Sandcastle

Hello, world.  It has been a while.

I come to you with a confession, a need, a proclamation.

A confession: For me, blogging had always been about desire – a desire to be seen, to be heard, to be understood.  It was a way to shout into the void from my lonely being and see if I could make some sort of connection with a vast array of strangers who, in my desperate yearning, could affirm that, yes: I am.

And then one day, I met someone, we got married, and I no longer needed a blog.  There beside me stood a woman who saw me, who heard me, who understood me, and so that desire was sated.  My blog became obsolete, remaining as a monument to a past.

But then, she left, and with her, she took my sated yearning, leaving me empty.

And I wanted to scream.  So I did.
And I wanted to cry.  So I did.
And I wanted to reach out and pull her back and hold her and feel her warmth and fill that yearning and right the wrongs and see her and hear her and understand her.

But I couldn’t.

A need: Of course life isn’t perfect.  In these last years during our marriage, in my moments of yearning, I’ve often taken to social media to shout into the echochamber of friends and loved ones when I feel the need to express myself to the world beyond my wife.  Even now although we are apart, that is still her world too, and while we may express ourselves back and forth with each other in private, I cannot shout about her into her void filled with our audience.  So I return to my blog – a place of relative privacy and anonymity, removed from her sphere of influence, with a faded readership, filled with only my most curious friends and otherwise complete strangers.  …and maybe her, but I do not write this for her to read it, nor for anyone she knows to read it.  If that happens, so be it.

A proclamation: I am not here to talk about what happened.  Let me make that clear.  That is none of your business.

I am here to talk about my wedding ring.

I don’t wear jewelry.  When I first said my vows and put on my ring, it felt alien and uncomfortable.  I remember not being able to put my fingers together or clench my hand like I used to.  I was annoyed that I couldn’t drink water out of my cupped hands without leaking.  It got in the way of doing a comfortable pull-up.  But I figured: that was the point.  The ring is there to remind you of your solemn obligation: to be loyal to someone you’ve pledged your life to.  If you couldn’t feel it, you could ignore it.  At times, in reaction to grievances or exasperation with my wife, I would roll it back and forth between my forefinger and thumb and think: here lies on my finger a symbol of undying devotion.  Devotion is a privilege.  Being constantly aware of the ring was being constantly aware of that duty and privilege.

Then, at some point, the wedding ring changed for me.  It stopped feeling alien.  It no longer caused discomfort.  It was no longer just a reminder of my duties, but rather something much more magical.  It was a reminder that someone out there was my advocate, my partner, my most important other.  If I ever felt lonely, I could feel my ring on my finger, look at it, and remember that a particular someone is there for me.  As long as I wore it, I knew I was loved.

It felt great.

I kept it on for almost two months after we separated.  The first day I kept it off was two days ago, just to see how it felt.

It felt naked, and it felt lonely.

I keep it in my pocket just to remind myself that she’s there somewhere.  Our future may be apart, but our past is together, and nothing can change that.

A proclamation: I am here to talk about boat.

Yes: boat.

…for of a relationship is born a language of songs, symbols, and utter nonsense that becomes its bonding dialect.  A gesture may mean between a couple something unique, something that carries the weight of depth between two people who have together forged something meaningful out of something superficial or mundane.  A song may call back to a time or place or situation that exists outside of the song itself, but is intrinsically connected to it in the minds of its listeners.  And a word, devoid of any meaning, may rise to the surface of its waters and gain some sort of absurd significance despite any disconnect from its literal reality.

For us, that word was boat.

Listen to the sound: abrupt, curt, rounded like a pucker swallowing a donut hole.  It pops from the lips and is stifled without fanfare — a staccato proclamation that interrupts the seriousness of a still silence, ripples its serenity, and vanishes just as fast.

For you, a boat is a vessel that floats on water.  For us, boat carried no actual meaning.  It carried an understanding that we shared a dialect that was no one else’s.  It said, “Hello, love.  Welcome to our life together.”

…as should have the rest of our language.

A proclamation: I am here to talk about a sandcastle.

…for when I look at our marriage, I look at a sandcastle, built by amateurs at play with no real plan and a vision resting in the vast potential of what we could be together.  Sometimes the sand doesn’t cooperate.  Sometimes something is created accidentally that still looks cool, and becomes part of the design.  No one is ever sure how it will turn out.  There’s no blueprint.  There’s no method.  But it’s being built nonetheless, filled with wonder and imagination.

