The big-ticket items

The web has changed a lot since the early days of this journal. And in many ways, I miss the way things used to be. I guess it’s that nostalgia that brings me here today.

A lot too has happened in my life since I stopped updating the journal regularly, but here are a couple of the highlights. First, I got engaged to Stacy,

Engagement ring

and I am to be married later in the year!

Second, I quit my job late last year to try and make it on my own. I was quite brave and sure of myself when I first quit, but after a couple of months of making little progress on my ideas, I’m starting to get a little antsy.

I guess that’s how it is with life. It’s trivially easy to keep things emphatically static. Change, on the other hand, takes serious effort and is as daunting as it is exciting.

Oddly enough, I have a feeling it’s all going to work out just fine.

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.

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.

Drowning in opera

Stacey’s life path has been remarkably different from mine. For instance, she’s lived with another boy before. I am not always OK with bits of information like this, and my lack of real acceptance manifests in sinister ways, especially when she’s away. Like what happened last evening at an Opera performance (in a shady bar themed to match a submarine!).

Pleasant conversation and fun people, the evening was going remarkably well until the negative stresses popped up. The cuteish mid-twenty year old cuddling up to an older guy. She was enjoying the show, and he was enjoying her touch.

I couldn’t help but imagine you with someone else. I looked around and I started to see your face everywhere. A younger you. A naïve you with an innocent face, clearly in love. The happiness in your face as you looked at him; it haunted me.

The music changed. The once cheerful lyrics now dark and ominous.

And I needed to leave.

One times three-hundred and sixty-five

It’s taken me a long hiatus to realise this, but I need to write. I think putting my thoughts and feelings down in words plays an integral role in how I go about processing them. And so, starting today, I plan on rekindling my writing habit by jotting down at least one entry here each day. I’ve resolved to keep it up for a year, but we all know how well such proclamations usually pan out. However long this lasts, I expect that the writing style will be unfocused, raw and in the moment. Though today, you get a little back-story for the tales that are to follow.

  • After a month-long holiday in India with Stacey, followed by a couple months alone there doing very little, I returned to Oslo. I’ve been here for just under a month now, and live in a new home with a couple of housemates who are also my friends and colleagues. This leads to some interesting situations which we’ll definitely be getting into. Either way, this is a temporary situation as Stacey and I will be moving into an apartment together before the end of the year.
  • Things with Stacey have been almost perfect, and she makes me very happy, despite the fact that she’s needed to go to the States for a few months to study. She’s managed to take breaks and visit me in the interim, which has made it a lot easier on us. I’m much happier in Oslo than I was in India, and my feelings toward Stacey gives me a surety about my decisions that I lacked before she came along. Even so, I have some misgivings about her past, which is a topic of some consternation when I feel low. (Which tends to happen when I feel separated form her. Which tends to happen when I am separated from her.) I hope this changes as we spend more and more time together.
  • I am trying to make all sorts of positive changes in my life. I have started to work out and I dress better. I am motivated to work hard (to ensure my stay in Oslo). I am trying to form and maintain additional friendships beyond my current set. These changes help me feel better about getting older.
  • I work in a new scientific group, and not knowing many details makes me feel like an idiot. You’ll hear about this more and more if my reading doesn’t improve the situation.

I am sure a lot more back-story is required to orient you to subsequent stories, but I will stop for now. Instead, I’ll try to insert relevant bits as necessary, and now go to sleep.

Breaking news

These past few days have been quite chaotic. Shortly before I landed, my favourite grandma had a nasty fall and ended up breaking her hip in numerous places. She’s not in pain anymore, but the doctor that performed her reconstructive surgery yesterday said she’d take a few months to recover completely. In all this activity surrounding my grandma—trips to the hospital, handholding old relatives (and coddling their grand-children!) who keep popping up to visit her, sorting out food for some of the longer-term stays, disseminating information about her progress, …—I haven’t had much time really to talk to my parents about my life; about Stacey.

A couple of months ago, I was lost. There were voids in my life I knew not how to fill. The wide array of choices I had laid out before me for when my contract in Scandinavia completed made it quite obvious: I was OK with doing whatever, wherever, in my search for something more. All this began to change as I got closer to Stacey. After spending nearly every moment with her since I first met her, it became clear to me that I was happy right where I was with her. I liked my job and my friends and my home and my city (fucking cold and dark as it can be!). Unfortunately, this realisation came just a few weeks before my current contract expired, taking down with it my intimately-linked European work/residence permit. We tried quite valiantly the last ten days or so to sort something out in terms of employment, but my months of telling people I was leaving (to teach kids) and turning down offers to extend my stay was hard to undo. Not wanting to take any chances, I decided to book a ticket back to India, and sort out how to return from there. Since we were confident things would work out on that front, I left much of my stuff back in Oslo with my friends and Stacey suggested she’d join me, transforming this hasty trip into a month-long vacation in India.

She’ll be arriving soon. We’ll be leaving soon to find somewhere relaxing that’s neither too hot nor too wet in July.

I wanted to sit down and explain all this to my folks. Talk about how I feel toward her. Talk about my life, the choices I’ve made and the ones I’m still yet to. That they needn’t worry for me. That I’m still their responsible boy. That no matter how unsure I am about the future, I’m nearly thirty years old and I’m brave enough to do the things I want to. And happy for it.

But I can’t. They’ve been distracted by another phone-call requesting them back at the hospital.

Life with Stacey

Very much has happened in my life these past weeks, but I’ve been too busy living it to write about it. Now, on a plane to Paris, I have a few minutes of solitude to jot things down.

It didn’t take very long for Stacey, my psychologist friend, to transition to being my lover and for words like ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ to be bandied about. Before I knew it, we were living together, inseparable, apart from the few agonising hours we needed to spend at work each day. From formal breakfasts with friends, to fun holidays together, to deep post-coital conversations lasting late into the night, I have been rather overwhelmed by so many experiences and emotions. Many of them new; all of them wonderful.

Now I’m sitting at a Parisian café waiting for my food. A little travelling buddy kept me distracted and entertained for much of my flight. Mye, the baby girl of the couple sitting next to me was intensely amused by my face, glasses and hair. She spent the whole flight tugging and trying to chew on anything she could get her tiny hands on. I loved the attention, and her parents, eager to have a few moments rest were happy to let me have her for the entire trip. She was all sorts of cute and nearly drenched my entire shirt with all her drooling.

But enough of Mye.

It’s a strange feeling being in this city. I’ve always liked the way it looks and the way its people look. I’ve enjoyed its cafés and its bars. But this time, it feels cold—even as I soak in this warm bathtub in my hotel room. Yes, I’ve returned to my hotel room now. Dinner without Stacey wasn’t fun at all, and I cut it short. I miss her.

It’s a good thing I’m on a plane returning to home then, into her arms. Thankfully my stay in Paris wasn’t very long, but it did help me realise something. I once knew a German girl, Anna, who was of the opinion that all the people in the world fell into two categories: those with big noses and others with pig noses. At the time she told me this theory of hers, all I could say in response was “poppycock!” But these few days in Paris after months in Scandinavia have made it clear to me what she was trying to say.

I always thought I was attracted to only big noses. Stacey’s got the cutest pig nose, and I miss her so very much. It’s a good thing she’s waiting for me at the next train station. I can’t wait to see her again.