Snoozing

I'm really happy to be behind on my writing. That usually means I am living at a greater speed and depth than I can find time to keep up with in words captured in text. The balance of words captured in and reciprocated by other human being (first order) witnesses, to words captured in text, relayed to other (second order) human beings, is shifting. I know this means I capture much less of my life, growth and experiences for posterity (my future self especially), but that is okay.

Like all the wonderful thinking I have done together with S that has since evaporated uncaught, being in the process is so much of what has been missing from my life, and reconnecting with it is at least the necessary first step on the way towards retaining and being able to recall on command what perspired, came up and was revealed.

Friday night we went downtown SF and saw the Christmas Oratorio, and yesterday, we went to the Berkeley botanical garden for a delightful stroll among all the wealths of nature that converge there. I like her taste in replenishing and soul feeding activities; they feed me too. We got as far as a sushi restaurant in Lafayette (Kobe?) before sundown, and stopped for a moment on top of the hill with a great view of the bay that even outshone that from her fairy-tale house. There has been a massive flow of beauty through my otherwise more sparse life over the past few days, and I am still quite taken with it.

Only the very notion of being let into somebody I like's life is a great and wondrous thing, and all the other layers on top of that have merrily been flowing over the brim.

I'm still in the process of figuring out whether we are both emotionally ready to operate (and what kind of) a relationship together, just as, in all fairness, I am with every woman I am in some kind of relationship with. The contour, form and content is getting better defined with Kim. It's rather fluid (and early) with Katya, sounding the territory and finding what will carry and how. With S, I don't really know what would, and would not, trip my past, co-dependent behaviours around adopting, or at least carrying / becoming weighed down by issues that are not my own, were we to live closer. With A, it will be very interesting to see what relation we retain from last we saw each other back in Sweden, once we reconnect over the winter holiday and when she comes to visit me early next year.

All relations keep finding their current shape and configuration. These are just some of my closest and deepest connected ones. It is slowly starting to dawn on me to what extent I devote my time and attention to crafting and maintaining these relationships in my life, especially after the recently posed question of what I do with my time besides work, practical matters of living, the time I spend with Kim and the creative outlets I had already mentioned (writing and programming). I drew a blank. I think a little reading, and somehow relationship centric things account for most of the rest, but enumeration and making inventories are not my strong suites, so I may be missing things.

Maybe there will always be a little haunting feeling saying "is that all I do?" whenever I come up with a list. And I guess I prefer doing a few well chosen things to a great extent over doing lots of things without any kind of follow-through.

I woke up realizing that in the culture I grew up in, shame was a tool used to monopolize people's sexuality.

And to be clear, let me underline the fact that the above conclusion is in the passive tense without an intelligent perpetrator and a specific target or victim -- because it is an evolved dynamic, whose current form can hardly be traced back to any element of intelligent design (by a human or group of humans, as I think of it, but feel free to consider a royal fucktard of a god here instead, if it pleases you to have an evil overlord cast in this most destructive role). And whether sprung through conscious intentional design or (from today's vantage point) unfortunate evolved shifts of perception over time, I am not interested in scapegoat tracking or vengeance follow-ups; I just care about undoing the damage and liberating those trapped in this poisonous dynamic.

I am aware that I can't know who is or isn't, beyond myself, but I do know that I have been at least indirectly trapped in it myself, from perceiving that my surrounding culture were, with the exception of those few who by proof of their actions visible to myself showed that they were not, or were recovering from it in a fashion similar to the path I was embarking on for myself -- breaking free of shame and arriving in territory where brains and bodies harmonize with one another in beautiful abandon, free of cultural messaging like the shalts and shalt nots of Christianity. (A spell too ill defined to be invoked in that specific a role, but I'm taking this briefest liberty of smearing some dirt over it; I quite obviously do hold a grudge about its lack of built-in safeguards against being used to abuse, imprison, hurt and cripple people. Few memes have evolved long enough to gain those, or been designed with them from day one, and the pointy finger of C is not an A grade student -- at best a weak C.)

I see quite clearly now that one ruling principle in my choices of partners, with little exception, was the will and/or capacity of breaking out of this dynamic, or (better still) never having been in it in the first place. Because I can't stand the thought of my lover being imprisoned in a brain lock about being subservient to myself, conditioned to have negative emotional response to taking the best possible care about themself and committedly pursuing their dreams and fantasies, just the way I want to, too -- and I also think I haven't felt free to do those things myself unless my partner enjoys those same freedoms, in a rather enforcingly constraining perception of fairness.

