giving answer to the why
hi, internet. i am having a summer!
the, um, plurality of my waking time is spent working on rust. this is really a blast, and i keep having to rehearse the argument for why i'll be happier in the long run being a grad student. today i finished (sans some final touches) my major project, which is rebuilding the task (== unit of parallelism) ( Read more... )
the, um, plurality of my waking time is spent working on rust. this is really a blast, and i keep having to rehearse the argument for why i'll be happier in the long run being a grad student. today i finished (sans some final touches) my major project, which is rebuilding the task (== unit of parallelism) ( Read more... )
This used to reliably happen to me every spring for about a week, and then it would subside again. It might be that even recognizing that period as such, or just being a crazy-busy undergrad, helped make it go away... at least until the one year when it was an all-consuming problem for about six weeks :-P (This is not necessarily a helpful comment; just a thought to say that this feeling happens to others too.)
i can't seem to grasp that any happiness in the world is 'legitimate' unless there's some sort of "irrefutable artifact" that you can point at for it - and i guess i grew up always assuming that falling-in-love-having-a-relationship is the only way to make one of those.
This was a bit surprising for me to read. I think of you as someone very in tune to your personal happiness (and state in general) as it may be affected from a large variety of sources. Does that mean that the joy of good home-cooking, a beautiful sunset, an afternoon out with friends, etc., isn't legitimate in the sense that you mean here? (Not meant to be a leading question; just a thought.) I wonder if "legitimate" is meant to stand in for another word, like maybe "long-term" or "interpersonal" or "socially demonstrable."
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i am curious about this, largely because you have been dating someone for as long as i've known you. was it during that time, or before? i wish to learn more about the same problem happening in different circumstances (it is a debugging tactic, if you will).
I think of you as someone very in tune to your personal happiness (and state in general)
aww, shucks, thanks. sometimes i feel solid about it; sometimes i feel totally not together.
'legitimate' isn't the clearest word for this. another try would be to say that it exists, but doesn't stick. not "beauty inherent", but "beauty despite", as i think tak once said. my ingrained criteria for 'winning at life' sometimes don't match up with what makes me actually (transiently) happy.
edit: to expand a little on "it just doesn't take" - this is the frustrated feeling of repeatedly doing awesome things and trying to be in the moment during happy times and yet, come the end of the day, when happy ben says to sad ben, "hey look how much great stuff your life is filled with", sad ben might as well not even remember any of it for how little it cheers him up. (edit edit: boy that sounds bleak. it only happens some of the time..!)
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Oh, definitely before. Quick version: You met me about four months after my current relationship got started, but the history there is that I was already 24 years old and it was my first. Before that, I was always too shy to say anything to anyone I was interested in. Most of the time I was OK, but there was something about the weather getting nicer in the spring, I guess, that always brought my continual lack of girlfriend to the surface for a bit and made me worry about it. We can talk more in detail if you're interested.
The story of Happy Ben and Sad Ben reminds me a lot of what I now call my "depressive semester," which was roughly the spring of 2008. It was the same for me: as long as I was doing something and engaged with other people -- and you guys in the Cohort played a big role in that -- I was fine. But the usual happiness baseline for my alone time was just tons lower in a way that I didn't fully understand.
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hm, this also sounds a little like one of the reasons i'm a bunch more comfortable in the wintertime than in the summertime.
i would like to talk more, yes. you may have to coax me into it.
But the usual happiness baseline for my alone time was just tons lower in a way that I didn't fully understand
sounds like all of this past year for me. >_< it is hard to get over, but has been clearing drastically since i got out of town.
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