2003-10-16 - 5:38 p.m.

I Know As Much As Ever

I am honestly not sure what I have at this point in terms of a relationship. The unserious parts are very nice, and it is much less satisfying to wander through the mall without a destination when you're alone -- much less to wander through life, it seems.

When there's any specific place in mind that I want to be, however, I've been thinking more and more that perhaps this isn't the best way of doing anything other than meandering aimlessly. Which, admittedly, it would probably seem to an impartial observer that I've been doing the last few years anyway, company or no, but I really do have a place in mind that I would like to arrive at someday.

I'd like to be the same person for everyone -- I'm not quite sure how that person would act, just yet, but I'm closing in on it bit by bit as my life offers me a greater variety of situations in which to expand. For the past several months, the two situations that have presented the most opportunities have been the traditional white-bread American trio-minus-one: work and my home life.

Work is simultaneously immensely more difficult and complicated than I imagined when I first accepted the position as store manager and at the same time, much less so. The stress level of maintaining the third-highest volume store on the West Coast at an level of understaffed-ness sufficient to break last year's profit-margins by a significant amount with only one other manager for one hundred and thirty hours of operation weekly is .. substantial.

Well, that's inaccurate. It's not the actual performance of the job, but the awareness that my inadequacies crop up more and more as I get increasingly tired and stressed -- my attitude toward my employees is not what it could be even when they really are performing at near their own capacities with minimal direction. How many managers are routinely told by their own employees to go do paperwork, they've got it under control? I always figured that managing one's self into obsolesence was the unattainable ideal of a manager -- it's really not that grand of an experience, though.

I feel unnecessary, though I know that will pass as business picks up for the winter and more and more tasks pile up that only I know how to do properly. I guess I would like, somewhere somehow, to be necessary for something intrinsic to me and not just knowledge that I can communicate to someone else in a couple idle hours. Perhaps the ability to learn new things at an inhumanly quick rate qualifies as such, but that's not really something I can put on a resume.

Enough about work. It's only half the fun.

She's been here for a couple months now, and it's been a major adjustment to have someone actually present in this formerly barren place I call my life -- a lot of moving around, and I no longer sleep in the center of the bed.

The company is nice, but there's a point where it stops being company that I think I'm approaching.

There's an inward twinge I start getting toward the end of relationships I've had that have meant something to me -- it's a very odd double-reaction to the realization that someone else is present.

My first response is a bit of disquiet that someone else -- specifically, the Whomever in question -- is here and that it's time to emerge from my skull and live through my mouth for awhile. Second response is instinctively quelling the inappropriate feeling.

I still havn't, for all my effort, completely accepted my own varied emotions. I imagine that personal development in that regard is asymptotic, and that without clearly defined and entirely artificial time-boundaries, there will not be a point at which I completely cease having difficulty accepting my own feelings, or labeling them as inappropriate.

Feelings are indicative -- not necessarily of useful things, but always indicative of something.

She is home now and I do not know how comfortable I am with her reading my unabridged thoughts, so I am going to delete this from the Internet history now and shrug, because I know she periodically reads this site anyway.

There is only so much time I am willing to go without openly expressing my thoughts, which is one of my main issues at the moment -- the inability to just speak plainly about whatever is on my mind without the risk of causing emotional damage.

It's not that she's exceptionally fragile. I just don't often deal in the ordinary or comfortable.

I do not know at this point if I will have room in my day-to-day life for someone who is actively, lifelong seeking a point of stability as their final resting place.

No way of knowing until I get there. We shall see.

Peace with you all.

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