I haven't been willing or open to pursuing single-handed hedonism; unless it's been mutual and win-win, I just haven't been interested. This clearly limits partnering options.

Odd. I started writing this in the morning hours, with a ton more to come, as it felt at the time, but I think I lost the steam somewhere along the way during the work day in-between. So I'll skip to the conclusion I was aiming for, where I describe the two-dimensional life I was so often ending up in, and how I am attempting to create a new, three-dimensional life for myself now that doesn't compromise away my own needs, wants and dreams.

I have always been pursuing a life heavy on love, intimacy and sexuality, trying to create a good container for that. As I was just stating above, however, it was not okay with living in a relationship where any one of those were a compromise of theirs, rather than something done enthusiastically with great abandon together. If that triggered trauma or was not mutual, I would rather not go there, and eventually, the relationship would wither away one way or the other, as my own needs would not be met in it (I still had a rather mono-centric world -- but I honestly don't know how I would respond to a relationship I could only have a subset of those in, if I had my needs met together with other people too -- I presume it comes down to how much complexity buildup it would amount to in practice and whether it was taxing my cope or feeding us both).

Hm. I think what I'm noting, as the topic faded into the background during the day, is how much I miss thinking together, a dimension that I think wasn't even on my map a year ago. Tricky, as I don't even know quite how it works. This post would probably have worked far better in dialog form. Which is territory I have not been very spoiled with in the past. I want to learn more about that.

It just struck me that I know of so many cases where the love, sex and relationship conversation that needs to happen between parents and children has the direction of information flow switched. The kids possess all the knowledge, experience and insight, and the parents are the students, if not for their own sexuality, then definitely to make heads or tails of how the lives and relations, norm systems, values and agreements of their children work in order to be able to understand them and not be afraid for (or even of!) them, worry, and to harmonize and stay in touch with them.

Authority is about knowledge-, not age-disparity.

I am behind on having these conversations with my biological family members; I, and my choices, have been more insulated from them than some I know, affording me options to delay them indefinitely even -- if I so choose, without building up an accretion disc of lies to keep track of about public-facing parts of my life.

I think what I might like to share most about my life is about HAI, and second, about polyamoury, and / or relationship anarchy, and how neither is a very radical concept. I kind of wish I had had those condensation skills of my best friend's with me at a pool conversation in Harbin, where we were twisting and turning the subject of how monogamous and non-monogamous relationships are really just different marks on a scale of simplicity, communications and the rise in number of intra-relationship paths, for growing numbers of n. (n=2 => 1 intra-relationship path: AB; n=3 => 4: AB, AC, BC, ABC; n=4 => 11: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, ABCD; and so forth)

Without great tools, communication, people, choices, norms, values, agreements and much more, the whole idea of going beyond n=2 has been so deeply out-ruled that it gets passed on as infeasible, sometimes even through stigma and taboo, rather than via the more honest path of reasoning and as subject to debate and intellectual consideration.

And how much more defining a characteristic of a healthy relationship the choice of beliefs, norms, world views, fears, commitments and otherwise are than the choice of n, the genders of participants -- or of so many other non-traditional choices -- may seem to be to the owner of a slim world model.

Much of what makes it so complicated, of course, is that it is difficult to see, think, compare and comprehend from inside a tight space. Other things, that it gets even worse when inter-mixed with fears, with partial or skewed understanding of fragments, not to say misrepresented information, or downright disinformation in wide circulation from parties with vested interests, or spreading fear propaganda, from a position of fear of their own.

I think my own family is likely to be a remarkably easy target to bring on board when I get there, being all academics, and where fear and isolation really only runs rampant in my mother. It could be so much worse. It would also be really interesting to bring up a lot of this stuff with my mother's brother's wife (I don't know my relationship algebra well enough in any language to name that traversal of the largely binary family tree that is my family :-), whom is a psychologist of some flavour or others, and likely has some concoction of partially deeply informed perspectives on some to much of it. I think that is at the moment one of the larger carrots for me. :-)

I wonder if I'd be up for bringing any of it up over Christmas when I go back to visit my family.

