I hate Americans sometimes. It's like the determined ignorance and inarticulate lack of civility are in the fucking water. Where else in the world is "intellectual" an insult?

I'm sort of tempted to blame the current state of the nation on American education, but I may be forced to decide that America is just a country of native ignorance and boorish pride, our revolutionary origins and determined, pioneering history thoroughly gone to waste. It's like China's been right about us all along.

I am, as always, experiencing new feelings these days. It's boredom, only not, because I find stuff to do. It's loneliness, only not, because I know I'm myself and that's fine, and someone will come along to play with me at some point, and I'll handle that honestly and openly and it will run more like my last relationship than the endless series of train wrecks that preceded it. It's lack of motivation, but not entirely; if I don't go to aikido, it's not necessarily because I don't want to go to aikido, but that I'm in a fairly good mood and the chair I'll be sitting in at the time isn't particularly uncomfortable, as such, and so there's no great need to leave it for something else...

But I do keep showing up, and that's the important thing. I've never missed training for more than a couple of weeks.

What a mystery, though! As if suddenly my mind has lots of free time to jump around and try to get me unhappy again. And I'm not...it's just somehow a bit more challenging to energetically engage with the world. So something needs to change, although I've no idea what that might be. I feel like I've balanced my life into a stable equilibrium, sustainable indefinitely: good home with cheap rent; job as stable as they come these days, and not especially lucrative or challenging; single, and the same circle of (over a hundred) wonderful friends I've had for the past few years. Life could continue like this endlessly, but I don't want it to. The house and friends are great, but I don't want to be at this job for ten years--or single, for that matter. Being in a sustainable pattern, my task now is to not spaz out with a feeling of being stuck and lacking any options, and create catastrophic change just for the sake of something different. No, this time I pay attention and stay picky about jobs and relationships and everything else.