My Interest Piqued

What an awkward breakup.

I don’t feel.

It’s probably a problem if lilacs and bats on bicycle rides by rivers still have me thinking about someone else, so that led to an awkward and painful conversation with my girlfriend. It’s selfish continuing to date her when I still care so much more about another person. How to stop caring: a life mystery. Visiting cabins and watching sunrises over lakes doesn’t help. Neither do the ongoing dreams. Life.

Went for a bike ride to clear my head, late at night.  It was that perfect sort of trail that I’d been looking forward to finding years ago.  Passed bunnies and bats and ducks and lilacs.  Stopped and sat on a swing.

Oh, and I saw two towering clowns sifting through a dumpster.  It was a lovely trick of light that my imagination played with, and that made me so happy.

So, I’m taking a hiatus from reblogging and sharing things, but I still need a semi-private place to express myself.  You might want to unfollow me, as it won’t be entirely pleasant, but it’s not supposed to be really sad.  

/Start occasional surge of feels and reflection

A new nightmare last night.  This time it involved my participation in the Wildlife Club, they were having a potluck, and my housemate K was there with me.  An acquaintance from the past, J, was there, who I once myopically fashioned as a manipulative enemy, and this time used honest, cutting sarcasm to cut through all the collected faces of my current self.  With the right perspective, nothing about me can be good.

The weirdest things fuel this cluster of memories.  Yesterday E asked me what my favourite restaurant had been, followed up by my favourite way to eat eggs had been.  At one point I had to stop and breathe, overwhelmed by memories of greasy spoons by Greyhound, the Apollo restaurant, and most crippling of all, visiting my older sister in Victoria and being fed together. It quickly connected with the day before, being at Shakespeare Arms and seeing on the TV the Queen of Saanich ferry stopping at Gulf Spring islands.

I feel like I can never return there, not without breaking down.  It’s not just that they’re memories of things that had been, but they’re memories of future hopes now squelched.  The makings of a tradition of visiting a sister together and being spoiled a little, of adventures riding ferries, visiting a grandfather not mine by blood, enjoying cold winds and embracing the elements, hearing “I am the land and the land is me” and having it resonate through my being.

After almost two years, I continue to try to ignore it, forget it, recast it as worse and less desirable than it was, block it out, dull myself to it, deaden myself to the emotions.  It helps a bit.  I’m functional again.  It hasn’t ruined my ability to make new friends.  But sometimes I still find myself thinking about fictional solutions like at Lacuna from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I now understand why that J above was discouraged from watching it once; even though it’s still one of my top 5 favourite films, I don’t think I can bear to watch it right now.

Besides the occasional melancholy, which I can treat by surrounding myself with new friends and distractions, the only permanent problem I have is letting myself care about others again.  It’s so unfair of me, when there have been people who wanted to care about me, and I’ve blocked them out.  It’s not that I don’t care about them.  I think it’s strange to continue dating people when you can’t authentically say you love them after months.  I sometimes wonder whether one honest love is sufficient for a lifetime, and perhaps that that aspect of life can be considered done.  I’ve been dwelling on the nature of it a lot recently and my inability to intently express or feel it since, but I don’t think I should articulate those thoughts now.

Life proceeds and I fill it with beautiful things.  Wonderful friends, wonderful interactions with the physical world (through iaido and jodo and cycling and running and sometimes swimming), wonderful animalia (veganism, living in a house full of pets, amateur birding), creativity (house projects, most recently drawn and multilingual labeling for all the cupboards!), learning (languages and my thesis), open source programming (hello 3rd Google Summer of Code for GNOME), and adventuring (Europe, streams, trees, tall grass, adventure).  Perhaps that can be enough, though it’s hard to believe that when it’s 3AM and you want to take someone you haven’t actually seen in years on a virtual tour of your apartment to share the silhouettes of birds.

/End occasional surge of feels and reflection

I think writing here has helped spare me from sending many unwelcome, unsolicited e-mails.  It would be easier to be a robot and to lock up areas that are inconvenient, like I can do with my photo collection. :D

I enjoy using you as a replacement for Google Reader’s Shared Items, but now I begin to wonder whether Google is not wise in cancelling Google Reader all together.  I briefly hated them for it, but what is the value in reading all the things posted by an individual.  I spend too much eating informational timbits, and need to focus on my thesis.  So I will try to disappear for the next four months.

I will still share my thoughts on things at my blog, kosmokaryote.org, as always. 

Love,
  Richard

Ugh, I was looking forward to some day watching Hannibal on Netflix.  However, Amazon has signed it as an exclusive for their Prime thing.

No, this is not how it will work.  I will not pay to use 4 different, mostly redundant services, just to watch a few exclusive shows.  Exclusivity is violence against customers.  It’s no better than cellular contracts, and should not be tolerated.

Multiple social networks, multiple chat clients, multiple video streams, etc.  At least e-mail got it mostly right: you only need one e-mail client and you can send and receive mail with anyone!