I am an on-again, off-again power-user of my own website. I mean, sure, I try to check Modern Evil every day. Preferably a couple or more times a day, and I try to read everything. (Though admittedly, some of it is not the most stimulating to me these days, and I have begun not to read everything.) But sometimes, once in a while, on those days I decide to try to fix something, I access a lot of pages. On the two days I was re-vamping the back-end aggregation system, the bandwidth use literally doubled. When I am working with the site, I use nearly as much bandwidth as every other person who visits the site uses, all day. And I do it on dial-up. And that doesn’t include FTP bandwidth.
Now, today, with the deleting a few comments and banning a few IPs, there will probably be a spike in bandwidth use, but not a doubling. I’m not going that crazy. Plus, I’m pretty sleepy. If I don’t go to bed, and soon, I’m likely to make some serious mistakes with my hands in the back-end.
Anyway. I’m writing this as I wait for pages to load, as I work on cleaning things up a little.
If I hit 1AM, maybe 1:20AM, and I still haven’t cleaned out the “Last 60” on the Main ME page, I’ll go to bed. It’ll clear itself out when people post tomorrow.
***
Strange things are a foot. Or is that afoot?
Anyway, maybe not strange, after all.
Work on furniture isn’t getting done. Work on time-sensitive, permits-running-out-Thursday projects are being interrupted by the spur-of-the-moment projects that the most senior person around here happens to come up with. And work on the actual time-sensitive ones interrupt work on furniture. Well, that and cold and inexperience. And things still get communicated after it is too late for the communication to do any good, despite the easy availability and time to communicate properly at an early enough stage. And Heath is already failing two classes (Shhh! It’s a secret!), though he promises he’s doing his homework. And someone I know is coming up to Pine from the valley with the express intention of spending time with me. And it isn’t a family member.
Okay, so maybe a little strange.
I think, if I understand the plan correctly, we are going to have a picnic. Though I am not 100% on what this entails, since it is freezing (in the shade) all day long this week. (And bloody cold in the sunlight, too.) I’m sure that by tomorrow night, I’ll know. I’ll be taking a little shiny bit of insanity I’ve begun carrying around with me lately, just in case there arises a need for it. I don’t forsee that, but I like to be prepared. Well, as prepared as I can be, considering.
Perhaps, hungry-ish, eh? Certainly not ‘full’. Not for a picnic. It would be improper.
She and I seem to do a lot of lunches. I think we did one dinner, perhaps one night laying side by side, and then went back to lunches. Somehow I made a mistake in there somewhere.
I’ve begun to come to a conclusion of sorts about that sort of thing in my past; that if I’d just gone ahead and had sex with all the women I wanted to and were available, I might have avoided (or at least postponed) quite a bit of trouble and heartache. From my very first relationships sex has been a sticking point, a hot point, a point for breaking up. Not because (as I hear the typical teenage boy does) I wanted to have sex and they didn’t, but quite the reverse. I refused to engage in pre-marital coitus, and they were unsatisfied, shocked, and/or confused by it. I think some of them thought I was lying, that I had sex with everyone else and they just weren’t good enough for me. Or that I was lying and that as soon as I got them into bed I’d have sex with them despite what I’d said. I can’t say for sure in every case, but there is enough compelling evidence (and quite a few people who said this very thing in one way or another) to believe that it is a trend. And I definitely can’t say one way or the other about the young woman coming up the hill to see me tomorrow.
But at least she isn’t bringing another someone with her this time … I mean to talk to her about it tomorrow, but the other couple of times she visited me here, she had (in addition to her son, a man I do not feel I am competing with per se) a man with her the relationship to her I could not easily just ask about openly, did not know, and seemed to be such that were I to say anything meaningful, personal, or show any subtle signs of affection (such as a simple hug) I might be crossing a line or wind up with a fist in my jaw. When it’s just she and I, and not some third party I don’t know enough about to know what’s what, I am more comfortable with her. Because I do care about her, but I don’t know if I’m suddenly something like an ex or ‘the other man’, so I find myself unable to act or speak. Sigh.
***
I just passed 1:20AM, and I just got the last SPAM-type comment off the ‘last 60’. A little more and I’m going to bed.
***
My back hurts. I really need to sleep. Good thing I have a good bed. I think I’ve got it adjusted just right for the sort of back pain I get up here. Thank heavens for Select Comfort (ie: The Sleep Number Bed). Zoe/Amy just bought a Select Comfort Sleep System and used me as their referral. Another referral and I can afford a really, really nice pillow I’ve been looking at. Another nine and they give me a free Twin Sleep System. I guess word of mouth works well for them. Anyway, yeah. Good bed. If you’re thinking of getting a new bed, take a look at Select Comfort. And if you decide to buy, tell them I sent you.
***
I am in a weird place lately. Bouncing, almost. Mood swings, some people call them, but this isn’t like mood swings, this is … weird. Like mild bi-polar disorder, but fast. Up and down and up again. And again. And again.
There’s a comfortable place where I couldn’t care less about whether I was single or coupled or married or any of it, now, later, forever-after. There’s a less-comfortable place where I’m lonely and longing and hoping and seeking. There’s an odd place where I dream fondly of the ones that ‘got away’, thinking it could have worked out, thinking of what I could do better next time I get the chance. There’s a very uncomfortable place where I’m desparate for companionship outside my family of any kind, meaningful or not, physical, emotional, short-term, long-term, whatever I can get. And there are other places, and stranger places that seem to be two or more of these simultaneously, and I’m bouncing back and forth among these things quite a bit, sometimes sticking in one for days, sometimes finding myself in all of them at various points in the same day.
There are places where suicide looks like pleasant relief. There are places where I can see that there is something, I don’t know what but something, I’m supposed to do before I die, and these taint the first, robbing it of it’s little pleasure. There are places where I feel normal, content even. Places where I even feel happy, satisfied, comfortable. Places where I feel stressed out. Under pressure. Falling behind. Useless. Places where I remember love and am lifted up by it. Places where I remember love and am brought down by it. Places where I cannot seem to remember love at all, no matter how hard I try, beyond the dry idea of love. (I recently realized that I cannot exactly remember what it feels like, even just physically, to be kissed. I have the idea of kissing in my head and images of kissing in my head, but the kisses themselves are missing … the feeling.) Places where I am confident and self-assured. Places where I can’t see past the present. And while I bounce around the places described in the former paragraph, I seem to move independently within and among these places, too. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes sharply singular in mood, sometimes mixed. But no idea why, or what’s next, or how long one thing will last.
Or if I’ll be hungry. Or sleepy. Or any of it.
I’m in a weird place right now. Inside my own head and heart.
I’m going to bed. I wonder how I’ll feel tomorrow.
