[dis­jointed entry alert: sort of writ­ing this one on assign­ment, as it may be]

People have accused me of liv­ing in the past. This is sim­ply not true — I just don’t appre­ci­ate the present until it’s become the past. I think it started when I was around 15. I have (had?) very few mem­o­ries of child­hood, so it makes sense that I can’t really miss the past until there’s enough of it at a dis­tance to miss, and I’m old enough (self-​​aware) to actu­ally notice it. Also, I’m not miss­ing the past specif­i­cally: I have always missed the first time I felt any par­tic­u­lar way. Well, maybe “miss” is the wrong word. I long for that moment when I recog­nise I am feel­ing a new (to me) emo­tion or notic­ing the way sen­sory inputs have aligned in a par­tic­u­larly sub­lime way.

As my child­hood was, er, abnor­mal, it’s no real sur­prise I didn’t really start to learn about and rec­og­nize emo­tions until I was in my pre-​​teens. I think the first time one of these moments occurred was when I was around 11, and I remem­ber miss­ing it within a few years. Since then, it’s been at least one thing every year that gives me a sort of bit­ter­sweet, exis­ten­tial feel­ing.* I’ve cat­a­logued all of these sen­sa­tions of height­ened self-​​awareness and I wish I could turn back the clock to feel them again…but not at the age I was when it hap­pened, because I didn’t actu­ally appre­ci­ate the expe­ri­ence until a cou­ple years later. I want to be myself at my cur­rent age as an omni­scient observer of my inter­nal dia­logue at the time when I was break­ing into new emo­tional ter­ri­tory. Oh, man, that sounds ridicu­lous, doesn’t it? I should think about that for a minute.

…

Ok, I’ll stand by that, but maybe I need to real­ize that the way I live now, yearn­ing for the expe­ri­ence of the new, has great value to me. This actu­ally brings me to the main rea­son why I’ve embarked on writ­ing this utterly self-​​serving blog entry. Only in the past year or so have I learned that I am not doomed to a life of long­ing for the past via its traces in the present.** I real­ized, like the genius that I am, that every year a cou­ple new things hap­pen. Taking it to another level, things have never stopped hap­pen­ing. Oh snap, that means they prob­a­bly won’t either. Now why might it be worth more for me not to notice how I’ve learned (impor­tant word) after a few years? This allows me to take the expe­ri­ence that has hap­pened to intro­duce me to a new emo­tion and see how I have uncon­sciously learned from it (or not), see­ing if I did well or if I need to make changes.*** If I was in tune with it at the time, I’d undoubt­edly fuck it up and learn from it incor­rectly. Another aspect of get­ting older is that I know that my first impres­sions of an expe­ri­ence are usu­ally poor, so a rel­a­tively ingrained behav­ior of ignor­ing my first impres­sions is pretty advan­ta­geous to my per­sonal growth. This is a com­pli­cated thing per­haps ready for another blog post in a few months, if I even feel like dis­cussing pub­licly is some­thing that mer­its doing. Although it is why I started this post…

Yeah, I’ll fin­ish the thought. This may sound sorta like bull­shit, but I’m try­ing to recon­nect. See: child­hood, awk­ward­ness therein; fur­ther see: syn­drome, Asperger’s, my. Ahh, been a while since I dragged that old chest­nut onto al-​​bloggariya, hasn’t it?**** Well, it’s been on my mind WAY more than usual lately. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to sug­gest that the time has come for me to finally tran­scend that and join the reg­u­lar folk. Ha, no, as if. Lately, though, I have been notic­ing that my nat­ural incli­na­tions have been pre­vent­ing me from being the per­son I want to be, so I wish to add new traits and per­haps refine some that I already have, all while keep­ing my iden­tity intact (that means you, Hans’ handiwork).

Changing? Keeping your iden­tity intact? Sounds hard, some might say. Pish posh, I say. Change is for those who’ve made mis­takes and don’t like them­selves, some say. Well, shit, they don’t say that to me, because I don’t know any­one who’s a closed-​​minded fool who believes that it’s a good idea to stand in the way of change (= progress, look it up, dammit).

[see, I told you this would be pretty self-​​serving]

* So, in a way, an exis­ten­tially bit­ter­sweet feel­ing is one of the first emo­tions I became famil­iar with. No sur­prise I was a pre­ten­tious shit in high school, eh?

** Who grokked hauntol­ogy from the moment he heard of it? This guy, that’s who.

*** E.g.: 2003 was when I learned about jeal­ousy. Yeah, I’d never felt it until then. Those were fun times; I’m sorta still try­ing to atone for them.

**** I’ll thank you for kindly refrain­ing from inform­ing me that it’s been a while since I really dragged much of any­thing onto here.