the end is not yet

Goodbye Guelph, and good riddance.

You are a place I most deeply associate with pain and loss. Since moving here exactly five years ago, I've watched love die twice. Three family members have died. Every friend I made while a student moved away and out of my life.

To me, you are a place of farewells without end.

Farewell to you.

Tomorrow I move to Toronto. The city that has somehow been built up in my head since I was a child as a place of magic and evil. I look forward to what this move brings. But I dread it too. I am a creature of fields and forest and animals. Not of streets and concrete and endless people. Hustle and bustle and striving for success and ignoring your neighbour and living on other people's terms. Quiet desperation.

But at bottom, I dread the city because I fear I will come to love it even though it represents most of what I loathe.

I don't know when I'll next feel like or be able to post new entries. But I'm pretty sure I'll have the ability before the inclination.

This blog goes on hiatus as of now. The hiatus may last a week, or two or more. I don't know.

Parker seems to know what he's writing about. It is like carrying a glass of water that's filled to the brim up a flight of stairs without spilling a drop. Balance it properly and you feel nothing.

Sorry, kids. Don't ask.

Houdini will not walk into or out of Shokes' room. She must either be carried, have launched herself from the doorway onto his bed, or have launched herself from his bed through the doorway. If she happens to be outside his room and want in, she will sit at the threshold and let out the most plaintive meows I've been privy to for a while. As of yet, we can not figure out a purpose for this neurotic behaviour.

A U.S. government dietary advisory panel is considering whether its revision of nutrition guidelines should let some people treat themselves to guilt-free desserts.
- 'guilt free dessert?'; globeandmail.com; sat, aug 21, 2004

[Note: Claire's cat Channy, a big white poof-ball of a ragdoll, is staying here for the week while Claire is in Newfoundland.]

Shokes: Did you know that Channy is sometimes scared to go in the litter box?
Aaron: No, I didn't.
Shokes: Yeah, she'll sometimes just stand there staring into it for a minute to make sure its empty. Then she'll go in.
Aaron: I wonder how that [fear] developed.
Shokes: Houdini. She's jumped Channy a few times while in the litter box. That's one of the rules she never learned not to break.

According to an article in the Globe and Mail, there is a tribe in Brazil that has no vocabulary for numbers or counting. Adult members of the tribe appear to be unable to learn math, even after months of basic instruction. The tribe also has no distinct vocabulary for colour.

Some of the people quoted in the article say this is the best evidence for a long discredited linguistic theory posited by amateur linguest Benjamin Lee Whorf about 60 years ago. According to this article, he said that learning a specific language determined the nature and content of what you think.

Canadian trampolinist Karen Cockburn just took silver. This gives 'us' two medals, a silver and a bronze.

I'm about to do something risky.

I'm going to make an assertion without any empirical research to back me up. And I want you to give me your honest opinions as comments to this post.

I think sports should be as necessary a component of a child's education as english, math or science. And I'm talking about sports, not just phys ed.

Properly coached, I think there are lessons kids can take away from sports and apply to life that they won't get from the more traditional subjects.

I'm saying this as someone who loathed gym in school. But I loathed it for three reasons: the cockiness and elitism of the natural athletes in class, the focus on team sports and the winning is everything mentality of the majority of my classmates.

Basically, I didn't like it because I dislike playing team sports and because sportsmanship wasn't paramount. In fact, gym class spoiled me on sports altogether for a very long time.

That's not to say that I was never exposed to sportsmanship. My dad was an athlete all through school (hockey, baseball, track and field, etc.). So I played hockey when I was little, but left after a year or two. But even though I left it, my dad was still who he was, so sportsmanship was still a part of my upbringing. Later, I also could have gotten into martial sport through martial arts, but I was more interested in learning to 'fight' than on competing in tournaments (there are differences).

