Mountains Made Low

Yes, 2010 is roughly two-thirds gone, and this is my second post of the year. Sue me.

I had plans with friends on Thursday night. I blew those plans off. Not typically my MO, but I did. And I did because I was tired.

Like, exhausted.

Like, having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open at 7 pm.

And so I told my friends that. When I talked to one of them on Friday, though, he expressed concern for my health. Okay, it’s good to know that I have a friend who worries about those kinds of thing related to me, but I realized, after we talked that his reasoning was flawed, but that the flaws were my fault. So here’s the deal….

Yes, I do say “I’m tired” a lot, particularly when I’m asked to do something in the evening, and whatever the activity is will take me an hour to an hour and a half longer than whoever’s asking because I have to drive 30-40 minutes each way. Or when it’s the weekend after a long week. Or when I’ve had another of my brushes with insomnia (which was the case this Thursday).

Sometimes it’s an excuse and it means, “I don’t feel like driving.” Sometimes it’s true, and means, “I’m about to physically fall over.” Sometimes, it can mean any number of things.

Most times, though, when I say that I’m tired, it has little to do with my physical state or a need for sleep. And it’s not just my excuse to blow someone off. It’s a plain and simple request for the extroverts of the world to indulge my introversion for a day or an evening. It means I don’t want to be around people. In fact, it often means that I’m tired…of being around people.

To be fair, people who encounter me first, or primarily, or only, at work come to know me as gregarious, as outgoing, as a guy with an easy smile and and infectious laugh. That, friends, is my professional persona. It’s who I am, at work. But it’s not, necessarily, who I am.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m much more that way than I ever used to be. Back in the days when I didn’t strap that identity on and venture into a classroom every day, I was much more introverted than I am now. Some of my professional smiley face, that is, has taken root.

But that’s still not me, not the core of me, most of the time. I’m still an introvert on the inside, and I still need time (more than most) to myself. Me-time, if you will; or, time alone.

As I said to start this off, I’m fortunate to have friends who care as much as they do. I’m also very fortunate to have a small number of people in my life that I can be around and still be having “me-time” — the former are a rare commodity, and the latter even rarer. I just want the former to know that it’s nothing personal that they’re not also the latter — I care about many of them and worry about them as much as they do me, but I still, to some extent, feel like I’m “on” when I’m around them.

So if I tell you that I’m tired, please don’t think I’m sick or maudlin or depressed. I just, sometimes, need some time alone. And please don’t take it personally that I need some time alone. Just as many of you are wired up to be outgoing and the life of the party by nature, and just as I’ve learned to be those things through long practice, there are times when my inner (and sometimes melancholy) wallflower needs to assert itself, and spend some time apart from the world and its people.

I’m okay. Really.

The following is from Lindsay, with permission. It’s her take on Penny Arcade’s holiday charity program, Child’s Play. There are links to the Child’s Play site (and their “About” page) in the post below, and I’ll give a shout out to the charity’s nuts’n'bolts/making-it-work partners, Amazon and PayPal, here.

Lindsay writes:
…it’s that time of year, again. Yes, the time of year where there’s a holiday approaching called Christmas, where kids wake their parents up early and are obnoxious until they get to open their presents. The day kids await for weeks with baited breath.

Unfortunately, there are kids that aren’t as lucky. Kids that don’t get to jump on their parents’ bed until they begrudgingly get up; kids that are lucky if they have the strength to get out of their hospital bed.

Now, all you nerds with soft hearts can help, if you didn’t spend your last dollar and change on a 2-liter of Mountain Dew. I don’t like charities — unfortunately, donations to a great many charities often never reach the people you intended to help. However, there is one that is much, much different.

The nerds over at Penny Arcade run a drive every year called Child’s Play to get presents into the hands of kids in children’s hospitals across America and Canada, and even a few hospitals in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. You can donate locally, or internationally — your choice. You can donate cash, or you can click the hospital you’d like to donate to, and it will redirect you to that hospital’s Amazon Wish List. You buy the stuff, Mike and Jerry from Penny Arcade help pay for the shipping, and sick kids smile on Christmas day. It’s not rocket science.

If you’re still feeling a bit leery of the idea of donating to a charity, here’s the “About” section of their site – go read about them for yourself. If you’re feeling charitable, send a book or a toy or a video game to a hospital. I’m not going to tag anyone specific in this note; I don’t care if you donate or not. But, if you want to donate, I’m telling you that this is the place.

Happy birthday, Jen! You know by now, as many times as I’ve told you this, that for the next 32 days, you and I are exactly the same age!!! I hope your day is fun and festive and full of everything you want and nothing you don’t! Love you, friend!

I’ll post the pictures later.

Is it already Tuesday already? I suppose that’s what happens when the weekend passes in a blur of staying up all night Saturday and mostly sleeping Sunday away.

Ghost hunting on Saturday night was awesome! I didn’t even have any trouble staying awake on the walk-of-shame-esque drive home on Sunday morning—but believe me, I crashed hard pretty much the minute I walked into the house at 7 am.

