I hate to be a downer, but hey, there are probably enough things in your life to function as uppers right now, right? Plus, as far as the other purpose of my journal—recording how I feel—this ought to go there.
I slept right through midnight. I actually set my alarm for 23:30, and it went off and everything, but there just seemed to be no point to getting up. I half-wonder if the reason I've been feeling so lonely lately is to remind me what a stupid holiday this is.
It occurs to me that New Year's has never exactly been a joyous occasion to me. There was the one time at Ed's house, when his mother unplugged his computer because in her opinion his music was too loud. There was the year I told Alison that I loved her. There are all the years I've stayed home alone, and all the years I've gone to First Nights and felt alone anyway.
I did miss my chance to listen to the Final Fantasy Theme at midnight, which I've done for New Year's almost every year for a long time, but what would the point be, anyway?
Here's to another lousy millenium.
Fry, Space Pilot 3000, Futurama
Wiki page for this journal entry
On New Year's, I did eventually end up listening to the Final Fantasy Theme in the morning. Mostly I did it not to attempt to recreate what would have been the midnight experience so much as to make sure it was the first song I'd hear in 2004, since I'd probably forget about it if I put it off. The rest of New Year's Day I didn't feel so awful, but numb and bored, with occasional spurts of discomfort. By Friday I was pretty much better.
What happened to me on New Year's is something that has happened to me before. I experience it as what I would normally describe, in my own head, as “loneliness”, but is more accurately described as the feeling that no one cares about me. This can be (although is not necessarily) triggered by being alone, with no one bothering to call or IM or email or come visit me. This is particularly true on what are supposed to be festive occasions—as I noted in my previous entry, New Year's tends to do this to me pretty often, but Valentine's Day and my birthday are also very frequent triggers.
The thing that makes this phenomenon somewhat more complex and interesting is that it can just as well happen when I am with other people, even people I consider very close friends. For it to happen when very close friends are present, there pretty much have to be other people there as well. Generally, I feel that I am being ignored or considered unimportant by my close friends. This is the same phenomenon as in the case when I'm physically alone because 1) it feels the same, and 2) the root cause—desire to feel like someone cares about me—is the same.
Anyway, I don't know how to solve this. What other people would consider part of the problem, and what makes their advice largely useless, is that I have no desire to become the kind of person who doesn't feel this way when presented with the situations I am. Indeed, I have a strong active aversion thereto. So, I guess this, too, qualifies as bitching, albeit at a much more abstract, intellectual level than does my previous post.
I went up to Charlie's a little earlier this past weekend than I typically have, arriving there around noon on Saturday. (I considered going on Friday, but I felt too tired to drive 70 miles at that point.) One thing we did while there was exchange (well, open) Christmas presents. I was nervous that Charlie would find my present to be inadequate, and stalled for a bit because of that, but recognized it as such and remarked upon it, and after that stalled only a little bit more. (This is part of a long-term project I have to be less evasive. Although it does concern other people sometimes, this really has to start in my own head, because there have been a lot of times I've practiced what Ayn Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged as “blanking out”, and I believe it's had pretty severe deleterious effects on my mental function.)
My present for Charlie was a bottle of red Zinfandel which I had bought in Maine, while visiting Betsy there (the clerk there had described it as a better version of something sort of common). Charlie bought me a bottle of ice wine and a copy of Final Fantasy IV … err, that is Final Fantasy IV Easytype … well, actually, Final Fantasy II US is I guess the most accurate. This latter was in an enormous box, and Charlie was correct in his assertion that I wouldn't have guessed it in a hundred tries. While it may not be the most useful gift possible, it might well be literally the most sentimental. That first copy owned by Joe Martin changed my life. And, as Charlie said, it just seemed kinda wrong for me not to have it.
Charlie and I discussed love / Love some more, and realized that we actually agreed a lot more than we had thought we did, due to terminological differences and an arguably poor effort on my part to explain myself. See the Love Wiki page for further details.
