I have a headache and am feeling just generally blah today… I think I’m sick again… In past years, that would have meant finding me doubled over in pain, or strapped to the bed with a bucket on the floor nearby, being off work for a day or two at a time…
however, thanks to whatever perverse gods are looking out for me my overall health seems to have greatly improved of recent times and the same illness-causing-germs now find me with such minor symptoms that perhaps they could be attributed to allergies…
these are the same perverse looking-out gods that keep me teetering on the edge of doing well in life tempered with a good dose of getting kicked once in a while just to remind me not to get too cocky…
and then for one reason or three I have lately been thinking of marriage, which is quite ridiculous because I’m not even dating anyone— or perhaps it is because I’m not even dating anyone (or at least not successfully dating anyone)— at the moment…
For the sake of argument or enumeration, let me just take this moment to jot down some of the reasons I’ve been feeling the way I’ve been feeling lately:
- In no particular order…
- Last year about this time, for the January issue of The Zero Card, I wrote a prediction for the year. “I have a feeling that I’m going to meet my future wife this year, and we will become engaged some time in 2002. This will be a Year of Romance. There are two things that make this prediction so interesting. Firstly, I have absolutely no idea who she is, mainly because I’m not actually dating anyone at this moment. Secondly, I have the strange feeling that we have in fact already met; we are just not aware of our future destiny together.” Rather bold prediction, no? What wasn’t published was who I thought (or hoped?) that person was, or that I thought November would be when we would get engaged. Well, November came and went, and yet again I was still not dating anyone. Lately, I’ve considered a different interpretation— that I foresaw both the engagement and the person in question, but that I had mistakenly projected myself into the equation. Unfortunately, I’m not in contact with the person in question, or in contact with anyone who is in contact with the person in question, so I can’t verify that in any way.
- Speaking of The Zero Card, whatever happened to that, you may ask? Well, first we lost most if not all of our distribution outlets. It didn’t help that most of those were downtown, and my Day Job was not. That meant I couldn’t duck out on my lunch hour to distribute it every month; I had to make a special trip downtown, and rarely got there before the outlets closed for the day! Then I had all my Home Renovations to deal with, and that took up the majority of my energies over the summer. It didn’t help that the Toronto Dark Writers’ Group essentially went into an egocentric crash-and-burn tailspin following Convergence in Montréal.
- I am still not dating anyone. There are a couple that I am interested, but I just don’t seem to be able to make any progress with them. The story of my life, I suppose.
- I recently came back into contact with someone I dated a few years ago, and while the romance never went anywhere, we remained friends. Though we have not seen each other in about two years— by our rough calculation of what home renovations we last saw—
- A couple of other friends— who I like to have been “more than friends” with— are now married to someones else. They are still my friends, but it’s just more obvious that they are now unattainable in that other respect.
- The company Employee and Spouse Holiday Dinner/Dance was last night. I ended up not going, mainly because I didn’t have anyone to accompany me, and I really dislike those functions especially under those circumstances.
- A 75th Anniversary Reunion for my High School is being organized. That just brings to mind where I am and where I have been with my life, and giving me the opportunity to compare it with all the other losers that I went to high school with. Not to mention that I graduated high school almost 25 years ago! (I was IN high school during the 50th Anniversary celebrations!) Some of the people I’ve hung out with in recent years weren’t even born when I graduated… I could be their father (but I’m not)!
- and that starts to remind me of the ones that got away… some I’m glad to have gotten away from, and others I wish had not gone… I won’t name them here, but you know who you are…
- I have for many, many years been aware that I have never belonged to “A Gang of Friends”. I know some people who are still in the same group of friends from public school! Like FUCKING GRADE 8! Over the years, I have picked up one or two close friends here and there, but they are all very diverse people, and they all have their own circles of friends. I’ve been a part of a small group from time to time, but it never seems to last; I always seem to be either a hanger-on, or an outside. Eventually, I guess I just go my own way again. It’s odd that.
and then there’s this whole livejournal thing… it seems there’s a lot of interesting people out there… people I’ve met, or people I haven’t met and would like to… but they have converted their journals to “friends only”…
“FRIENDS ONLY”… aye, there’s the rub… just as a leopard supposedly cannot change its spots, so I seem not to be able to break out of my “Lone Wolf” personality… every once in a while I meet a group of people, and I begin to hang out with them… but regardless of what I do or who they are, after a time I seem to revert back to the comfort of the solitude of my own company…
and then it’s THIS TIME OF YEAR— the Christmas Dinner/Dance Season, the New Year’s Eve Party Season, the pending and completely horrible for people like me Valentine’s Day Season just a few horrible short weeks away— that just makes it feel all that more horrible to me…
Convergence in Vegas is beginning to scare me again. If you remember meeting me in Montréal— and I’m actually proud of myself for making new friends!— you may have noticed that if I hung out with you, I never really hung around all the time. I flitted back and forth from place to place, stopping for a while, but not for long… I hope you didn’t take it personally… I guess it’s just the way I am…
Just as the leopard can never change its spots, the Lone Wolf will never really become a part of the pack.
