Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Too much pizza.

It wasn't the snarky and cynical and humorous type of thing I usually (try) to write, but I wanted to give a detailed and honest run down of how I actually felt and what I actually did during my visit.  Well, not so much what I did, but I wanted to relate my mental state and emotional evolution over the 72 hours of difficulty.  I didn't especially enjoy writing it, and it's more than I'd like to reveal about my psyche, but (you may roll your eyes now) I thought it might be helpful to others.

I know that if I'd read it 4 or 6 months ago, or pretty much any time in the last several years, I would have done extensive eye-rolling, and it wouldn't have meant anything to me.  Some guy with a bunch of issues falling in love.  Great, wonderful, next.  I would have rejected it out of hand, since I didn't believe in love, and I certainly didn't think I'd ever be in it, and if I did it would be very easy to slip right into and I'd feel great all the time and so would the woman I loved.  Since love is all about happiness and better sex and all of that stuff, right?  Why would I feel broken to my rotten core to hear a woman tell me that she loved me?  Why would I find myself unable to stop crying and laughing when I realized that I loved her in return?

And so on.

I'm not saying that everyone is as fucked up as I am/was, but I certainly had no idea I was fucked up at all, much less as badly as I was, and the amount of baggage I had to shed before I could comfortably open my heart to another person was amazing to me.  Looking back now, I'm amazed I was able to do it in a single visit, much less just the first three days of the visit.  I certainly couldn't have done so if Malaya and I hadn't had such a close relationship from our extensive ICQ and email and phone chats.  We knew each other so well going in, had hardly any secrets left, and we are both very committed to open communication, and care about each other a great deal.  So we were able to move through my issues a lot faster than I think most couples would have been able to.  Certainly faster than we would have if we hadn't talked almost daily for a couple of months prior to the visit.

Anyway, I don't mean to go on and on about how special we are, since everyone thinks they are their sweetie are of course the most special and clever people on earth. And that's great.

It's just that all the rest of you are wrong.

I started to mention the reader reaction to yesterday's blog, and it was pretty heartfelt and supportive.  There was one weird, long, rambling, semi-coherent mail from a guy who apparently wrote one of the Guest Articles on the D2 site months ago, and thinks that I remember it/him at this point, despite the fact that I post 3 or 4 a week and read about 20 to select the 3 or 4 that I do post.  Anyway, he was vaguely-insulting (as I said, it was not a real coherent email) and appeared to be complaining about me posting too much personal information on my personal website, while also saying that he never read my personal website, since there was too much personal information on it.

Take a wild guess how much time I spent giving that argument any consideration?

More useful mails from several regular readers were very supportive and sympathetic and even congratulatory.  One reader sent me his personal story, one that had a lot of parallels to my own.  He had personal issues, an inability to accept love, and one thing I hope my own life/story will have; a happy ending.  Since he did get over his issues, and did accept the love of the woman, and grew to be able to return it, and they've been married for two years now.

You may join me in an "Awwwwwwww" of sympathetic admiration.

I think I'm over, or almost completely over, my issues in loving/being loved by Malaya, and she and I are very much looking forward to the next visit, which begins June 10th.

I'll have my spare computer hooked up there and be writing every day, though I don't know how much of that writing will be in blog form.  I'm really wanting to get going on the fiction to a much greater extent, and I think I'll be able to do that very well at Malaya's place, since there won't be the cable modem distractions, and I'll have her to motivate me.  She's wanting to get going on her professional work as well, and we think we'll be great at motivating each other. Her condo is cozy, we'll have our desks basically side by side in the living room, and since we're doing things together 99% of the time when I'm there, if one of us is writing, the other will almost be obligated to do the same.

I don't know how it is for her and writing, but I do know that for me and fiction, it's all about finding the motivation and time and space, but mostly about getting started.  I often feel like I don't have it in me today, and I'm not in the mood, and then if I sit down and actually force myself to type, I'll look up 2 hours later and wonder what happened and where all of the stuff I just wrote came from.  In other words, if I can just get myself to start on it, I usually go pretty well.