Towards the end, we talked about image, or how one attempts to project oneself (mostly to people one does not yet know; with people with whom I feel comfortable, I prefer to just “be myself” rather than trying to “put on a show”). I've traditionally not given this a lot of thought, and unfortunately this has resulted in my having a reputation which does not necessarily align with my goals (and on an individual level, a perception that I am hard to approach, which may in turn be tied in to my problem with loneliness). I still have an emotional aversion to thinking about this at all, honestly. It seems like people should just recognize me as I am … somehow. Then, the ones with whom I want to deal would know to approach me, and I'd rather drive the others away, anyway. Still, it is clear that this won't work, and that people ludicrously overvalue first impressions in a way that's pretty much impossible to work around. So, I may have to give more thought to this.
One of Ratha's clients is getting cranky, because it's been something like half a year and her site hasn't been set up. So, she and I need to get something up and running as quickly as possible. With that in mind, while at Charlie's, I spent a good amount of time IMing with Ratha, working together to set the server up. There's still quite a bit of work to do, and the timeframe is tight, but we made good progress over the weekend, getting Interchange (the open-source e-commerce package we'll be using) up and running on the server.
Wiki page for this journal entry
Wednesday after work, I drove over to Ed's house to pick him up.
We didn't have anything in particular planned to do, so Ed suggested that we go to Wolf Road. Once there, I chose Borders over Barnes and Noble, since it seems to just be … better.
Since Ed had just read Breakout the previous night, in one go, our conversation largely focused on that. In fact, we mostly used Borders as just a place to talk, although I did end up buying a book of short stories by Philip K. Dick and used the availability of copies of Atlas Shrugged to show Ed a particular passage (the one where Hank Rearden is introduced, which while kind of cool, is also overdone to the point of levity), and Ed bought a Neil Gaiman novel.
Ed liked Breakout, but at the same time he did see some substantial flaws in it. I actually think that Ed's feedback may have been more useful than either Charlie's or Ratha's. With Charlie, I get a sense that there was so much raw appreciation that it was hard to look at things with a critical eye. Or perhaps it's just that he didn't want to, which is perfectly fine with me, but does mean that he's less able to tell me what's wrong with the story.
With Ed, on the other hand, he grasped the very basic fact that this is an important book, and the fundamental reason why, but still saw the flaws—was, perhaps, unable to avoid seeing them. Indeed, much of the advice he gave me was immediately answered with “yup, I already plan to fix that” (which was still helpful, as it confirmed I wasn't going crazy or something). I have a feeling that this attitude may be influenced not only by Ed's basic nature but by the fact that he, too, wrote a novel recently (and somehow managed to do almost all of it over a span of six days or something—I envy that level of dedication to a single purpose, which I myself have never been able to muster). I tried to offer comments on From the Notebook of Jerry Finch when appropriate (one distinct disadvantage of Ed's title compared to mine is that I had to look it up, at least this time, although I'm sure eventually it will be imprinted on my memory), but this was much harder, since it had been about a month since I read it. I offered to re-read it and do the analogous thing for Ed's book one day while I was visiting Pittsburgh, and Ed seemed to like the idea.
Ed also managed to notice a few things in Breakout that I hadn't known were there (minor spoilers for Breakout, look at the HTML source of this page to read):
I told Ed that Breakout is a very “iceberg” kind of book (most of it is hidden below the surface), and that I intend to retain that attribute though all of the editing that I do, but I was genuinely surprised that there were things in there I hadn't known about.
Ed also suggested that I show the book to someone who didn't know me as well as the people who had read it so far. One specific reason for this (although not the only one) is that he found the places where my characters were expressing emotions to be a bit contrived, but he thought that this might just be because he knew me and my emotional style so well that when he read those parts, he immediately thought “oh, here's Kenn expressing an emotion” and that drained it of its meaning. Now, while I do think there is some value in having people who don't know me read my book, and I do intend for that to happen at some point, it's hard to know just how much value it would have, because if someone didn't get the fundamental point of my book—which I think is not only possible but likely—they'd spend all their time criticizing trivialities, quite possibly in such a manner that if I took all of the their suggestions, I would compromise the basic value of Breakout.
