"To shake the loneliness and shine the light"

I'm hanging out at DrB's tonight, listening to people play board games and sitting in the corner. 

My day has not been without its challenges.  Light stayed home with a bad back, which always makes it hard to leave the house, since hanging out with him is a lot more appealing than anything I could do at the office.   Work was mostly unexceptional, there's a conference for captains of industry at the Beast's faculty club thursday night and friday day (I have to be in Harvard Square at 7am on Friday..  blargh), and it's exceptionally chaotic, and it makes me cross when I find out that professors can't write coherent sentences.   And not just one or two sentences, the entire four page document was a little bit like a train wreck.  But in a couple days it will be over, no matter what.

I've put out some documents for Readercon, and I'm not getting the response I want, but it too will be a thing that happens.  I'm having the board over to my house, which means of course I'll spend the next three days cleaning frantically and freaking out about a menu.   (Maybe just moosewood mac'n'cheese?  everyone loves mac'n'cheese).    And then the day after there's the actual concom meeting, which also fills me with anxiety.

I came home to Light, instead of going to the asylum to file things.   And then I pretty much bullied Light into going to the doctor, who said naproxsen and go to the er if it gets much worse.   And afterwards, we talked about how the conversation had gone down, and he told me that I could just say "I'd feel better if..." and I told him that I didn't think that my feeling better was a good enough reason to do something.

And then there was an interaction with Bespoke that was exceptionally interesting, but also left me realizing I need to work on feeling grateful for attention.   He makes me feel a little feisty, but I was also chatting on my phone, so I didn't have the reassurance of "X is entering text" and I understand how the world of conversation on the internet works, sometimes conversations vanish midstream, and I think I'm almost over the part where I interpret silence as having horribly offended or dismayed the other end of the conversation (no longer being with Asshat has certainly helped in that regard).  But I still feel like I want all of the words all of the time. 

I want to ask everyone all these nosy questions.  How do you experience want?  What do you intend?  What do you want and how does it differ from your intentions and why?    What makes it hard to breathe in a good way?  What makes it hard to breathe in a bad way? 

I'm better about trying to be what I think other people want.   I'm working on being what I want, I think.  But that doesn't seem to have had any dampening effect on being fascinated by how other people shape their interactions. 

Feste said something recently about everyone being hungry, and I didn't think that was true, but maybe the world makes more sense if it is.  I assume, for example, that Media and Saint are living the life they want to be living, and they expect that they'll get whatever they want as time marches on.  I assume most people feel like they have the right number of friends, or are on the right career path, or live in the right place, and that I'm just self-ostracized, half by being raised by wolves, half by having unreasonable desires.

But Feste asked me what I wanted, and I said a thing, which I realized I actually meant and was a positive trait. And it's hard to think about, and hard not to tack on a gazillion qualifiers, and I feel like by saying it, I'm inviting the world to refute it, to tell me I actually am nowhere near as good at it as I think I am.    But....I am excellent at loving people, I am excellent at taking care of people.  

There, I said it.