Still struggling
Its 7am and Ive been up for about 3 hours as I still cant sleep very long with this cold. Im now on day 16 of this crap and I keep hoping that one day when I wake up all the fluid and pressure will have had drained from my head and that my eardrums will pop and I will be able to hear clearly again. That day is not today even though in certain positions my ears are popping like being on an airplane.
Nearly everything is packed up in my house, I boxed up my computer this morning and then looked around at my place. It really has an empty feel to it now and I can sense that my exit is near. This apartment is not all that nice and its not in that great of neighborhood but there are some advantages, First off it is about a block away from a Walgreens that is open 24 hours a day, this is a huge convenience as I am a night person and have walked down there many times at 3 or 4 in the morning to grab a coke or even some household supplies. There are some other advantages as well, its 3 blocks from a grocery store, less that 500 yards from a Subway and a UPS store. It has banks all over the place and within just a couple more blocks is a Barnes and Noble and a mall. Ive never really been a mall type person so I cant say that its an advantage but from time to time I was able to catch a late night movie at the theatres there and was close enough to walk home which gave me some quiet time to contemplate the movie.
The place im moving into is pretty isolated and has no real convenience to it at all. Maybe thats a good thing in some ways but ill have to hold judgement on that one for awhile. Sometimes its a lot easier to order a pizza than to make a meal and at times that has almost been a crutch of mine.
Its continues to rain in my little corner of the world and it seems everything is starting to flood, its a familiar theme in this area but in the past few days it been mentioned that we are almost at a fifth of our typical rainfall for the year and we are only 14 days into it. Kinda scary…too bad the weather is so warm otherwise the mountains would have about 300″ of powder so far, looks like another disasterous year for that industry.
I am not looking forward to moving and not just for the typical reasons, the past 3 years I have lived alone and I have grown to enjoy it more and more. There is a sense of tension that exists when you live with other people and its not something im looking forward to. But in the end I think that social interaction makes me mentally stronger and a much more likeable person. Isolating yourself from the world can have a dramatic influence on how you see it.
I remember seeing an interview with Hilary Swank and it came up that she rode the subway everyday in NY and that she felt it helped her because she loved to watch people and how body language told the story of each individual. She said that if she lived in a gated community and had a driver that she would soon lose touch with certain aspects of humanity and how people interacted with the world in general.
I think thats very true. I have been very lucky to have been exposed to many different types of people in my life and I am blessed with the ability to blend in and to be able to interact with people that most would find it hard to be comfortable with. I didnt come from money but have lived in nice communities where money existed, I have been around criminals at certain times and have also been around the cultural elite from time to time. You might think that its completley polar opposites to attend a Yacht Club 5 star dinner party and to hang out in the seedy back room of a house of drug dealers. It really isnt, its all about manner of speech and the way you carry yourself.
I never really got into anything harder than marijuana and some heavy drinking even though I experimented with most things. But I had some friends that did some harder drugs and sometimes I was put into a situation that was a little hairy. I remember this one incident when I was 16, I was looking for a little weed and a ran into a friend of a friend downtown, he told me he could hook me up and I followed him into a house not knowing what I was getting myself into. I didnt really know this guy too well but as it was a small town and I wasnt very concerned about running into trouble. But when we both got in the place and I looked around I saw what can only be described as deperate people all around the room. The guy that lived there seemed to be ok but he took one look at me at pulled out his gun, for whatever reason he thought I was a cop. The guy I was with tried to convince him that I wasnt but he didnt want to listen. Now this guy wasnt pointing the gun at me, only holding it to his side to prove his point but it was still a little scary. I told him that I was only 16 and that I was a junior in high school and that would pretty much eliminate the possibilites of me being able to be a cop. He took another long look at me and then began to see that I was telling the truth and put his gun down on nearby table.
At this point all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there but that would have been too suspicious, so I just went along with buying some weed and just to make sure I wasnt a cop he wanted me to smoke some in front of him, he said thats why there was so many fucked up people in the room, he had to make sure they were cool. So I did as he instructed and we passed around a pipe, this seemed to eleviate his worries and he sat down and started talking about why he had a problem with me. He explained that because I was someone he didnt know his attention was drawn to me and that the way I reacted to the room of druggies was of total apprehension and uneasyness. He rarely saw that anymore and he figured I was either going to rob him or bust him. He didnt even think to realize I was just an inexperienced kid who hadnt seen this kinda stuff before.
He kinda opened my eyes to the world that day. After I left and had gone home to my comfortable and safe world, for the first time in my life I started to realize that if I was put in certain situations that I could endanger both myself and others with something as simple as my body language.
From then on a lot of times when I was in a new environment I would just observe, watching the people and how they interacted with each other. Over the course of about 5 years I did this a lot and got the reputation as being the quiet one. But it wasnt as simple as that, I was learning almost as if I was attending a class. I absorbed all the social interactions and soon began to understand what it took to blend in. I started to realize that people like the guy that doesnt have much to say but when they do speak its not something opinionated but added to the conversation in some way. Usually it would be a humurous remark but it was never at the expense of someone else because that individual might take it personally and if you dont know what type of person that he or she is, the situation could turn negative. It was a generally a comment that didnt stand out but just flowed with what everyone else was saying. It something that if done correctly can really make you fit in with a group of people in a hurry. Like the expression goes, being on the same page with someone.
One thing that I have noticed though is that the more and more I isolated myself or even stayed in my comfort zones the less and less this skill was developed. I tended to be more outspoken about things and even at times would overstep some of the boundaries of typical friendship. This of course exposed more of my personality and I was more likely to get labeled as certain type of individual rather than just being a small part of the group.
Because of this my personality has changed quite a bit and so maybe this move will help me get back that part of me that just like to observe and interact in subtle ways rather than be a focal point.
Well this was kinda a long rambling post that ended a lot diferently than it started, well anyway enjoy your weekend and hopefully we shall see a ‘Hawks victory today, I sure hope so as the Seattle sports scene could really use an infusion of pride and hope. Till next time, peace….