Spurred on by this, I did later start working on my outline for Breakout and on comments on what needs to be changed, but that comes outside the main timeline of this description.
After buying our respective books, Ed wanted to go to Dunkin' Donuts, so we did. There, Ed said he didn't understand why I so vehemently advocated that he give drugs (particularly caffeine and alcohol) a serious try. I apologized and said that it was an error of judgment on my part. I do think he could benefit from them, but I tend to overestimate the magnitude, and if he can get along without them, then that's fine.
I forget exactly how this idea came up, but somehow I ended up asking Ed whether he'd mind going to a liquor store. I think the purpose was because he didn't know what gin was like, and I wanted to show him, and didn't mind buying a bottle of gin for the purpose. Ed didn't mind going, and even said he'd try a drop or two, reminding me that his opposition to drugs is far, far different than mine used to be.
There was a cop at the liquor store we went to the entire time we were there. As Ed commented later, “they must get held up a lot”. I bought a bottle of port, as I'd had some the previous weekend at Charlie's and thought it was very good. Then it was time to pick out some gin. I told Ed which varieties I already had, and said I'd prefer not to buy one of those. There weren't too many others, and both Ed and I were being indecisive, but having fun, talking to one another. The clerks, particularly the female one, were giving us evil eyes. She probably thought we were gay, and was certainly a very poor employee. Nevertheless, Ed and I didn't allow her to throw us out of our grooves, and eventually ended up getting a bottle of Leyden Dry Gin.
Ed said that he could at least see why people would like gin, unlike the vodka he had tried earlier, though he still found gin merely unrepulsive rather than especially attractive.
There being seemingly nothing to do in Albany, I just started driving. We eventually ended up driving all the way to Coxsackie on 9W, then back to Ed's house on the Thruway. While driving, we continued to talk.
We discussed kung fu, pursuant to Ed's comment on how he had been slacking over the vacation. I talked about how I felt bad for having given up on it so easily, and how now every time I see Marc Black I feel bad again because it reminds me of what a failure my attempt at kung fu was. This morphed into a discussion of the body in general. I said to Ed that it seemed odd to me that given that he thinks in an earth-based manner, that he wouldn't think of his body as a tool, to be manipulated by drugs once he understands how they function as long as he decides that they benefit him. Ed responded that that was actually an airy way of thinking in his opinion, and that in an earthy way of thinking, it wasn't that the body was a tool, it was that the body was him. This was immensely enlightening, because I've often had some trouble understanding how earthy thinking works.
Eventually I dropped Ed off at home. It had started snowing in Albany, and I had to drive slowly for a while, but about half-way home, I drove out of the snow, and got home at a semi-reasonable hour.
Wiki page for this journal entry
I seem to have acquired another reader on LiveJournal. (The user-agent of their RSS robot tells me so.) If you'd like to introduce yourself, I would appreciate it. My Wiki is not intended to be a closed system where only people I know closely (or at all) feel free to post.
Of course, if you don't want to introduce yourself, that's fine too.
Ever since NaNoWriMo, really, I've had very little energy. This is not so bad on a strictly physical level, as caffeine can mostly compensate and my demands on my body are not all that stringent anyway, but my mind hasn't really been working the way I'd like it to. I find it easy to put off tasks, and when I try to focus, my thoughts are often clouded.
I find it very difficult to keep myself internally motivated. A few factors are coming together to produce a somewhat heightened level of external motivation right now, which is good, but the whole thing is a mess. I wish I had some way to maintain a high-energy level of existence, but nothing seems to work. I eat only when I'm near-starving, never exercise, and find myself tired or inattentive or both most of the time.
I've been bothered by this lately.
Relations with Charlie have been a little strained because of this. My impression is that although both of us want to deal with this on a rational level, emotional factors are getting in the way.
