Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

So, tonight was a good night.  I like to think, at least, that it went better than last year’s company Christmas Party (I don’t think we’ve regressed to the point of caring to call it a “Holiday Party”).  At this one, I didn’t make a point to yell out my sexual orientation loud enough for people in adjacent counties to be made aware.  That always counts as a success in my book.

I did try to have a serious conversation with my friend Eric about what we do at work and where we’re all going in the future.  I fear I may have been a bit meandering, but at least I made the effort.  I know I have trouble with that.  I always am concerned I’ll make a fool of myself, but alcohol has the wonderful effect of making me not give a shit.  I intentionally planned to have a discussion about these sorts of things at the party cause I knew I could talk after a drink or two.  I was at about my 5th when I started the conversation, and I think the content suffered as a result.  I hope the point came across, though.

I’m not really sure what I mean to say here, except that, after having a rough day (my furnace is broken and I may be getting gypped into a $2,500 repair for it, and my partner found a colony of spiders [like 30, literally] living on my computer equipment), I still count today as a success.  I tried to let a friend know I cared and supported his decisions but just wanted to help him make the best ones for himself.  I tried to let my partner know just how much and why I cared so much for him and about him.  Tomorrow, as I’m reading this more sober than I am now, I’ll probably groan and realize what an ass I’ve been, but for tonight I’ll let myself bask in the idea that maybe I did a couple things right on a crummy day.

I bought this house two months ago.  Two months ago, we were sitting in a small room with not nearly enough ventiation; across from us: three people with whom we could barely communiate.  They spoke Korean and a little bit of English.  I knew how to say “no” in Korean, a vestige from a party with me and a guy who had a crush on my sister in high school.  I barely knew it, actually, and I think it might have sounded something like “no.”   It’s weird, but “no” almost always sounds the same in all languages.

Ever since then I’ve meant to fix the lights in our bedroom.  I meant to take those two cords, swinging merrily in the breeze, and unify them so they weren’t low enough to hit our heads.  I’ve never gotten around to it.  Tonight, I’m looking at them yet again.  They’re just another in a long line of projects I’ve never finished.  I’ve yet to fix the kitchen.  I haven’t called the radon remediation company.  I am miles away from sending out a slew of E-mails my boss has been on my ass for since three weeks ago.  But I’m staring at these light fixture pullchains, with my partner’s head in the nook of my arm.

The chains are two different sizes.  I just now noticed.

I’d never be able to unify those two chains, it just plain couldn’t happen.  It’s a stupid little thought, but for some reason it’s sticking with me.  After all these things that happen during the day, just one thought sticks out.  It’s because it’s so useless, so pointless, that I can’t get it out of my head.  We, as human beings, have about 10,000 useless thoughts run through our heads every day.  Some, they’re just temptations and easily forgotten; others, they’re desires never to be fulfilled.  What happens to them?  Like us, they are ephemeral: fleeting electrical impulses soon thrust out of our brains and never existing again.

I’m still thinking about those chains though.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll make a special trip to Home Depot, or Lowe’s because they’ve been caught less often trying to put a value on customers’ lives in court cases about safety.  Maybe sometimes, our thoughts, like us, can be held on to, made important.  There are six billion people, we’ve each thought more thoughts in a year.  Thoughts can cling to you, can make themselves heard.  Will you be heard?  Will I?  Time will tell, and time will make fools or heroes of all of us.

I fell off the blogging wagon.  That didn’t really take long; in fact I think it took about two weeks.  My “boring life update,” like this one, was rather forced.  These days it just doesn’t seem like I have much to post about.

Actually, I do, but none of it seems particularly valid.  Of course, in high school it was perfectly acceptable to blog about how lonely we all were, how no one understood us and it was just all so damn hopeless.  These days, I feel like I’m supposed to “know better.”  If I don’t have friends, it’s cause I don’t go out and make them.  If I don’t have a working furnace, it’s cause I was stupid enough to buy a house.  I’ve still got the annoying situations, but I’m supposed to have the maturity to just adapt instead of running to the internet and complaining.  At the very least I’m supposed to understand that people have worse situations than mine and complaining about mine is paltry.

I guess that’s perfectly valid.  In high shcool there were hormones at the steering wheel more than common sense.  Instead of thinking about the valid reasons why my parents were trying to control my behavior (to protect me, usually), it was just so much easier to assume they were emissaries of Satan, sent to rob my life of any semblance of happiness until I killed everyone and automatically got sent to burn in Hell for eternity as a result.

Of course, they weren’t perfect, and I’ve always felt somewhat socially crippled as a result of their efforts.  I feel unable to form meaningful long-term attachments because I hate people so damn much and assume that everyone hates me and, if interacting with me at all, is only doing so to try making a fool of me (cause I make it pretty damn easy).  It’s not their fault, though, and again, at my level of emotional development I’m supposed to be able to fix a problem if I see it, instead of whining incessantly.

Sometimes it’s hard to do much else though.  I’ve been verbally blogging to my mother and my partner for a while today, so I figured I’d commit at least a bit of it to the written form.  Of course there’s the aforementioned furnace: it’s broken, but thankfully it’s because it didn’t want to kill us with carbon monoxide, for which I’m grateful.  I consider myself to have few friends, as always, and I never know what to do with the one(s) I have; this is actually where almost all of my daily stress comes from (and what I’ll probably talk about most at length).

I want to offer advice for the bad situations in which people find themselves; from the outside looking in, it always seems so obvious.  But by the same token, I don’t want to damage what already seems so frail with words that may not be so well-received.  Life’s not easy for everyone, but for some it’s harder than others, and I do definitely recognize that.  While the advice that isn’t so welcome may be useful, it’s still about hard decisions that I don’t know how I’d really make in the same situation.  But maybe that’s why the advice is so useful: I couldn’t make the decision myself so easily, why should anyone else have to do so?  But then we are brought, again, to my being socially crippled: even if my advice is good, it might as well be as thrusting thumb tacks outwards from my eyeballs for the ease I have in giving it to anyone.  I’m just not charismatic enough to be a good friend, cause it takes balls to say the unfortunate truths that sometimes need to be said.

And so, I come to my blog, wherein my verbal vomit serves as an embarkation point for all the ideas floating in my head that are too difficult to say aloud.  At least here I can acknowledge that my thought exists.  At least here I can pretend like I know what to say or what to do to make everything better for everybody.  I really do think I have an idea, but I remain mute.  For fear of reprisal.  For fear of recrimination.  I remain mute.

I’d like to end with an epiphany, an apocalypse of understanding in which I emerge from the cave and know what to do and then do it.  But I won’t.  I’ll just end, cause all I can do here is return to my childhood where at least I could complain about my inactivity, rather than suffer in silence because of it.