This is not a blog

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Will choose later 

If you have been here before, you know that I usually post when I am feeling somewhat down! Well, another day has come.

I feel my writer's muscles are pretty feeble now, after such a long period of infrequent visits to this blog. Anyways, I'm here once again to weave my scattered threads of thought and let them materialize into something more clear, and perhaps readable, on this scratch pad.

In fact! This is exactly where I should start. Why is it that I need to spend this much effort to even see what is really going on in my own head? I have been pondering this question this evening. I usually find myself capable of looking around and seeing the connections in my environment. People know me as someone who has good analytical skills. Well, I admit I perceive the world as something somewhat simpler that what it really is, and I have never been good at understanding people. Again, perhaps because people are much more complicated than what I usually imagine. Part of that is because I'm quite plain myself and then naturally that's how I envision other humans. This is not what I am going to rant about. The thing I have been pondering is that I have come to realize that my ability to understand me, myself is disproportionally lower than my ability to understand my environment. Well, I said I'm not good at understanding people in general, but when it comes to myself, I feel my knowledge of what goes on in my subconscious is orders of magnitude lesser than what I hoped it would be. I still observe myself as an outsider. I look at my own reactions, feelings, and behavior as an outsider. Oftentimes I find it extremely difficult to predict any of these, even when I have somewhat complete understanding of the situation I'm going to be in. Put even more simpler, I don't know myself very well!

How is that so? That's a million dollar question, I guess. I see traces of this fact in many of the struggles in my life. For example, I am a huge procrastinator. For the longest time I have been trying to figure out some clues about the characteristics of the tasks I find myself willing to postpone indefinitely, despite the severe consequences. As another example, I know I don't have good social skills, but there are certain patterns for when I fail myself beyond my expectations in my social interactions. The point is that I see the pattern only after the thing has happened. The list goes on. Now the dilemma is that I believe I am a plain and simple person. How come I remain so unknown to me? This speculation became stronger in the past few years after I occasionally took some totally unrelated fun or otherwise serious personality and psychological tests. Have you seen those tests like "What kind of operating system you are"? Even in tests as irrelevant as these I repeatedly saw unusually accurate references to some of my personality traits. Now if by asking a few simple questions these tests can tell me about myself so well, why is it that I remain so unknown and unpredictable to my own conscious? Perhaps I am a bit in denial about some of my weaknesses and insist to ignore them? Perhaps I have never really looked to find any?

The more I look at it, the more crucial I find it to be. I think this extends to other areas of my life. Back to my non-24-hour-sleep-wake-cycle, sometime in summer I began writing down my going to bed and waking up times; attempting to measure the average length of my sleep period and the average daily drift. I think I forgot about it in a week. The consequence is that up to now I have only some rough idea about those two measures; no numbers. Could it be that the reason I don't know myself is similarly because I don't care to look well enough? I think the fact that the behavior of my subconscious is more difficult to measure than the length of my sleep period does not sound like good news here.

By the way, speaking of news, it appears I'm in love! Did I mention that? Perhaps that's what really made me think about this all today. I think I know exactly when I fell in love, and I think I know the event that initiated the sequence of reactions that made me end up here, but what I don't know is what was the main factor behind that seemingly irrelevant event. I'm looking for the switch in me that such an event could trigger. The issue is that I can't make the connection between these different phases. It seems I'm removed from some state and then spawned in some other state. I don't quite see where I make the transition. I am aware this is perhaps the most complicated of the issues all people face. You are afraid of falling in love, because you know it happens beyond your control, and knowledge. But that's not the issue here. What occupies my mind at this moment is the reason why I need love. Good thing is that I am aware it matters to me more than it matters to the average person; But I don't know which part of it. No need to mention, part of me wants out. So at the same time, my conscious is in search of the switches that have made me fall out of love in the past. Too bad there are fewer of these, than those that make you come in.


I believe I ranted enough. I'm sorry I have been out of touch with you guys out there. I know some of you have quit your blogs. Only few of you I know are still writing. Well, keep writing! I'm sure Thomas Tipp is right. "People will read again"! The most prominent of them being you, yourself!