I discussed with Ratha that I think that what Ed said may have been even more generalizable / deeply true than I at first realized it to be. Being that I am a Pisces and my fundamental nature is watery, I do not think of the watery parts of myself (emotion, essentially) as something to be manipulated and mastered, but rather as me, as the core constituents of my identity, and thus sacred, not to be defiled by treating them as mere tools.
It seems that this differentiation—of being an element vs. using it as a tool, and that these two strongly interfere with one another—is probably generally applicable, but I'll have to keep seeing how it works in more cases to be sure. It has already produced useful results, though.
Even aside from my low energy of late, I would probably be somewhat overstressed at the moment, due to working roughly 1.5 jobs. Ratha's client has been getting a little testy about not having her site set up, so we've clarified what exactly needs to be done and when. Ratha wanted me to take over the site entirely, so that she could pick up another project, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that, because I'm sort of overwhelmed right now in a lot of ways, and I'm not willing to take it over unless I could promise, with certainty, that I would be able to complete it in time.
I spent most of the weekend working on this site. For most of the weekend, I was very worried about whether it would be possible to get things to the state they need to be by Saturday, when Ratha's client has been promised that she will have something to work with. This wasn't due so much to there being a massive amount of work to get done as to the fact that I seemed to be spinning my wheels a lot of the time, while Ratha worked on other stuff. But last (Sunday) evening, I managed to figure a few things out, and now it looks like the next task, at least, just needs to be done rather than also needing a lot of figuring-out-what-needs-doing (which has been the main problem).
I told Ratha last night that if this works out somehow, she will owe me forever. I said it as a joke, but I was only half-kidding.
I seem to have gained the ability to maintain friendships without letting them slip into dependence.
Well, I shouldn't say that I've gained the ability, because that implies that it's under conscious control. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I've noticed that several of the relationships I have now fall into the category of non-dependent friendship. The other day Mark ICQd me, and we talked. I had barely exchanged two words with Mark since we graduated, but it still seemed natural and friendly. I felt like Mark understood me—at least, well enough to be able to deal with me in an acceptable manner—and I understood him.
I'm planning to see Mark (and Mitch) when I visit Pittsburgh. I think it will go well. I would have liked to see Mark last time, but it never ended up getting organized. Mark really doesn't like to be interrupted and puts forth little effort to make himself available via realtime communications media (IM or phone; he also doesn't check his email all that often), though he also doesn't actively avoid them. It looks like it should work out this time, though.
Something similar seems to have happened with Laura. Her communications (whether email or IM or LiveJournal posts or the phone or visits in person) always make me smile, often very broadly, but I don't feel dependent on her at all. She's just a constant bright spot of sunshine to which I can return now and then.
I wonder if my need to be dependent is generic. What I mean by that is that although I seem to need a certain amount of dependence-implementing behavior, it also seems that that need can be temporarily satiated by a certain level of input, and then I don't feel the need to act that way towards other people. This is kind of strange, but I actually think it might be right. (I apologize if that paragraph was more confusing than enlightening; perhaps I should have capitalized Dependent, since I might be using it in a proprietary sense.)
I'll know I've won when I'm able to think of them together and have it not bother me.
Or will I have lost?
Identity is a complicated thing.
Do I really want people to be unhappy in the sphere of ultra-generalized romance? (Generalized to such a point as to include physical contact of a non-sexual nature, conducted for non-sexual pleasure, with any sexual connotation consisting solely in the mind of the participants—perhaps even only one of them.) It almost seems as if I do. My rational side tells me that if I do feel that way, it would be a vicious, antisocial, evil feeling—but, on the other hand, also that evading it would just implement a pattern which has had nothing but bad results in the past.
When I first read Ayn Rand's statement in Atlas Shrugged that evasion was the root of all evil, I thought that her statement was ridiculous as well as false. Now I'm not so sure. Every problem of import in my life seems to have had evasion as a necessary if not a sufficient component.
