"why aren't you attached?"

Before I forget, I've come up with my third spring term resolution, and it's a good one:

#3: Have fun. Sound simple? It is... sorta. It means scheduling time to read books for leisure, it means putting in the effort to, well, bust my ass studying productively and smartly so I have more time to spend "relak-ing one corner". In other words, work and play hard(er?).

Yeah, I realize that balance has been lacking in my life last term. I'd work like crazy for a test and then lay off for a coupla days too long, only to find myself struggling to catch up for the next test. And the book I was reading at the start of term, Che Guevara's Guerilla Warfare, remains semi-read. I think I've been doing a good job reading in my free time so far this week to get my mind off stuff, while doing work instead of lazing in front of the internet or some Super Nintendo game.




On a wholly unrelated note, someone *cough cough* asked me a pretty interesting question earlier this week: "Why aren't you attached?"

Why aren't I attached? Why should I be?

First of all, I abhore these stupid tags people put on other people. "Together". "Attached". Or the worst one - "Going Steady". I mean, geez, what gives, man? At what point in any relationship does anyone go "hey let's be together"? There's no... yardstick to say you're "with" someone, or are "just friends", is there? Should there be one, even?

Excuse me, folks, but I just don't get this whole "attached" thing anymore. If there's... something going on between two people, then that's it: leave it at that. Don't... slap a TAG on them and go "Oh they're attached! It's so sweet!"

Unless of course...

At the same time, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, how many people do you know (or are you one of them) who prance around the place and go "I've got a girlfriend/boyfriend now" when they start seeing someone and decide its "official", thus tagging themselves as being "attached" for the world to see?

Hell, what makes someone *your* boyfriend/girlfriend? Is there a measure for even that, a modern social date-o-meter that determines when, or how, even, someone becomes "attached"? And, what makes them *yours*, yours to own like a emm-effing trophy?

While we're on this - though I probably am stretching things a bit far - what is a date? I remember talking to a close friend... I think it must've been Gabriel about this perhaps a year or so ago. What is a date? Coffee? A meal? Going by that definition I've been dating every day for the last 9 or so months with several different people. Or do you have to be interested in the person - and does the person have to reciprocate for even that to count?

But I, as I often find myself doing, digress.

Why am I - and ohh, do I hate to use this term - unattached, indeed?

At this point in my life, I feel so... powerful. Like I can do anything. My ex-colleague Kathy (of legendary "fire siren" fame) said that "when you're in your early twenties you feel like you can accomplish anything you want", and she's right. I don't just feel like I can do anything I want right now; I know it.

And I realize that I want it, too. At the same time, I've seen so many friends lose their individuality, lose their edge, their power and oomph when they get "attached". Think "Bennifer" and you'll understand how traumatic this phenomena is to behold for the casual singleton onlooker; two perfectly fine, interesting people melded together to form something far less than the sum of its parts, into an irritatingly vanilla symbiotic entity, joined at the hip incessantly like a pair of incredibly blah Siamese twins.

Yet, despite all these jaded feelings, it's not as if I can't, haven't or don't have "feelings" toward someone. Yes, the shards of the rose-tinted glasses of my youth have long been crushed underfoot, and I find it hard to think about (and I cringe, saying this) letting my heart go without thinking about soulless, metallic things like opportunity costs and the compromises and everything else distasteful.

At the same time, there's a little wussy boy underneath my skin, underneath it all, who just like everyone else, yearns more than anything else just to... to love and be loved in return.

Am I, like most of the Male Species, suffering from fear of commitment, quite possibly the number one thing that makes girls roll their eyes and mutter "ugh, men..." under their breaths? I don't think so. Anyone who's been close, really close to me since my time in RI, since secondary school knows that, even as my delusions of "eternity" crumble into ashes.

And at the end of all this that I've thought of and written... at the end of it all, to answer the question... I DON'T KNOW. I really don't know why I'm not... attached. I know one thing though - whatever happens, happens.



And even as I write this I realize that virtually - no, eerily enough, exactly - a year has passed since I made some very costly and ugly mistakes in my life. I... couldn't see beyond my own delusions and put myself into a vulnerable position to be hurt, more hurt than I'd ever been.

In other words, I didn't fire the gun - but I walked into the line of fire with my eyes wide open.

I see now with hindsight that putting myself in that position by my own doing... I have no one to blame but myself for how things ended horribly. How years and years of something so good, so seemingly eternal, so very much there burnt itself out in a two-minute phone conversation sitting in my friend's car, so that now even the ashes are blown away and long, long forgotten.



Wow. Haha.

I've been pretty pensively prolific today, haven't I?

That took a lot out of me, but I'm feeling better already.

Whatever the case, it's already 2.30 AM, in the wee small hours of Saturday morning, and there's some EPL to be watched in about six hours, I think. Have survived the week, the first week of a new term. Let there be many more good weeks in the uh, weeks ahead... =)

AMEN and God bless.