05.27.2002 – dream
Originally written .
the normal exam-time anxiety dream. did really poorly on a distributed systems examination and got upset about it. woke up all nervous until logic kicked in and told me that i had already taken the distributed systems exam and didn’t do too shabilly (at least by my recollection).
05.27.2002 – day
Originally written .
woke up really sore from playing football yesterday.
i upset erin yesterday when we were talking on the phone, which sucks, not so much because i care about upsetting her – i know i didn’t intend to, she knows i didn’t intend to, and i know that everyone can sometimes get upset by things that aren’t intented to be upsetting, but because it’s just hard to have a conversation with someone who you care about, and haven’t seen in ages, dominated by that upset ackwardness. upset is a weird emotion, because it’s something that, at least I, always feel sort of weak and ashamed about, so, it hangs about in the air, present, real, but never completely taken form, as though unconfident about it’s own existent. in the end, i’m far more comfortable with anger or grief or something less ephemeral when it comes to communicating with my friends.
my apparent reluctance to introduce erin into other parts of my life has always been a point of contention in our relationship. i’ll grant that i have a tendency to compartmentalize my life and my friends, but i’d say that’s more of a self-anxiety-imposed act on my own part rather than some edict about how my friends should interact with each other. the thing is, i hate akwardness. i even hate watching it. like i cringe in movies at the akward moments that are supposed to be comical. for me, they’re just painful. and for me, one of the most akward things, is trying to interact with people with whom you don’t have anything in common. now i have lots of good friends who don’t outwardly have something in common with me, but those friendships were able to be built because we spent a lot of time together, either in classes, the dorms, or through debate. if i had only met them at a party, or in a class that didn’t require any interaction, i probably wouldn’t be friends with them. it’s easy enough for me to hit it off with someone who skates, or who listens to similar music as i do, but beyond that, i find it difficult as hell.
so, i think in my attempt to avoid akwardness, i tend to keep aspects of my life that are rigidly defined seperate from each other. i perceived my girlfriend as not having a lot in common, on face, with my housemates, and didn’t make a whole lot of effort to make the two aspects of my life interact.
i think erin interpretted me saying that i didn’t think that she had a lot in common with my housemates as an indication that i found her somewhat boring or inadequate which isn’t the case at all. it’s just that my housemates and her are different. i’d say my housemates defined themselves, like myself, far more by easily encapsulated lifestyles – skater, punk-rocker, scenester, activist, whereas my girlfriend’s self-definition is much more subtle. she owns a skateboard and rides it, but she’s not a skater, she owns punk-rock records and goes to shows, but i wouldn’t say that she’s a punk or a scenester. she cares strongly about social issues, but she doesn’t talk about “consensus” or “afinity gorups” or talk about dates using the first letter of the month followed by date format (e.g. “a12” or “j13”), etc, etc. it’s not that there’s no substance, it’s just that the substance isn’t defined by some cliche.
so after a point, erin get’s sick of discussing things like this. but i really like it, because even though i feel bad about hurting someones feelings, sometimes that can open up one’s eyes to some new perspective. for instance, in thinking of the way i define myself, i realized that all the activities that i like tend to entail some sort of lifestyle – skateboarding, punk/hxc, even computers. now that’s not to say that there’s a single, homogenous lifestyle that is associated with any of these things – mark gonzales is not chad muska, g.g. allen wasn’t ian mckay, and the carbon defense league is not bill gates, but i guess what the whole lifestyle thing means, is that it allows me to be aware that there are people, somewhere, who share a great many things in common with me. more importantly, i think, it lets me affiliate with a social group that is more constant than your everyday social groups, such as my college friends, or my friends from high school, which, as one comes to realize, are tragically fleeting. there are individuals that i haven’t seen in years, and probably will never see again. but in every new city, i can find people who are familiar to me. skaters, punks, scenesters, computer jocks. the faces are different, but in many ways, they are the same people who i have always known.
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting, up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cties of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, for whome the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.
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