I just had lunch with my mother. I tried out a very different way of interacting with her than I have in the past, one of total non-appeasement and honesty. I tried to express to her that I am a person of exceptional value and ought be treated as such (and furthermore that I am in part incapable and mostly unwilling to deal with her in any other manner), but I don't think she really understood what I meant by “person of exceptional value”. Unfortunately, I think this is a logic problem rather than simply a matter of words—I think my concept of exceptional value is unknown to her at a fairly basic level. I still hold out some small hope that she will be able to understand it eventually, and advised her that reading Atlas Shrugged might help her get there. I guess I'll see what happens.
Despite this, I found lunch fairly enjoyable, with some interesting discussion, though I'm not sure the same is true for her. It's kind of strange that even though I think of exceptional value as partly consisting in faithfulness to one's state at the moment (an absence of evasion as concerns the self, essentially), I felt like I was outside of my head for much of the time we were talking. I'm not totally sure what it means. It might just be that it feels very alien to attempt to deal with my mother as an actual human being, rather than a (relatively simple) pattern of a certain type.
(Ratha, you might want to pay attention to this. If you're making any kind of schedule (and yes, I know you aren't my secretary :-), I'd like it to include these items.)
I'm not at all opposed to anything that isn't on this list, and in fact I may well have forgotten something critical. I just figure that if I list these items, there will be a better chance that all of them happen.
Less than two weeks.
Wiki page for this journal entry
You might think, from the obvious travesties inflicted upon the rights of American citizens in the 20th and the 21st centuries, that the Constitution and its amendments were too poorly written to protect our liberty. Well, I have a perfect example of how it's not the Constitution's fault—our courts have actually become perverted to such an extent as to apply the English language not only incorrectly but actually self-inconsistently. Allow me to illustrate.
First, in United States v. Miller (307 U.S. 174 (1939)), Justice McReynolds wrote in the opinion of the US Supreme Court that
[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
(http://www.guncite.com/journals/dencite.html)
This ruling is kind of questionable in the first place. Allow me to quote the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
There are a couple of well-known semantic issues with gun-control arguments based on the first half of this sentence:
However, let's ignore these issues for now. What I do want you to take not of is that this sentence is written as a pair of statements, although the first is not written as an independent clause. That is, it may well be false that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state as of 2004, but this has no bearing on the second statement. But, the court said that it did. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that somehow, despite the logic of the 2nd Amendment, they were right.
This rule was then expanded (arguably in nonsensical fashion) in Cases v. United States (131 F.2d 916 (1st Cir. 1942)) and United States v. Tot (131 F.2d 261 (3rd Cir. 1942)). So, regardless of the logic or lack thereof of any of the decisions, this is the law of the land, and it's well established. The first clause, not joined grammatically to the second in such a way as to make the meaning of the latter dependent on the meaning of the former, in the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution, has nevertheless been held to condition in a fundamental way the meaning of the second clause.
Now, allow me to quote from Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
The Congress shall have power […] [t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries[.]
See the word “by” in the middle there? That makes the second clause restrictive. Congress is given the power to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts”, but only by “securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”—they can't do it some other way, like giving the authors and inventors titles of royalty (which is specifically unconstitutional anyway, hence makes a good example). And, likewise, they are given the power to “secur[e] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”, but only to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”—they can't do it for some other reason. This is basic English, and is a clear case of logical dependence of two things on one another. The Constitution specifies both a goal and a method here. Congress is only empowered to accomplish one by way of the other, not either of them in isolation.
Given the holding on the 2nd Amendment, we would expect that, a fortiori, Congress' powers as regards copyrights, patents and trademarks would be limited. So how can it possibly be logically consistent that in Eldred v. Ashcroft (Supreme Court Docket No. 01-618; can't cite it correctly, not published yet), the Supreme Court held that the “limited times” wording is not a substantive limit on Congress' power?
To me, this proves that while the Supreme Court may throw liberty and the Constitution a bone once in a while, they are willing to interpret things in a manner which is not only questionable but flat-out inconsistent to serve their own political agendas. And that's just sad. If we can't count on only nine people, extensively trained in the law and selected by a rigorous standard, to uphold its plain meaning, what sense is there in saying we have a rule of law in the United States?
