more tentacles from across the world
saturday, december 22, 2001
they keep stretching for me and so i'm sprouting tentacles to stretch all over the place as well. as predictable as it may be, christmas really has become a great opportunity to re-introduce yourself to people you care about, in whatever surface or deep capacity.
christmas has become this great time where you can pretend like you haven't accidentally ignored people and family for far too long and simply start over fresh with little tentative sentences wishing well and merry to all.
see, i love e-mailing with people i like. i love knowing (most of) the people i know. an assorted bunch of online and in real life people i've somehow been tangled with for however long or short, they are people i do care about.
but there is the curse: when you genuinly make attempts at keeping in touch, there are the two predictable routes, at least for me. either i am able to keep a semi-daily contact with people for a long period of time, through short e-mails or, as i used to, online chatting and irregular, long phone calls (case in point: gene). or, the more (unfortunately) usual route--starting off with a few long e-mails that become looonger and loooonger and looooooooonger e-mails that abruptly stop because they simply become too large and clunky and energy consuming.
somehow it seems rude to disregard all the points i want to comment on, so the e-mail discussion grows to giant proportions, and soon enough, the behemoth will end up sitting, un-replied to, in my (or the other's) mailbox for weeks. or, more accurately, months.
and then the whole guilty "it's been so long i feel like a moron replying -now-" thing kicks in, and suddenly it has been 4 month of radio silence. oops.
but then christmas comes along, and suddenly there's a reason for pushing the silence aside for a few tentative tentacles to sense the ground out. best wishes are sent, a few "sorry for being so slow at replying!" lines are thrown in, and then a few more merry wishes.
my e-mail box of received and sent messages is suddenly filled with a wide variety of names i don't see enough because we're all crap at maintaining things. or because we mutually lost touch on purpose. that has happened a few times as well.
the thing is.. hmm, what is the thing. okay. let me think. i started to type this paragraph, but it got all convoluted and annoying, and not as straight forward as i'd like it to be, so i'm giving it another go, in the next paragraph. here we go:
the thing is. i don't forget people. or, that's not it. but people who i at one point cared for in some capacity, well, i never quite shake the care for them out of my system. believe me, it's not for lack of trying.
but lost best friends and people i've been attatched to--there may have been huge amounts of rage or sadness or plain and simple fed-up feelings that led to them abruptly leaving me, or me leaving them, and moving on--they still feel like they are there.
i mean, i may not be able to know them anymore because it either hurts too much, or causes me (or sometimes them) damage to some degree, but i miss them and want to know they are doing okay. shrug. i just do?
when i was a teenager, i thought this meant that i was a loser who could not get over people. now i realise there are more levels to life than that. caring for people long after we have ceased to communicate is Okay. i really think it is.
it just takes a long time to move beyond the immediate feelings, at least for me. i can hold onto anger and disappointment for a long time, sure. but then i just got to a point where i realized it leads nowhere. it's okay to think about the past, and analyze my actions, as well as others. but the past needs to stay in a contained zip-loc bag that can be examined every now and then without it still being a vital part of my life now.
oh crap, it turned wishy washy and lame again. let me stop the lame thought train again.
to distill what i'm blathering about: christmas feels like a good time to re-open communication with people i have been crap about keeping up with, but it is also a time when i think about people that got lost along the way. they're not getting e-mails from me, but i do secretly wish them well. whatever. lame entry. anyway.
so. i'd like to say today (since i've got a few days of pre-christmas to work with): best wishes to you all, whether you have read me for a long time (i'm entering my 5th year as an online diary person!) or just randomly peeks in out of obligation, and whether we have ever exchanged an e-mail or not.
i appreciate the random e-mails and the fact that my page receives a few hits daily. i appreciate the well wishes when i've needed some support. and whether i count you as a friend, or just a silent reader--thanks for that. and have a merry few weeks to come, with lots of cheese and things that make you feel happy.
i apologise for my slow, or sometimes even totally lacking responses; know that i do try but sometimes fall short, and i do read and always intend to get back to you. and again. merry, merry!
okay. now i'm off to start reading neil gaiman's "the sandman" books again. mmmmm, the saaandman! (sorry for posting crap today) cin cin! �� 5:21 p.m.
