Author: Teel

I am personally reluctant to ask people I am attracted to for their phone number. Giving them my email address and phone number, no problem. Accepting offered contact info, just as easy. Asking for it though… I worry about me.

I do not recollect ever being told by someone that I was smothering them, but I feel very much like I am unreasonable or excessive when seeking the attentions of friends and (potential) lovers. I’ve said it before, but I worry that somehow I’ll be like Jon Favreau’s character in Swingers, calling too soon and too often and perhaps inarticulately and somehow ruining whatever favorable impression I may have made in person. I feel somehow that if I give my information out and get no response, that it was better that I didn’t have their contact info anyway, as I would have tried to contact someone who didn’t want to contact me. That if I give out my contact information and do get contacted, that perhaps I’ll have someone new to talk to at the least. Human contact is appreciated.

Mobile phones have changed everything. It used to be that if one gave out their number, there were some great opportunities for false hope. While one is away from home, they could call at any time without one knowing. Perhaps they called and were too nervous to leave a message. Perhaps they are leaving a message right now, while I am away. Opening the door when coming home was a moment of anticipation as you hoped to see the light on the answering machine blinking away, a sign that someone was thinking of you. If you didn’t want to miss a call, you had to stay at home, literally sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring.

Now I carry my only phone with me at all times. I am always sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. The fact that I’ve been having trouble getting steady signal lately gives me reason for a tiny amount of false hope, since perhaps their call didn’t get through to my phone, but it is hard to believe. I simply don’t miss calls. Even when I don’t answer the phone (because I am in a movie, for instance) I know when someone is calling me, and usually who is calling me as well, the moment they call me. That old anticipation of coming home and hoping for new messages has been displaced to mail and email, but it is not the same because I can’t hear the voice. Plus, I never used to get SPAM on my answering machine.

Everyone I discuss the activities of mine I am most concerned about crossing some line or turning into stalking tells me that I have nothing to worry about, that I am not doing anything wrong. Some even say I am doing everything right, but I wish there were some sort of auditing system for it all. Some way I could submit every email and transcripts of every conversation to trained professionals who could let me know where it all went wrong. Why they stopped responding to my email, or why the conversation dried up all of a sudden, or what I could have said or not said or done or not done so things could have worked out even a little better. I keep trying to imagine a handheld device, or maybe a combination of a bluetooth omnidirectional microphone and a device in the pocket or backpack, that has not just voice recognition in the standard sense of being able to recognize words and transcribe them, but also voice recognition in the sense that it is able to properly transcribe who said what in a conversation. I keep trying to figure out how to write software to do that, plus to be able to recognize context and figure out what people’s names are on its own, then build a database of all the conversations I’ve been involved in, searchable by date/time, people in the conversation, keywords, whatever. Because my memory just isn’t what I’d like it to be.

I’ve gotten off track, here. I meant to be speaking about why I’m still too shy to ask for other people’s phone numbers when I feel just fine giving mine out. Probably something about putting the burden on the other person’s shoulders. Revealing that I feel that understanding how soon and how personal and the expected contents of that first conversation is a burden. That I don’t understand, or at least I worry that I don’t. Perhaps that I feel that by giving out my information I am expressing my interest, and that in contacting me or volunteering your information you are expressing yours. That without that return I will doubt that there is any interest.

So, the fee deadline was tuesday, and the registration system was completely closed wednesday and thursday, so this morning at 7AM was the first opportunity to try to register for classes at ASU after people got dropped for non-payment. When I noticed that it was 7:04 I began rapidly dialing and re-dialing the number to Sun Dial, ASU’s only non-local registration system. At 7:43, I got through & attempted to register. Both sections of each of the classes I need that occur at times I could attend are still full. I guess Art majors pay their tuition on time.