Here I'll sit down to write fiction and think I'll just surf for a minute, or blog for a minute, and then three hours later it's time for bed and I'm wondering what happened. Similar time warping phenomena, but one that's much less what I want to be doing long term.

Anyway, the discussion of how things went with Malaya for the second half of my visit is presented down below.  It's got more action and less emotional turmoil.

¤ One weird news item today. And it's this one, an amusing article on Rolling Stone about a really big dick.  Literally.

The average adult penis, according to the Kinsey Institute, measures just under six inches when erect. Most men -- about eighty-seven percent -- are between five and seven inches. Dr. Alfred Kinsey found that the largest reported penis was a bit more than nine inches erect.

Jonah Falcon's penis is 9.5 inches flaccid, 13.5 inches erect. Tense your forearm. Now wrap your hand around the middle of the muscle. That is the girth of Falcon's erection. Those who have witnessed it describe it as "grotesque," "gorgeous," "hideous" and "stunning." Falcon, who stands five foot nine, thinks his penis is perfectly formed, with a fifteen-degree downward curvature at the six-inch mark and absent the blotching, lumpiness and sudden bends that mark some oversize sex organs. A penis this size functions, physiologically, like any other, according to urologists, a claim substantiated by Falcon. His balls are proportionately huge, each the size of a grade-A jumbo egg. When erect, Falcon's penis generates enough heat to warm hands -- campfire style -- from a distance of six inches.

There is a link to a Mindspring page with a nude photo of the guy flaccid, and yeah, it's big.  Freakishly.  He's ugly and not in good shape, but certainly qualifies for the freak show classification penis-wise.

alaya visit, Part Two.  If you didn't read yesterday's blog, you should read it before this, or the following will make a lot less sense.

Yesterday's telling of the first three days, three days largely filled with anguish and concern and upset, ended with Malaya and I lying in bed, and me laughing through my tears as my mind finally accepted that she really did love me, and for the first time considered that perhaps I felt the same way.  I had sort of come to terms with the idea that maybe I was loved, I mean I know my parents love me, and I know I love them, but that's not at all the same thing.  With relatives it's like, "Of course they love you." With a partner it's much more of an achievement and a compromise.

You live your live and at some point you meet another person who you really click with, and if all goes well you'll eventually find yourself alone with them, and if all goes extremely well you'll find yourself feeling more strongly for them than you've ever felt for anyone else in your life.  Do they feel the same way about you?  Do you want to be with them all the time? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with them?

If you answer "yes" to all of these questions, then maybe you are feeling something like love.  It's not "like" and it's not "lust".  It should incorporate both of those things, but feel so much stronger and more "right" than either of them do on their own.  I was not expecting to ever feel that way, but expecting or prepared or not, I felt it.

Anyway, of course you love your relatives.  But you love them almost as an obligation.  How many people do you know who really have nothing at all in common with their parents or children or siblings or grandparents, and who you know would not spend 10 seconds in each other's company if they weren't related and felt like they had to.  And who wouldn't even want to know each other.  Much less like each other.  Much less love each other.

I've long planned to blog (at some point) about the oddness of loving and tolerating your relatives. And how we just do, despite the fact that so often blood relations have absolutely nothing in common.  It seems like almost everyone thinks their mother was saintly and wonderful and sacrificed so much for them and was the best mom on earth.  And that sort of attitude is smiled upon.  But be a little bit objective.  Most likely your mom, no matter how much you love her, was not really that great a mother.  She was probably pretty average; not as supportive as she should have been sometimes, not as loving or forgiving as she should have been, too lenient, lazy, disinterested in your activities, eager for you to get off to school or a friend's house so she could do her own thing, etc.  And yes, this applies to my mom also.

I'm not saying anyone should stop loving their mother, but it's self-evident that every mother can't be the best.  The vast majority are just very average. Nothing special, nothing unique. 

