I'm sorry, my last post was...well, very negative. I looked back at my last few posts, and I've been setting a negative tone that I didn't mean to put. I'm happy for my coworkers getting better jobs. and I'm having a pretty good time myself. I found some friends with whom I can be a larp-nerd, not that I have time for it, but people who actually play the game I play(live), namely Changeling the Dreaming. It's set in the same world as Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf the Apocalypse, but we're fae, and our battle isn't against monsters but against the banality of the world. [laughs] I know you don't care about the game, but one sentence didn't hurt, did it? I'm looking forward to more learning. I just read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and I took a big bite out of Memoirs of a Geisha last night (it's very different than the movie), and I'm going to be learning dancing more soon! Also, I have just released my beloved girlfriend back to Ohio and her family. I know there are big red flags that may make it impossible for our relationship to work out in the long run. But there are also big green flags that say Go Go, man, it just takes more work, but it's worth it! With anyone else, those red flags would be powerful, but Grace makes compromises like a debater or fish-merchant, unwilling to give an un-earned inch, so I know that no matter how hard we butt heads, we're not compromising who we are and hating the other for it. We're learning what it takes to be so strongly independent and yet live not for oneself. Even if we don't get married, breaking up and going our separate ways somewhere down the road, I wouldn't give up the lessons I've learned any more than the dancing and the laughing and the holding of hands. Plus, you don't know what love is if you've never loved someone who responded to your love. I don't mean someone who took advantage of your love, or someone who inspired your love, or someone who just loved you back. I mean someone who treasured it and allowed you to know it. Someone who would rather die a thousand deaths than throw your love on the ground and step on it. You don't meet people like that very often. Because people like that to grow up in a selfish world like this one aren't common. And then, for that person to be absolutely wonderful and exactly what you want and need, it's beyond words, even for me... Ah, fire, how I long to flutter my way around you, beat my wings in your dancing arms and blink the world away into the next. My recent rage is a symptom of my illness, that malaise of the spirit that I've allowed to settle upon me. Grace is such a wonderful cure for it, demanding I be who I ought to be and not merely who I am. I'm going to end this post. I'm not happy, blogger. I'm not sure I know what real happiness is, though I can imagine it. But I'm close enough to make blind grabs for it, with a smile on my face. If my example or my words help you find happiness, enjoy it a little extra for me, won't you?