I guess it's sportsmanship I'm thinking about. You know what I'm talking about. How you play is more important than whether you win or lose. Show respect for your opponents and yourself. Give maximum effort even if you're tired, losing or hurting.

That's my opinion. What's yours?

You can get out of mandatory military service in Finland if you demonstrate "net dependance."

You are now required to register to access globeandmail.com's articles. I don't really like this.

The Genesis space capsule carrying solar wind particles will be plucked from nearly 1.5 kilometres above the Utah desert by stunt helicopter pilots who've replicated the retrieval, without fumbles, in nearly a dozen practice runs.
- 'helicopter pilots aim to hook onto genesis'; globe and mail; fri, aug 19, 2004.

Cool.

I have a new one up at the Salon. (Note you can get to the Salon itself through a link somewhere on the right.) This one's on Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

When dropped onto the couch, Houdini reliably bounces a foot in the air onto the back of the couch as if the cushion is a trampoline. It looks like she does it without any conscious control, and without even moving her legs.

Few things can cheer you up like walking into a room of random six year olds at camp in which four or five happy little high pitched voices cry out your name because they remember you from last year.

(I volunteered for a few hours today at the camp I used to work at.)

The Globe and Mail has an interesting column here about the invasion of commercialism into the Olympics.

[Edit: You'll note I describe this as "interesting." I'm not saying I agree with everything Brunt has to say.]

If I were religious, I would pray for strength for I am weary. In spirit, if not in body.

A few of us from Guelph have gotten together and started a blog to discuss what we've read, seen or listened to lately. Jer set it up and it's called The Guelsh Salon.

My first post just went up there, on Robert B. Parker's Love & Glory.

I could write an entry that scrolled for minutes down your screen about my camping trip.

I will not.

Instead I will share a series of brief moments from the trip and try to give you a taste of it.

---

I sit in the tent, an hour after setting it up and several before sunset. Rain starts to filter through the forest canopy. Then it pounds down in sheets that shake the tent and splatter mud up the walls on the outside. I notice two leaking holes in the tent, light a flat tealight candle and put a dab of wax on each hole with a Q-tip.

After the rain stops, I fail to build a fire despite much gnashing of teeth. Apparently, nothing is dry. And I'm too stubborn to use the homemade firestarter in my backpack. Only matches and what I can find. Phooey to that, I decide later before falling asleep. Or trying to.

I toss and turn that night, uncomfortable in my sleeping bag and on my sleeping pad. At one point, I hear a creature moving around outside the tent and am unafraid. When I camped alone as a boy that always scared me.

I awaken thinking it is Sunday morning and that I am blind, only to realize its the middle of the night and the darkness is absolute. Which is something you never get in the city, or even at my parent's house.

An hour after dawn on Sunday I crouch by a deer trail in the woods. The air temperature drops and the wind comes up. I walk quickly through the woods to zip myself back into the tent in time for another hour-long rain. Not as heavy this time.

I start a fire in five minutes Sunday morning after the rain using the firestarter. I made it years ago as a Boy Scout and never used it. Truth is, I needlessly doubted its effectiveness. It was four egg holders from a cardboard egg carton with a mixture of parrafin wax and wood shavings in the bottom of each.

Around noon on Sunday, the embers of a successful fire cool beside me and a baked potato cools in its tinfoil. My chin is on my chest as a porcupine climbs tail first down a maple tree seven feet away. About five feet from the bottom, it pauses and looks straight at me as it holds a tiny branch with one of its front paws. Then it starts climbing down again. I am sitting stock still and realize that its eyesight must be movement based, like deer and other prey animals. It gets to the bottom of the tree and I stand so that it will see me and not make a pin cushion of my leg as it blunders into me. It scrambles up the tree again. My next thought: "Never again will I go into the woods without a camera."

