Don’t write an ex-girlfriend to see how she’s doing, and explicitly ask about the “great guy” she mentioned last year when you last exchanged emails. Don’t do this when you KNOW that you’re going to be shattered when she tells you that she’s engaged to marry him later this year.

Also, don’t then look up your ex-girlfriend on theknot.com, even if you are going to find her and her fiancé’s entry password-protected so that you can’t actually read the syrupy how-they-met story or how-he-proposed story.

Because you’re still going to learn the fiancé’s name, and you’re going to go search Flickr for their first names together, and since one has a fairly uncommon name, you’re going to actually find pictures of them. And the pictures are going to belong to the Flickr account of a wedding photographer, who takes extremely romantic photos of couples for the purpose of engagement announcements meant to makes families and friends of the couples gush with joy.

Don’t do any of this.

Too late.

The most agonizing aspect of my life is not being on dialysis.
It’s not PKD discomfort.
It’s not an unfulfilling career.
It’s not a hopelessly disheveled home.
It’s not elusive financial security.

The most agonizing aspect of my life is that I am alone, and I recognized many years ago that I was not going to have a successful journey through this life if I remained alone. My most important objective for as long as I can remember was to find a girl to shower with adoration, who would accept my flaws and somehow love me back. I am reducing this goal to a hokey cliché. I think I could’ve said this more elegantly ten or fifteen years ago.

Someone’s going to tell me that I’ll meet someone when “the time is right”. Someone’s going to tell me some drivel about needing to be okay with myself before I can find someone else. Someone’s going to tell me to focus on my health, that I shouldn’t worry so much about other matters.

Life is so damn fleeting, to use another hokey cliché (well, hokey if I don’t throw the “damn” in there). It’s already March. I’ve already been on dialysis for six months. All I have accomplished in the past six months is surviving dialysis. I’ve got to do a lot better than that. I really don’t feel like I’ve done anything productive since my February 2008 kidney stone that led to an annoying preoccupation with health health issues that’s been pretty much non-stop since. But “annoying” is really all that’s it’s been. These health issues should NOT be precluding me from HAVING A LIFE. (caps lock time). I CANNOT AFFORD FOR THESE HEALTH ISSUES TO GET IN THE WAY OF ANYTHING. TIME WILL JUST VANISH BEFORE ME. TIME DOESN’T CARE IF I’LL BE HARD-PRESSED TO ACCOMPLISH GOALS UNTIL I CAN GET MYSELF A NEW KIDNEY.

So the #1 goal is still to meet someone. But I don’t do any activities that allow me to meet anyone new. I am part of the 24/7 party that is Match.com, but I am almost completely passive on it. I’m a wreck whenever I do try to communicate with anyone. I can’t even answer the question. “What do you enjoy doing,” because I don’t have any clue anymore, because I DON’T DO ANYTHING.

The best part of my week is on a Saturday or Sunday morning when I stay in bed, getting far more sleep than I need, because everytime I wake up, I see my CAT curled up next to me, and I feel a complete lack of stress and sense of comfort lying NEXT TO MY CAT. And that keeps me in bed until noon or later. A Google search of “pathetic” ought to come right to this post and to this very paragraph.

I’m off on a bit of tangent now, am I not? I know this whole entry is completely unsuitable for publication, given that I’m horrified to think of what some who read this will make of this. And then I’m reminded of a recent quote I read.

Low self-esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.
– Roger Ebert

Apparently, chick digs confidence, but it’s easy to see why they don’t dig me, considering I can never, even more a short while, block out any thoughts of what others are thinking of me. Just a for a day, or a week, I’d love to be consumed with the delusion of my own greatness. I’d just like to see what that’s like.

Being “authentic”, which is a nice way that some have referred to my addictive self-deprecation and inability to feign positivity, hasn’t yielded beneficial results.

Comments are really off on this entry. I say I’ll do that sometimes, but I forget. Can’t stop FB comments, I suppose. I don’t have the balls to make this a two-way conversation. This was just my therapy for the evening.