And then suddenly a wave comes in and goes out, and the sandcastle is gone.

And I stand there, wondering why I didn’t build it further away from the water.

I see the spot where the sandcastle used to be, and there’s nothing left.  Just the memory of enthusiasm I had for building it, and sadness of watching it disappear so quickly.

The future: ambiguous, exciting, mysterious.
The past: concrete, fixed, unchanging.
While you’re building, there are questions without answers, flaws, problems, choices.  But once it washes away, it exists solely fixed in the past.  What it was was all that it was ever going to be. And in that realization of its fixedness in time, the totality of its existence now final and permanent, it all seemed so beautiful, even with choices unchosen and flaws unreconciled. It was, and will always be, the sandcastle we built together.

But building a new sandcastle feels impossible and pointless, and I stand there at the beach, my feet cold, my hands dirty, and my sandcastle gone.

I am here to draw neither a point nor a conclusion, but merely to stand at our sunset and watch the sand wash away into the ocean.

No Homo

I told a story to a friend:

“This past autumn, I went camping out by Bishop Pass: a rocky and inhospitable ridge in the Sierra Nevada whose landscape is as grizzly and striking as it is cold and indifferent.  The autumn leaves were changing, and I had been yearning to escape my life in the suburbs, to flee that mundane routine of trivialities enclosed in a box we call home.  As miserably lonely as I often am camping alone, I am just as lonely waking up in solitude night after night, in a bed meant for two, feeling the charms of the Earth slowly pass me by.

“Each and every person camping on any given night has made the conscious decision to sleep on the ground.  Each person you see huddled by a campfire has chosen, out of their own free will, to be cold.  When confronted with the choice between a warm night of
comfortable sleep and good food within the safety of one’s home, and a sleepless, miserable night tossing and turning on the cold hard ground beneath a volatile wilderness, something has compelled us to choose the latter.  What force drives us to such lunacy?  What emotional and spiritual unrest chases us away from the comforts of civilization into the very world against which we have fortified our lives?  Have we all gone mad?

“The night at Bishop Pass was blisteringly cold, and I didn’t think to bring anything for a campfire.  In my sorry mood, having once again regretted driving the six hours it takes to get to where I was from where I had been, just to stand by myself in the freezing moonlight, I decided to walk into someone else’s camp, if only to share his campfire for a brief moment to warm up.  He was by himself, roughly around my age, and well-stocked with alcohol and other such delights of those who find themselves often in solitude, and welcomed me into his camp like a brother.

“As it turned out, we were none too different from each other.  We both suffered from the same modern ennui that so often drives us out of our homes into the hills.  We both shared similar anxieties, and a longing for a life beyond which was laid out for us by virtue of our era and our birth, and alternately doubt that perhaps maybe this is the best of all possible worlds after all, and our discontent is more out of foolishness than any sort of grounded reality.

“The two of us told stories and shared ideas late into the night, drinking whiskey and tending to the fire.  Then, we parted ways.  We knew each other’s first names, but we didn’t share our surnames.  It was mutually understood that our friendship was for that one night only.  No finding each other on Facebook.  No shooting emails and getting lunch later sometime down the road.  Our bond was born and died with the campfire, as well should that of two passing strangers on a mountain ridge.”

After I told my friend this story, I had to suppress an extremely strong urge to say, “No homo.”

Now, I’m not here to talk about the obvious derogatory and offensive use of the word, “homo.”  You and I both know that the homosexual community has had to put up with bigotry and homophobia since the dawn of humanity, and they continue to face ridicule, bullying, and legislative roadblocks against self-determined happiness.  Using “homo” to denote something you don’t want to be assumed, or saying something like “That’s gay” as an insult only propagates the idea that something is wrong with homosexuality.  We all know this.

And yet, I still had the urge to end my story with “No homo.”  In my defense, it would have been a joke.  My friend would have been amused, and I would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of something so maudlin with something so vulgar.  So what actually stopped me from saying it, if I felt so confident in the contextual harmlessness of my words?

In that moment, “no homo” revealed itself to me as an indicator of a deadly malaise deep within the masculine psyche, and I was disturbed by it.

For readers who have no clue what I’m talking about, “no homo,” whether sincere or in jest, is used to clarify to a listener that the speaker of a story or opinion of sexually ambiguous nature is in fact not gay, just in case there was any confusion.  It was popularized by hip-hop and found its way into the mainstream lexicon of urban and now general youth.

