perspectives
Monday, September 20, 2010 at 10:22AM So I went to a wedding over the weekend. A good friend of a friend finally marrying someone they've been dating for years and has known for twice (or more) as long. As I sat there watching a group of friends who have known each other since around (some before) high school, and who have managed to stay best of friends in that time, I had a strange shift in my perspective about such things. Well, maybe 'shift' isn't the best word. I guess I recognized my own perspective on things, I accepted that it has been my viewpoint for years now and I've determined that I no longer find it acceptable. Yes, that's a lot of shit to happen in the 30 minutes the wedding took place, the 6 hours or so of chatting, eating and dancing (boy did I dance) during the reception, and the next 6 hours of afterparty sitting and chatting and smoking and learning a lot about a few people.
Yea, I stayed up LATE. In hindsight I should have waited to see the sunrise.
Item No. 1) Friends
I've never really had a whole lot of friends. Never really had much of a need for them, never really had much desire for very many of them, never really went out of my way to make any long-lasting ones. In fact I had even gotten to the point of going out of my way to distance myself from everyone I knew out of some need to take on the world by myself because I would be less of a person if I didn't. Don't ask me why, I don't have enough time and this post would take on biblical proportions (in length). I had even become so jaded as to believe that most people who "required" a group of people around them as friends were doing so only to stave of the loneliness and to distract themselves from themselves or done so out of some sort of dependency on others. Which, granted, some people do; not nearly as many as my distortion had estimated and not to the extent I had assumed. Welcome to projection ladies and gentlemen. What I saw was a group of people, who generally like each other (because that's all you can expect when people get together) and who will go out of their way, out of their comfort zone and put aside past squabbles to be around each other, to be there for each other and honestly enjoy each other's company. I have never been so genuinely envious of a group of people in my entire life. Ever. It is a thing of beauty to see a group of sometimes strikingly different people come together (even though they do so quite often) and still have so much to say. It's not perfect, there are little looks and jokes and comments and such, why wouldn't there be, but when all is said and done they are there... for each other, and what more could you ask from another individual?
I realize that is something missing from my life.
Item No. 2) Shallow Hal.
I don't know when it happened, or how it happened or why, but somewhere along the line I lost all sense of what "beauty" is and went into some weird narcissistic shallow alternate reality. I don't have the words to explain it but there it is. For example, during the wedding I saw one person in particular go from my standard "cu-ute girl" to "beautiful woman"... through the course of a night. Mostly because I took the time to get to know this person instead of hiding up in the hotel room, and in that time what i defined as "cute" vs. "beautiful" had changed significantly. Yea, I don't know fantastic until it says goodbye and walks out the door. That makes no sense. To put it another way, instead of allowing my brain to tick off a list of features that define as necessary to be beautiful it appears that I let my heart decide. It sounds romantic comedy cheesy, believe me I KNOW, but someone somewhere turned the toggle.
Item No. 3) Normalize
The past few years have been a weird blah of mess. Let me refine that; I have been a mess for the last decade. Maybe more. Only in the last few weeks has a sense of normalcy returned to my every day. This isn't purely as a result of the wedding, it's been way longer than that and with way more work than just deciding things should be different. However I did notice a change in myself, in how I interact with the people around me, how I felt about the people around me and how I felt about myself in that situation. In the past it was difficult for me to pull myself out of whatever "blah" hole I decided to be in and actually enjoy myself, to be happy; but somehow I've gotten through it and took more from that night than the standard "I got out of the house now shut the hell up about what I do with the rest of my time" speech. Whatever Dayne I became through that "dark decade" or "lost decade" has evolved; used the prior 20 years of life, experience, knowledge and wonder and took from it the personality, characteristics, boyhood joy and freedom, smelting it in the cold hard fire of a single, depressed, insecure, desperate friendless and confused male in his late 20's early 30's and casting a person. A real life person. Man, do I love the sword analogy.
Pay no attention to the guy behind the curtain, he's just spewing words now.
Cheers.
Reader Comments (4)
So did you ask her out?
Nope, I'm a chicken.
You should go find her then. Nothin' to lose, right?
She's not as available as all that.