Steve - Finds Himself Disturbed

There's a different vibe flowing through me at the moment, a different breeze, a different wave. Seems like my friends are disappearing or fading, and replacing them are these... people. They share the following characteristics:

1. They're generally into some form of art (writing, photography, film)
2. They're female, but that's nothing new really.
   
3. I am the one to seek them out, or initiate the communication with them, whereas in the past it's been people wanting to talk to me for some reason.
   
4. They confuse me.

Points three and four are the important ones, really, and they're linked.

I'm 'experienced' in forming new relationships. It sounds arrogant, but... it's true. At least, a certain kind of relationship. I have an intuition for it, about what happens. When I want to be friends with someone, it's generally happened. My 'sub'conscious nudges me at the right times to say the right things, and this lets my relationships with people progress at a fair rate. Maybe this is all delusion, but it seems to work and happen... not necessarily as I expect, but... like in a nuclear reactor. It's a complicated and chaotic series of events that can get out of control quickly, but even though you might not expect everything, you can keep things going in the direction you expect them to. It's kind of like that.

It's generally true that the important things when trying to 'figure someone out' are the bits that aren't there. The things they subtly avoid talking about, the things they skip over in emails, the things that don't happen. They're tricky to notice, because they don't happen and so you have to actively watch for them. Sometimes they're misleading, but even if they're misleading, there's still something there.

And that's part of what's confusing. The gaps are different in these people. In one, the gap is practically all-enveloping. There's such precious little information that it seems like islands in a big nothingness. From knowing her so long, I've managed to connect the dots to some degree, but she's largely shrouded in mystery.

In another, the gaps are there and seem to form some kind of a pattern, but they're irregularly formed, or there's not quite enough gaps to make sense of what's beneath. They're all on one side and so I can't get much of an idea of what it is.

In another there seems to be no gaps at all. She's almost brazen about how plain and obvious her truth is. The only gaps are the ones I don't want to investigate, not until there's a bit more connective tissue to compensate for the obvious conflicts that will ensue (if only in my head), and I doubt they'll be any less plain. But how can I adhere if there are no gaps to link to? Without secrets, how can trust be communicated? This is the most startling for me, though perhaps this is because it is the most fresh in my mind.

The other thing is confidence. I've not got huge reserves of confidence to propel me through self-esteem blackspots. Since I've sought out these people, I'm the one expending confidence in the course of trying to get to know them. If they demonstrate interest in me, I can assure myself that they actually do want to be talking to me, rather than just anyone or specifically not me. I don't know what they think of me, so I'm very sensitised to rejection (as well as approval), and I'll almost look for it. This gets me very up-tight and easily upset. I get that it's a problem with me, but I'm not really sure how to circumvent it or what to do without making false assumptions.

So, I write about it. I overcommunicate even, over-express. One of my big fears is weirding people when I just express in such volumes (which is very easy for me to do). But if I don't, I get more and more worked up. I've already had one experience of that, and I don't intend to repeat it. If it weren't someone who understood to an extent what was going on in my head, it could've been far worse.

So I guess this entry was my outlet for today. I hope I get this all figured out soon, or at least enough of it to allow me to concentrate on one thing.

Queries welcome, though don't blame me if you get an answer longer than this entry XD

Personality

Even the best of us sometimes succumb to personality tests. Today I did, to the standard four-letter psychological test, Myers-Briggs or whatever. I remembered why I dislike them so much. They are, as a wise man said, the equivalent of saying:

"Here, I have a series of boxes. Which one do you fit into?"

Before I saw them this way, when I was a positivist, I used to have a lot of trouble with them. I'd take one, and then I'd be agonising about whether I was INTP or ENTP. I spent an afternoon considering it once, I think. Today the test gave me INFP.

To be fair, INFP fits me pretty well. So does INTP, INFJ, INTJ, ENFP, ENTP, ENFJ and ENTJ. You see the problem with the test here: I hold characteristics of anything with an N in it (interestingly, in the test, the N is very strongly expressed). This makes sense, since intuition is such an important part of the way I think. If I lost intuition, I would be very literally crippled.

Take that, Jung. Personality is more compex than 16 boxes!

Anyway, today I had the following thoughts:

• Instead of having plain old sizes in coffee shops, we should go more for the JapaneseVideoGame conception of size: things improve and have things added as they get larger. The small drink is plain and small, the medium drink is mediumsized and has say... whipped cream, and the large one is largesized and has whippedCream+chocolateSauce.
• Life would be far more interesting if capitalism didn't adhere so much to economics. If it just did things for the hell of it. See the above point.
• I put a £1.75 tip in the tip jar for the coffee shop, because the girl looked like she was having a bad time. She was also rather pretty, which made me a little more nervous than I usually am interacting with shop employees. I meant to tip even more, but I didn't by accident, and it would've been weird to go back and tip more, I think.
  

Ah, here it is!

So... it would appear I have no box for the title of this post. Oh well, titles are overrated I guess.

I've had this blog for a while. Every time I sign up for a new account I think about how much of my information is distributed across the internet. Huge swathes of the internet are marked my by presence, more than I could possibly even attempt to remember. This blog was one of the lost accounts I'd forgotten about.

Until today.

There is no climax to this entry. Just rambling. Online journalling has a special place in my heart, since I owe the first of the really interactive online diary sites (OpenDiary) a lot of my 'netChildhood, my writing skills (my writing really was atrocious before I started journalling), and a large part of my coding skills too (through coding neo-journal and my more malicious play around TOD's security issues).

Anyway, expect entries... at some point...