Examples:

“I love you, bro.  No homo.”
“Dude, check out his killer abs.  No homo.”
“I totally care about Princess Kate and Prince William.  No homo.”

I had just told a story about connecting psychologically and intellectually with another man.  “No homo,” because forging any sort of meaningful connection with someone is obviously pretty gay, right?

It’s no secret that the ideal American Man is a child of the strong, silent cowboy type of Western lore.  A man who doesn’t talk about his feelings.  A man who, like Teddy Roosevelt’s military, “speaks softly and carries a big stick.”  Someone who can deliver justice from the barrel of a gun or the knuckles of a fist.  These are our masculine heroes.  They are the idols to which we model our identities as unambiguously straight, manly men.

Real men don’t laugh.  Real men don’t cry.  They are Indiana Jones.  They are James Bond.  They are Batman.  Superman.  The Man With No Name.

So what we have is a population of men who subscribe to the idea that to show emotion is weakness, that to communicate sensitivity is womanly, and to admit to enjoying someone else’s company is to admit dependency.

This model of the Ideal Man is hurting us.  A large number of men would rather hit their wives than talk to them.  Many are alienated fathers, unable to bond in a genuine way with their children, perpetuating an endless cycle of terrible parenting.  Street violence, gun violence, and general psychopathy could be symptoms of the emotional constipation of ideal masculinity releasing itself like explosive diarrhea.

And where does this ideal come from?  Where does this emotional constipation come from?  What prevents us from comfortably bonding with our fellow human beings?

I believe it’s a deep-seated cultural condition of homophobia.  Allow me to call it “linguistic homophobia.”

After all, we do not choose the language and culture into which we are born.  Our brains operate within an endless and impersonal thread of idioms, expressions, and values that are imprinted from external linguistic and cultural forces and cannot be removed.  “No homo,” an expression of wariness regarding homosexuality, is simply just part of the English lexicon now, and has entered my language according to no will of my own.  You cannot choose what language infiltrates your brain, just like you cannot prevent certain mail from entering your mailbox.

And this is what suddenly disturbed me about the phrase, “No homo,” and why I felt the need to use it in this context: it demonstrated that, in general, straight men are petrified of being sincere and open with one another, and ultimately with anyone at all, lest it seem gay.  Our intrinsic, linguistic homophobia creates within us an inability to accept our emotional vulnerability in front of others, and what results is a whole culture of men who can’t admit weakness, who can’t ask for help, who can’t forge meaningful relationships with anybody, and who ultimately resort to explosive displays of violence and abuse as outlets for being unable to communicate.

Homophobia isn’t just damaging to gays.  It’s damaging to everybody.

Transcending the Narcissism of Guilt

I’d like to think I’m a decent human being, but truth be told, I have a long way to go.  Somehow I’ve come to believe that nodding while pretending to listen is the honorable thing to do in the face of uncomfortable social exchanges.  Feigned sincerity may be a lie we all tell, but it’s still a lie.  We can do better.

Last night, while crossing the apartment courtyard to the laundry room, a mentally disabled older man stood there watching my every move.  It made me uncomfortable and I was feeling antisocial, but he was standing at the entrance to the laundry room, so there was no avoiding an interaction with him.  The moment I reached the laundry room entrance, he spoke:

“Hello!  My name is Arnie!  I’m doing laundry!  Are you doing laundry too?”
“Yup.”
“My name is Arnie!  What’s your name?”
“Jeff.”
“Hello Jeff!  I’m doing laundry!  I like your detergent!  I use the same detergent!  Did you get it from HEB?”
“Yes I did.”
“I like HEB!  It’s a good store!”
“I suppose it is.”

And such was the nature of our conversation.  He had one lazy eye and one eye out of focus, and a small bit of drool coming out of both corners of his mouth.

“Jeff!  I don’t speak too well!  Sometimes I can’t get what’s in here…” he pointed to his chest, “…out here!”  he pointed to his mouth.  “I have trouble saying what’s in me!”

I looked at the man and guilt washed over me.  Interacting with him made me uncomfortable, and that discomfort exposed a shallowness within my soul – a reluctance to be thankful for the advantageous conditions within which I exist, and an inability to truly empathize with the less fortunate.  I wasn’t treating him as a man because he wasn’t communicating like a man, but was he not a man in his heart?

