I should start making plans for my 3-day weekends. As it is I slept some more, ate leftover Indian food, and failed to schlep myself to the dojo for the midday (holiday schedule) class. (I got caught up in some cleaning and tidying, as my car was a train wreck and my room was descending into unlivability.)

The costs of moving have leveled out, and I'm starting to spend money again, on some things I need (new power supply for my server, a network switch so my network experience doesn't suck) and some I don't (the three volumes of Sandman I've been missing). I think I should really pay off my car at this point, though.

I've been re-reading my Steven Brust books. Kelly introduced me to him, and he's a marvelous writer, with terrific stories and a dry sense of humor that appeals to me (who'd have thought?). Somewhere in there, Brust got divorced (as far as I know), and a couple of the books, especially Teckla and Phoenix, show a relationship in disintegration. He shows it perfectly: the constant arguing, the butting heads, the ramming straight into each other so it seems like there's no way to reconcile anything. It's got me thinking, though, about my experience participating in and witnessing in others that kind of disintegration in a couple, and how to keep it from happening, or resolve it when it starts. We seem to focus on the wrong things in that situation; psychologically we spasm a bit, and our boundaries get messed up. In the books, the wife has gotten involved and committed to an ideological bunch of revolutionaries who will eventually be crushed, and the husband does all sorts of things to try and ensure she won't be killed. They butt heads, it seems, over their opinions of the revolutionaries. My ex and I did this constantly; at one point she decided I was a soulless monster who didn't care if women got raped, which so patently contradicts my life and my self that my brain almost exploded. But you get the idea. It's difficult to see clearly in those situations.

I'm not sure here. I've known couples who disagree strongly on points of emotion-laden opinion, and they manage it by simply leaving that out of the conversation as best they can, or (if they're seriously disciplined and enjoy a healthy argument) having intelligent exchanges about it where they never change each other's minds. I don't know...I think, imagining the kind of woman I'd go so far as to marry these days, the proper course of action would actually be to either let herself go get killed if that's her choice, or to step up and watch her back in the pinch, even if I disagreed with what she was doing. If someone you care about has a well-reasoned (according to their beliefs) course planned out that could end in their destruction, is it worth stopping them if it means losing them as part of your life?

And there are ideas here about how things get to that point--it started when the wife was hanging around the revolutionaries and didn't mention it to her husband, figuring he wouldn't approve. It escalates from there...how do you keep that from happening?

I'm feeling very bachelor-y this week, and not guessing that I'll have any of these challenges soon.