Wiki page for this journal entry
I wonder if it's a moral condemnation of me that when Simple Plan came up in my playlist, not only did I not feel tempted to skip it (it's still on), I've found that almost every song deeply resonates with me right now.
I think it might be.
Wiki page for this journal entry
Tick tick, tick tick; tick tick, tick tick.
The Universe moves like clockwork. Most people never even realize this. But, if one gets really close to it, one can start to faintly hear it. And once one hears it, trying to march to the beat of a different drummer is not evil; it's just incorrect. I think that the Universe wants one—wants me—to succeed. The ticking is not the Universe trying to threaten one into conformance. If anything, it is the Universe trying to tell one how things will work anyway so that one can take advantage of them. And when one fails to do so, the punishment is, more often than not, perfectly suited to the crime.
In particular, I am amazed at:
3.5 days—Pittsburgh. 4.5 days—Hoobastank, P.O.D, Story of the Year, Linkin Park.
Thanks, God. I'll try to remember that I owe you one.
Wiki page for this journal entry
Strange game—the only winning move is not to play.
—WarGames
Wiki page for this journal entry
Hehe, okay, Ratha, you kind of asked for it, right?
Wiki page for this journal entry
You can't have a fire if you have nothing to burn.
—Marc Black
Wiki page for this journal entry
Too much to write about. I am giving in to the fact that this entry will not adequately describe the events in it. Maybe it will be enough to remind me to write more about them when I have more free time or energy, though, and in any case something is better than nothing.
The entire drive to Pittsburgh, I was consciously aware of the fact that I had to act to preserve my life. I kept my speed down the whole time. I didn't really run into any bad weather until about half way through, and got in around midnight.
Ratha looked much different than I remembered her looking—much cuter, with a hat decorated with a cloudy sky, and longer hair. She helped me get into the parking lot and we went upstairs and started talking. The conversation was good, and lasted until about 5, but the whole time I was consciously holding back from touching her, until eventually I explicitly brought up the issue and she sat down beside me. We ended up sleeping in the same bed. I felt very fiery, like everything was going perfectly according to plan.
Saturday William and Ren arrived. We picked up William at the airport and Ren met us back at Ratha's place. I felt like Ratha's attention was sort of unpleasantly divided, and in turn was sort of unfairly demanding on her, but mostly managed to shove it aside. We went to the tattoo parlor for William to get a tattoo based off of a picture he took several years ago. The experience was informative as to what getting a tattoo actually entails, at least. Then we went to dinner, and then to the party.
My experience at the party was truly unique. It was not at all the “normal” party experience, I think, nor was it similar to Jammy Jam. In some ways, it was the polar opposite, because there were a good number of People of Exceptional Value there—Ratha, Ed, Laura, and Marc Black. (And me, of course, but I wasn't really interested in interacting with myself, as that wouldn't make me feel like I wasn't being ignored.)
What repeatedly happened was that I would have some positive interaction with someone or some group, but then it would die off and I would find myself sitting there alone and depressed. Instead of letting that continue indefinitely or just leaving or anything, though, I would always eventually realize what I was doing and breakout of that pattern by physically moving myself to another location and finding some other worthwhile person or people with whom to interact.
The single most impressive of these experiences, to me, was clearly Marc Black (my last journal entry's quote comes from one of our conversations that night). I can't remember why I was moping before that, but I immediately decided “I am now going to talk to Marc”. It was totally strange, because the aversion that I had expected to have to interacting with him—that I have had every time I've seen him since I quit kung fu until now—was just totally not there. He remembered my name, and he confirmed my gut-level belief in him as a Person of Exceptional Value, as someone who just fundamentally gets people and the world, completely, and even though in retrospect it seems obvious to me, I still find myself in near-total disbelief that I was able to admit that.
