money to not worry about it, but to keep living fairly inexpensively. I want that to facilitate travel outside of “vacations”, where I’m not on a cruise or a tour, and instead can wander about in leisure. I want to learn to be more comfortable with
more people, to learn of other cultures. I want to keep learning new things, have my jobs be continually more challenging as I continue to get them figured out. I want independence and to continue to not rely on the government or other subsidies to support me, and other services
to take care of my, like fixing my own car. I want laughter, and friends, and random trips to random new places where we don’t come back the same way we left. And the hard part, I want to share all of this with someone by my side.

I forget who I was talking to recently, but I recall discussing where the compromise laid between finding someone who has a similar personality and similar interests. The best, and of course reasonable, answer was a balance of both.  Such a complex thing as relationships can not be widdled down into formulas. Although reading Parkinson’s law gave me an interesting side trip down a comitology/sociology. And fresh lessons? Balance in direction.

As life goes on, I see more and more value in the ingenuity of love getting us through these trials. I try to live life in this band between challenge and peace. There are no problems of men that we cannot solve as we created them. This truth is a reminder that the complexities we face are choices.  Like not making a choice is a choice, we aren’t the victims of troubles but rather the sculptures of them.

Which is a difficult path too. As I find my lack of having made choices steering me in and out of uncertain seas, I have to remind myself that I can hold no fault against any other than my self for the course. You risk getting down on yourself in this realization. It takes me a bit of time letting these bits swirl around to come to terms with them. With a past full of blame, and the slow realization that society completely fails at teaching us the lesson that there is no right and wrong, answers I can settle on take their time to resonate. The blame for that? Relgion? No, well, the source is fear. If there was one lesson that everyone learning that could change the world, I believe it is this one.

Recent events have questioned my intentions. Or at least made me ask myself head-on if I have any idea what they are. I’d like to believe that I’m not wandering aimlessly. I think I have believed that my determination at the core of previous success was somehow going to continue to guide me. In the right light, it’s obvious it’s a choice to make no choices.

Friends laught about Shatner’s album, but I’m reminded of a line from Has Been:

What are you afraid of?
Failure?
So am I

And there it is. As I wonder where others are going I realize there’s no certainty in where I’m headed. Certainty comes not from the economy, the job market, or my retirement savings. Perhaps from the knowledge of who I am? I don’t think I’m particularly lacking there. The missing line is probably in what I intend to do with it, and when I’m going to get around to announcing as much.

I’ve been playing with CSS recently for a side project, BikeAlive. It’s interesting, although the CSS differences between IE and Firefox are just plain stupid. Microsoft is an asshole for putting people in this situation methinks. The desktop publishing aspects, and being able to talk to my Mom about them were interesting. Eventually I figured out that IE ignores margin-top in a div element, but will respect padding-top. Making the change fixed my layout issues.

I watched Son of Rambow tonight. It was cute. I found The Brethren interesting, insomuch that I’ve been thinking lately about right and wrong on a deeper level than previously. After a long hard breakup some time ago I spent a while recovering and contemplating how one decides what’s right and the balance issues with trusting the opinion on specifics of someone you care about. I’ve since come to terms with the fact that there is only a socially accepted right and wrong that comes from compromise and agreement, but not necessarily fact.

Mom is here, and as she meets more people I see anew the reactions of my friends when they see that they can be themselves around my mother and she’s not going to huff or chastise them for their choices. I talked to Matthew yesterday about age a little bit, and he’s commented a couple times about how after a certain point, we’re all adults. Developmentally (social), I think our growth generally slows at some point in our early twenties. I’d be reluctant to advertise ourselves as all being adults, but that’s a product of my definition of being an adult probably requiring more compassion, patience, and thought than you get from the unculled masses.

Brush my teeth, I’ve got letters to mail.

Lots of recent topics to remember.

People often say that actions speak louder than words. Whilst growing up, I was told lots of lessons that didn’t make sense until I actually learned them. One of them amounts to this. I’m much less interested in what people believe than that they’ve thought about what they believe, and consequently what legs those beliefs stand on.

I regularly worry about, well, fitting in. Insomuch as that I worry that I’m not as smart, or as capable, or whatnot as others. What’s of particular interest is that I used to more, and that as time’s gone on, I’ve realize that the level of comprehension that I believed others to be at was always actually quite higher than reality, and where they really were I easily achieved some time ago without realizing it.

I was thinking tonight about the consequences of believing you are awesome. Do you continue to grow or challenge yourself if you somehow believe you are some sort of pinnacle of humanity? Doubtful. So I would figure that the people that question themselves are actually more likely to be the ones achieving much of interest at all. The other’s are probably busy filing software patents (ha!).

Then, I wonder about the difference between people who worry about how awesome they are and those that don’t care. At first glimpse it seems that many that don’t care do so because they do in fact think highly of themselves. But you have to assume that there is a level of [achievable] complacency where one is totally indifferent to their awesomeness.

There’s something to be said about believing you are fallible and maintaining a bar, or goal, higher than your present self evaluation. The trouble is in thinking far too low of yourself, or too high. Once again, like most everything, it’s a question of balance.

Anna has an interesting post and poll about language of love. The poll is difficult like an okcupid question and probably would be more interesting if one could rank them. I communicate my care in many ways and there’s different emotions that come with those actions, but they’re all under the same umbrella.

What is your primary “language of love”? (More than one ok)

Quality time (doing things together or being in the same space)
Communication (verbal or nonverbal)
Physical touch (laying-on-of-hands, touching backs, sex, etc)
Words of affection, praise, or validation
Acts of Service (Doing tasks for people)
Giving gifts to people
None of the above is a “language” that I communicate love in

Quality time forms bonds. The experiences you have are shared and produces a feeling having lived together, in the sense that life is lived, not specifically that you share a house/apartment.

Communication helps you better understand someone, and it’s fundamental to getting something that is bothering you out in the open, where it usually dissapates immediately. At least in my experience… with reasonable people; which admittedly hasn’t always been the case in previous lives.

Physical touch tends to be the most emotional for me. Which is mostly why I vote for the monogamous party. There’s certainly a corner of happiness and contentedness reserved for lying around with someone you love.

Words of affection for me seem to be a product of my feelings. I’ve made inroads at filtering them, as I worry they’ve contributed to making relationships into unmanageable constructs that were doomed to implode in the past. I say things that I feel, and sometimes that’s socially inappropriate, kinda maybe.

I’m always doing things for people, it’s a weakness that’s gotten better as I’ve moved my time towards peopel that can take care of themselves for the most part. I like being useful though, so I don’t mind helping at all.

Gifts, I don’t know about. If there’s anything in this list I’m iffy about it’s gifts. It seems too easy to lose the love and care that should be inhereit in the gift to the material. Mom loves christmas, Dad could care less. I’m in the middle in a convoluted way. Christmas is difficult because people want to know what I need. Well I have everything I need. Oh, then what do I want? Well, at the moment? I don’t know, nothing? It’s odd how hard it is to specify something less than $100 that I want that I haven’t gone out and picked up on a whim.

Also, what’s up? Nothing Really. Now time to work already.