Does implying he is less fortunate not expose a sort of deplorable arrogance on my part?

Does my preoccupation with my own guilt not expose a profoundly egocentric narcissism with which I interact with the world?

“I like you, Jeff!  I’m glad I met you!”
“I’m glad I met you too.”  I forgot his name.  It wasn’t Arnie.  I just made that up.

This encounter recalled to me the countless encounters with homeless individuals in the places I’ve lived: these shadowy, undesirable, subhuman characters we ignore all too easily in their plight to survive day by day via means of which we may haughtily disapprove.  Perhaps if I too were homeless, I would think differently.  But there I pass by, one panhandler after another, thinking, “If I don’t look at them, maybe they won’t exist.”  And suddenly, the marginalization of fellow human beings is one step closer to completion.

I see these individuals standing as mirrors, reflecting back to me the frailty of my own conscience.  I used to think that this reaction to them, letting them expose to me my moral or interpersonal shortcomings, was somehow better than just seeing them as annoying or disdainful, but in reality, it’s just as bad, because when you see someone as a mirror, even if you experience humility through your reflection, you’re still not seeing them as a human being.

My language itself, using words like “they” contrary to “I,” exposes more than my shameless self-absorbed rationalizations ever could.

I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my.  Awful words.  I know they are.  But I only have my own self through which I can experience the world.  Excuses.  Empty rationalizations.  If I could experience the world through other people, I would.  What a cop-out.  I can do better.  I.. can do better.  I… I.. I… I…

If you only ever see individuals in terms of oneself, will you ever truly see them for who they are?

Shame, guilt, remorse… they’re all narcissistic responses to our bigotry.  Yet, it’s as if guilt gives us the authorization to act as moral judges on behalf of humanity, as if experiencing guilt and knowing ourselves to be shameful sinners absolves ourselves of the sin itself.

Inward guilt is better than outward disdain, I suppose, but it’s a far cry from outward humanity.

And thus I see myself at the base of a tall mountain: the Mountain of Interpersonal Humanity, upon which you climb to transcend your ability to connect with your fellow human being, to remove yourself from your narcissistic world view and part from your egocentric life below.  Like any other towering mountain peak, I see this mountain as having layers of ecological (psychological) zones.  When you start out at its base, you know guilt, and you see people as mirrors of that guilt (I vs. They), then you climb and eventually see people as individuals (I vs. You).  But don’t stop!  Climb further, and soon you will see yourself with everyone as part of a humanity, a unity of mind and spirit!  You have achieved “We!”

But don’t stop there.  Beyond We is the peak: the true summit of selflessness, where guilt and pronouns don’t exist.  Only here is where you earn redemption.  And yet, you don’t earn redemption because “you” don’t exist.  With the self gone, there is nothing to redeem.  Personal shortcomings are absolved, but that doesn’t matter.  There are no pronouns, only the Universe.  Only existence.

Perhaps that mysterious, nearly unattainable, metaphysical summit is Heaven.

And yet, as long as I see the world in terms of I, I, I, me, me, me, I will never reach even the slopes of that mountain.  Thus is the folly of ego.

The Worst Lesson I Ever Learned

Let me tell you the 2nd worst lesson I ever learned: Good things come to those who wait.

Truth be told, those who wait may wait forever.  Good Fortune is not seeking you out.  It isn’t even waiting to be sought after.  It is nothing – a scattered array of abstractions that must be collected and constructed via proactivity and ambition.  But alas, back in my impressionable college days, I learned this fateful mistruth, and the course of my life has been defined by it.

I’ll try to keep the long story short.

It all started back in freshman year when I saw a lovely, rosy-cheeked girl across the lecture hall and said to myself, “Quack, you’re going to be with her someday.  You don’t know who she is or where she’s from, but by the power of determination and myspace-stalking (yes, myspace), Destiny will decree that you two shall unite.”

And sure enough, we did.  A year and a half later.  Because I waited patiently for her longterm high school boyfriend to break up with her, which he did.

Good things come to those who wait.

And like any teenage relationship founded upon exemplary methods and principles such as the Love-At-First-Sight delusion, internet-stalking, and rebounding, this one lasted less than a year before it fizzled away into passive aggression, resentment, and eventually nothingness.

But it was too late.  I had learned the lesson.  If I wanted something, all I had to do was wait.  Time would reward me for my patience.

Oh, Patience, the supreme virtue.

