It has, boys and girls, been that sorta day.
We will start at 12:30 PM, because this is the point at which I woke up.
Following my slow, methodical reaffirmation of consciousness, I proceeded to sit on the couch and read Crossroads of Twilight (again, nothing to do with Twilight the teen phenomenon) until 5:30 PM. Lazy Saturday, this is how you began. Around 6-ish, I called Jason and Eric to inquire when they expected to be back from their ski trip (which I declined to go on at the last minute). They said they'd be back in about an hour, so we all planned to go to dinner around 8:00 PM. In the intervening hours, I took a shower, got myself presentable, and wandered out to de-snow my car and drive over to Arlington where we were going to eat.
We ended up at an Argentinian restaurant called "Tango," or "Tanga", or some such. Regardless, it didn't seem to have any Argentinians in it, and the wait staff was very, very North American. And by North American I mean Bostonian White (Mental note: suggest "Bostonian White" as a Crayola color). Dinner was fine, we had Jason, Kat, Eric, Mike, Ria, Jess, and myself. There was a pitcher of sangria. It was pretty good. There was a crepe, which I ate, which struck me as more of an Italian enchilada, baked, and absolutely smothered in cheese. Over all, the food was good, but the company (as usual) better.
After dinner, I returned to my car and drove myself over to Mike and Ria's, where the hosts, Eric, and I played a game of Galaxy Trucker. Good on me for getting it as a Secret Santa gift for Mike (not so secret now, is it!), cause it's a lot of fun! I think I'd say that even if my beginner's luck hadn't kicked in and given me a spectacular third and final round.
Prior to heading out to dinner and at some point after my stint of reading, I downloaded a LiveJournal client and then, using said client, downloaded a log of my entire LiveJournal post history. My first entry was sometime in March of 2003, and the last was January of 2009, though I hadn't seriously posted in it since 2006/2007 or so. The log is approximately 1.5 megs of XML formatted text. I read through a few at the beginning, and a few painful ones in the middle, before filing it away in my Documents folder. I'm glad to have it. It documents a particular portion of my life which is, often, difficult to think about. It's easier, perhaps, to keep all that knowledge and time tucked away in an XML file.
It would, somehow, feel good to connect that log to this blog somehow. I think. It would help me feel like less of two separate people, and connect the life that I lived during that time with the one I live now. I'm not sure if I have anything to learn from it, or what.
I've said many times that in November of 2005 or so, I essentially ceased to exist and became a new person. I've avoided butterfly and phoenix references (and, actually, hadn't even thought of such a metaphor for it until now), but in my mind there is this very definite six month period where I went from being one person to being something completely different. In a sense I reinvented myself, though that implies a certain amount of intention to do so. Rather, I was reinvented. Reset, maybe. I went from having one group of friends, one set of relationships, one set of family, one job, one set of possessions, one personality, one way of dressing, one financial outlook, one living arrangement, and one future, to having my life change, almost utterly, in every single one of those areas, all at once. If it's possible for stress to knock years off your life, I imagine that happened somewhere in there. It was at that point, I think, when my LiveJournal died. I couldn't write in something connected to all that. Maybe, in the last couple years, I couldn't bring myself to really write anything at all as a result. I think, perhaps, that I've spent the last four years recovering, though there were certainly substantial milestones of recovery that I reached quite early in that process. I don't know, and it's probably not worth speculating on. I am where, and what, and who I am, at this point, regardless of how long it took me to get here, or how long I go on changing as a result.
I have never been comfortable defining my existence by any of that, so I won't, and haven't. Someday, though, I may get myself to the point where I'm one continuous person again, rather than a 23 year old and a 4 year old (generally speaking). Acknowledging LiveJournal and everything there, downloading it onto this computer, and bringing that history into my life, however, somehow feels like a good step in that direction, even if it's merely copying some 1's and 0's from a server somewhere to this machine, where, as I type, they just finished being backed up (along with everything else) via Time Machine.
Not bad for a lazy Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment