Monday, June 20, 2011

Summer Mode

I'm in summer mode. I will do nothing unless someone urges or yells at me and No one is urging me to apply to grad school or jobs, eat, read or blog. I'm withering away and I'm not even documenting it.
I think I could make FaceSmash.

About a quarter of my summer so far has been in the two most happening cities in the Northwest: Corvallis and East Wenatchee. I jest (please see the municipal websites for both cities), but I enjoyed my time there more than here. Or maybe the same. I'm with old friends and only a handful have gotten old and stale. The ones that haven't seen my in years and mispronounce my name were someone else's friend to begin with.

I finished On The Road recently. It was killer. I stopped after the ridiculous and benign first ten pages, but then I realized that was the whole book and dug it fully. That was the first for-pleasure book in months, maybe a year.

I leave for Poland in two weeks. I'll have research papers due in Winter after I get back. I'm excited to be in a foreign country that isn't Canada, not that I don't love Canada or Canada isn't foreign (It very much is). I'm thinking of this trip as a test. If I fail, I have to work for the post office for the rest of my life. I won't be cut out for international relations. I'll be cut out for what I've done best so far: apologize for late packages.

"I know you have the tracking number, but the number doesn't necessarily signify anything at all.
"I'm sorry."

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Polyamory and whatever

I had a conversation with one of my friends about monogamy a month ago. It's easy to forget that there are other sorts or relationships than the one I'm in. Hell, it's a challenge to be aware of anything that I'm not. Friendship is like the perpetual defeat of my accidental solipsism.

Nonmonogamy is interesting. I think I dig it. I think it's something to be dug, but I've never dabbled. I've never seen anyone that had an interest in other people, as well as me. They wouldn't! I couldn't possibly be with someone that had eyes for another, just couldn't do it, it's wrong and painful ugly, but most people are attracted to everyone around them, right?

What kept me out of long-term relationships for the last four, five years, other than fear, is the feeling that I'd be missing out on all these great trysts that are always satisfactory.

I've heard that these relationships fail in previously heterosexual, monogamous relationships. I think Dr. Drew told me that. I hear that, sure, but there are many people that survive (and succeed) in alternative relationship forms. April Ludgate, of course is an example. My friend in my boat-building class was reading a book about how to better her polyamory. I asked her about it and she told me that the water's fine.

And I have a family friend that's been in a ménage à trois for some five years, longer even, but she doesn't like the company of her husband, the third wheel is a deadbeat skeez, and she's fallen off the deep end in other aspects of her life since then.

It works for some people and other people pretend it works for them. Sounds like every other part of relationships.