Which means that I have to show up on the first day(s) of class with override slip(s). I’m thinking of looking up the professors and emailing them before the semester starts to let them know my intentions/request information in preparation of their classes. I don’t want to buy any textbooks or supplies until I am certain I will be allowed to attend, which may not be until August 26/27, but I don’t want to show up unprepared on the first day of class, either. It creates a bad impression.

Worst case scenario, I contact the respective professors of the studio classes I am trying to get into and get turned down, then take something like Art History and an upper-division Literacy course instead. Which should be no problem, since the Art History class has a cap of 250 (100+ free seats right now), and I suspect I’ll be able to find an upper division Literacy course with a seat or two free if I need to.

Hey! The ASU Website is not so completely bogged down that I can’t access it! Now I can check … Okay. Of all the sections of either class, there is one seat free in each class, Mondays and Wednesdays from 7:40-10:30AM. I couldn’t attend one of these classes (because it conflicts with even the latest possible schedule here at work), let alone two simultaneously. It’s interesting though that of these two classes (basically the two studio classes that all first-semester Art Majors take) people would be dropped because of non-payment in such a strange fashion. So… there you have it.

“If you’re certain the possibility of the words “I will always love you” being spoken in your frame of existence is so apocraphyl that you’ll wouldn’t even be able to hear them whilst eavesdropping on a conversation at a romantic restaurant (table for one, and yes, you’ve tried), perhaps you should see if fire still hurts. Go to the stove and hold your forearm over the flame. If you scream, you probably still exist. … By the way, if you do exist, you’re still the only one who knows it.”
–Pretty Girl

Continue reading Do I even exist?

I don’t think my posts here adequately reflect the full spectrum of my thoughts and actions. I suspect that there are a lot of things I’ve said here that I’ve changed my mind about or emotional states I haven’t mentioned at all, and the picture of me that is formed here is not a complete one. Like how I Like Blue Skies doesn’t tell the whole story, or even an entirely true story, but when people read it they seem to believe it is about something real and says everything that needs to be said. What about her side of the story? What about the times he feels happy, or isn’t thinking of her? What about all the little details I added to the story (and a couple of big ones) that have nothing to do with me or anything I’ve experienced? I’ve got I Like Blue Skies comics on scraps of paper around my house because I am reluctant to post them.

So what is the whole story? I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ve forgotten to post or everything I’ve been reluctant to post, and I’m not always aware of everything I have posted. Regardless of what makes it on the site, I’m not sure I know the whole story; though I definitely remember much of what happened and some of what hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t make for a complete narrative.

How did I get from there to here? How will I go from here to over there? Not physically; I remember the path taken, the mode of transportation, the details of each move through the physical world. How did I get to where I am as a person from where I was two years ago? Or five years ago, or six, when I was getting engaged to be married, to today, where the only valid numbers for women in my phone are family members or married to someone else? Where I claim to be ‘interested’ in men, but have never had a real relationship with a man, or really been physically intimate with men? I literally can’t remember the last time I dated someone; I assume it was some time before I started getting engaged to them, but … who was it?

Did you know I never held a proper job before I was 18, and that I only started looking for work because I was engaged to be married? Before that, I had simply planned on being a professional student for another 8-12 years. Did Amanda really start me on the path to where I have been for the last couple of years where the primary defining characteristic of my days is my job? Did you know that on the day that I found my first job, before my first day of work, I came home to a phone call where Amanda and I split up? That I started working anyway, somewhat because I hoped and planned to be able to patch things up with her? That I kept doing the things we had planned together for years after she had totally disappeared from my life? Transferring to ASU immediately. Moving to Tempe in August ’97. Then fewer things and smaller things; remembering her brand of shampoo or her taste in furniture, and eventually I found myself without any idea of what to do next because I had run out of things we had planned to do together. No one came along after her that wanted to make plans with me. Or even just to be with me. So for years, I just kept on doing what I was already doing; living in Tempe, working the sort of job you work when you don’t know what you want to do with yourself, sort of vaguely looking for someone to step into the space I’d made in my life for someone to join me…

How did I get here? I guess this is sort of where I wanted to go, but that I was expecting to have a travelling companion.

