{"id":70,"date":"2008-01-01T21:51:34","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T05:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=70"},"modified":"2008-01-01T21:51:34","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T05:51:34","slug":"watch-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/2008\/01\/01\/watch-yourself\/","title":{"rendered":"watch yourself"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/btmspox\/2136858182\/\"><img src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2398\/2136858182_9ea088731a_m.jpg\" style=\"padding: 5px; float: left\" \/><\/a>Mom says sometimes I should watch myself. Pa has slowly gotten to the point of accepting he&#8217;s an alcoholic. I think it&#8217;s taken him a couple decades. Much like society likes calling herpes cold sores, my dad&#8217;s family likes calling alcoholism &#8220;joe&#8217;s bar&#8221;. Whatever, I guess growing up around it desensitizes you a bit. I forget exactly what the criteria for such things are, but I know I fit the bill of &#8220;binge drinker&#8221; or something. We call it partying, but like I already point out, it really doesn&#8217;t matter what name you call it.<\/p>\n<p>After two nights of drinking, I walked down to the store tonight to clear my mind and take a walk. Somehow I came back with a 24 of PBR and I feel like I shouldn&#8217;t trust myself to say\/write anything. People often talk about alcohol being a depressant. I&#8217;m pretty confidant when I say I can&#8217;t think of when I&#8217;ve ever felt sadder after drinking that before. I hate to link to some crappy webspam like about.com but there&#8217;s a bit <a href=\"http:\/\/depression.about.com\/od\/drugsalcohol\/a\/alcoholanddep.htm\">here<\/a> that touches on this. &#8220;but the evidence suggests that in men alcohol use preceded the depression&#8221;. I don&#8217;t know, doesn&#8217;t make sense in my head.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve spent a couple hours here trying to convince myself to distract myself until it&#8217;s late enough to go to bed. Rather than risk writing something totally irresponsible. Oops. Don&#8217;t forget that posting on the internet is like yelling something out loud in public.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, I&#8217;ve totally forgotten all the personal stuff I was going to write about. Is that a good thing?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve ranted in the paste about women on dating sites making comments about just looking for good honest guys and laughed about how it&#8217;s kind of unbelievable. The best part of the &#8220;dating&#8221; adventure, recent conversations, and ramblings is that I&#8217;ve come out of it all with a pretty good idea of what I want\/need from a relationship and while I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s that complicated I&#8217;m pretty convinced it&#8217;s not going to be easy to come by.<\/p>\n<p>When people&#8217;s standards are things like &#8220;honest&#8221; I can&#8217;t help but feel like these standards are a little broad and not really considered. As I&#8217;ve said, nobody ever says they really want to date a liar, but of course the reality is that it comes down to priorities. How high of a priority is honesty to something like looks\/money\/power\/number of toes\/etc. I guess that&#8217;s the point really, but I like pretending I&#8217;m slow because the first conclusion is more amusing to me.<\/p>\n<p>Of course I often rant about people being &#8220;religious&#8221; about things, or a zealot, or perhaps a better, less religion focused word. When people are all &#8220;omg. THIS!&#8221; I have to shake my head and turn off, because they reek of unreasonableness. I see this most often in religion, but often elsewhere, even &#8220;hippie&#8221; bits like in vegetarians or vegans. It&#8217;s not so much a convincing argument but a statement of how it&#8217;s going to be. And come on, it&#8217;s not like they&#8217;re <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=MDUQW8LUMs8\">Chuck Norris<\/a> or anything and can tell the world how it&#8217;s going to be.<\/p>\n<p>Staying away from stereotypes like saying that you want &#8220;to be treated right&#8221; or &#8220;respected&#8221; in a relationship is a good thing, as these bits are often super duper specific to each of us. I&#8217;ve spent a bit of time parsing out my feelings as part of my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.okcupid.com\/profile?u=btmspox\">okcupid<\/a> profile over the last few months but to add a little bit on to where I ended earlier&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>When I really care I get pretty vulnerable. I feel like that&#8217;s something that kept me from caring or getting excited about things in years past as it was too easy to get hurt when it didn&#8217;t work out the way I wanted. I wonder that now that I&#8217;m more willing to let myself be vulnerable if it&#8217;s the sort of thing I&#8217;ll grow more of skin for, or gain more vision\/wisdom, or just ruin myself ;). On second thought I&#8217;m not sure I really knew how to care, otherwise avoiding it was somehow subconscious. Interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Like the lack of specifics in the summarization of &#8220;honest&#8221;, I feel like saying that I want to find someone that cares about me as being some sort of a trap. As people care in different ways, that&#8217;s obviously something specific to me. As I try to bury old feelings for people while not having any new ones to replace them with, I&#8217;m just left feeling lonely. I know I have friends and family that care, but it&#8217;s not the same. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s simply the physical contact of holding someone close, but I often even feel lonely around people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mom says sometimes I should watch myself. Pa has slowly gotten to the point of accepting he&#8217;s an alcoholic. I think it&#8217;s taken him a couple decades. Much like society likes calling herpes cold sores, my dad&#8217;s family likes calling alcoholism &#8220;joe&#8217;s bar&#8221;. Whatever, I guess growing up around it desensitizes you a bit. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}