So, I have come to realize that one of my problems right now is a significant lack of people to talk to. As you may or may not know, at work, it is a constant insult war amongst several of us and a constant pretend (yet not insincere) flirtation amongst others of us. Flirtation I can do, not that difficult to pretend that I have more feelings toward my coworkers than simple friendliness. However, the insult war gets tiring. I have taken to, rather than insulting others, playing along with their insults. It freaked them out at first. Now it is run of the mill again, yet at least I don't feel like a callow jerk for insulting everyone. At least, when I insult myself, I can laugh about it. And don't worry, I am not the type to come to believe those insults, no matter how many times I repeat them to myself. I'm much to vain to believe I'm a terrible person, and I know myself too well to believe lies. However, this is a process by which I solidify the masks that we all wear. Normally it isn't that much of a problem. After all, we are all more comfortable with masks than without, whatever we may claim. But several things have added up to make me feel...emotionally distraught with the current situation. First, my friend Drew hasn't been to dance class in a long time. Meaning I haven't spent time with him in a long time. That is a small lie...I picked him up for dance class 3 wednesdays back, but he didn't go this week or last week because he was busy studying for a work-related exam (getting a higher certification level), and he was working for several weeks before that and couldn't come to dance. In the course of the long evenings, we generally worked our way off generic and unimportant topics to things that actually matter. On the phone we rarely do, because they simply don't last long enough and neither of us is blunt enough to start a conversation by taking off a mask. We both must work to get underneath them, no matter how long we have been best friends. And so I have not been able to talk to my best friend Drew on any real, I would almost say healing, level of seriousness. My other best friend, Charles, has grown more and more distant. I don't even know why, really. I don't find out about his life except through other coworkers, since he rarely speaks to me. And if we don't even speak about things like his separated wife quitting her job and letting their son's health insurance lapse until 2 weeks after it happened, or the status of his not-a-relationship-honest! relationship for weeks at a time, how can I expect to go into how he feels about these things, much less talk about how I feel about them, much less talk about how I feel about the things that are going on in my life? I am not too proud to say that I am failing to be a good friend to him, but I do realize that it is his pride that does not allow him to reach out to me in my foolishness, my busy-ness, or my simple complacent numbness. I try to reach out now and then by talking about myself, that which is most comfortable to me, and he doesn't listen. Yet when I ask about his life, he gives me terse and unenlightening answers. It's infuriating, considering we are supposedly best friends. And I go on, my other co-worker, Matt, a friend through Charles, with whom I have very little in common except an interested in games such as foosball, pool and video games, is the only source of information about Charles that I really have. Matt, whom I do not even really consider a friend, has become one simply because we spend so much time together. I was the first person (and perhaps still one of the only people) who knows that he hasn't had sex with the girl he's currently seeing. He's such a highly-sexualized person that no one can comprehend him having a non-sexual relationship, much less that he has feelings beyond sexual attraction, and yet he does, and he talks to me about them. As though I were his friend. It makes me realize that perhaps I am missing something, if Matt feels there is a friend-relationship there, and I didn't see it. I know my priorities in life are not in the order in which they need to be, but am I that blind? That was at work on monday and tuesday. We go on chronologically to my other friends, specifically my new dance partner and friend, Irina. There was dancing on tuesday night that solidified who I want to take private lessons from, and why. Which was good, because that had been something I could not make up my mind about. After dancing, Irina and I and another dance person named Dina (yes, her father is jacob, her grandfather is isaac, or whatever the russian equivalents of those are) hung out and talked for several hours. At one point in the conversation, we were discussing strange things like star charts and psychological personality profiling and things of that nature, and we argued about whether I'm an introvert or an extrovert. I have always defined it that an introvert gets strength from within, has a core of beliefs and self-definition that is most important, while an extrovert gets strength from without, has a structure of relationships with others that is most important. I have never once tested as an extrovert, on any personality test, ever. And yet they argue that I do, because I always look people in the eye while I'm talking to them, because I'm willing to share all sorts of things about me, about my past, about my present, about my desired future, anything you want to know, I will generally share it. My response to this was, "But I never share anything important." This line was brushed aside in the conversation. Dina I don't know well, and I have long known that whenever I am feeling particularly depressed, or cynical, or self-contemplative, or misanthropic, I talk about all the bad parts of me, all the strange things that have happened to me or that I have done. I have many to choose from, and some come up frequently (in this type of conversation) and some never come up at all, despite that I think of them often. I try to drive people away from me by making them feel they have less in common with me than they think. But Irina is...the type of person that comes to an understanding of a situation, which can even include verbally defining a situation, a relationship, or an action, and then she always treats it that way, no matter how different it may seem or how much it is not talked about later on. This would be very good for Charles, because he doesn't know how to be in a relationship without acting like a serious boyfriend. It's terrible for me, because it means we can open doors to have a stronger friendship, and then ignore them. She acts as though they had never been opened, and depending on the situation, that can either mean that she pretends the door is closed, or she pretends there is no door to ever have had closed. It means no matter how much I know that if we talked about something, she would understand it (and I'm not refering to anything particular here), I