So yes, here I am again, think­ing about why [again] I seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. You long-time read­ers may notice this is a bit of a pat­tern. Thank­fully, Sara reminded me, in a way, about this whole com­mu­ni­ca­tion thing. As you've no doubt noticed by now, I'm not ter­ri­bly good at it, but I'm trying.

Many things have hap­pened in my life since I last wrote here, and I'm not sure how many of them I want to dis­cuss, but let's see what we come up with.

In early Feb­ru­ary, I moved. It's a smaller place, a qui­eter place. And I like it just fine, I sup­pose. It suits my needs and it guar­an­tees I won't freeze to death in the ele­ments of the Col­orado spring, but some­thing feels off. An obvi­ous point to make is that this is the first place I've ever had com­pletely on my own. Since Jiggy's depar­ture last Octo­ber, I've felt very iso­lated, but this move was what made it 'offi­cial' in a sense, what made it feel real. Some­times I'm fine with that and some­times it feels entirely empty.

I'm not sure how I would be get­ting through this if I were doing it com­pletely by myself. I still have S, and our rela­tion­ship has had more than its fair share of ups and downs, but she makes me happy, and she's done what she could to help me through this tran­si­tion in my life.

I still have Q, and my net­work of friends down south. That's a com­fort, but it's only so much of one when I can only see them once, maybe twice a year. To even change the dynamic fur­ther, Q has been doing incred­i­bly well with the new job, and she's impressed the right peo­ple. They know now the tal­ent they have, and right­fully so, they want her hands in all sorts of pies. The trade-off for that is, of course, time. I won't go so far as to say that's strained things between us in any way, because I'm extremely proud of her and I'm glad she is doing so well, and we've made attempts to stay in con­tact as much as pos­si­ble, but it all comes back to the time. It doesn't make things eas­ier, that's for sure.

On top of that, and you'll for­give me if I can't really elab­o­rate on it thanks to a non-disclosure agree­ment, but within the last cou­ple of weeks, I've found myself seek­ing employ­ment for the first time in over three years. It feels strange, hol­low in a way. Any­one who knows me well knows that I had an immense pas­sion for what I did, and I never really con­sid­ered doing some­thing else. Per­haps that was naive on my part, or maybe even denial. In any event, I find myself pon­der­ing just what the hell I'm going to do now.

The impor­tant thing that I'm doing my best to keep in mind is that I can't dig my heels in and feel sorry for myself. Deep down, I know that ulti­mately, the only per­son who can make things any bet­ter or worse for myself is me.

I can't lose sight of that.

[audio:http://evilduckie.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/Keane-Nothing_In_My_Way.mp3]