Alas, the years went by, as did the women, and there I stood offstage awaiting my cue, but my cue never came.  One such fair maiden got engaged abroad and permanently relocated.  A couple more have been in committed relationships since the dawn of our friendship years ago; any windows of opportunity that might have passed have since set sail for the seas of Nevermore.  One woman in particular, I waited for the better part of three years – when they finally did break up, she kept me as her Plan B just in case her Plan A didn’t work out… which it did.  Before I knew it, college was over.

“Dude, Quack, you idiot, you’re going about this all wrong.  What about people who were single and searching?”

Let me explain this lesson I learned: Good things come to those who wait.  Good things don’t come to those who don’t have to wait.

There was one woman who made herself available to me.  She was a beautiful porcelain angel – mature, responsible, with a golden heart.  She was and she still is.  When she walked into the room, people noticed.  When she spoke, people listened.  When she smiled, it made people happy, and when she frowned, people would become sad.  I still think about her regularly – almost daily.  Our involvement with each other was the moment when my adherence to The Lesson was revealed to be a neurotic obsession.

Here’s what happened:

After a dinner date, we stood in the parking lot about to kiss.  I leaned in.  She leaned in.  Then an ugly voice uttered from beneath my consciousness: “No, Quack.  You wait.  You don’t have.  Having is not what you do.  Waiting is what you do, and that is what you will always do.  Forever.  Because good things come to those who wait.  So wait you will.”

In a bizarre panic, I averted the kiss and tried to morph it into a hug instead.  She didn’t get the memo, and her lips grazed my ear.  Embarrassed, we parted ways.

Jesus, what is wrong with me?

Had I developed a perverse romantic obsession with being lonely?  Sure, the Romantics of the nineteenth century were all about the torment of desire, the anguish of never filling the void in the heart and mind.  The most valuable aesthetic expression was that of yearning, not of achieving.  Richard Wagner notoriously prolonged the victorious climax in his opera Tristan and Isolde until it could stand for nothing else but the finality of death (or orgasm, depending on your musicology professor).  Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz was written through a veil of longing for his lost Polish homeland.  Hell, all of Polish Romanticism is about the lack of free nationhood and the nationalistic pining therein, and I, as a Pole-wannabe, how can I not find this role in life intellectually appealing?

Is it my duty on this earth to pass the torch of Nineteenth Century Romanticism to the twenty-first century?  Is it my role to yearn, pine, wait, long for, and eventually die having never known the sweet taste of achievement?  Am I destined to be a martyr for some abstract metaphysical ideal of a bygone era?

No, of course not.  That’s absurd, and shamelessly egocentric.

But it’s too late.  I already learned that good things come to those who wait, and I internalized waiting to the point where it defined who I am and what I want out of life: un-satiated desire and the regret of inaction.  What for?  I don’t know.  All I know is that I have accepted my role as an inevitability bestowed upon me by some metaphysical force.  Someone had to be me, so it might as well be me.  I’m just a victim of causality for some greater unknown purpose.

Thus, when a woman passes by, and we smile at each other and part ways, I can’t help but enjoy thinking that maybe, just maybe, she’s experiencing a small bit of yearning, and perhaps lamenting the nocturne of her own unfulfilled desire.  And, if for nothing else but the poetry of a prosaic world, I am too.  And we shall never meet again.

But no.  That’s ridiculous.  Why subscribe to some bogus precedent that makes me miserable when its greater purpose is only imaginary at best?  Is my delusion of grandeur really so enormous, such that I have to make up grandiose, romanticized excuses to cover up what is probably nothing more than standard cowardice?

…which brings me to the worst lesson I ever learned: One cannot help the lessons one learns.

The Foolish Destiny of a Delusional Egomaniac: i.e. The Art of Denial

I am unfit for companionship.

It’s not that I’m terribly unattractive – I have two eyes, teeth which point roughly in the right direction, and I smell okay on most weekdays – it’s just that somehow, somewhere in my past, it entered my head that I’m destined to be a martyr on behalf of single people everywhere.  And unfortunately, an idea, like some cruel virus of the mind, is a difficult thing to shake.

Such it is that I jeopardize my romantic prospects before they’re even prospects, using awkwardness or ineptitude as a conscious scapegoat to hide the delusional truth: I actually believe in some bizarre yet essential destiny for myself, a reluctant destiny of emotional destitution, about which I find myself asking Fate, “Why?  Why must a fulfill this role in the world?  Why did you choose me, of all people, to bear this awkward and terribly unnecessary cross?”

