It's late to be here on a Friday but it's been a very long day and I still have two chapters of my ssl documentation left to finish before I can start on my new project on Monday.
But the tender snarls of anxiety are slowly unwinding and I'm feeling distinctly proud to be alive again...
After deliberations with Daniel who is finally beginning to understand that THERE WILL BE NO UI WHATSOEVER involved in this project, that the only demos I'll be doing are printouts of the log files and of the encrypted communications between machines.
Daniel is learning the open source way of thinking, and is promising to stop trying to shower me with UML diagrams and flashy arrows pointing between methods that don't mean anything at all.
And I'm slowly polishing up a packaged release of a project I did weeks ago, and at the same time I'm delving into the research of the ssh layers that I'm going to re-write to work with a smartcard.
And last night was a jumble of hugs and arms and quiet sexuality, none too obtrusive but somehow David's comment yesterday, of how he's worried that watching a movie tonight might be too tame for me to be interested, sparked far too much chatter and introspection...
...about party monstre and wild monstre and happy girl and whether any of those actually need to intersect at all.
And I don't feel the need to rehash my million faces right now, I think somehow in the quoting of obscure poetry about wild things and the strange thrill of an evening spent playing bridge rather than drinking beer -- somewhere in there I reached my own epiphanies for the millionth time and I'm comfortable in my skin again.
My eyes are open slightly wider and I can hear the wind stretching across an empty parking lot and I'm seeing whorls inside myself that make sense to me...
...for once.
And somewhere in there are my dreams of moving with the wind, and somewhere in there are memories of friends in France who wrote me to wish me into the new millenium, and somewhere in there are my fears of settling down, of stagnating, of losing sight of things I want to do before I lose myself to washing dishes and cooking dinner and decorating my appartment.
And I know I can do it all, I always have, I've always decided when it really counts that this weekend it's time to think about the warmth of my home, and tonight it's time to write a new story and script a new song and put the contents of everything I've learned about joy and perspective...
...somewhere where someone might find it a slight solace from the same whirlwind that they're falling through.
And we spoke of abuse and the abused becoming abusers, and how desperately I wish I could find an algorithm that stems the flow of pain and the transfer of anger from the dominating to the dominated.
How desperately I wish I could stop the world and make everyone whoop and cheer at how glorious it is, just for a moment, a sheer moment's perspective...
And we spoke of how not caring what someone thinks of you and your actions isn't the perfect solution anymore.
Because, and Ally Sheedy said it best:
"When you grow old, your heart dies"
"Who cares?"
"I care."
And oh how desperately I'm learning to care, and so I lose myself sometimes to insecurity, I begin to doubt what someone thinks of me, and I react violently at myself for succumbing to other people's expectations...
...only slowly, but ever increasingly, I care about these people, and how I make them feel...
...so I care what they think, but the trick is...
That when I'm not spending time worrying about it, when I'm spending time picking my actions according to what I want them to be, and not reacting to my own insecurities...
Then I know I'm doing the right thing...
So I'm off to get some more work done, do the right thing, and kiss a beautiful man on his beautiful mouth.
(and try to teach him how to play contract bridge, and feel more confident about his poetry)