This weekend I’m heading to North Carolina to go to a Jimmy Buffet concert with my family. It’ll be the first time we’ve all gathered in the same place for a long time. I got a new iPod for the trip, as my other one had long since died. I called it iValhalla. It’s syncing happily right now.

So far living alone is great. I haven’t really been lonely much. Walking around naked FTW. Now that moving out is over, I’m slowly but steadily getting settled in for real here.

I finished the entire Harry Potter series for the third time today. I’ve got a lot of excellent book recommendations though from the Rails programmers on IRC, so I should finally have some good books to keep me busy for a while.

The fly is up, and the pinnacle of everything is blurred together.

They left today around noon. I didn’t feel like hanging out with anyone after that, so I didn’t go to the Sir. I’m also not in the mood to go to frisbee this afternoon. This year’s Vanderbilt intramural season hasn’t gone that well, what with losing every game and the lack of attendance, and that’s kind of put me out of the mood to play, even though today is just a pickup game. So I’m going bike riding instead, on Leah’s old bike.

I’m feeling a bit drained and moody today. I’d rather just not talk to anyone much, which is lucky, since I doubt anyone will be at the apartment until late tonight. I kind of enjoy being home alone, which, incidentally, happens a lot lately.

It’s funny. When I’m feeling down, I feel like everyone should understand that it’s not trivial. I want some compassion. At the same time, I want them to leave me alone. Sometimes. I wish everyone could read my mind so I wouldn’t have to communicate my feelings.

I’m sure I’ll feel better again soon.

I think that my reliance on my friendships might be unhealthy.

Cowboy got a new job at Belmont. It pays great, but his hours are at night, which means when he starts working I won’t see him very much anymore. That means that I’ll be at home by myself a lot more often. I’ve been thinking about moving out on my own for a little while, and this sort of gives me a lot bigger reason. If I’m going to be by myself at home a lot anyway, I might as well start thinking about getting my own place.

Part of me is terrified to get my own place, but I think it might be good for me. Maybe it’s time for me to start leaning on my own self-esteem again a bit instead of relying on my friends so much. It’s been nearly 5 years since I started healing from depression. Maybe the next step in my personal growth can’t happen until I start trusting myself a bit more.

God worked a miracle in my dad. We found out about it last Friday. Pretty amazing. My sister wrote about it here.

I went to the percussions ensemble concert at Belmont last night. It was pretty good. The last song pretty much blew me away. There were drum set solos by Zoro and Derico Watson. Awesome.

I think for the first time during my week off I’ve managed to unwind enough to see what’s going on inside of me. I realized that I’m still healing from the conversation I had with Nate a couple of weeks ago. Some of my flaws were pointed out to me, and I did some pointing out of what I thought were flaws of other people. It wasn’t easy. I’m still trying to feel normal again on some level.

If there’s one thing that I’m going to try to take away from that experience is that it’s better to talk to friends about problems instead of hoping they’ll go away.

I got to thinking about my relationship status. Single. Why is that? I did some thinking about it. Every time that I think about having a girlfriend, I end up ask myself why. Is life somehow incomplete without one? If so, why? Is it for sex? Sure, I have sex drive, but my libido is pretty much never strong enough to be a good reason.

My reason ultimately tends to be that I need a girlfriend to fill some insecurity. Usually it’s because I don’t want to be left out. I mean, dating is a huge part of our culture. People get married all the time. More and more of my friends are getting into serious relationships. I guess that means I should be looking for a girl, since everyone else seems to be, right?

But then my self-esteem training kicks in. I don’t need approval from anyone to justify my actions. I don’t need to do something just to fit in. I don’t need to prove myself to anyone. Then that desire to be in an intimate relationship with a woman goes away. I don’t need one. BUT, if someone were to come along, and we fell in love, well that’d be fine with me.

I sound really convinced, don’t I?

Maybe there really is something wrong with me. Maybe I’m terrified of intimacy. Maybe I’m scared shitless to share some of the crazy shit that goes on inside me with someone else. That’s probably part of it. I’m holding a finger in the hole of the emotional dam that is my soul, and whenever a girl comes along that I consider a “candidate”, I get excited and everything comes pouring out. That’s a surefire way to scare the hell out of someone.

