The time is about: 3.14 15 54/60. Happy Pi day!
Category: General
“Whatever, just calculate something.”
The new year brings along with it a new lifestyle. Details at 11.
Probably all in the mind
This is manifestly par for the course, but I recently found myself starting to retreat into my head again in an attempt to process a wide range of feelings. That isn’t to say these are particularly hurtful or negative feelings—you know, about relationships and intimacy and insecurity—just that they’re very intense and demand some attention.
While retreating into a shell often works out (perhaps after some turmoil), there are times when I concede that I just can’t do it alone. I lack the life-experience and a certain width in my world-view to truly grasp and work through the happenings around me. So, on occasion, I do the next obvious thing: turn to the people I’m close to and try talking to them about it. Unfortunately this hurts just as often as it helps.
Therefore, I’ve found myself trying something different these past weeks: turning to popular culture to see current society’s take on affairs. I figured maybe I’ll then realise I’m not so special. Maybe my experiences aren’t actually so out of the norm. Maybe all the ecstasy and turmoil I supposedly go through every day are just regular moments in an average person’s life.
This has led me to voraciously consume a lot of media: the quirky wit of Woody Allen’s movies, the blatant awkwardness of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the pithy realism of Marc Maron’s comedy, the intellectual frankness of Noam Chomsky’s writing. (Why is it that older Jewish guys seem to have a monopoly on neurotic, egocentric cynicism?) And maybe I’m cherry-picking my sources, but their observations seem to suggest that what I’m going through isn’t so abnormal. It is just that life isn’t always easy, and expects some degree of openness to change; not everyone has this. Honesty and intimacy in relationships doesn’t come for free; not everyone is willing to put in the effort. People know that they should pay attention to their heads, but listen only to their hearts at important moments. In short, it is clear that life isn’t perfect.
All I need to realise, I suppose, is that being happy comes when you decide to look beyond the imperfections and appreciate life for what it is.
I bought my first ever app on the iPhone: Rage HD. Now if I could only make the time to play it!
Memories from England
I did not take very many pictures in England when I was there earlier in the year because I wasn’t in the frame of mind to do so. What I did instead was to take a few portraits of people that mattered to me during my stay. Here are three such portraits; released now because I felt the journal could do with a splash of colour.
Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “I can’t configure Debian.”
Getting closer
Wave after wave of emotion have washed over me these past days. A Skype marathon with Stacey that began Thursday evening lasted well into Sunday night. The conversation was deep, raw and revealing, and resulted in a discrete jump in our closeness. Not all that was said was easy to swallow, but I’ve begun to see much deeper inside her. And it only confirms what I already knew and acted upon: I love the woman inside.
The conversations have also made me realise something about myself. For far too long, I’ve been confusing being isolated with not having social skill. In reality, I am a deeply sensitive and socially aware individual who’s fully capable of handling himself around people. Most importantly, I seem to have a gift for understanding people and being supportive of them. And this is giving me confidence to face life that I knew not I possessed.
I talked to my mama
I talked to her for a long time. I explained to her that she caught me at a particularly low moment in my life when she called a couple of days ago, and apologised for not answering the phone then. I explained to her that things are a lot happier, and that whether I am happy or sad, I have people who care about me to communicate with what I am going through. I asked her for a lot of time to grow up, and to learn to recognise and appreciate when my life is good.
I don’t think she understood entirely, but I think she feels better about how I am doing.
Shades of grey
Long time readers of my journal are no strangers to the fact that my mood is extremely oscillatory. Much like the colour scheme of this site, my mind is either entirely black or entirely white. I can jump several times an hour or day or week or month from exceptional bliss to extreme depression and sorrow. Sure, this lets me feel alive, allowing me to experience life in an intense manner, but it is sometimes scary as these wild swings are not under my control.
The entries in my journal reflect this, albeit in a skewed fashion, because I’m personally more likely to write when I’m down.
The closer I get to Stacey, the more I’m beginning to understand why I might be this way. I seem to have an extremely black and white view of the world around me. People and experiences and surroundings are either “insanely great,” putting me in a state of intense bliss, or “horribly hurtful,” driving me down into the depths of depression. There seem to be no shades of grey in my perception of or response to the world.
The same is true of how I experience the women I am with, including Stacey. For the first months of our relationship, I was in a state of ecstasy. There was nothing she could say or do wrong, and whatever she was was perfect for me. But more recently, things started to change. The more she talked about her past, the more perturbed I got about her sexual history. I started to sink and see everything in a negative light, and there was little she could say or do that would help me.