I'm roasting my back in the sun, sitting on my poncho in Skunk's Hollow beside the wheat field. Reading. An indigo bunting and his brown mate chirp away on the old rusted swing set. Him on one side and her on the other. Every so often, I look up to find that he has flown up to perch on something a few feet away. As I look, he chirps and then flies wildly back to the swing set, swerving one way then the other before smoothly landing. I smile and wish Christa was here to see it. Which would be a little difficult considering she's now living in Australia.

Later, I go back to the campsite and look way up into the tree. The porcupine is still there. I can see its head peeking over the edge of a branch.

"You realize if you don't come down I'm going to have to move my campsite?" I ask.

Its head disappears, but I can still see the quills.

Later that afternoon, I sit and read on a hilltop at the eastern edge of the property. I'm hoping the porcupine will climb down and go on with its day and not die of thirst because I didn't know to look for small bits of bark at the bottom of the tree and nicks in the bark of the tree when I chose my campsite. I add that to my mental checklist after "Widowmakers." (Widowmakers are dead trees just waiting to fall.)

The same hill, the same afternoon. A flick of movement catches my eye. A great bird with a huge wingspan wheels up out of the long grass on the other side of the field and soars to perch in a tree at the edge of the bush. I see it sitting there. I walk closer to try to get a better look. It calls twice, the distinctive sad screech of a hawk. That sound always pulls at my heart, and does so now. It spreads its wings and soars soundlessly into the woods, disappearing like a ghost. My next thought: "Never again will I go camping without binoculars."

Later, I check the upper branches again. The porcupine is gone.

Late Sunday night I get up with the flashlight to go relieve myself. I finish up, resisting the urge to swing the flashlight around wildly as I walk back to the tent. Memories of scenes from The Blair Witch Project plague me. I push them from my mind, with effort. I slowly walk back to the tent with the flash in front of me and the seemingly endless dark behind me. Funny how the imagination is the greatest source of fear in the woods. Why is it so much harder to control when you're alone?

Monday morning I pick chokecherries. Or are they pin cherries? My book doesn't seem to be much help in distinguishing the two. Whatever they are, they're not toxic. I ate some Sunday without any ill effects. I'm concentrating on the bush in front of me when movement in my peripheral vision catches my attention. A turkey vulture is lazily gliding in wide circles far overhead, barely moving except to adjust its path. It continues like that for at least ten minutes before going out of sight. It never flapped once.

I stand on the edge of the wheat field, listening. I'm on my way back to my parents' house. My backpack is heavy on my back, with all my gear packed and my tent in two pieces on either side. My second rule of solo camping is, "Only bring what I can carry in one trip." (The first and third are: "Short of injury, no going back until the alloted time is up" and "Plan carefully.") There is a snapping sound from the field that has mystified me all weekend. At first I thought it might be mice running through the wheat, knocking the stalks as they pass. But the snapping comes from the tops of the wheat. Then I wonder if it is insects flying through. But I watch and listen carefully and see that when an insect knocks into the wheat, it makes a different noise. Finally I figure it out. It's the wheat itself. Its cracking open. I stand and listen harder and hear the surface of the field crackling for as far in every direction as I can hear.

Last night was good.

I spent the first part unconscious, exhausted from a long week of early morning MSN conversations to Australia, long days at work and late nights with friends. Wednesday was yoga with Emma followed by the Albion for Ian's birthday. Thursday was a quick spin to a secondhand bookstore in Fergus with Emma, and then a party with the people I've been working with the last two weeks.

Shortly after waking from my nap last night Shokes told me that Christa was online. So I went online to talk to her for quite a bit. When I was finally able to drag myself away, I drove over to pick up Jer and we headed to Ian's for Kiernan's going away bash. There is a tiny grass yard in back of their apartment building that is sunken four feet below the parking lot. It was filled with people in varying degrees of drunkeness and a bonfire.

