How to Start Over

How do you start over in dating? I feel like I'm picking up a torch dropped from a previous relationship and I just want to rush to the finish. I don't know how to start from the ground up every time I meet a new guy, and in not doing this I'm becoming more emotionally unhinged more often (which I'm not getting away with). I actually cried in a bathroom stall the last time I went on a first date. I'm over my previous boyfriends individually, but I'm still at that level of readiness to settle down - but I guess dating isn't like transferring schools (which I know so well), you can't take your credits and still be at softmore level.

Of course, I know what I need to do and how I need to act.  I hate logic, but fuck, I hate always being alone too.

Money Theory

I was just thinking, and it's late, that when you die, it does not matter how much debt you have (or had). It's really simple; when you die, it does not matter.  In what belief system will you be judged on whether you had this or that many assets and what your credit score was? These things seem so ridiculous to me.  A lot of things do - I feel that I am too far outside of society to subscribe to its tenets.  I guess we have to believe that there are some long-reaching karmic sort of retributions for our financial dalliances in order to maintain social order and keep us from living the feared brutish life of our ancestors.

Any look into history only seems to confirm the meaninglessness of these things.  We have entire civilizations we know nothing about, and yet we are so concerned about our statuses - as if there were more to them than a fleeting moment that really only resonates to ourselves. I feel pressure from my parents to do well, to become successful, but for what? So I can keep the cycle going? Again, I feel outside of society and that I am not a on the circle but a quick offshoot that does not lead anywhere.

A Hecka Tight Hike

In the same vein as the prairie dog story, this one is just a 'vignette'.  In Alaska, while we were climbing the world's most forgotten great peak (it took us almost three hours to summit), my fellow SCA intern and I were talking about our friends and she mentioned that she had a friend that says "hecka" instead of "hella" (a word that was hella cool in 2002, we were going through 2009 at the time).

The hike was pretty legit (sorry, 2009 me is going to narrate this one). When we got to the top, we snapped some pics and all that, ate M&Ms and she smoked a cigarette. Then we started the long haul down.  It took nearly twice as long to descend as we had to avoid falling off rock cliffs which were covered in brush - in this part of Alaska there are no trails.

With mosquito bites, dust/dirt and scrapes a'plenty we returned to the Coldfoot Camp truck stop, parked our weary asses in a bench and drank our weight in free soda refills.

Every time I say 'hecka', I think back to this hike while the person I am talking to winces at the stupidity of the word 'hecka'.

Hangin' in There

Today, more than usual, I've been flip-flopping between different possible future Adams. I walk to the bathroom thinking that I'll become a teacher in a third-world country, in the bathroom decide to be a lawyer and walk out hoping to be a marine biologist in Australia.  It's frustrating to never have a  steady point to work toward and I'm envious of my friends who do have that - friends who have steadily worked toward lives and have been building all along. I'm just laying a million foundations and never going further, wasting my energy and eliminating possibilities all the while - sort of like in the Bell Jar when the main character sees all the figs, her dreams, fall around her because she could not focus on reaching a single one.  I want to build something, to be more than entry-level - I just can't focus.  I guess whatever I'm doing is better than spending 30 years in a profession I don't like, of course, it may be a minute before I have a house and car.

Below is me hangin' in there...

Praying to Prairie Dogs

About a week ago, as I was walking to another interview, I passed a corner lot of dirt snuggled up to a major intersection.  This lot was teaming with prairie dogs; the first I'd seen of these hay-colored, clicking critters since moving to Boulder. Because there was a woman with a stroller walking inexplicably fast behind me, and I didn't want to have that awkward, prolonged pass (for five minutes she would be within ten feet kind of thing), I kept moving. On the opposite side of the intersection I walked over an underpass filled with prairie dog art -  several underpasses here in Boulder have that kind of thing - scenes from nature with a little Indian flair, so I didn't think much of it.

That's the set-up.

A few nights later, while spending some time with a new friend, I mentioned the prairie dogs (the context was that I wanted to try squirrel and whether or not prairie dogs were protected animals).  He told me that when his very religious dad had visited him at school here, they had crossed that same underpass and his dad had remarked that after the apocalypse people are going to find this tunnel and think that we worshipped 'damn prairie dogs' and then his dad went on to criticize the 'monument' erected in their honor.


I found it really funny that there will be post-apocalyptic people and that of all the structures we have made, in all the cities, in all the non-Boulder areas, that they will only stumble on this and believe that this was a holy temple. And the idea of a culture/epoch solely devoted to the prairie dog is pretty funny too.

So that wasn't much of a story...