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a personal relic Today was a great day for me. I let myself indulge in all of my favorite hobbies. I read and listened to music with no worries or concerns. All that existed was a very content and confident version of me. Part of me still takes pleasure in having Monday off. While the rest of the world works, I relax. It is one of the few eccentricities that I still have left. The rest of the time I just seem to blend in with the crowd. On Mondays I can slow down and go at my own pace. Struggling with work makes me edgy and forget who I am. I need time alone to think and just be me. I don't need to be surrounded by people. Mondays give me that time that I need so badly. Part of the morning was spent online. After I had read my selection of journals, I started to read about Prague. My trip to Europe is still uncertain, but the possibility of me going with my brother has surfaced. My mother told me that he was planning on going after he graduated this spring and we might be able to go together, which might not be such a bad idea. There are so many places that I want to see and Europe is only one of them. One thing that I am more and more certain of is that there is so much to learn in the world and I have so little time. We live in an age where information is readily available, but I can only process so much of it at one time. My mind jumps from one thing to another, but I start to overload and I need to take a break. I lounged around the house listening to the winter winds blow outside my window. Snow was coming again and I knew it, but I ventured out before it fell. There was a quick stop at the bookstore where I paged through a book about Edward Hopper and decided to get it at another time. I knew that some videos that I had ordered would be in my mailbox waiting for me when I got home. I have to keep my entertainment spending under control or I would buy new things on a daily basis. So while the snow fell I read my latest batch of comic books as my newly acquired copy of Tori Amos videos played in the background. I wonder if I give the impression to people that I am lonely. I hope that isn't the message that I am sending across through my words. Being alone is not a crime. Nor is it a form of suffering for me. There are days when I don't want to talk with anyone. I need to be myself so that I can think. People who need to surround themselves with people confuse and even frighten me at times. As for me having another girlfriend, I don't think that I could do it anymore or at least not for a while yet. There isn't an easy way to say this without sounding misogynistic, but I can not be some woman's fantasy twenty-four hours of the day. It is hard trying to make someone happy all of the time. I simply can not do it. On an episode of Mad About You, Paul Reiser talks about wooing. He says that a man woos and woos and then he reaches a point where he has to say whoa. As simplistic as this may sound I have to agree with it. I always feel myself slipping away when I am in a relationship. I am no longer me. I become more and more what they want me to be and eventually I end up leaving. Maybe this point is what they refer to as the honeymoon being over. Perhaps that is true, but at the moment I have yet to find a woman who made me want to get past that point. Damn, that sounds really harsh, but there is some truth to it. A more delicate way of phrasing it would be that I have yet to find the right woman for me, but then we are entering into the world of fantasy again. Defintion of fantasy woman by me: a woman of Irish descent who looks vaguely like Paula Marshall, wears overalls once in a while, reads more than I do, speaks another language and plays the cello. All joking aside I guess that what I am trying to say is that I am happy to be by myself for the moment. Maybe in time I will find some woman that will change my mind, but for now I am content. Now to change gears for a moment and address something that has been bothering me. The journal has changed over time which is only natural, but I am wondering if it has stopped growing. I fear that stagnation has set in without me realizing it. In the beginning it was a novelty for me. I wondered how long I could do it. In the past I had abandoned paper journals after a time. Here I might be more willing to commit to something more lasting with other people reading. I might even learn something new about myself. Then there was always the hope that I would get better at writing, which was something that I did very little of in college. I may have been an English major, but I was more of a reader than a writer. I loved what other people could do with words. I envied them and wanted to be like them, but I was never sure if I could do it. Over time the journal became purely an outlet for things that were bothering me. It was almost a daily whine. I was not overly fond of this period. Then it became slightly more essay like in form, but that didn't last very long. It was a very distant form of expression and did very little for me. Finally the journal became almost monotone in nature and it should have died, but it didn't. I refused to let it die. I would make pathetic attempts at being clever or interesting. It wasn't as though I was being guided in any direction by my readers. For the most part my small following is a quiet one. They come and go and read in silence. Once in a while they break through and contact me, but not that often. I am trying to decide what I want to do next with the journal. The reason why I do this has become unclear to me. I think that I am going to take a leave of absence for a week from this journal and see how I feel about it. If after a week I don't miss writing here, then I will know for sure that it is time to stop. There won't be any final shouts of this sucks or how much it is a drain on me. I will simply have lost interest and will leave what I have done here as a relic. It will be a somewhat flawed time capsule of eighteen months of my life expressed in broken English.
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