Saturday, December 25, 2010

I actually like a youtube comment

"Well, Not Exactly, but next time he's Alone With You, he'll give you the Satisfaction of explaining everything."  Sounds kinda hot.

(It's not a bad song either, by the way.)

Friday, December 24, 2010

on being home for the holidays

Since moving to Philadelphia "for real" (I guess), I've been experiencing the transitional issue of wondering what the word "home" means.  Does that now by default refer to my room in the apartment I share in Philly?  Does it matter that I will only be living in that specific apartment for another five months?  It's automatic to fall back to the college student's mindset - referring to my parents' house as "home", and then, remembering that in all technicality it is no longer my primary place of residence, tacking on "in New Jersey".  And thus I'll say to people, "I'm going home to New Jersey".

Linguistic specificity aside, it feels pretty much like home right now.  Last night I went to our local Barnes & Noble with my mom to finish off the Christmas shopping list.  Once back home, my dad distributed glasses of eggnog with brandy (fantastically delicious - makes me want to get into brandy more) and we delved into unwrapping the ornaments.  My mom has a tradition of seeking out an ornament of a new material each year, one for each of my brothers and I, to add to the collections to eventually give to us.  Each year I hang the golden snowflake, the sheep decorated with buttons, the pumpkin-seed poinsettia, the cork reindeer, the flat felt snowman, and so on... along with a variety of ornaments handcrafted by yours truly from preschool, elementary school, and craft projects with my mom.

This morning, after extracting myself from the blankets atop the air-mattress bed that now lives in my bedroom with surprisingly less difficulty than one might expect, we had a nice breakfast with our whole family.  A mug of Earl Grey tea accompanied mine; I'm still hoping it will mostly take care of my daily caffeine quota (normally fulfilled by coffee).

I've been lounging on the living room couch ever since, still in pajamas and wrapped in a fleece blanket.  The couch is awash with (occasionally blinding) sunlight.  The warmth and comfort is precious right now - enough that I've kept on delaying getting dressed and wrapping gifts for the past few hours.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Breaking the narrow-mindedness

It's been awhile, from my perspective, since I was in a relationship - two years or so now.  Though I still think plenty about interpersonal relationships, and most likely worry too much about how my actions come across to others, I have for quite some time now written off trying to understand relationships.  Not being in the midst of the work of maintaining one myself, I've been feeling for some time that whatever knowledge I thought I had collected has been slowly draining out of me.  Whilst my few theories on the subject continue to be chipped away over time, I grow to feel more clueless about how to "meet someone", transition into a relationship, and maintain one.  Without possibilities presenting themselves on my horizon, I've been relegating myself to wondering at how friends around me make relationships work.  As for myself, I mostly continue to rather passively hope that things will eventually fall into place with someone by way of beautiful happenstance.

One theory of mine in particular, developed early on in my forays into thinking about relationships, grew mainly from an experience of my own which I still hold as very special.  I decided that the most logical and successful way a relationship could happen was to transition from best friends.  It made all the sense in the world to me: you are already perfectly comfortable communicating, you get along well, you enjoy each other's company and seek out spending time together.  I guess I figured that all you needed was a spark of attraction to push things past the platonic realm, and then you were all set because the rest of it was already in place.

I held pretty steadfastly to this theory for a number of years.  It received its major crack in the same way I first came up with it - through my own experience.  Though I no longer believe in it like a guarantee, I still think it's possible.  I simply learned that it also might totally not work at all.  And I am glad to have the experience and luckily came out of it for the better.

Another theory: I have long assumed that getting into a relationship only makes sense if you have taken a pretty good deal of time to familiarize with each other.  This one is based partially on precaution: my fear is not taking enough time to discover a person's major characteristics, and then stumbling onto something serious enough to potentially drive a new relationship apart.  It also has to do with my being terribly indecisive, and being afraid to start something because I'm still not sure if I like the person enough yet.  (At least, that's typically what I'd argue to myself which leads me to stall for more time to decide.)

In the past couple of days, I have begun to think about some of these ideas differently.  Perhaps things can develop between people outside of these scenarios I've had outlined in my head for so long, and still be real.  Maybe I don't have to know someone long enough to think I've figured them all out before deciding I like them.  Perhaps a great deal of the joy of a relationship is learning the pieces of someone's personality over many interactions and experiences.

So I think, now, I am closer to letting go of my indecisiveness and being more willing to try letting things happen with someone without knowing ahead of time that everything "should" work out.