A flashlight held by Ian - who else? - flashed on and shone our way safely down from the parking lot. After being offered whatever pop I wanted - it's now well-known that I'm an a break from alcohol - I was quickly found by Paul, a guy I had two philosophy classes with a couple years ago. We caught up and talked for a bit. Turns out I'm moving into his parents' neighbourhood in September. Also, when he asked where I was from, I didn't have to do the whole song and dance to explain it. He's actually driven through my hometown before and knew someone who had come to Guelph from it (yes, I knew the person too... so what?).

Shortly later I was sitting looking into the flames of the bonfire when Emma announced to me that she had worked out the meaning of life and did I want to hear it? And so began a conversation that lasted for the majority of the night. Forrest joined the conversation at the beginning and left for brief intervals as he got new drinks.

Eventually people started to disappear and it was only Ian, Kiernan, Jer, Emma, Forrest and I around the fire. Emma decided to head out, as she had a roadtrip the next morning and wanted to be well rested for it. So the five of us talked as I fed the flames.

"Where are you going camping?" Jer asked at one point.

"In the bush at my parents'," I said. "They own a fair chunk of land. The truth is, by camping there, the nearest people will be much farther away from me than if I went car camping at a provincial park."

Jer nodded and smiled.

"I know what you mean. I hate camping in places like that for the same reason," he said.

"You can find isolated sites if you look for them," Ian pointed out.

This started a discussion of the relative merits of camping and cottaging that lasted a fair bit.

At about the appropriate time, I stopped feeding the flames and the fire died down to a bed of coals at about the point I decided to leave. Jer asked for a ride and Forrest decided to leave too. We put out the coals. Forrest left on his bike as we all went upstairs so Ian could give me a bunch of books. That done, we said our goodbyes and Jer and I took our leave.

I slept in today and now I must eat, pack and drive. I camp tonight and for a few days. There are many things I want to blog about, not the least of which being the Weapon Project post on fear and pain. I find that I need to organize my thoughts on that a little more first. It will come sometime next week.

Waiting until you're attacked before doing anything about it is an efficient method of getting hurt.

Aside from training, there are two main things you can do ahead of time to minimize the risk, or failing that, maximize your ability to meet the threat. They're so interconnected that you can't talk about one without bringing up the other. First, you make yourself as aware of everything around you as possible. Second, you assess what's going on around you to make the changes necessary to boost your chances.

Here's how to do it.

Make a map in your head of your immediate surroundings. Note potential points of entry and escape. Note the positions of every person in your immediate area. Note every object that can be used as a weapon (e.g. thrown, swung or stabbed). Note your blindspots. Note who is within critical distance (minimum distance within which someone can attack you).

Good. Now do it again. And again. And keep doing it.

Make this thing in your head to a map what a movie is to a photograph.

Now, tweak things. Position yourself so that your blindspots are as small as possible, so that you can see all the points of entry and so that as few people enter the critical distance as possible without you knowing before they get there. Check the blindspots often.

This is easy to do when you think about it. Extremely hard to make an automatic habit. Even harder when you're tired, drunk or sick.

Eventually you'll find that sitting with your back to an open room makes you uncomfortable because you've effectively made your blindspot an entire room and you have no idea who is in the critical distance. You'll find that needless clutter makes you itchy because it could impede your escape if you have to run. That being tired, drunk or sick are made doubly unpleasant because of how they blur your thinking. That you'll start to lock your door even when you're home because the sound of a rattling knob will serve as early warning.

You'll also find that you are surprised less often than others because you see things coming. Or that you're surprised first. Also, you'll be more likely to spot people you know in a crowd before they know you're there.

Try it for a night. You'll be surprised what you notice.

I will make two more posts and then this project is done as far as this blog is concerned. The blog coverage did what it was intended to, which was to keep me going until the training became routine. And it has, so writing about it is no longer necessary.

The first post will be on mental mapping and I'll write it this afternoon.

The second will be on fear and pain. I'll write it before I go camping this weekend.

I'm at the apartment, back from work extremely early because the boy I'm contracted to work with isn't up to camp today.