I have been going on high gear more or less non-stop since Thursday, and would under normal circumstances be exceptionally beat about now, 8pm after a focused work day after an all-weekend work shop (HAI Level 2) after a really early Friday morning (6am up, at work before 7 vs typical 11) after a sudden huge time critical work load spike that came from a blue sky Thursday evening. I am not, though; if anything, I feel exceptionally high-functional right now, did some excellent UI design and implementation at work today, pulled off a great re-architecturing feat from a net café Thursday night in concert with a co-worker in less than an hour, that we had only tossed as an idea prior to that.

Thinking about cause and effect, how can I stay in this territory and what contributing factors have and have not been present in the most relevant and measurable recent past? I'll try to make some kind of inventory here, as best I can. Needless to say (it should be, it only hasn't, historically), all tidbits aim to be naked data points, not enshrouded in story pandering to expectations about specifics about how facts should be padded.

About two weeks ago I was, to my surprise, disentangled from bonds of relationship both quite abruptly and cleanly. I think that may have unlocked a chunk of brain capacity and emotional insecurity about navigating feelings of other people, not to step in their fears' way. I also lost (for the time, at least) connection with what was probably as close to an emotional home as I then had.

Friday night that same week, I headed a few hours and two hundred miles north in a rented car to visit the other similarly deeply emotionally connected friend I have on this continent, in a non-relationship relationship. Just prior to the break-up, we had met, reconnected and to our delighted surprise found ourselves share trust and touch connection on a deeper level we formerly did not have with each other.

I ended up staying with her not just over that week-end, but the work week that followed it, too, balancing work, me time and we time rather well all week. Breakfast porridge, somewhat lacking café soup lunches, rather good dinners together in the evenings, some Jeeves and Wooster watching together, magnesium tea and lots of pillow talk before going to sleep every night.

Much mirrored touch cuddling, some kissing, no shared sexuality. Lots of thinking together, exploring things like a coping trap that had slipped into my communication with Kim, specifically around a mis-understanding that happened between me and my host-to-be, some days prior to my departure. She had mentioned, after a post of mine on some relevant subject, "no wonder you feel safe with me", upon which I had felt the need to reply that I do now, but that that had not always been the case -- in order to make sure we still had a common understanding (the subject was up only some day earlier) that what I heard as present tense was indeed, even for her, present tense. The insight that grew out of the above (it was a charged subject we had worked out, at great effort, before then, and this verification, over IM, pretty much exploded and seemed undone for a while, until we met in person again) was that I had so often felt that I failed to come through to Kim, when speaking and/or acting in and from the present tense -- as doing so, and having all sorts of extrapolation happen into other tenses, past or (probably more) future, unbeknownst to me. So I was checking in to see whether we were in tune or not, when I didn't have more cues to go on than mere words in an IM window.

My typical 11 to 7 work days, but tele-commuting from a little café with nice music; Édith Piaf, and the like. Achieving better than usual results in somewhat J-heavy and creativity/ingenuity/architecting-requiring domains. Introvert friendly interactions with other people, predominantly women, sitting amidst them and light non-disturbing conversations not requiring or even cuing my direct participation, but nourishing some form of social need none the less, or maybe especially so.

Wednesday night, going together to an EFT circle, for myself on the topic of asking and having my needs worth, an environment somewhat dominated by female presence, but with sparks of really excellent participation from a deeply wounded and hardened veteran male, sharing hard earned wisdoms such as "shame disables your ability to expose the lie" and some really apt high amplitude verbal attacks on anyone and everyone that breeds fear and sells security; that hideously common modern subliminal slavery that ethically poisoned yet legally legal businesses around here thrive on so much.

Being very much at choice, liberty and independence in all respects, except perhaps living, but there, instead, cohabiting in a way that was my exact choice and preference at the time, so it did not amount to compromise at my end. Solving remaining logistical issues over the week for HAI at Harbin with useful input and tips, but doing the actual execution on my own. Friday afternoon, driving to Harbin, and then, having a wonderful and enriching time all weekend in naturism and touch centricity among exclusively (to my perceptions) highly emotionally open, available, resonating and evolved people of both genders.

Superlative catered food all three days, even including rather decent breakfast, which speaks volumes about the quality of it, as I am picky about the all-American sugar-centric breakfast, and take some issue with eggs, sausage and the like before lunch -- there were other options, including a rather good granola and real, plain yoghurt. (On top of all the really healthy-feeling and tasty food, I even had two or three rather sugar bomby nut-instead-of-chocolate-chip type cookies, and didn't crash and bomb out over that.)