I met my friends, Andy and April, their friends Nate and Matt, and April’s brother Chad at the old prison in Mansfield a little before 8 on Saturday night. I actually got there first, which surprised me, though maybe it shouldn’t have because I was only trying to get one person ready to go. The “hunt” started at 8 with a tour of the facility led by the volunteers. Different volunteers gave different tours, it became quite clear. Some of the tours were over by about 8:40, because the volunteers leading them were wandering around without a bunch of visitors in tow. Our tour, however, was more…I guess thorough is the word; we were being toured around until about 9:30. Which, while not what we were there for and a little frustrating to members some of the people I was with, I thought was a pretty good thing—it allowed me to get my bearings in the prison, and I’m the sort of person who, once I’m oriented to a place, can find my way around, even in the dark. Which is important, because at about 10, they turn the lights out.

So we wandered around the place from about 9:30 until about 2. Took some pictures. (Note to self: if doing such things again, get a little point-and-shoot digital camera; I love my camera, but it’s actually too good for this kind of environment: it doesn’t deal with dark/near dark conditions very well.) Most of the pictures I took were more “historical” than “haunted,” which is really fine by me because the historical nature of the prison and the popular culture connections were a big part of why I wanted to go in the first place (Shawshank, Tango and Cash, and a number of other films have been shot there—when I get the pics up, you’ll be able to see just how much of Shawshank was filmed there; it’ll probably surprise you…it did me).

At about 2, we took a pretty significant break. One of our number was getting quite tired. Another was having problems with some arthritis in his knees. So we went outside and those who wanted to have a sit down could. In this process, we lost the tired one, who spent the rest of the night sleeping in the van.

But the other five stalwart adventurers went back in. And the funny part is, it was a lot more fun between 2:30 and 5:15 (when we actually called it a night) than it had been before. For several reasons:

First, the crowd was actually thinning out. They say they let 100 people in per hunt. This weekend there were more like 150 there. I know that we were part of that problem, because the date was technically sold out by the time we registered, but April played the birthday card (Sunday was her birthday, and this ghost hunting experience was what she had asked for), and they added us, because it was actually her birthday. With fewer people around, the prison became quieter and creepier. Much more fun.

Second, we kind of figured out what we had been doing “wrong” in the first part of the night, by talking to some other visitors, some volunteers, and amongst ourselves. We’d been running around for about 5 hours straight. The idea is not to hold still all night—not just to set up camp, in other words—but to pick your spots and hold still for a half hour or so at a time. We did that in several places for the rest of the night.

Third, we met some guys who were a little more experienced at this than we were (doesn’t take a whole lot, even yet). They were from Michigan Apparition and Spirit Hunters (and ironically, for this hunt, these three guys’ jobs, when they’re not hunting ghosts, are in a Federal prison). They talked to us a little bit about the holding still part, which we’d already sort of figured out, but they confirmed our own thinking, and they let us tag along with them to their next couple of spots. I sincerely hope that expanding their group from three to eight, including five rank amateurs, didn’t ruin their hunt.

On the whole, it was a fun night spent with friends and meeting some new people (my friends’ friends, mostly). And it was spooky and creepy, even if nothing truly weird happened (d’oh!). I’ll post my history-oriented pictures here later on tonight, and I’ll post some interesting, possibly paranormal pictures that the others took, when I get them (we’re sharing).

Oh, and Andy came to me in the office yesterday, and said that they’re going again in November. I very well may, too.

I feel the need to bake cookies this weekend. It’s a deep-seated urge that I cannot avoid. But it also presents me with a problem: I get the urge to bake cookies when I want a cookie and would feel perfectly comfortable having a cookie (or two or three over the coming week). But I’ve yet to meet the cookie recipe that talks in terms of one or two or three—or even four—cookies; usually they talk in terms of 4 or 5 dozen cookies.

So here’s the deal. I’m gonna bake cookies—haven’t decided what kind yet, so don’t ask, and besides, beggars can’t be choosers! If you want cookies let me know (and how many, if you care—I’ll probably default to a half dozen or a dozen). I’ll send them out Monday morning.

First come, first served!

On the pilot episode of the TV show How I Met Your Mother (brilliantly entitled “Pilot”), Ted tries to convince Robin that she should date him even though he made the incredible faux pas of telling her he thought he was in love with her on their first date. One of the reasons Ted gives is that he’s a good kisser, to which Robin replies, “Everyone thinks they’re a good kisser.”

Which is probably true.

That everyone thinks it, I mean. But one of my New Year’s Resolutions this year proves that it’s not true that everyone is, and that, over the past couple of years, I have the experiences to prove it.

What’s funny is that while no one has commented on my list of resolutions on the blog itself, I have gotten some back-channel commentary on that post, and particularly that part of that post. One reader even asked me, outright, “How do you know you’re any good?”

