Been a good week and weekend.

Work is productive, spending much of the week dealing with various on-going projects and a few 'fires'. Lots of gaming continued this past week, often with me hosting. Should quiet down for the next few weeks until my trip to GenCon SoCal in mid-November. OryCon is in two weeks, which should be an enjoyable "Relax-A-Con" hanging out with loree, jeliza, drakemonger, rubylou, and others. Following some on-going special law of quantum mechanics, royalbananafish will be in Seattle that weekend.

jeliza and I managed a date Saturday night. As an aside, Canyons might claim to be southwestern, but we couldn't find anything that really qualified as spicy. Decently cooked food, just kind of bland.

As is often the case, I tend to have kinda bizarre and vivid dreams. This morning I woke up from a dream that started off as your usual 'stuck back in high school, the school building is of a bizarre architecture, and you are late for class' thing. It then morphed into a John Cusak flick based on some recent events in my life. It's never a good sign when your subconscious decides Cusak is the ideal actor to play you in a movie. A friend suggested that maybe the subconscious was being clever in that Cuask films often involve him beating himself up over some crazy girl who dumped him and ultimately finding a more sane girl as his true love. One could only hope. All I can really say is, "I want my two dollars!"

Long time readers of my journal might remember that I gave a big recommendation for Julie Larson, a local Oregon singer, a few years back. She was going to come out with a third album at the time, but it never materialized. Turns out she made it, but never got it released due to the arrival of twins. She is, however, selling me a few copies direct. Sweet!

For the most part, I like my personality: my sarcastic wit can be highly entertaining, my emotional vulnerability has been a boon overall in my adult relationships, and while the whole introvert seeking community dichotomy is a bitch at times I can live with it. There are times, however, when I want to strangle my subconscious depressed and wounded inner child.

So I have this dream last night. I'm in Kim's house having this typical painful stab-in-heart conversation about her lovely new life, house, partner, child, etc--thankfully it was more going through the motions and a bit numb emotionally rather than feeling like it was actually happening. Now, I've had similiar dreams before and I've posted about it here, but here is the part that Freud would have a field day with: The house is actually my parent's house in San Antonio where I lived while in high-school, and the painful argument is followed by a D&D gaming session in the other room.

Fuck.

Look, I know that I miss the comfort and safety of a home I lost a long time ago. I love my parents, but we really didn't get along in the years we were in that house and I left that place by basically running away in the middle of the night to a friend's place over the summer between high school and the start of my first year of college. I know I feel an immense sense of loss and rejection because of Kim's choices, that she lied to herself and me when she pretended she felt any sense of long-term potentiality in our relationship. I know that she dumped me over seven years ago and that the four years that followed were a painful one-sided pseudo-relationship where every moment I spent trying to be her friend was just another reminder of the magnitude of my loss. While I can still feel the painful knot that formed around my feelings for Kim, I have spent years learning to relax and let the feelings ease out rather than trying to force them away or dwell on them 24/7. I'm fully aware that I took to my gaming hobby with such intensity to escape my depression and social isolation in years after my separation from appleang. Hell, both the long-term fallout from Kim and the gaming escape both played really poorly with Andrea's issues and helped push her into giving up.

I get it. I'm not out of touch here. Enough already. Let it fucking go.

On the other hand, at least I didn't wake up feeling like hammered crap after the dream and instead just got increasingly angry with myself for still obsessing over a ghost of a relationship dead for most of a decade.

I blame the whole incident on a bit too much time alone this week, and maybe the re-heated pizza I had for dinner. Perhaps Bush's policies. And Canada.