I'm gaining more influence over the brain-weasels. The running train of thoughts leaves me feeling isolated or bored or something, so I run around like a madman trying to tire myself out or distract myself enough that I don't care. The real resolution is to simply not engage the world on that level; to remember that my life is fine, and when I'm not spastically wanting something else (and I can spot this easily, since at this point my life is generally so nifty there's little to nothing I genuinely want to be different), I remember that this time around I'm fine being single; I'm single for a reason, which is that I kind of freaked out on the nice girl I was dating, more evidence if I needed it that I'm just not in a place to be truly open to those kinds of relationships; I do see a lot of my friends, and we all love each other lots; and yes, I'm complicated and weird and difficult in many ways, but I'm actually a good person, and maybe thinking of dating women as "inflicting" myself on them isn't necessarily the most clear-minded way of looking at things.

My life over the past few weeks has been a moody mix of work, aikido, and friends, with splashes of house-hunting and bits of consumerism. (I decided I was being silly and I finally ordered the Spyderco knife I've been wanting for years. It's like magic, I fill out a form on the web, and people send me stuff in the mail! Now if only I could motivate to buy myself some new clothes.) I'm trying to let aikido take up more space, and it seems to be working out all right: I'm relaxing more, taking better falls, muscling people less (since Wednesday, when I muscled people a lot), and getting to know better some new friends at the dojo.

The new job still rocks. It's hard, and I'm starting to boggle at the amount of work waiting to be done--still a couple years' worth, with a team of 16 senior people (and me--I'm brilliant, but neither humble nor senior). I'm constantly astonished at the difference between this and any other job I've had...I'm very obviously in a different tier of the industry, both in the problems to be solved and the people solving them. So I'm surrounded by really smart people who can all disagree and all back up their opinions with facts and experience, and we can have really complex conceptual discussions and figure shit out so it's good and solves our problem. So I'm still the cocky kid shooting his mouth off, but this time there are people smart and articulate enough, and with deep enough practical experience and theoretical knowledge, to know when and how to smack me down. I think it's very important to surround myself with friends and colleagues who will call bullshit on me, because I need it sometimes. (It happens that someone will ask me a question I don't know the answer to, and I'll just make something up that seems like a probable answer, and as I say it, it sounds fairly authoritative...two of my exes learned to pick out when I was doing this. One thought it was fantastically annoying (even though I'm right a lot of the time), the other thought it was amusing and cute because she does it too. Guess which one I still talk to.

So it's a good place to be. The higher tier pays better, too.

Life is good. I could mourn the things I'm not--stable in romantic relationships, mostly. But I've been through that, and I think I'm about done with it. That's not who I am, and if I make an ultimately-volatile boyfriend, I'm good at being a friend, brother, son, cousin, training partner, co-worker, and stranger. I have a million roles to play, and in the end, I do all right.

I bet you do, too.