My first response was that I’ve never had any complaints. But then I thought more about it: The women I’ve dated who prompted the resolution never got any complaints, either. But then I thought about it some more, and I threw a smart-ass response back at that reader; I told her, “Asking that question is not the same as saying I’m not any good.” You see, this particular reader is one of two of my close female friends who’d be a position to know—though I’ll readily admit that as of January 2009, her knowledge on this particular score is 16 years out of date. And I have to say that her response to my comment can, I think, be taken as confirmation of my assumption, at least in her recollection of our 17-year-old selves—when it comes to kissing, I’m at least not bad.

And, believe it or not, 2009 is almost 5% gone (we’ll get to the actual 5% mark before this holiday weekend ends and I head back to work on Tuesday). My resolutions are going well enough, though all of what I’ve said here so far is probably a fair indication that resolution #3 has not yet been tested.

#1—Check!
#2—still figuring out what and how.
#3—untested, so Check!
#4—Check!
#5—so far so good. 2½ books per month must be the goal here, and I’m well on my way to that for January.
#6—so far so good. Just under one movie per week, and at the end of the third week (second full week) of the year, here I am, set to watch Movie #3 (2009) this weekend.

This may be the longest I’ve ever gone without breaking one of my resolutions. Though I’m certainly going to have to think about when only thinking about and trying to figure out #2 crosses the line into not keeping it. But everything else is going well. At least, it’s going well enough.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend, and after she made a somewhat suggestive comment in our conversation, she apologized to me, in case her comment had “crossed the line.” I hadn’t thought twice about the comment, just laughed when she made it, and I responded that, while it had been suggestive, as she thought, I was pretty sure we couldn’t even see that particular line in our friendship from where that comment was. She agreed. Case closed.

Back in August, as my first semester on my new job was about to begin, I wrote here about the beginning of a short, but nonetheless fulfilling, relationship I had back in 1999. More specifically I wrote about the masks we all wear in our relations with other human beings. I stated then, that at that point in my life (in 1999), my primary mask was that of the aloof intellectual, and how that mask caused this woman, who had (apparently) been interested in me for some time, to not say anything about that interest, and how we, but for a brief moment in which the “real me” shined through, would likely have missed that time we spent together, entirely.

But I also wrote then about the primary mask I wear now: one of gregariousness. What I didn’t mention then, but have been thinking of now, particularly in light of my conversation about “lines” earlier this week, is that maybe it’s just a little bit disingenuous for me to refer to this persona as simple “gregariousness” when talking about it in broad terms. Because while that’s what it is, up to a point, I realize, too, that it can become, and often does become, more than simply smiling for the camera and being easy to talk to.

The bottom line is: I flirt. A lot. And given the fact that most of my close friends are women, well, it requires a lot of keeping tabs on that line (or, more accurately, those lines, because they’re different in every situation).

And sometimes that’s difficult—or, at least, causes difficulty.

I think sometimes, when first encountering me, and my gregarious/flirtatious mask, women aren’t sure whether they’re being hit on or not. The answer is generally “not,” but I won’t hesitate to admit that it’s sort of a testing of the waters, too, particularly since I know I become even flirtier when, even right at first, I find something about a woman attractive. In most cases, as these women get to know me better, they learn that it’s harmless, it’s just part of who I am, and while I flirt with women who are romantically attached all the time, as with my friend and her suggestive comment, I’m not looking for it to progress beyond that. In most cases, I flirt because flirting is fun, and that’s all.

But this cuts the other way, too. Just as women who don’t know me sometimes get the impression that they’re being hit on when they’re not, sometimes, it seems, that women who do know me, and who know this about me, don’t get when my flirtation indicates what might be a more serious kind of interest. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s a difference in me and my actions, my flirtation, when I’m doing it because flirting is fun and when I’m doing it because I think a particular woman might be fun to have around more often.

The worst of it is, I like the point where my flirtation is accepted as a harmless part of my personality; it opens up the possibility of not having to take every little thing so seriously, and being able to have fun with all the possibilities of a friendship. At the same time, I don’t like having that that flirtation accepted as harmless, when I don’t intend for it to be completely harmless.

It’s a conundrum.

And I’m not sure what to do about it. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, either because she thinks I’m hitting on her when I’m not, or because I am hitting on her when she doesn’t want me to be. But the thing of it is: I’m pretty good (I’ve been told by my close friends who are women) at flirting. I’m not so much good, though, at indicating whether my flirtation is “just for fun” or something indicative of a different kind of interest. And I’m pretty sure that—whichever a woman wants it to be—my behavior can, at times, “cross the line” and come off as the other.

But I feel like I should come with a warning label or something. Because often it doesn’t mean anything, but sometimes it does. And I’ll tell her one way or the other, if she asks (or, honestly, if I get the distinct impression that she’s got the wrong impression, one way or the other). And I wish I was better at showing that difference, to avoid any misunderstandings that may arise.

But I sure don’t know how.