I'm in my room, the pale green sheet 'curtain' pulled up over the window and the lamp on to maximize my light.

I'm reclining on the small couch, enjoying a book that came to me through Ian.

Houdini, the little gray striped cat who lives here, is curled sleeping on her side with her back against my hip and her feet hanging off the edge of the couch.

Kids with special needs like autism are very schedule reliant. Change the schedule without warning and you risk a blowup. Because of that, social stories are very important. They're also very important to help soothe such a child when they really want to do something that it's not time to do yet.

At the camp I worked at for the last three summers, these social stories would often sound something like, "First we play games, then we have lunch, then we go swimming."

I woke up feeling particularly antsy last Friday. I was going to Kenny's Cottage after work. Kenny is a friend of my dad's and every summer for years, we've had the cottage for a week.

MSN was on in the background as I got ready. I keyed the following in for my username:

"First we pack, then we work, then we flee."

When work ended Friday, I fled. Right up to Tait's Island on Lake Manitouwabing near Parry Sound. It's a long drive by yourself, but I wasn't particularly bothered. I wasn't exactly seeking social comfort.

For a number of reasons - chiefly a brief stop-over at my parents' house and a minor fender-'bender' in Aliston - I didn't arrive until late. Late enough to start to worry my parents, who had been there since Tuesday and are still going to be there for a few days.

I stayed up to talk with them a bit and to read. Then I crashed.

I got up early on Saturday, though I don't know what time. My watch had been placed on the nightstand the night before, not to be looked at again.

I was on cottage time. For the uninitiated, it goes like this. You get up when you wake up. You eat when you're hungry. You swim when you want to. You sleep when you're tired. Time is measured by how much of the sky the sun can still traverse. Anything more precise just kills the cottage experience. This is all the more important when you're only there for a weekend.

After breakfast, we drove into Parry Sound so I could stalk through the secondhand bookstore in search of Parker books. I found one that met my criteria. I also picked up The Three Muskateers by Alexandre Dumas, And No Birds Sang and A Whale for the Killing by Farley Mowat.

We got back to the cottage and fixed ourselves lunch. I still felt very urban and was a little unsettled by that. My bare wrist kept floating up so I could check the time. The knot of tension in my shoulders hadn't left yet. I kept feeling like I had a full dayplanner of stuff to do.

A few minutes after realizing this, I was sitting on the end of the dock easing my feet gently into the cold lake. That's what did it. Abandoning the watch was the first part of the ritual. This was the completion. The tension drained away into the lake like it had never existed.

I'm never really at the cottage until my feet are in the lake.

It's kind of like how I'm never really camping until my hands have been plunged into the soil.

If I'm to relax on such mini-vacations, the rituals must be followed. Otherwise I'm just a slightly citified country boy going through the motions.

Sitting here at the computer, I can't help but notice that I know exactly what time it is, the tension's got a hold of the back of my neck and my dayplanner is full.

Grrrr.

Apparently I need to be challenged before I'll actually get something done.

(Read the fourth comment on the previous post if you're unclear on what I mean.)

Now I'm going to challenge myself to be asleep in ten minutes.

No, I still haven't taken the time to figure out the code this page is written in.

Parallel Universe
Gryphon Girl in Oz
The 7th Parallel
Fire Child's Bonfire
Fractionals
I'm Huge
Adventures Abroad
4am Voice
Words
Lagustar

I have my parents' car for the week and it's all I can do not to drive it everywhere I go. I had to restrain myself from driving to work today, which is a ten minute bike ride away. I had to restrain myself from driving to Jer's tonight, which is a two minute ride.

The car is an Intrepid, and such a sweet ride.

About three months ago I was back visiting my parents' for the weekend and dad asked if I wanted to take the car out for a spin. So I did. I just pulled out of the driveway and took random paved roads. Two minutes later I realized I felt like seeing water. So instead of turning around at the next intersection like I'd planned to, I just kept going north. Forty five minutes later I was entering Collingwood, thinking about the morning I'd watched the sun rise on a beach not far away.