don't feel comfortable talking because it doesn't feel like we have progressed beyond a dancing-together-and-hanging-out-sometimes relationship. And so while I know that she is as close as Matt, at least, I don't feel as comfortable with her as I do with Matt. Second-lastly is my friend from my online game, Jhaded, Leisha (I just recently learned her real name), with whom I have played and quested from level 15 through level 50, several months in fact. We help each other out, we learned team work together such that we are most comfortable working with people of our character classes (I'm a druid, she's a rogue), and we are, for each other, some of the few people in the game with whom we have talked about ourselves more than just simple things like sexual preference, relationship status, home-state, job, etc. I have not even given my real name to any other player in the game. I consider her a good friend, someone I can talk to about things, and yet now she is approaching the presigious level 60 while I linger on at 53, and so she is doing the quests that require you to be nearly level 60, while I am doing lower level quests. She goes in dungeons I am not high enough for, building strong teamwork ties with people I may never get to that point with, though they are my guildmates as well as hers. I am not jealous, not even envious. I just miss being able to quest together. Especially since this came at a time when our old guild fell apart, most of us moving to another guild with "more opportunity" while others, including some of the only guild-friends from way back when I was still level 10 and 20, moved off to do their own thing. It doesn't help that now I'm dancing a lot, so I'm not on the game as often. I wouldn't give up dancing, in fact I am going to start taking classes and private lessons soon, in addition to social things. But I never have opportunities to talk to her anymore, or they are rare things, and she is distracted with wherever else in the game she is doing something. And so, with all of my friends feeling distant to me, either physically, mentally, perceptually or emotionally, I must also deal with my girlfriend Grace, my darling and my beloved, being a thousand miles away. And she is not the type who talks about the boring things that happened in her day, as I am. Now that she is out of school, she is not at a computer as often, nor does she have lots of time to sit and email me. We have been dating for 3 years, 6 months and 13 days, as of the date on this post. I know her very well. I know what she fears, what she pretends not to fear, what she wants and what she thinks she can never get. I know so much about her, and yet, I don't get to hear what is going on in her life. Right now, I might as well be a good friend, with whom she talks now and then, someone she can bring her problems to (though she hates burdening anyone with them) and someone she can share her joys with (if they happen to be something she thinks I would be able to enjoy with her and for her). But that's not what I want. I want someone I can watch and criticize movies with, someone I can go thrift-store shopping with, someone I can hold and adore and make to feel special, someone I can read quotes from books to, someone I can share my current obsession cheese with, someone that can surprise me, someone that I can surprise, someone whose hand I can hold, someone I can show off, someone who will always find time for dancing, someone who can serenade me, and many many other things. I have already found all those things in her. And now she is far away. [laughs] now! No, she has been far away, and she will continue to be far away, and I'm terrible about communicating long distance, but I try for her. And I am faithful because she is worth it, because she is what I want. Every friend I grow close to here, every organization I join, every committment I make, every habit I form, every place I begin to frequent, I hate, I hate them all, because they take me farther away from her. And I am terribly terribly afraid of losing her not because we don't get along but because we become too attached to lives we have grown while apart. And she tells me to look for a better job here. I know I need a better job. God I know I need a better job. But how can I get a job anywhere, a real job more binding than tango or youth ministry, knowing that I may be restarting my life there, a life that she will not be joining because she gets a job somewhere else. Who will read this? I've been typing for an hour and a half. I rarely write emails this long. (heh, better make a backup copy, because the internet is notorious for losing things that aren't backed up). I am so busy wearing masks. Wearing a mask of friendliness toward my coworkers whom I have grown to despise because of the masks they have forced me to wear. Wearing a mask of committment to youth ministry and to my tango organization which I would drop without hesitation if getting a job in a particular town meant moving there to be with Grace, not until she finds a job and moves away, but for good. Wearing a mask of friendship toward all the people who I merely consider acquaintances from tango and western style dancing that, if I moved away, I would not keep in touch with at all. Wearing a mask to hide my fear of the future. Wearing a mask to pretend that I am happy. Wearing a mask to deny realities that I cannot share with anyone because No one else knows what it means to dream while you are awake, nor believes in them, nor admits them to the realm of who I fucking am. It has been a long time since I shared something about myself that was not meant to change that persons perception of me from one mask to another. I take off a mask to reveal another mask, slight of hand allows me to take off a mask that isn't even the one in front, and yet most people never know, accept what they see before their eyes. You believe what you see. You deny what you know. You allow reality to be determined by what is inside your head, and you interpret the world through a kaleidoscope. I don't mean you who are reading specifically, whoever you are. I mean you the world, you that includes me. Where is my kaleidoscope? I don't like this reality, so let me give it a spin and a shake and a whole new world opens up, even though it's the same beads and flakes and mirrors. I am tired of interpretations. I am tired of people not bothering to interpret. I don't know what I want, but I'm very tired. And I wish someone cared enough to try and figure it out, because I don't think I can. But it's been a long time since someone asked. I am out of coherent thought. Thank you for reading to the end of this blogger. I...have no advice. I think I just feel unloved. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to make the future less scary, much less the present. I just need to sleep and dream of a world where I can fly, and sleep peacefully, and my life is whole and undenied.
David