TMI

Most of my boxers are YEARS old at this point, and i tire of them, so this morning i went to Ross and bought a bunch of new underwear. I really like what i bought and am looking forward to that pleased feeling i always get when wearing new underwear. Am i the only one who still likes that?

Urban guilt

I nearly ran into a homeless guy on my skateboard as I was heading back to the apartment to grab my helmet. I gave him a friendly smile and a "sorry." He asked me for a quarter and I gave him a dollar. He thanked me, and as I was riding away, told me to look out for people like him. Or was he warning me to look out for people like him because the donation of a dollar was the only thing that kept him from wearing my skull as a trophy?

I find my compassion for people in a bad spot is more or less always at war with my assumption that the homeless are mentally ill and therefore potentially dangerous.

I'm not sure what that says about me.

Things I am learning

Thinking a lot about how I interact with people these days (yes, more navel-gazing dear reader [omphaloskepsis? was that the word?], but it's my blog and I can cry if I want to). Largely because interacting with people just seems painful to me right now. I have finally gone back into therapy with a promising Hakomi practitioner, so I can spare you too much emotional out-pouring, but I feel like writing something out and I might as well put it on my blog.

Here are the things I've learned about myself and interacting with people in the last year:

- It is very difficult to let people you care about distance themselves when they clearly need to.

- It is very difficult to become estranged from a friend.

- There is a big difference between understanding my relationships intellectually and understanding them emotionally.

- Not only is it hard to lose a friend, it is hard to lose all the friends that came with them.

- Not only is it hard to lose a friend, it is hard to be fair to mutual friends (emotionally speaking) who still like both of you.

- It is hard to watch your former social circle whirl merrily on without you, even when everyone recognizes (even me) that it's reasonable and appropriate for me not to be in it.

- It is hard to relate to people in any good way when you can't get through a conversation without feeling hurt.

- It's really easy to distance yourself from all your close friends and leave yourself feeling lonely and isolated.

- it's really hard to pick yourself back up and get out there when you've left yourself lonely and isolated.

- I'm really super good at making myself miserable.

- There is nothing more constant about friendships and people than that they are always changing.

- it seems wise to me to learn to adapt to the every-changing closeness/distance with my friends without letting it cause me suffering but I don't know where to begin.

- I'm a little bit of a drama factory right now.

- I have a hard time managing a social life emotionally. I largely attribute this to lack of practice.

- I someday hope to deal with all of this much better than I do now.

What is. . . IS

Oh sweet blog, your hero does not normally subscribe to half-baked philosophy from comic books, especially from Marvel who wrote the following ideas around the same time they thought evil/good/boring clones were the foundation of all good storytelling. In any case, they also wrote about a fictional tribe in the future called the askani (as part of one of their less egregious clone story lines of course) who lived, also of course, in a future ravaged by war. Because any and all of them could die horribly in any given moment, they had a very pragmatic outlook on life: what is, is.

This is pseudo philosophical mumbo jumbo I know, or at least written in that spirit. But, I have been thinking about this a lot today, oh dear, sweet blog, because my biggest struggle this week is to accept what is. Sometimes doing the right thing leads to sadness in the short term, sometimes doing some wrong things leads to the same place, and sometimes things just ARE sad and you just have to get through it. And sometimes those 3 things happen all at once. And there's nothing to do about it but accept what is, and try to build a better life going forward than you have so far.

To accept what is and hope for better is oftentimes hard for our hero.

For the record

Oh, sweet blog, it's been a roller coaster few weeks. An awful weekend, followed by an awful weekend, followed by a good few days, followed by a good weekend.

I am grateful for my friends.

Soylent Reminder

It cannot be overstated how much the banner personifies my internal emotional life.