Well, I was gone for a month or so. Although I suppose I got back about a month ago. Can't say the experience of travel has provided any epiphanies, but that wasn't the point; I needed to get out. Travelled across a significant portion of the United States. West coast, midwest, east coast, and what is technically the south. Kept noticing posters of Willie Nelson no matter where I went just out of coincidence. Spent a while in Denver. Smoked a lot of, ahem, weed. It's an interesting experience, being in a legal shop. So much cleaner than past conventions, for one. I also developed a pathological hatred for exceedingly loud cicadas. Visited an old friend living in Kansas with his family, where I spent a week admiring virtually empty countryside and a couple of towns that stopped very abruptly at the edges of cornfields. This started with driving three hours just to get to some backwater town I'd never heard of before. No wonder the people I was with thought Kansas City was "huge" and not just some place where they kept an airport. Surprising number of old hippies, though.
Then I spent a week and a half or so staying in Maryland and visiting parts of the DC area. I stayed with an old friend, and her husband as well as their roommate. It was... nice. I enjoyed being there, in spite of everything I'd put myself through this year. She and I had time to talk alone, and more than once, on many things. Well, I say talk, in most cases it involved me inelegantly sobbing into her shoulder, but I digress. In retrospect, perhaps my overwhelming fears were unwarranted; I had to call my therapist just to muster the impetus to talk to someone I trust like no other about how I'm feeling. I'm not sure if that sort of thing should be a big deal or not. But, after all my fears, all the concerns about her well-being in the face of a mess I created for myself... She was fine. Everything is fine between the two of us, even in spite of my usual instabilities and theatrics. She had an idea what was bothering me when I first wanted to talk to her. I suppose there's a reason we've been close friends this long, and in the end that's all either of us ever wanted.
I really don't know how this ends. I can't say if the feelings are ever going to quite stop bothering me. But I have other things to worry about, and I'm tired of dealing with this.
Still, I had a fine time, and she and I had plenty of time to hang out and do things. I talked her ear off about art history while we look at an exhibit from the Dutch School, we walked around the National Mall and saw Lincoln, I got drunk on multiple occasions, she and her husband managed to keep me from drooling over Jefferson's Library for too long, we went to at least one overpriced restaurant, and at one point she dragged me off to a gay bar where I ended up making out with this adorable drunk guy who was absolutely flaming. You know, just a typical trip to the US capital, really.
Her husband is a nice fellow. A bit younger, maybe not the most erudite, but he's a metalhead and drinks real beer and liquor instead of the diluted piss water that's popular in Maryland. He and I spent a day out acting on an idea I had, which involved going to a tiny Eastern European grocery in some obscure spot in downtown Maryland. Got some rye bread, pickle,
salo, and then to the liquor store where I bought some premium vodka. The night involved showing him how to drink like Russians while I slurred a series of Russian toasts and slang. We also vomited like Russians. Fortunately my best friend only had one drink and was bafflingly patient about the whole ordeal brought on by two guys being overly enthusiastic about a very expensive bottle of Stolichnaya Elit. Really, it was a fine time until the retching occurred. Regardless, I was very pleasantly relieved to find out I liked the guy, and that they really do seem genuinely happy together. That's perfectly well. We all decided we'd all try and get a group together and travel across Europe when he gets out of the air force in a few years. Something to look forward to, at least. Meanwhile, I need to continue lifting weights... Been at the gym ever since I got back. Took my best friend, who's a damned massage therapist, to look at my back and talk to me about how weak my muscles had gotten to get me to admit my health hasn't been that great. Turns out extremely long periods of stress and undereating can weaken you. So now I'm working on reclaiming lost muscle mass.
If a number of details about where I've gone seem confusing, I suppose this can sort that out: I'm 27 and I'm from Alaska, not the UK. The long and elaborate identity deception is something of a long story. Suffice to say when I started using the internet it was treated like this scary place where sharing anything about yourself would get you murdered by random hate groups or some
. However, the internet was still a place to socialise. Lying seemed easy enough, and combined with my ethnic background and the fact I started casually typing in BSE out of habit in my teens due to doing some work on foreign websites, a persona emerged. Effectively what happened was I got too lazy to explain and just went with it for a long time. Then I decided it was a tired schtick a few years ago. It's dead. Bury it. I have a low tolerance for bullshit anyway.
That being said, don't be alarmed. I'm still the same personality, right down to the faux snobbishness and cheese fixations.
Well, I've run out of things to disclose. Frankly I'm not sure what the point of this thread was; much of it qualifies as oversharing by my standards. Maybe I just had nowhere else to talk casually about a few things. I'm also very, very tired, and not just because I'm underslept on my day off. As for the emotional pains, I believe I can cope.
I'm not dying. Thanks for listening.
