It's been a while. I haven't just been neglecting this old blog, but really almost all my social interfaces. So a bit of a catch-up is probably in order. In this edition:

1. Personal life and romance report quarterly update.
2. How's business?
3. And what about all that ranting...

As you may be aware, I have been spending more and more time with a certain special lady, including travels to London and Brazil. Things have been going really well, I think. Since one of the purposes of ye olde blog is informing people in my weakly-tied circle of cohorts of life-update kind of information, this warrants a long-overdue post. Read on for the romance report.

I've been a bad friend, son, brother, and even lover of late. Too much workahol leading to broken plans, missed connections, absurd periods of radio silence. To all the parties waiting or wanting or hoping to hear from me, I truly am sorry.

So here's what's been going on.

I escaped my dayjob-infused routine last weekend to attend an Indian Wedding in New Jersey with the girlfriend. Oh yes, that's right, I'm using The Title now. Reluctance to do so in the past is — hindsight-wise — kind of embarrassingly immature. Also, while it sounds quite nice rolling off the tongue, "paramour" isn't actually a very flattering alternative descriptor.

For my part, this feels different than previous relationships. It's more... intentional. I chose pursuit in spite of improbability and long odds. While she's certainly into me (so I got that going for me too), this isn't one of those things that just fell into my lap. I had/have to work for it.

This is foregrounded because it's been long-distance, which is a pain in the ass, and also not the norm for me. Shamus jokingly scolded me that this was the best I could do given my quote-unquote emotional availability. Very funny, but there's maybe something to be said for the way in which the distance gave the whole thing a chance to sneak around various subconscious defense mechanisms of mine. A trojan horse for the heart, you might say.

It's gotten harder now that she is in London, and not New York, and timezones are a real barrier, and we have to plan and coordinate even to talk. But people do this, and even successfully. Seems kind of silly not to try.

So, what's been going on? Clearly I'm not doing a great job of expressing myself in the written word, and aside from what you might intuit from Twitter there's been precious little to go on in terms of my life and times. If it's any consolation, I've been similarly vague and opaque in real life too; when conversation turns to me and myself these days I've been full of noncommittal generalities.

The truth is, a lot is happening, so much and so constantly that I'm not really keeping up with the processing. The spiritual backlog is growing, technical debt to the soul.

One big thing that's been happening is that I met a woman. When I've revealed that to my friends of late I say it with italics — "I met a woman" — and with a kind of level eye-look that tells them I'm serious. She's out in New York City, a Lawyer by trade, double Ivy, South Asian, whipsmart and gorgeous (natch) and loves to dance. Her name is Rina and she's inspired some quality prose and two weekend visits back East this spring thus far.

It's geographically improbable, but I'm uncharacteristically sanguine. We have passed beyond initial worries that spending 72 hours together might become unbearable — that we won't actually like one another upon close examination — and into the subsequent worry that oh hey we actually do, and so now what.

Did I mention she's moving to London? Oh, yeah, she's moving to London, but again I'm uncharacteristically optimistic. However, it is beginning to dawn on me that this may actually be kind of unpleasant. Time will tell. I play the long game.

Music please.

I got a note the other day that complimented me on the quality of my "public longing" (that as opposed, I understand, to the more conventional "secret longing") and this tender sprout of an idea took root in the unfortunately rocky and barren terrain that is what passes for my subconscious these days. I don't know if it's really something to be proud of, but I think I've gone too far down the road of radical transparency to really make much of a turnaround now. Nothing short of the online equivalent to death (that is, taking the whole thing down) can really extricate me from my legacy. Or, as they say in the middle of a bum trip, the only way out is through.

So public longing it is. New tag. Warning to any groundlings out there who might see this post; it's got mature content, which is preferable to immature content IMHO (and as the man sez), but if yr parents aren't into that sort of thing, maybe trip away*.

I'm back in that Swerengen place, which I know at least some people out there get. It's a nasty cocktail of pressurized and randy, a place I get where the facts of my life stretch me out thin enough that there are a real limited number of things that'll make me feel good, and the first one on my mind is getting epically laid, but of course this is a pretty terrible position from which to go playing the scene.

A blog post about the feeling of wanting, or rather of wanting wanting.

I remember a night cold as this, twelve odd years ago (jesus, twelve!) one of the first times I ventured into Brooklyn as a young student; a classmate who lived out there at a young and early age, no dorms for her, was throwing a house party and everyone from our section was going, including the girl I had an enormous and unspeakable crush on. I remember a lot of talk, and some minor dancing, and seeing her mostly across the room but feeling so damn much.

It's strange. In some ways I remember most sharply these feelings which sprang from fantastical unfulfilled crush-dreams. Times I was in love — which is a reciprocal situation, something of considerably greater depth and complexity — I know about feeling-wise mainly because I wrote about it in one place or another. Of course I remember all the facts, but only bits and pieces of the real emotions: saying goodbye the very first time, at a subway gate; bawling my eyes out on a hardwood floor; romantic petty theft; brief but indelible bedroom moments... still, by in large these quantities of time and whatever ticked by inside me have submerged below accessible consciousness. Amnesia of the heart.

And on a night like this, pedaling a borrowed bike through the city of my birth, a cold foggy Saturday night years beyond years beyond any of these times I remember, remembering those kinds of feelings makes me wish I had some of that kind of jumpy excitement in my life. Honestly I'm inwardly still somewhat Buddha calm about things like settling down and having kids; what piques my angst is this bland numbness, the staggering lack of epic romantic fantasy.

Thus the allure of fanning old flames. Thus the desire to radically switch up my situation. Thus the tendency to rhapsodize the potential of things that never happened. Thus the desire to play the lottery, to strike gold after scaling some yet unknown height.