Still in a good mood, a sort of afterglow from Friday (working, aikido test, dinner, good Mona conversation), which itself had some afterglow from the week before (long conversation getting some stuff said out loud and setting some important boundaries in my life). I'm still tired, I haven't felt well-rested in weeks, but I'm feeling better about myself, and my ability to find occasional bits of work (short contract ended today, but I expect to hear from them again). I feel like I'm becoming the person I want to be, and it's a nice feeling both to be on the right path and to feel the sheer power of it...not just the freedom of being who you are, but the confidence and...I dunno, I guess awareness, that comes from opening yourself to the world around you. My insight has qualitatively changed, in the way I perceive people, and simply my way of being: I feel like I'm much quieter, but now I speak the truth and I don't try to get people to like me, and I can feel and see how the simple force of Who I Am[tm] affects the people around me, particularly in my aikido world, where people have only known me for a few months and there is such a constant cycle of learning and teaching going on.
Tomorrow sometime I'll head north to see the relatives, and come back on Thursday evening sometime, to get ready for Angstgiving on Friday. Have a good holiday, if you're spending it as such (no harm in ignoring it, it's what I've done for the past three years), or if not, have fun renting the entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre series and sitting down with popcorn and some friends. Either way, look around you and identify the people you love and who love you (they may not be completely the same list, and that's okay), and be thankful for them and tell them how important they are to you. Someday they may not be around--people die, or move, or change--and whether you realize it or not, you get a lot of support from that love, whether it's the kind that understands you, that accepts you even without understanding you, or that loves you even though it thinks you should really be something else and find a nice girl and settle down and raise a family (to be clear here, much to my entire family's credit, no one has ever said such a thing to me, and if anyone thinks it, they keep it to themselves) when you just want to subsist enough to let you skateboard or do art or get your band going or whatever. Love is nifty in part because all of those variations are still good things, and even the love that thinks you should be someone else still lends you strength to become who you really are.