The darkness had nearly descended completely, until she reminded me that we’re all just humans and have different aspects of our persona that could either please or perturb another. She pointed out that how I might not be a perfect man by any objective standards, yet all that she’s been longing for. Looking into her loving eyes and soft body as she told me all this reminded me of how happy she’s made me this past half year. And that her past is just that, her past. I don’t have to fully understand or accept it right away, just to recognise that through her imperfections, she’s someone who’s capable of making me immensely happy.
I am not sure which sucked more, G.I. Joe or Sex and the City 2. What a waste of a few hours.
Inebriated introduction
There is one crucial aspect of yesterday’s story that demands a closer look. But that in turn requires some necessary back-story.
Even though I have all this turmoil going on in my head, I’m outwardly very calm and composed. I rarely lose my cool, and my tone and demeanour barely change, no matter how intense I find external stimuli. This is good because it gives me a feeling of great control; this is bad because it gives me a feeling of great control. Sometimes, I feel like I’m forcibly filtering all my “innate tendencies” just to behave and sound like a certain mellow chap I fantasise myself to be. Or, rather, that I imagine other people want me to be.
People have always been telling me how they lose some of their inhibitions and control when they start to drink, and how this loosens up their social behaviour. I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve always been curious to find out. Just how would an unfiltered me experience and react to the world?
The general practise here is that you carry your own alcohol to parties (since it is so damn expensive). I normally carry a lot, but don’t really drink since I just don’t. On the way to the party where I was to later meet Alicia, someone asked me why I was carrying so much if I wasn’t going to drink anything. I didn’t have a strong case, other than to point out that I thought contributing to the party was the polite thing to do.
And that’s when it dawned on me, why don’t I just bite the bullet and drink my stash at the party, and find out whether it changed anything? The idea simultaneously excited me and made me nervous, but I really wanted to perform this experiment. So I asked a friend of mine to keep an eye on me (which he utterly failed to do) while I hung out at the party and went through my drinks.
Several drinks in—but, as I saw it, none the woozier—I met Alicia. Interesting, open, opinionated… she seemed like everything that I claimed she was, but was she really? Why was I talking so long to a woman I wasn’t even attracted to? How did I find it so easy to talk to her? I left that evening with a few questions I couldn’t easily answer right then, because I wasn’t certain if my perception of the world was warped by the drinks. I had to meet her when sober to find out for sure.
And so I did. Multiple times. And she really is all those things, and extremely easy to open up to. It hasn’t in the least felt any different from our first evening. Perhaps my brain ever really relinquishes control.
I went to see Resident Evil 4 alone yesterday. Big-breasted women running around with big guns; that’s all the storyline a movie ever needs.
Getting to know Alicia
As bleak as things seemed, I was determined to fix the situation. At least to try earnestly, anyway. If I wanted to make a friend outside my current friend set, I was going to go out and make it happen. Too many years of my life had already been lost reconciling to awful situations under the blanket excuse: “But I’m incapable of doing anything about it!”
I made it a point to put myself out there more. I’d done it once before, and that resulted in Stacey now sharing my bed. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? And so, repressing all social anxiety and other introverted tendencies, I started showing up at all parties I was invited to. I consciously attempted to talk to people I didn’t already know.
It’s on one such evening that I met Alicia. I noticed her early on, hanging out at the kitchen, effortlessly flitting in and out of conversations with different groups. She seemed interesting, and her eager smile made her approachable. I don’t recall how it happened, but soon enough I was talking to her friend beside her, and a short while later, I was talking to Alicia. Our conversation lasted well into the night, even as the party had long since thinned out. We talked about ourselves and travels and dreams, but more importantly, and for the longest time, feelings and relationships.
Alicia was gentle, open, opinionated, young (though mature beyond her years), and you know the strangest thing? I greatly enjoyed talking to her though I wasn’t attracted to her. She was perfect. I’d found the first of my friends outside my current circle, and I didn’t want to lose her. By the end of the evening, I did something I hadn’t ever done before: exchanging contact information with a perfect stranger.
(At this point, there are a few directions I could take this story. For now, I think I will jump over crucial details and just complete this primary tale, leaving the other threads for subsequent entries.)
Even though Alicia has been remarkably busy finishing her M.A. and holding onto a couple of jobs at the university, I’ve got to spend a lot of time with her since we first met at this party. We’ve gotten closer over long evenings of good food and deep conversation. I enjoy her company and her view of the world. And each additional perspective helps me make a bit more sense out of life.
Typing this message from my new and cool iPhone. There is so much I need to learn about it.