After the party, we (that being Ratha, William, Ren, and me) went back home, dropping Ed and Rachael off on the way. When we got back, I pulled Ratha aside and asked her a couple of things.
First, at the very end of the party, I had seen Ratha kiss Tommy. I had forced myself to watch the whole time, rather than allowing myself to be evasive, though I had expected to feel awful—but instead, it didn't bother me. But I wanted to ask Ratha what it had meant. Her explanation was sort of complicated, but the jist of it was that it was not really a romantic kiss.
The second thing was whether we could sleep in the same bed that night, which she was okay with. When we woke up in the morning, though, we discussed the potential for a romantic relationship between us—she didn't think it would work out. She sees the purpose of a romantic relationship as to provide a complement for oneself, and she doesn't think that I can provide the stability that she needs, as we're both lacking in self-generated stability (and I have even less of it than she does).
Sunday morning was brunch. It was tolerable as far as I was concerned, and I was able to participate in the conversation somewhat, but Ratha seemed totally withdrawn. I tried to help involve her a little bit, and she responded to what I said, but never really developed any dynamism of her own, and explained to me later that she really had felt pretty bad at that time.
Later, during kung fu class, she called me from an elevator and told me that she didn't think she could go to the concert, because she felt too drained, and also mentioned she was worried we would get stuck because of the situation with my door locks. I said that we could take her car, and that I would drive. I told her that we'd decide for sure when she got back.
When Ratha got back, I led her inside (Ren was asleep) and gave her her Christmas and (original) birthday presents—a calendar of the Tao and the first printed copy of Breakout. Then she totally broke down and started crying, for complicated reasons that I still don't totally understand. Basically, she was sad that there was beauty in the world that would be missed, and that there was nothing that could ever be done to make up for it. In the middle of this she told me that she was not romantically interested in me, which I calmly accepted, even as I sort of knew that I was just making things easy for myself in the short-term and that at some point, this would have to feel like crap. I helped her as much as I could, and also raised the question of whether she would be able to go to the concert.
Ratha finally agreed to try to get to the concert, though I think more because I seemed to want to go than because she wanted to. We drove for a while, but the driving conditions were just too bad, and though I probably would have pushed through, I also said to Ratha that if she ever wanted us to stop, all she had to do was ask, and that was what we ended up doing. We went to a hotel and talked, and eventually she wanted to go to sleep.
Ratha was not comfortable with us cuddling that night, because she felt it would increase my degree of romantic attachment to her, and she didn't think that was healthy. Around 3:30 in the morning, I woke up and for quite a few minutes lay in bed thinking about how it felt like my blood sugar was low, but I didn't care enough to get up to treat it. I finally got up and did a blood test, but it actually wasn't low. I lay there in bed, looking at Ratha a lot of the time, and thinking about how she would be better off if I didn't exist and how I seriously wanted to die, but it never reached the level of any kind of specific action.
Eventually somehow I fell asleep, and when I woke up the next time I actually did have low blood sugar, although this time I didn't question it, I just went to the soda machine and bought some soda (the way I know it was real low blood sugar is that when I did a blood test several hours later, it was fine). Then I had an idea about cuddling that I wanted to express to Ratha, and I formulated it, but I didn't want to wake her up to say it.
I told myself I would absolutely wait until 9:40 before doing anything that might have the effect of waking her, because 940 was the number I'd had to count to while standing outside of her apartment after kung fu waiting for her to show up before she did. True to plan, she woke up at some point in the 9:30s. I told her with suitable qualifiers that I didn't think snuggling necessarily had to lead to increased romantic attachment (although I admitted that I could, again, just be manipulating things for the sake of unadmitted goals) but that I viewed it as an expression of extreme value and that I wanted to feel at some visceral level like I was able to protect her.