My point here isn't to talk about moms, but about relatives in general.  Everyone (practically) loves their siblings and parents. Why? What makes them special, other than that you grew up with them around them and you've all seen each other in private, at your best and worst.  Sure they know you, but what makes them any more special or nice or compassionate or understanding than any random person you pass in the supermarket?  All of those people have sisters and brothers and mothers and children who they love and who love them, and to them, you are just some idiot in the supermarket.  No one special.

So why do we all think our relatives are special and why do we love them and put up with their shit?  Even semi-relatives like your drunk brother in law who sleeps on your couch and leaves back hair in your shower drain.  You can't stand him, your wife doesn't like him, and yet he gets treatment better than 99.9% of the people on earth, just because he's related to you, despite the fact that he's never done anything for you, and you have no expectation that he ever will. Why?  Why do humans give such higher priority to people just because we've known then longer, or came from the same sperm and egg?

I don't have an answer for this at this point, and this digression is running way long.  I'll pick up this topic in a blog some day, I suspect.

Picking up where I left off a few paragraphs ago; we feel like we love our relatives, but how do we go from not knowing to liking to loving a total stranger?  What about me is it that Malaya enjoys so much that she loves me, and thinks fondly about spending the rest of her life with me?  And what is is about her that makes me want to do the same?

Well actually I can sort of answer that last question, but since I'm asking it rhetorically, I shan't.  For now.

As I was saying, as I realized that Malaya loved me, and especially as I realized that I loved her, it was an amazing awakening/dawning. I'm not saying that scales fell from my eyes or that my heart swelled up, Grinch-like, to ten times its size. But I certainly felt like it was, and for quite some time, 45 or 60 minutes at least, I was unbelievably happy and content to hold her while I kept laughing and crying.  And we talked and I tried to explain to her how I was feeling (and didn't do a very good job of it, but she got the gist of things) and that everything was going to be better now.

At first she didn't believe me.  When I told her that I loved her.  She relaxed and felt very good that night, and I slept well, but the next day she was a bit wary, and gave me the opportunity to recant, or rethink, or backtrack.  Which was very nice of her, but totally unnecessary, since in the light of day I realized that everything I'd felt the night before was entirely true and accurate, and that I felt it all the more strongly for having slept and settled down a bit.

From that point on, all was bliss.  Or if not bliss, at least a lot happier than it had been.  We were content and enjoyed each other's company, we made love a lot and it was wonderful, we snuggled constantly and were disgustingly cutesy and happy around the house, we cooked together and washed dishes together and went shopping for two hours at Target for homewares stuff. We went on a picnic up in the windy hills and made out in the grass, we walked in the woods, we took two long baths together, we gave each other numerous massages, and we even regretted spending a whole day at Blizzard North playing v1.10, just because that was a day we could have been together, alone, doing together/alone things.

I'm skimming over this since it's between Malaya and I, and you can go watch any cheesy Hollywood love story movie, and just focus on the requisite "happy new lovers" collage where they do all that happy new lover stuff and it's all cutesy for about 10 minutes as they dab whipped cream on each other's noses and giggle a lot and fall over while walking a dog in a park and trade meaningful looks across a crowded room.

We didn't do any of those specific things, but whatever, you can envision us doing them.  Except for the fact that you have no idea what she looks like, that is.

I'll talk more about things we did in future blogs, and we'll be doing more things together in the future, but I suppose that variety in blogging is essential to keep the readers happy.  So I'll probably do my Matrix 2 plot discussion tomorrow, rather than another long Malaya essay.  Though I'd be quite happy to just talk about her/us every day.

In closing, here's the best picture I took of the two of us.  I was holding the camera up in one hand, and this is the second of two shots.  The first has us looking at the camera, and it's not that good a shot.  As she was looking at the lens, and I was looking at her, I couldn't resist a kiss.  And while starting with a peck it soon became much more, as most of our kisses do, and we were quite lost in each other for about 30 seconds here, standing on this dirt path in the woods, with the warm spring sunshine bathing us.

The left side isn't cropped at all, but you'll forgive my poor aim considering the circumstances. I wasn't exactly devoting 100% of my attention to where the camera was pointing.

I like this picture a lot.  More every time I look at it.

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