Am I sleeping yet?

I … I don’t particularly feel like I have anything to post in particular, but I feel … obligated to post. So here I go. I’ll try to make it a good one anyway. The site was ‘down’ on the back-end for nearly a week, and … I’m not sure … Well, I know I had several posts I wrote and lost and never posted, but … I don’t know.

So, yeah. There’s a new comic, Self Defeatist by Robert Grove, that should be updating fairly regularly from now on, and starting next week (Easyspace willing) I’ll have the archives of Gary and Agnes online and Modern Evil will be a live mirror of this great M-W-F comic. (I wanted to have ME’s mirroring of GnA to match its triumphant return to life on Monday the 8th, but the back-end problems prevented me from getting the back-end set up and … well, everything else has prevented me from getting it together sooner than next Monday. And … coming… when BitPass goes ‘public’, a mystery comic, the first several pages of which will be free and weekly (we hope) to get you interested in buying the rest. And … someday … Mouse? I’m waiting on panels from over half a dozen artists, myself, and I have … seven totally unassigned panels … so, it could be a while. We’ll see.

Umm… I’m conflicted about something. See, there’s this thing I’m involved in that if I tell you about it, I feel the response will be similar to Zoe’s – that I’m only involved because it’s “safe”, not for the right reasons. And while the opinions of the masses reading this (like the guy who copy/pasted “Fuck Java” hundreds of times into a comment box earlier today, and the people who comment on my years-old link to a news article about Islamic women witholding sex to get their basic needs met without reading my post or the linked article, but only the title) factor little enough into my decisions to actually pursue one course of action or another in my life (that is, I’ll go ahead and do what I’m doing whether y’all like it or not), it does influence my decisions about what to write here or not. See, this thing, I WANT to write about it. It consumes me, day and night, and I want to share it. I already write about it, but on paper that you will never see. I want to write about it here, too, though. And at the same time, I want to keep quiet about it. I want to avoid the potential emotional backlash I will experience if/when people decide to turn to abuse about my personal choices. But … I suppose I’m already writing about it. In fact, I already have, but that short post was the result of writing and deleting and re-writing and deleting over a thousand words each pass and ending up with a dozen.

Here goes: I am in a relationship with a young woman named Laura. I like her, she likes me, and we have both agreed not to become emotionally involved with other people. In fact, I have recently discovered that I love her. Being a romantic at heart, I sensed weeks ago that I was heading in that direction and did nothing to stop myself, even though I knew she is moving a bit slower, emotionally. She is beautiful and intelligent and witty, a college student taking a full load of courses (actually 6 classes) in a variety of subjects, and (and this is quite important to me to be able to become friends or more with anyone) she is more than capable of holding her own in a conversation with me. She and I have a mutual friend who knows us both well and correctly guessed that we would be well suited to become good friends and more, and I thank our mutual friend for introducing us – even though we were a little slow on the up-take.

Oh, and Laura happens to be attending St. Louis University. In Madrid, Spain. And her ‘permanent’ residence is in Virginia. And we have never met, in person. Right now we mostly correspond via hand-written letters sent by physical mail, though we do email and even (occasionally, and at some expense) speak on the phone. When she was in VA we spoke for hours at a time, day after day, night after night, and really began to get to know each other. We ‘hit it off’ almost immediately, and seem to be doing well.

And … and that’s that. I know Spain is 3500 miles from here and VA is half that. I know that because of school there is a good chance I will not meet her for the first time for months or even years. I know that to Zoe (and probably others) this seems to be because of a ‘fear of commitment’ in me, and as I told him, I disagree. I have been trying for years to meet someone I could like as much as Laura and get to know them and build a relationship with them, in Tempe and the Phoenix area, and now in the Rim Country and even all of Arizona, and I think you know how much luck I’ve had. Many of my failures (not all documented publicly, thank you) have been because the people who have shown any interest in me at all have had not a fear but an outright aversion to commitment of any kind, something that simply is not compatible with my romantic nature. I’m not looking for a warm body; I’ve tried that. I’m looking for someone I can have a lasting friendship with, who I can grow to like and to love because of who they are as a person, who they are emotionally and intellectually and because of how we match as people. I’m looking for something serious and meaningful to share with someone who is also looking for something meaningful and lasting and with whom I feel comfortable to laugh and to cry and not pressured to perform or impress, but to be myself. And despite the difficulties with a long-distance courtship, it seems to me like all the things I’m looking for to build the foundation of a relationship are available in it – and they would have taken effort anyway. And the things that enhance and extend that relationship that cannot be shared across an ocean and a continent will be available to us just as soon as we both decide to take that step, make that effort, and be together in the flesh.

Oh, I know I don’t need to defend myself, but I feel like I do. I know that what I feel for Laura, what I have with Laura, is valid and worthwhile and WONDERFUL whether you accept it or not, and will continue whether or not I continue to post about it. But still, I worry about leaving my personal emotions out on the table, half-expressed for you to attack. I worry about all the people I know are out there whose first instinct is to tear other people down instead of ingoring them or building them up. But this is bursting from me. This is filling me up and making me glow. This makes every day better and brighter. This is a good feeling from a good connection with a great person. I like her, she likes me, and that is such a wonderful thing.

I’m going to sleep.