i'm sitting here in the wee hours of the morning, and even in a happening place like berkeley, everything is quiet. it's wonderful. i can't sit here in the stillness, with the sad song and the darkness, without smiling. i'm happy to be alive; it's not that there's anything good in my life, but simply that the life exists in the first place. i'm starting to believe the buddhist doctrine that happiness is just the lack of suffering, and that in the absence of anything whatsoever you experience ultimate bliss. ironically, of course, the one place where there is never silence at any hour of the night is new york, the place where i have still lived for most of my life. actually, i guess that's not true any more; ten years and assorted fragments in new york, and here i am nearing 22.

sometimes i idly wonder what the vegas odds would look like on my life. specifically quantifiable things: where will i be living in four years? who am i going to get married to? because, let's face it, statistically the odds are overwhelming that i'm going to get married someday, regardless of what the current situation may be. it's fun to speculate on, but i can honestly say that i don't really know where my life is going. and i'm happy about this.

up until today when i was thinking, i always saw my growing older as an impediment to my meeting that perfect person. because my standards get higher; as i meet more people, i incorporate more characteristics into my ideal of the perfect person, thus making it that much less likely that that person exists. but this isn't true; it's false pessimism. first of all, even though i think about abstract people in terms of abstract characteristics, i don't think about people in terms of those characteristics. i think about people, first and foremost, as how i feel when i'm around them, and then i try to figure out the characteristics that cause that.

you can argue that point, but there's something else going on. as i meet more people, as i grow older, i myself pick up more characteristics. more things i like doing. i went to one baseball game my entire four years of college, and i've gone to around 75 in the two years since i've graduated. i've picked up interests, i've picked up things i like to talk about. and as i learn more things that make me happy, i increase the chance of finding someone with whom i can share enough things to last a lifetime.

wait -- this is the first time i've ever used emphasis in the seven months i've been writing here, but wait. that's wrong. i wrote it down, and i expected it to sound right, but it sounds wrong. i'm in a very emotional mood right now -- very optimistic, very cheery, almost ditzy, and i can see it affecting the writing. what i'm saying doesn't make sense, and i don't think you should be right to believe it.

i think what i'm looking for, in a sense, is the person who will know that without my having to say it. in person, it's not that hard, but in this medium, without the person to back up the words, it's harder to judge. i want the person who will know when i'm drecking like this and either appreciate it for what it is, rhetoric with no grain of truth to it, or, more likely, laugh it off.

i once dated a girl who would laugh at everything i said. i'd be saying something that i really did believe, or something that was meaningful to me, but in my usual (or so i like to believe) tone, the animated, lively tone, and i was speaking in the legato of the english language. i think what was going on is that she couldn't separate the times when the content was serious from the times when it really was just to laugh at, that she couldn't figure out the tone enough. she thought that because i was trying to put things well, because i was trying to make the conversation a lively one, that i was necessarily not talking about anything of note.

but there are times when i do deserve to be laughed at. at that point in my life -- and i try not to get personal here, but it's relevant -- i was coming off what i perceived as a relationship where i was not laughed at enough, where things like what i wrote up there couldn't just be laughed off. that the other person maybe wasn't real good at figuring out which part of me would bring her happiness, or was stubborn enough to want it all anyway. there are lots of self-esteem issues floating around here, which you can figure out as well as i can say them, and probably have more fun doing so, so i'll cut this story short.

i have a lot of characteristics which, the more i think about them, the more relevant i think they are to what the hypothetical perfect person for me would be like. but they all break down in practice, because love is not that predictable and people adapt (and this is a good thing; i mean adapting in the sense that they quickly learn to enjoy different lifestyles) well. let's take the example that i thought of first: being a morning person. i'm definitely not a morning person, unless you count the fact that, well, i'm usually up at five in the morning because i've stayed up that late. yet of the people i've dated, most of them -- more than half, anyway -- have been morning people. i think i could be a morning person; i've just never really had the incentive to do so. no -- the bullshit meter is going off again.

i guess what i mean is that i don't think i could be a morning person, and yet if it happened i would adapt and be just as happy. because of my relatively privileged life, i haven't had to adapt much, and in a sense i think i'm eager to see if i can do so. maybe that's why i enjoy the silence: because i grew up with a notable lack of it, and it's something to adjust to.

i'm going to go explore the silence and smile. i highly recommend it.

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