I usually skip St. Patrick's Day. We used to go to the parade most years when I was a kid, but I've noticed as I've gotten older that my life has gotten progressively less scheduled: now, I just do fun stuff when I feel like doing fun stuff. I'm lucky enough to be Irish the entire year (and Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Scottish--I can pass for native in a whole host of European countries), so I don't take a holiday for it.

I missed a week of aikido due to last week's meltdown at work, and in trying to get back into it, it's completely kicking my ass. I haven't been able to relax my breathing well for a month or so, but the week off spent staring intently at computers fifteen hours a day doesn't seem to have helped. I finally went back to the chiropractor Wednesday morning, after about four months, but I'm still adjusting and relaxing. One of my current projects is my legs: they're huge, and powerful, but they're wasting a lot of energy being tense, so I don't have the endurance or use out of them that I should. There's always something new to work with.

One of my friends encountered this page about the eventual housing crash in the Bay Area. It's a little frothing-at-the-mouth, but it has some good points, and the links back it up (though of course that's expected). It also has a powerful intuitive ring of truth, as I keep scanning various housing markets: just a year or two ago, a buyer needed my (current) salary to be able to buy a house, but a buyer could then buy a house pretty straightforwardly. Now, for me to buy a house, I'd have to resort to any number of bizarre financing tricks, without leaving me some of the carefully-considered safety margins I so treasure. (It's true that for non-financial operations, my margins are a bit narrower than others might like, but that's another discussion.) But, a vacation home, bought with friends, in some location where the market hasn't exploded yet, still sounds like a decent idea.

I feel pretty peaceful and okay, overall. It's a little strange. I expected the experience of purposefully not dating to be a little more angst-ridden; while there's a touch of angst, I guess my initial assessment, that for the moment I've just beaten the will out of myself to even try, is correct. Singleness comes with its own challenges, of approaching life in a useful, constructive, purposeful, and ultimately compassionate (if not always amiable) kind of way...challenges I think are important for being a better whole person, though, so when the eventual inevitable non-singleness occurs, it might actually work.

No, really. I could date someone and it could be a healthy, working relationship. I did it once. Out of like five or ten tries, but it's a good proof of concept.

Stop laughing, dammit.

Thbbbbbbt.