On the way home, we discussed a number of things, but they mostly centered around an examination of Earth and why it's both necessary and problematic for both of us. Through the examination of a number of aspects of my life, such as my lack of ability to maintain habits, my undervaluation of travel and inconsistent valuation of money, and my appraisal of stability as purely deadening and evil, it became evident to me that in fact, I have a much larger problem with Earth than I had even realized, though only recently had the symptoms become so obvious (manifested most blatantly in my inability to eat a sufficient amount to adequately nourish myself without feeling strong urges to vomit) as to be almost impossible to ignore.
It came out that for both Ratha and I, Earth is perhaps something to be sought at least partly from external sources. Ratha explained that the reason a romantic relationship with me would not work out for her is that it would be too unstable, which largely boils down to my lack of Earthiness. She mentioned without specific intent at one point in the conversation that she loved universities because they gave a stable grounding to flights of the mind, and I immediately inferred from this what perhaps should have been obvious to me—that going further than I have in academia could be a tremendous stabilizing influence on me without being something that holds me back. At this point, I'm really seriously considering applying to grad school. There are two things about it that worry me. First is that even though I've had the insight, I could lose it. I know there have been times when I've known important things in the past but then they've kind of dropped on the floor when I enter a less dynamic environment, such as will be the case when I go back to Albany. The other problem is that I'm worried that even the application process will take enough energy that I won't be able to fuel it purely by Fire, but will actually require a certain amount of ritual and centeredness—Earth—in order to get this far. Later Ratha and I discussed that even given my aversion to Earth, it really doesn't seem like I can get by with almost literally none of it in myself, deriving it all from outside sources, like I am right now. So, I think I'm going to try to introduce more Earth into my thinking, but it's going to be tricky. Old habits die hard, and at an innate level I think I still consider a lot of Earthy traits evil. And I don't really think that's going to change, completely, but it does seem that a certain amount of stability and groundedness is necessary in order to make high levels of achievement sustainable for me.
We also talked quite a bit about astrology, and I mentioned how given the last couple of months, it totally makes sense that my moon sign and my ascendant are both Aries, even as it seemed a completely mystery not all that long ago. We looked at my natal chart (no descriptions, just a list of what planets are in what house and so forth) and a lot of the interpretations we were able to derive really did seem to make sense regarding me.
Ren decided not to go to the KGB meeting, so just Ratha and I went. Despite the presence of many unknown faces, the KGB is still the KGB, and still a force for good in the world. But I honestly no longer really feel myself a part of that force; rather, I view it as an ally, alongside me rather than above me. (Universal persondom, or at least the extension of persondom to certain entities that it clearly makes sense to approach as persons (such as sub-selves or social organizations) is starting to seem intuitively right to me.)
The meeting was quite funny, with a successful motion near the end to ban Ed from further usage of nouns that meeting (not including pronouns or gerunds); Ed was sort of unsuccessful at complying therewith. I did keep getting distracted by thoughts, having my “head up in the clouds” so to speak, but I would relatively quickly notice it and start to pay attention to the actual things happening around me.
Ratha told me later that she usually talked to Ed after meetings, but this time Ed was making up to Rachael for mistakenly referring to her as Rebecca during the meeting (this being one of the things that led to the ban on Ed's usage of nouns). So, Ratha and I took off and went home to pick up Ren and go out for food.
We applied some sort of complicated rational process to choose where to go for food, which eventually resulted in our arrival at La Fiesta, a Mexican restaurant. I ordered fajitas which I was not only unable to finish, but of which I actually brought home significantly more than I ate while there. The conversation there and on the way back largely involved the elements, astrology, and their application to Ren in particular, as to Ratha he seems a very airy person, but his sun sign is Taurus. I tried to extract as much data as I usefully could about what makes him tick in the limited time we had, though I'm not sure how successful I was.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morning | K: Laura R: Work |
Work | sleep | bagels & paper | |||
| Afternoon | KGB | Work | Work | Firing range? | Tattoo? | K - bye R - KF |
|
| Evening | Plan | Work | Drink | R: Shaolin K: Laura/M&M? |
Sushi Movie? |
something special. |
Wiki page for this journal entry
Kenn Hamm
For copyright and other information, click here.
Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:27 2008