Sometimes, perhaps for practice, I envision a break up with no one in particular, in which I say, “It’s not you.  It’s not even me.  It’s a condition of the universe,” and then, instead of explaining myself, scuttling away Zoidberg-style such that the last memory she may have of me is one which frees her of any desire she might have ever felt.

But in reality, I could be having a lovely conversation with a beautiful woman, when suddenly my imaginary spiritual leader descends from the heavens and says:

– No, Quack.  It’s not your time.  Your time will come later.  You must preserve your purpose in life.  Initiate CockBlock Sequence 104B.
– Awww… do I have to?  I like this person!
– Yes, Quack.  Yes, you must.

“…sorry if it starts smelling funny here.  I just farted.”
“Uhh… okay…”

– Are you happy now, Destiny?
– Tee hee… yes.  Yes I am.

But why martyr?  For what purpose?

I suppose I do this out of spite for the dating game.  As I approach my later twenties, I’ve noticed air of fatalistic impatience surrounding courtship.  People have enough life experience to know what they’re looking for in a partner, and dates proceed accordingly like reluctant yet cordial job interviews where both parties are at once the interviewer and applicant, checking traits and idiosyncrasies off an imaginary compatibility checklist before consulting the business partners (i.e. friends) and having a conference to discuss the applicants, whose differences are often trivial and meaningless.

“I just watched a movie with Applicant C.  It turns out he likes romantic comedies, which is a +1, but also pops his collar, which is a -2.”
“That still puts him ahead of Applicant F [who lives with his mother], doesn’t it?”
“Applicant F does listen to punk rock though, which I also happen to enjoy, and he makes me laugh.  Making me laugh is a +3.”
“Can they both be moved to the next round?”
“I suppose, but only if neither of them finds out.”

It’s this sort of calculated analysis combined with the fatalistic need for companionship that makes the adult dating world particularly intolerable.  That is to say: the whole, “I’m 25 and single, so by the end of this month, I will be in a relationship with whoever has the highest score over +10,” and thus by the 31st, Applicant B with a +16 shall summoned to some movie where he shall lean in for the kiss and not be rejected, as is the custom.

Because God forbid anyone be single for any length of time in their twenties.

It’s almost as if, by this age, people suddenly feel the need to fulfill some greater destiny and partake on the Great Ritual of Courtship, and whoever happens to be tolerable and available at the crossroads of desire is He/She Who Shall Be Mine, Forever.  I’m just not ready to accept a reality in which my entire future is determined by intersection of complete random chance and opportunism.

It’s this kind of sober and objective determination combined with this generation’s ever-growing desire for matrimonial eternity that makes me nostalgic for the bumbling awkwardness of teen romance, when dating was confusing yet exciting because no one had any idea what they were doing, so everything was fair game (to an extent).  Expectations didn’t exist because they didn’t have a past to which to be compared.  People did what they wanted to do, whether or not it actually did anything good.

To be fair, perhaps the objective-analysis approach to the dating game is a little better than the early-twenties “College Bro” approach:

Such it is that I somehow believe I’m fighting the Good Fight: some silent and frustrating war between the accepted conventions of dating and whatever ideal I feel should exist in spite of not actually knowing what that ideal would look like.  And therein lies the fundamental problem with my foolish battle: I don’t know what I’m fighting for.  I know what I’m fighting against, but I can’t figure out the end goal.  What’s the point in martyrdom if it has no vision?  Why am I doing this to myself?

No really, why am I doing this to myself?  Why am I allowing myself to be blinded by talk of these senseless and lofty ideals – this elevated talk about ‘martyrdom’ and crusades against accepted conventions?  Why can’t I just admit to myself that it’s all a front, an elaborate psychological front to keep me feeling noble and proud in my distractedness from the truth that I’m nothing more than afraid?  Afraid of what?  Afraid of finding out that I’ll be disappointed with my future, unless I accept one that’s intentionally jeopardized in advance on behalf of some ‘noble cause’?  Were my naively idealistic expectations for adult companionship so unbelievably high such that I have to defend myself from growing disillusioned with their underwhelming realities by not allowing myself to partake in their joys?  Am I afraid to find out that maybe my future isn’t some star-crossed destiny, but rather is the trivial result of random chance encounters at a convenient time?

Maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to avoid vacuuming my apartment.