on the one hand, it's not like anything bad has happened to me, and i've been having fun. on the other hand, there were so many good things that could have happened and didn't, and there have been several telling signs of less-than-ideal patterns in my life. let's talk about today.
today i was at the math department picnic. i showed up two hours late and hardly fashionable -- i realized later that i had worn a terrible shirt for the occasion, which is particularly damning since i didn't think at all about it (as i usually don't.) this is what i mean by less-than-ideal patterns: either of two things could have easily presented this. one was the realization that this girl i had met like twice and wanted to meet again would be there. two was my intuition kicking in and guiding me to a more appropriate shirt in my tired fog du jour. three was serendipity. all right -- three things.
i guess i should interject here that it seems, from my web statistics, that this weblog has been viewed by more people than my webpage itself (and i mean the actual webpage, not the stupid disclaimer which i keep there so i don't need to change my links (because sometimes i want a disclaimer.) or at least that's the etymology.
to continue with the interjection, there are other things on this webpage that change. the pertinent one at this moment is the perspectives thing i've been tooling around with, but there are numerous projects that i pick up and leave off in a couple of weeks that are occasionally there. i mention this only because i think this might be of interest to you.
back to life. the serendipity thing -- it's an obvious choice for one of those perspective columns. the picnic caused me to do a lot of thinking about various things, such as types of people.
i don't know if i should mention this here, because even though the person in question hasn't stumbled across this yet they certainly might. some time ago, i met this person who i was intrigued by, i guess a person i wanted to know better. what happened afterwards was shocking: i went through the course of an entire relationship with this person without seeing them again (we exchanged two relatively perfunctory emails.) i went from intrigue to being friends to seeing if we clicked to breakup to post-breakup rationalization; i'm now over this person, i think.
you see, in the course of having to deal with the breakup, as i always [try to] do, i realized some reasons why we weren't right for each other, flaws in the other person. the scary thing is that this all came from thinking -- it didn't come from any new information about this person who i've known about for awhile but only recently met. i think what happened is that because i was used to living life at this speed -- this happened over the course of about a week -- i naturally played it out at that speed in my mind, despite the fact that i was getting far less direct interaction than i usually did with a person who i felt this way about.
one of the problems with life, i think, is that things get more serious as you grow older. people become more wary of situations, less impulsive, and so it's harder to get to know someone on the fly. if you do go off on some jaunt or other, it starts to mean a lot more; it's a date, or something equivalent to one. maybe i'm being paranoid here, but it seems like in the environment i find myself in you have to commit yourself to liking someone before you get to know them better, which kind of defeats the purpose. in other words, if you start taking those steps it conveys that you really like this person.
these are the ramblings of a tired me -- hopefully you, gentle reader, can pick out the truth from the garbage in these words. as for me, there are two people in my life who i want to get to know better and i haven't the slightest how to do this without the initial seeming awkward. and i do genuinely like both of them, so maybe the issues aren't as in play as i think, but i'm still baffled. if you have any advice, let me know.