We had our second grad (highschool formal) at the Cranberry Resort in Collingwood. The first one wasn't technically mine. Half the people in my group of friends, including the girl I was seeing at the time, had fast-tracked and had enough credits to graduate early even though they all came back the following year for OACs. The first grad we had on a ship in the harbour in Toronto.

The following year, the rest of us graduated and decided to have it at the Cranberry. Yes, many of the people in my group had spent the entire year planning the event. I had devised a point system that allowed graduating students to volunteer their time in various fundraisers or in the planning or organization of grad and earn points that went toward decreasing the cost of their tickets. The fundraisers had brought down the price of everybody's tickets.

Six of us had gone in together to get a condo at the resort for two nights, the second night being grad itself. After grad we had stayed up talking all night, reminiscing about highschool and talking about our plans for the future. Shortly before dawn someone suggested going to watch the sun rise at the beach over the water.

Everyone wanted to do it, but the problem was that Collingwood is not exactly in the best place in relation to the water to do something like that.

So we piled in the car and raced the sun to a beach far enough west and north along the shore for the sun to actually come up over the water. We didn't make it and had pulled over to some random beach just in time to enjoy the sunrise, though not over the water. Nonetheless, it was the perfect capper to a great night.

We all got quiet and contemplative and separated from each other, finding our own pieces of the beach to explore and brood over and do whatever.

About an hour later, the girl I was dating - yes, the same one I'd been dating the year before at grad and had been dating for two years before that - dumped me.

I'd been a prick. Her closest friend was a guy in our group that she had once confessed having romantic feelings for. The fact the guy was gay didn't do anything to ward off my jealousy. I didn't take this well. It was an ongoing problem between us for a bad eight months before grad. He was one of the six of us on the beach.

I brought it up again that morning. I don't remember what I said or what triggered it, but it ended with her ending us. I didn't take this well either. I spent a great deal of time making a fool of myself, trying to convince her not to dump me. Essentially begging. Finally I accepted it and we all made the hour long drive back to our small town and to our respective houses. That wasn't a fun drive for anybody.

I remember sitting by the pool that night, my face wet. All I wanted was to call her and beg. Again. Thinking back now, I can't believe that.

I didn't though. I swore not to call her. If this was what she wanted, so be it. Lesson learned.

Five days later she called me and asked me to take her back. I did, though I shouldn't have. We were already done, but we were both too scared of a future without each other to admit it. We lasted until just after Christmas.

I pulled into Collingwood about five years later and looked for a place to park by so that I could stand and look at the water. I was on a timeline, so I pulled in to the parking lot of a Canadian Tire that was closed. It was Sunday afternoon. I drove around the corner of the building and drove to the edge of the parking lot. Got out and stood five feet from some very cold looking waves. Took a deep breath of the lake scent and said, "Okay." Then I turned around and drove back.

In the journal entry I shared with such trepidation two posts ago, I mention a void. It was always there, always ready to suck me under and bring my life to a grinding halt. It whispered to me all the time.

"Nothing matters," it said.

And nothing did. For a very long time, nothing mattered. Nothing filled the void, no matter what I stuffed down it.

Poor Bronwyn was driven nearly around the bend by this. I think it was something she had never been trapped by and couldn't understand why I was. I couldn't explain it either. Still can't.

Less than a year and a half ago I closed it. The void no longer yawns in me, sucking all enjoyment from life and keeping me from doing things.

"Nothing matters," it screamed one day.

But I was fed up. I was sick of wasting my time and hating my life.

"If nothing matters, it doesn't matter that nothing matters," I finally screamed back.

It had no response for that and shrank to a simple fact to be incorporated into my belief structure. Something I can use, not something that will use me. It hasn't even whispered once since then.

