February 14, 2000

Happy Valentine's Day.

Got an electronic Valentine from my friend Lisa while I was still at home, which made my day. …and a Valentine e-mail from Pam, which was also an incredibly sweet gesture. She was wondering if I had taken my journal down. [Hmm… No.] I then realized that I had mistakenly taken off the link with an older version of my contents page. Doh!

I wrapped around today. Every time I feel that my schedule is drifting into the not human realm, I try to rectify it by wrapping around. Last week there were a couple of nights when I stayed up until 8am or 9am. So I figured that this qualifies.

And what is wrapping around you may ask? I means staying up one night, waking up as late as possible the next day, and staying up through the night. Well, it is still the 14th and I haven't slept since afternoon yesterday. So you might say that I'm running on fumes. Needless to say, I have no plans for Valentine's Day. I did want to spend it with a particular young woman, but the simple truth is that we haven't gotten past our first lunch date. As much as I may have wanted there to be more, there simply isn't. We talked briefly about it on the phone and she said that she was only interested in friendship, at least for now. She facinates me. I've watched her as she talks about her family and her insecurities and there's something about it that I find very endearing. It's like talking to someone who hasn't erected walls to protect themselves. Maybe it is because I aspire to be secure enough about who I am and what I feel to be able to do it, maybe it's because I miss myself when I was that trusting, or maybe I'm simply that trustworthy. …stop laughing!

I suppose that I could've made other plans, but there's a part of me that would've felt a bit dishonest about it. Maybe that's a bit tough to say and it is definitely tough to hear. There hasn't been a single Valentine's Day where I had the opportunity to spend it with a romantic interest. Yes, this certainly means that I've never had a relationship that has spanned an entire year. My relationships have been polarized between long drawn out passionate relationships where somehow we never manage to cross paths and distant, unemotional, short, physical relationships. There were a couple of women whose smile will forever be etched in my soul and on the flip side, probably too many women whose name I can't even remember. I can't seem to come up with a happy medium.

This brings me up to my relationships with women today. I'm doing better. [Really!] There are a couple of pitfalls from distant past relationships that I'm learning from, but it is a constant learning process.

As for the entire friendship thing. Now, I'm friends with many women. I have no problems maintaining friendships with women. Yes, I lust after a large percentage of these women. It doesn't mean that I'm not honest about my friendship with them, because I am. It means that given the chance, if I could have sex with them with no other repercussions, I would. That being said, I have recently gotten to thinking, how honest can we really be about being friends with many people? I mean, not to be cynical or anything, but don't we eventually reach a saturation point for friends? Here's an example, for some mystic reason, when people shop for me, they routinely get one of three things: mugs, sweatshirts, or keychains. Well, I don't drink coffee (nor any hot beverage). I don't normally wear sweatshirts. And really, how many keychains can anyone use? Isn't there a point where you simply say, "You know… as much as I like X, I don't need anymore X." How many mugs are too many? five? ten? thirty?

Yes, I know the reasoning behind saying that you can never have too many friends. However, I have to wonder whether or not that's really true. Can you consider having two thousand friends? You'd be drowning in e-mail! I suppose that maybe it is a function of how much attention we give each of our friends. Maybe I take the friendship thing pretty seriously. Do you have a tough time calling someone an acquaintance? Think about it; it only describes the level of intimacy. It's not an insult. Is the world divided among the line of friendship where everyone is either a friend or foe and nothing in between? I don't think it is quite that simple.

Having said that, at what point can you truthfully tell yourself that if the relationship is not leading towards romance, you really have no interest in pursuing a friendship? Not to say that there's anything wrong with the person, just that there's no romantic interest… Is this simply something we say to soften the blow? Is this written somewhere in the dating handbook that someone neglected to give me?

Just random thoughts from my head… which is now running on empty due to sleep deprivation. I think I'll sleep now. Goodnight.

February 14, 2000