This is why I write here.

[pphaneuf]

I kept meaning to spend some time with myself, in the last month, do some introspection, some thinking (but not too much!). Today, I had a hard time getting solid work done, so I helped others do better work instead, left (relatively) early, and took the evening for myself. I ordered some food in, watched The Last Samurai, letting Diva take care of me as she knows how, and am now taking some time to ramble a bit. Read on, if you can!

Yesterday, I wrote this. Now, let's hop on the time machine, shall we? Say, to the last time this exact situation happened? This is very interesting, to see how I was then, and how I am now.

In the similar things, yes, I wish for things I have no rights over, or to even expect. But hey, wishing is allowed. Saying you wish is also allowed. What do I do? Well, I snuggle up with my pillow, and Diva comes and purrs at me reassuringly. Thanks Diva. What is, is, isn't it? But I should remember also that what is not, is possible. I forget it sometimes. I go and think some things I pursue without them having a future. It's not true. They could. Or not. The only way I'll find out, is to get there. And I do so, inexorably.

I still hate the lie, the obfuscation and the hiding, possibly even more so now than ever. And it fills me with contradictions, with inconsistencies, and that hurts me way more than even missing her does (and those close to me knows how I feel about that). And the sad thing is, there seems to be no way out of that. I could never talk to her ever again, and I'd still be contradicting myself, leading to the same result. But on top of that, I'd miss her terribly, so I'm actually choosing a less painful path.

But I have been living with these feelings for a while, and I don't think they explain at all why I felt so shitty yesterday night. I think now I get it. There was a memory attached to her last visit which is very precious to me. I remember it as if it was yesterday (ha!). I was wearing her coat, the one she was wearing then. The situation was very similar, with a few variations. The sunday morning where I dropped her off, I had breakfast with both of them, one in front of me, the other beside me.

When I'm shaken by strong feelings like these, I remember one thing: this is because I care. Sometimes, I don't know what I really care about, and these help me find it. And even when I do know, I would not want to not care, not even in exchange of avoiding this pain.

I tried talking with my partner in crime, after dropping her off at the bus station, more to comfort myself than anything else, but it didn't totally work. It is weird, I have a strange attraction to that guy (no, azrhey, not in that way! quiet in the back!), in the sense that I can feel a reflection of myself in him, some sort of weird counterpart. I sometimes wish I could be better friend with him, but at the same time, it's the same with me as with him, I don't know if I'd really enjoy spending a lot of time with him. I wish we could talk more, though.

It's funny, though, I felt the sting of what most people would call jealousy (but is really envy) for the first time in a good while, of him, but I'm not jealous or envious of her boyfriend. Heh. I think my favourite situation now would be if she broke up, and later on moved to Montreal, hooked up with him, and I could be a secondary from afar. He's a good man, I trust him to take good care of her.

People are often surprised when I tell them I am shy. It is true, I am. As with many hackers, I'm actually rather anti-social by nature. I am more of a loner, liking to do stuff by myself. For reasons not entirely clear even to myself, I decided that this was not very good for me, and undertook one of my niftiest and most ambitious hacks: my own psyche. I ended up with very odd results, to say the least, when my becoming more social clashed with my rather profound distrust of authority. But it still takes me a fair bit of effort to accomplish certain things, and I feel rather uncomfortable in the presence of people I have not been introduced to. Most often, I try to break through my resistance by pushing myself even harder, but in some cases, like street photography, it requires quite an amazing amount of strength on my part.

But I'm not a private person, no. That comes from a very old anti-cypherpunk principle that I had, where I just want to reduce my worries by having as little as possible to hide. This is also why I do not operate under pseudonyms on the Internet (Pierre Phaneuf is my real name), or why I make so many of these posts public rather than friends-only, doing so only when absolutely necessary, and even then, quite reluctantly. I have a love for truth, clarity and simplicity that I have very rarely seen in others. I'm aware that it will probably be my downfall, someday, somehow, but I am proud of my principles.

Why am I so proud of them? Well, I used to be a rebellious person, up until I was about 20 years old, in my own ways. I would disobey rules just for the sake of disobeying them, because the rules were evil. I've since found out that the rules are not the problem. It's the blind faith people put in them that is dangerous. So I live by my own rules, my own principles. Many happens to coincide with those of the society I live in, because they are universal enough, but they have been carefully vetted by my own judgement.

I still have remnants of my rebellious years, I must say. When I am told to do something, do not understand why I would do that, cannot see why I would do that rather than the opposite, and the person telling me to do so won't explain it to me, I'll often tend to choose the opposite. Attempts at manipulating me this way have happened before, so I revised this method to picking my behaviour randomly. This sometimes puts me at odds with sfllaw, bringing chaos around me.

For that reason, I often feel rather at ease in absolutely confusing situation, where society doesn't have any rules or guidelines to offer. Some people feel completely disarmed, they have no idea what to do. I like to think that it's because they're sheep, they're so used to follow the rules mindlessly, like zombies, and now they're lost. Oh, I'm confused, and sometimes afraid too, but I relish in the idea that when I come out of this, it will be out of my own pure and untainted thinking.

I wrote all that, and yet, there was some more things I wanted to write about. I decided to make one entry to start with, with a grab-bag of various ideas that had been floating in my head and that I had been wanting to talk about. I have also been thinking a lot about commitment recently, what it is and means to me, but I think it is late enough, I will have to write about this some other time.

Comments

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Hey, my thinking is very positive! I'm having a great time! It's only been a few days, and I feel much, much better than sunday night. It's one of the things I find with my approach to life, compared to how I did it before: I now have sharp but brief jolts of pain, where before I'd have no sharp feeling like that, but it would linger on, for months sometimes! And it's also about a month worth of thinking condensed into a single post, because I finally got the time, so...

But I'm in for a little fun, that's for sure!

I'm awesome? LOL! Sorry, you have nothing to do with that, it's just that you called me awesome just the day after I've read it... :-)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Hehe, that's all good. I've got lots of people caring for me, that's for sure. :-)

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

You seem to be pretty much on top of things. All I have to give you for advice is:

One sheep, two sheep.
One moose, two moose.
One goose, two geese.
One foot, two feet.

Yes, English is dumb.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Not only have you read this (well, at least to that point), but you've proofread it?

You're weird. :-)

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Believe me, on the Internet, noticing all spelling mistakes is an unimaginable curse :)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope I'm not too much of a pain to read. :-)

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Not only is English not your first language, but you don't even make as many mistakes as most people for whom it is. So you're in good shape. If it weren't for English's wacky pluralization rules, your writing wouldn't be recognizable as different from a native speaker's (and better than most people's).

Compared to the rest of the Interweb, you're a bastion of well-constructed sentences :)