Reading my journals from when it still screamed kind of scares me because it reminds me of how bad things were for a time. But it also gives me a feeling of strength for having gotten through.

Friday was essentially my last day as a mailroom jockey. Today I started as a one to one worker with a boy I worked with last summer. His mom had tracked me down months ago to see if I'd go to camp with him again this summer. I jumped at the chance.

I'm not sure what made the day so good, but it was excellent. The boy, Alex, was in good spirits, the program seemed an excellent fit and everything went very smoothly. For the first time in nearly a year I'm looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

For the last two years I've been keeping a handwritten journal. For some reason, I was reading it tonight. The following two entries bother me. I read them and they call up my state of mind back then and I marvel at how precariously I was teetering.

7:06pm, Oct 25, 2002

For the last six years I've fought a series of battles with an existential funk that always threatens to paralyze me.

The first came in the wake of a fatal car crash that mom and I witnessed. A car flipped and rolled 4 or 5 times down the highway in front of our car. I saw a person hanging from one of the windows. He was whipped around like a rag doll. And he was the one who survived. His buddy, the passenger, died. I watched the paramedics pull a sheet over his bloody, broken body.

I couldn't bring myself to do much of anything for a long time after that. I remember putting my back to a lab counter in biology one day and sliding down to a sitting position on the ground. Staring at nothing. Our teacher let me leave for the rest of class. That was typical, though it didn't usually happen in class.

What did anything matter when it was all going to end in death anyway?

I was 16.

It comes back every year. In fact, it never really goes away. It's not centred on death anymore. It's been centred on other things. The futility of life when you will only spend it doing something you hate. The futility of life when you know that everyone and everything you love will eventually die. The focus changes, but the message is always the same. "What's the point? Who cares? Why do anything? Nothing matters."

It's an overwhelming sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness. It's probably why, whenever I drink, I drink so bloody much. As if maybe I could fill this empty void in me with something even if that something was only alcohol.

Here is part of another one that bothered me.

1:30am, Oct 26, 2002

I am drunk.

Shannon came over tonight. She came around 9:45 or so. I cooked her dinner, we drank some and then went to the Keg. It was raining and we got soaked. She's gone home. I'm here, in the apartment I share with Bronwyn. Alone. Alone. Aren't I always alone? Bronwyn's at a physics conference. I drank some more after getting back. Not home. This isn't home. There is no home. I don't have one. I carry it inside. Home is internal, if you make it so.

I'm experimenting with letting you comment on my entries. I'm not sure what I think of the whole commenting thing and so may go back to having none at any point. Anyone got any strong opinions one way or the other on comments?

(And by the way, who the heck reads this thing? I have no idea anymore.)

It has seemed to me for a while that this blog is rank with arrogance and pride. As a result, I've found it very difficult to sit down and write in it lately.

I don't think I'm arrogant, so the arrogance I see here makes me uncomfortable.

The pride is real though. I'm proud of both the man I am becoming and of the man I already am.

In my eyes, that shines through in this blog. There's a part of me that looks at what I write here and shakes its head. "Why share that?" it asks. It makes me feel as if I boast, or try to make myself out to be someone I'm not. But the fact is, the me I share through these entries is the real one.

I'm not a shy person, but I am a quiet one. I do not speak about myself, my life or my beliefs to many people. Unsurprisingly, even people I've known a long time often get the feeling they don't know very much about me. This blog is an opportunity for me to share myself. I'm not looking for truth with a capital 'T', but for a personal truth that holds for me. And if you get to know me better in the process, so much the better.

The thing is that the blog keeps me honest and keeps me talking when my natural instinct is to keep my mouth shut. I can't lie in it. Not to you and, more importantly, not to myself.

The frank honesty with which I write here has shown me that I am far stronger and more balanced than I ever realized. In a sense, I have chronicled here my return to a life I consider worth living. I will no longer feel bad for sharing it.