By now, because of events in the last couple of years, I have made a sort of overhaul in myself so that instead of living a life that is missing Amanda, I am living my own life. Instead of looking for someone to fill a hole in my life, I am hoping for someone who fits in my whole life. That is, I’m making my life whole on its own. I know that it is possible for a person to fit well with me and my life (I have met such a person), and rather than change my life to suit someone who isn’t there, I am changing my life to suit me and sort-of generally hoping that such a person will agree with me that our lives will fit well together. Or something like that.

…So, err… more little details from the story, and maybe you can get an idea of the whole story from the little details, and maybe it doesn’t matter if you, or I, ever do.

Visualize the annual calendar you use as a loop instead of a line or a series of rectangles within rectangles. A continuous circle you’re just going around and around. There’s no beginning or end, just more days, one after the other. Imagine yourself standing on today on this vast loop. If you could walk straight across the diameter to February, it would take around 116 days. Normally of course, we all just stick to the circumference, which takes about 365 days to complete.

Now, if you can, imagine a smaller circle within the larger one, touching only at the point where you are standing. This is my calendar. It would only take about 95 days to walk straight across the diameter to month 9, and it only takes 300 days to walk the circumference. As I move along the circumference of these two huge circles, it seems as though the inner one is rolling around the inside edge of the larger one, so that they always meet where I am standing. Now, my calendar is not designed to synchronize with yours, so when I have gone one full circumference of my calendar, I have only completed about 82% of the way around yours. When I have completed one path around your calendar, I have rounded mine one and a fifth times. That is, while today is 3.1.4 on my calendar, and August 5th on yours, those two dates will not meet for another 60 of your years (sort-of; your years have an extra not-quite-quarter-day which makes it more like 630 trillion years before they synchronize again).

Okay, that’s easy enough, but let’s look at how we can use this visualization model to show why my calendar is a little easier than yours. Take my calendar’s ring out of yours, and instead put a tiny, 7-day ring in its place, representing your week. (The diameter of this one is only 2 days, 5 hours, 28.5 minutes.) Imagine it rolling around the inside of your year as you travel around the big circumference, and it will spin 52 times and get almost to yesterday. It will actually take 14 trips around your year before it synchronizes properly again. That’s 728 rotations of the week within the year and about 5096 days. Really, the 7-day ring won’t do, because of how your calendar handles “leap years”; instead, imagine a much, much larger ring that your year is rolling around, 14 years in circumference just to keep track of the days of the week properly. The ring you need, just to keep track of what day of the week it is, is almost four and a half years in diameter.

Now let’s step over to my calendar’s ring again. We can put a tiny 5-day ring in this one to represent the five-day week in my calendar, and a 30-day ring to represent the constant 30-day month in my calendar. Imagine that both of these rings within the year ring roll along the inside edge as we imagined before, following you around the year. In my calendar, the week ring rotates exactly six times for every month that passes, and the month ring goes around exactly 10 times to bring you back to the same place on the year. The same day on the year ring is always the same day on the week ring every year, and the month to weekday ratio follows the same synchronicity. 3.1.4 will always be in the third day of the week, in year 0 the same as in year 1, and in year 14 and every other year. If you were born in the middle of the week on my calendar, your birthday would always be in the middle of the week. (Interestingly, because my calendar is not solar, your birthday would always be on the same day of the week, but not always in the same season.)

So, on your calendar it will be 14 years before the days of the month and the days of the week match this year’s, but in mine they match every month of every year. Oh, and the only way to correlate your months with your years is on that same huge 14-year ring, since your months all have a different number of days, and aren’t even self-consistant.

Okay, was this boring enough? This is the sort of thing my mind noodles awya on sometimes. The entire visualization took me but an instant, but I wanted to share it, which took ma quite a while to type. I wish I could have drawn animated diagrams for you.