During the trip I listened to Kid A for the first time since In Rainbows came out. Kid A is still easily my favorite Radiohead album. I’d probably put In Rainbows third on my list, behind OK Computer.

After visiting my parents for a day, I’ll be heading to Ginger’s wedding. For now, it’s bed time.

Before the trip I spent more credit card reward points to get 100 songs. I got some Eames Era, which is cool except that all their songs sound pretty similar. I got the first Jamiroquai album, which pretty much kicks ass. I also got some Thievery Corporation, Air, Paul van Dyk, and Opeth.

On the way home I listened to The Infinite Mind, a program on NPR. Tonight’s episode was about money, how we think about it and whether or not it makes people happy. It was pretty interesting. Jim Cramer was a guest on the show. He talked about how his obsession with money used to consume him. There was also a economical psychologist who had some interesting things to say, like how people don’t think about the actual empirical value of money, but just of how much of it they have. For example, he said that people don’t get upset when they only get a 3% annual salary raise and that year’s inflation goes up by 5%, but if you cut their salary by 2% when there is no inflation, they get upset.

I still think of embarrassing shit I did years ago. I laugh at it to make myself feel better.

My bro’s surgery went well, and they say he’ll recover and be able to see pretty much just as well as before. Pretty awesome.

I finally got fed up with the sluggish behavior of Rails apps on Textdrive, so I switched to WordPress. So far it seems way more reliable.

We lost our ultimate game on Thursday, so that’s it for our season. Pretty good season overall, though. The team we lost to was pretty organized and experienced, but at least we got to play against a team that didn’t suck. The rest of our games weren’t very challenging.

I got around to doing my taxes this morning, but then I found out they’re not due until Tuesday. So I want to ask my accountant co-worker about some stuff first before I send them in.

Chilly, wet frisbee later. Pewp.

I finished First Meetings yesterday, which means I’ve read the entire Ender’s Game series now. So now I’m thinking about reading all the Harry Potter books again, which hopefully will take me until the seventh book comes out in July. =D But there are certainly other books that I need to read, so I might just re-read book 6 just before 7 comes out. We’ll see.

Vanderbilt intramural ultimate frisbee playoffs tonight. Wee!

We played our 4th and last game of the Vanderbilt intramural ultimate frisbee season last night. We finished undefeated, hooray. Playoffs next week.

Lately my job hasn’t been too fulfilling. I’ve got 65% of my time funded by projects that aren’t very interesting. The 35% I have left isn’t really enough to get much done on the project that I care about, and I don’t even care about that as much as I used to. One project involves me making these boringly routine Rails apps. But it pays the bills, I suppose.

It turns out that I’m going to RailsConf after all. Some spots opened up this week, and I registered.

Also, I found out that we have another month before we have to be out of the house. So that relieves some of the stress on all of us to get things together.

Nate and Matt are gone for the weekend, so I’m home alone for the most part. Chubbs and Bud are hardly ever home, and when they are they just stay upstairs most of the time. So I’ll be catching up on some anime and other shows.

Feeling a bit down today.

Sometimes I worry about how people might view me. I guess it’s the whole “feeling hurt when I feel misunderstood” thing. Most of the pictures of me on Facebook are of me drinking or flipping off the camera or acting stupid. Yeah, I do that, and it’s fun, but someone I don’t know might look at those and get the wrong idea. For example, Stuffy’s girlfriend Leah saw pictures of me, and when she met me she didn’t know what to do because she wasn’t expecting me to be introverted. Whenever I start thinking about that I remind myself that people who know me, know me, and that’s enough. I’m not gonna stop acting crazy from time to time just to keep a good “image”, mainly because I think if I did I would explode from being socially and emotionally cooped up so much.

I don’t feel like showering today. Shouldn’t we already have automated crap like the Jetson’s have? When I get up I just want to stand on a conveyor belt and have robots clean me. Bleh.

I need some privacy and time alone. As much as I get along with everyone, I’ve been around big groups of people coming up on like 5 days in a row. And it looks like it’ll be that way until New Year’s day. After the Plunketts leave, I’ll be going to hang out with Stuffy for New Year’s. I mean, I want to see everyone, but let’s just say I’ll be glad when things go back to normal.