Sleeping together with my HAI 1 buddy, with whom I resumed the great, uncomplicated, really connected right off the bat touch and trust connection we built in late August. No needless efforts were made to mimic how all (or close to it) the other people were keeping more distance in typical sit-down situations. Connecting closely with a woman that, somewhat like myself, had a run-away mother, but that had been dealt devastating blows by it, instead of having been safely distanced from it, by the mere difference of having had her home in her -- where mine rather was in my father.

Again, no shared sexuality, and again, me maintaining that boundary so others needn't (yet at their request, in both cases -- or all three, counting my host too). I found out that I lock myself into a role of ownership of the whole setting around sexuality, making sure it caters the needs of the other person, does not upset the needs or ethics of the surroundings and caters to my own personal needs too, unless the other person is (sexually, at least) a strong, willful, dominant woman, and/or really apt at communicating her needs, wants and want-nots, level and stable. Fail either of those last few, and I assume ownership of the situation from the conditioning I absorbed from what the Swedish women's liberation front preached about men being at fault and blame for a ton of violence and intrusion on womankind, and a lot of scape-goating and witch-hunting coupled up with it.

Not a very successful liberation movement, if you ask me, fostering a rather nasty strain of co-dependence in perceived enemies and fostering victimship in their own ranks, instead of building up strength and resistance. It is a rather smelly pile of conditioning I'm dying to get out of, over time, as I adopt better stuff to replace it with. HAI does a lot of good, and the kind of people I get in touch with through it, probably even more so. I'm not very apt at re-teaching the stuff I integrate from there myself, but really thrive in environments among the other people that have adopted the same curriculum. There be so many pearls to pick up there.

I also made a great hug connection with a Berkeleyan with whom I ended up having no workshop sessions, but where a very connected mutual flow happened each time -- her inner negative voice she was working away, to my perception, finding a very growthful place in me for picking up conveyed warmth and appreciation, to take its place. Both introverts, I approached her during the withholds / amends / paranoias / appreciations sharing (a great, great, great series of exercises and tools) -- or was it (probably) afterwards? -- sharing that I would really appreciate being part of her support network, post-workshop, back in real life. I hope I will be. (Note to self: Ferret.)

Saturday to Sunday night, I decided that I needed much sleep to not collapse during the drive home, and took it, over more cuddly or talky or warm swimming pool social interactions off-hours. I did not regret that move, and did end up driving all the way home, via Santa Rosa this time, as I wanted to drop off a library book and my computer at the office, so I needn't carry it from the car renter's on my way to work, that long hour's walk. That route wasn't as pleasant as going through Berkeley; especially those first 70 minutes it took to Santa Rosa were a dreadful drive after dark on high attention through non-stop curves and roller coaster passages where many were rightfully marked 20 or even 15 mph. (If you really have to, you can get to SFO that way in less than three hours under good traffic conditions that way, though, even if you slavishly stick to the 101 after Santa Rosa, I noted, after having tired of navigating on my own by iphone, and wanting to keep some battery, should I need it.)

The two worries I had during the drive home (that I had forgotten the soon-to-be-overdue library book I had brought, at Harbin) and that I had somehow caused thee nasty scratch at the back right wheel of my rental car, both turned out moot -- I had not, in either case, and I even got offered to be driven away from Enterprise, as they had a driver in and it was before 16:45 when I dropped it off this morning. I asked to be taken to the Palo Alto Caltrain (I think next time I'd ask to get to work instead, but I'm still practicing :-), just missed a leaving train, and instead walked the remaining half an hour through Palo Alto, picking up a Mophie Juice Pack Air that a friend of mine recently gave me a tip about, doubling my phone's battery capacity, giving it a hard shell, making it chargable and syncable through a normal USB cable and giving it a handy external hardware battery indicator, all in one, on the way -- which was really neat. The charge a single battery holds is just enough for a three hour drive if I'm running with the GPS on in navigation mode, but now I don't have to do the planning for charging I did this time around, which will be a neat gain.

I had half a naked green smoothie for breakfast and three of Kim's rather hideous-tasting vitamin health pills (I brought them to work shop too, but did not touch them there), three more tonightError running style: Style code didn't finish running in a timely fashion. Possible causes:

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