Reality Bytes

I was at a party on Friday night at which I stayed until the wee hours of the morning. I must confess: While I am a relatively social person, and often enjoy hosting parties, there are party situations in which I feel somewhat uncomfortable (and uncool). I kind of expected that to happen on Friday, and was pleasantly surprised when it didn't -- in fact, when LL (with whom I'd come to the party) leaned over at one point and said, "Hey G, it's quarter to 4, just so you know," I actually wanted to stay longer.

As the crowd waned, we ended up as 5 or 6 people in different stages of inebriation sitting out on the roof pondering the mysteries of life. A few interesting topics surfaced, one of which was fear of heights. A few people were, in fact, afraid of heights, and the general speculation was that it's because when they get to an edge, they think about how easy it would be to (voluntarily) step off. That led to a bigger conversation about altering your own reality, and the various ways in which you could drastically change the life that you've created over 20- or 30-some years, within, in some cases, a matter of seconds. And not even necessarily by doing something superextreme, but, for example, by saying something completely ridiculous in a meeting (for reasons beyond my comprehension, the example "I have a purple penis!" was used) - the idea that an impulse might pop into your head and that you don't do anything about it, but think, "oh my god I totally could do/say that and what if I did?" and probably even more, "what's actually keeping me from doing/saying it, and is that thing trustworthy?"

Like I do with practically everything these days, I spent some time thinking about how this relates to my current sitch with DLang, and how we got we got to the reality that is so different from the one we had last year at this time. I didn't come up with anything profound, except that maybe it wasn't one big outbursty impulse that led us where we are now, but maybe more about things that weren't said - which might have made the consequences less identifiable.

In this week's Get Naked, Jamie Bufalino advises, "The idea is to live authentically--that means having the balls to not gloss over your flaws. After all, you want someone to love you, and not just the facade you’ve cleverly cultivated over the years." Reread that, OK? Because it's awesome. That reminded me of a recent conversation about secrets and anxiety, and I think a lot of what happened in the past year has to do with me *not* talking about important things - behaviour which, it turns out, can be as reality-altering as the impulsive blurt.