there are so many possible interpretations of the data that i don't know where to start. perhaps i am resigned to never finding the right person for me, to having as my only solace superficial pleasures. perhaps my standards have gotten so high that the rudimentary test for attractiveness has become more critical, as everything else has. (in other words, before it was a useless test since it wasn't pruning in a relatively important direction, but as my total threshhold has gotten higher all directions have become critical.)
perhaps my sense of physical attractiveness has evolved to pick out people who i would be interested in personality-wise. perhaps my biological clock is ticking. perhaps i' m counting on the fact that physical attractiveness has little to do with whether i'm actually going to meet someone, and so i'm just filing it away to use as a secondary criterion.
no, not that last one so much.
the last couple of weeks have been busy. i'm now a doctor of philosophy, i've actually enjoyed a three-day visit from my mother (for the moast part), i've had an incredible meeting with my i-guess-now-former advisor, i love math, and so on. the main event, of course, has been the puzzle hunt that i organized (with extensive help from paul.)
i'm going to be 100% honest here and say that i was really hoping i'd make some friends there. here i was, in charge of something that brings a lot of people happiness, and lord knows i was in awe of the people who organized the last one. i guess you could say that i was hoping to cash in on some of that misappropriated awe. it's sort of mean, i guess, but i think i can be a good person for these people in specific, so maybe the ends justify the means.
in any case, it just didn't happen. there were like three people i thought were really cool and who i talked to for a bit, but of course it's contrived, of course it's not the most natural of settings, nothing is. here you are, surrounded by people who have one big same interest as you, people who probably have other interests in common with you, but you're running a game and it's not like there's a time when you will see them again. (well, i guess, there is, because these games are relatively frequent, but it's not like a group-social activity really.)
and, you know, i think i could probably have been pretty good friends with a couple of people there, in some sort of implausible utopian setting, but it's not to be. and so i'm reduced to staring at incidental cute girls and starting my sentences with conjunctions. there's the usual element of self-sabotage there, the usual element of challenging the world to care about me so i have more important things to think about, the petty adolescent game that has been coming and going in strength for the past three years or so.
while we're on the topic of physical appearance, i think there's another correlate of note here: optimism. when i'm optimistic, i get myself in shape, i smile, i don't detest menial tasks like shaving. i just look better. when i'm pessimistic, i do a lot of sitting around and sometimes busy work, i eat out of boredom and resignation, i don't get much sleep. it's not just being happy or sad; it's dependent rather on the forward-looking world view. so maybe i'm trying to select more for optimism.
i've been bad about responding to e-mail lately. i think that's another indication of optimism. when i feel optimistic, i feel energetic about cultivating friendships or whatever. interestingly, this correlates inversely with how happy i am, because the happier i am the busier i am (i'm not sure which if any way the causation goes) and the busier i am the less time i have for computer-stuff. i guess i've been very busy recently, which might explain the e-mail, but i think i write e-mail most often when i feel optimistic and sad. if that makes sense.
i might not write here for a while. i'm cycling again, i'm getting frustrated with the limitations of the internet. i'm actually not that way right now, but i can feel the momentum of the sine wave. summer is here and i want to go to the beach, i want to go hiking, i want to tire myself out playing frisbee. also i'll be in minnesota june 15 to july 5. i hope all is well with you.