{"id":233,"date":"2002-12-15T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2002-12-15T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/?p=233"},"modified":"2002-12-15T20:10:00","modified_gmt":"2002-12-15T20:10:00","slug":"leopard-spots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/2002-12\/233-leopard-spots","title":{"rendered":"Leopard Spots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a headache and am feeling just generally blah today&#8230; I think I&#8217;m sick again&#8230; <!--more sick feeling-sorry-for-myself rantings-->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&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>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&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>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&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>and then for one reason or three I have lately been thinking of marriage, which is quite ridiculous because I&#8217;m not even dating anyone&#151; or perhaps it is <b>because<\/b> I&#8217;m not even dating anyone (or at least not <b>successfully<\/b> dating anyone)&#151; at the moment&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>For the sake of argument or enumeration, let me just take this moment to jot down some of the reasons I&#8217;ve been feeling the way I&#8217;ve been feeling lately:<\/p>\n<ul>In no particular order&#8230;<\/p>\n<li type=\"square\">Last year about this time, for the January issue of <b><i>The Zero Card<\/i><\/b>, I wrote a prediction for the year. <i>&#8220;I have a feeling that I&#8217;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&#8217;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.&#8221;<\/i> Rather bold prediction, no? What wasn&#8217;t published was <b>who<\/b> I thought (or hoped?) that person was, or that I thought <b>November<\/b> would be when we would get engaged. Well, November came and went, and yet again I was still not dating anyone. Lately, I&#8217;ve considered a different interpretation&#038;#151 that I foresaw both the engagement and the person in question, but that I had mistakenly projected myself into the equation. Unfortunately, I&#8217;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&#8217;t verify that in any way.<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">Speaking of <b><i>The Zero Card<\/i><\/b>, whatever happened to that, you may ask? Well, first we lost most if not all of our distribution outlets. It didn&#8217;t help that most of those were downtown, and my Day Job was not. That meant I couldn&#8217;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&#8217;t help that the Toronto Dark Writers&#8217; Group essentially went into an egocentric crash-and-burn tailspin following Convergence in Montr\u00e9al.<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">I am still not dating anyone. There are a couple that I am interested, but I just don&#8217;t seem to be able to make any progress with them. The story of my life, I suppose.<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">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&#151; by our rough calculation of what home renovations we last saw&#151;  <\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">A couple of other friends&#151; who I like to have been &#8220;more than friends&#8221; with&#151; are now married to someones else. They are still my friends, but it&#8217;s just more obvious that they are now unattainable in that other respect.<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">The company Employee and Spouse Holiday Dinner\/Dance was last night. I ended up not going, mainly because I didn&#8217;t have anyone to accompany me, and I really dislike those functions especially under those circumstances.<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">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&#8217;ve hung out with in recent years weren&#8217;t even born when I graduated&#8230; I could be their father (but I&#8217;m not)!<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">and that starts to remind me of the ones that got away&#8230; some I&#8217;m glad to have gotten away from, and others I wish had not gone&#8230; I won&#8217;t name them here, but <b>you know who you are<\/b>&#8230;<\/li>\n<li type=\"square\">I have for many, many years been aware that I have never belonged to &#8220;A Gang of Friends&#8221;. 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&#8217;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&#8217;s odd that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and then there&#8217;s this whole livejournal thing&#8230; it seems there&#8217;s a lot of interesting people out there&#8230; people I&#8217;ve met, or people I haven&#8217;t met and would like to&#8230; but they have converted their journals to &#8220;friends only&#8221;&#8230; <\/p>\n<p><b>&#8220;FRIENDS ONLY&#8221;<\/b>&#8230; aye, there&#8217;s the rub&#8230; just as a leopard supposedly cannot change its spots, so I seem not to be able to break out of my &#8220;Lone Wolf&#8221; personality&#8230; every once in a while I meet a group of people, and I begin to hang out with them&#8230; 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&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>and then it&#8217;s <b>THIS TIME OF YEAR<\/b>&#151; the Christmas Dinner\/Dance Season, the New Year&#8217;s Eve Party Season, the pending and completely horrible for people like me Valentine&#8217;s Day Season just a few horrible short weeks away&#151; that just makes it feel all that more horrible to me&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>Convergence in Vegas<\/b> is beginning to scare me again. If you remember meeting me in Montr\u00e9al&#151; and I&#8217;m actually proud of myself for making new friends!&#151; 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&#8230; I hope you didn&#8217;t take it personally&#8230; I guess it&#8217;s just the way I am&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Just as the leopard can never change its spots, the Lone Wolf will never really become a part of the pack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a headache and am feeling just generally blah today&#8230; I think I&#8217;m sick again&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/badinage.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}