Muchness and Light

I'm not here for your entertainment.

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of my four-day, constantly-tearful breakdown of what established initial patterns in my relationships, I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.  La Bruja had recommended this book weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading it. 

Holy shit.

When she first recommended it, I did a little quick research online and came to the conclusion that I have an anxious attachment style.  "Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back."  I realized I mostly have dated and been in relationships with avoidants.  "Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness."

According to Levine and Heller, people with secure attachments—those who "feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving"—make up about 50% of the population.  Anxious ones like me make up 20%, while avoidants make up 25%.  The remaining 5% of the population is made up of anxious-avoidants, and I can certainly include a couple of my exes in that narrow margin. 

But when it comes to dating as an adult, the majority of secure people are in healthy relationships.  They're the ones you know who are still happily married after twenty years.  They're the ones I look to and wish I'd ever had a relationship like that. 

Secure men are generally not on the open market. 

There's a disproportionate number of avoidants in the dating pool.  This is part of the reason I am far more likely to encounter a Fragile Cat when I'm on the prowl myself. 

Anxious people are also more likely to be attracted to avoidants, as if something unconscious in us feels like we've found a missing piece of our puzzle.  Avoidants are usually reflective of a powerful, dysfunctional attachment in our earlier life, often from childhood.  Initially everything may seem really great, but then something happens and the avoidant backs away, which causes the anxious to move closer to close the gap, which causes the avoidant to back away even further.  Both partners are having their fucked-up emotional attachment needs met, but it's a pathological dance of getting close and backing away. 

In reading Attached, I was surprised (and thankful!) to learn I wasn't quite as screwed up as I'd thought.  Yes, I am anxious, though not nearly so off-the-chain as I could be.  (I'm less of an outlier than I normally am.)  Levine and Heller argue that there is a biological, evolutionary purpose and need for attachment.  Just as happens with parents and children, bonds are formed in the brain when we partner.  Synapses and neurotransmitters and a bunch of brain shit that I only understand as a layman come together to imprint that person on our brain as a matter of survival.  As inherently social creatures, especially ones who have sexual reproduction, we need other people. 

When an avoidant backs away from me, it activates that attachment system, and I've learned mostly unconsciously to do things and work in ways that will get a response from my partner, to deactivate that system.  (I'm talking phone calls and texts, not boiling bunnies, though I'd imagine this is exactly where and how stalking begins.)  When I don't get the response I need, it amps up my anxiety, so I step closer again and again until I'm either soothed or I get so worked up that love feels like a huge waste of my life.

Because of these patterns established throughout my life, emotional security is something I need in a different way than secure people.  That doesn't make it better or worse than anyone else—unless you're the avoidant on the polar opposite side of the need.  The avoidant's need for independence, their oft-refused acceptance of needing another person, is a defense mechanism and a way to fulfil their own established patterns. 

The avoidants' defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with.  The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others.  So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again. 

My secure friends, and certainly my avoidant ones, have a very hard time understanding this.  They don't get why I can't always just suck it up and go on and get over someone, even when they've hurt me time and again.  But when that attachment system is activated and spinning out of emotional control, contact with that person can immediately soothe all of my anxieties, much in the same way an upset baby is soothed by the presence of its missing mother. 

Many individuals find it hard to follow through on their wish to break up, even after they've tried more than once to do it.  Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take.  Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

One of the things Levine and Heller stress is that emotional dependency is not bad.  It is, in fact, a natural part of a healthy relationship to make your partner's needs more important than your own and vice versa.  It's okay and normal and good to elevate someone else's needs above your own when you are healthily in love. 

But I have this history of addicted men.  Alcohol, drugs, sex—I've seen and dated and slept with them all.  I've written before about how I am historically and enabler.  So what about codependence?  Isn't becoming so enmeshed in another person that your boundaries are blurred just dysfunctional?  Doesn't dependency on a partner make you lacking or broken or just fucked-up in some way?

Not necessarily.  

Need and addiction are not the same thing.  Codependency exists, and it is especially relevant in the realm of addiction.  The addict uses their substance as a tool to maintain emotional distance.  They drink or get high or sleep with other people as a way to cope with their own damage, and that often means they are actively inserting something between themselves and their partners.  There are other biological factors that come into play with addiction, as well.  The times I have refused to leave because my partner needed me to take care of them—whether to pick up their drunkenly-abandoned car or make excuses to their boss or friends about why they weren't showing up or to clean up whatever mess they created while they were fucked up—that's where the dysfunction of codependence can actually be applicable. 

Just because you need someone, that doesn't mean that you are addicted to them.

One of the things Attached recommends I do is date a lot of people, to go out with several at once.  That way if an avoidant sneaks (bombards his way) into my circle, I am reassured by the fact that I have someone else over here who wants to go out with me.  It's no big deal that this one fucked up, because there's someone else who finds me attractive and wants to spend time with me.  Historically, I am not a multi-dater, but I'll see how it goes. 

So I put myself back on the market. 

Friday night, I had a date with a new guy.  I'll call him S, because I don't want to reveal his name and—as you'll see shortly—he's not worthy of a jellicle name.  We met nearby at a billiards bar.  We had a couple of slow drinks and talked, though we never got around to actually playing pool.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We sat on the patio of the bar talking about sociology and music and dating as adults.  We walked around for a while, still talking and laughing, and ducked into another bar for a last drink.  I even messaged the Castration Committee while I was peeing that it was going really well. 

With about thirty minutes left in my night, that first kiss was looming.  Okay, you'll get a kiss, and it sounds like there's a chance you'll get another date.  I was looking forward to the prospect of seeing him again and getting to know him better. 

Cut to the chase, and he turned into a handsy ass.  Now, I'm no prude.  While I've been mulling imposing a Three Date Rule for sex, I have never been one to live by such social proprieties.  That doesn't mean I've slept with everyone I've been out with, and certainly not always on a first date, but I am comfortable going quickly down that path if I feel the situation is conducive to such intimacy.  Yes, sometimes, it's just a one-nighter.  I had to be home in an hour; this was not going to be one of those nights. 

For the first time in a really long time, I felt like a 16-year-old piece of cheap meat.  I felt stupid and also insulted that I was being offered a quickie in the backseat of his car, parked down a dark side street.  Again, not a scenario I'm unfamiliar with given my history, but I am not that girl anymore.  I'm a grown-ass woman.  I am worth far more than what this man was clumsily and uncomfortably offering me. 

And after writing two weeks ago and talking with my therapist this week, it was like I was watching this from above, from outside my own body.  For a moment, it felt like Stephanie was sitting there with Quinn as this recently-nice man imposed himself on us.  I could feel myself now, knowing this was just insulting, but I could also feel Quinn sitting silent and petulant, wishing he would just take his rough hands and slobbering mouth off of her. 

Something in me clicked and shoved him away quickly.  I got out of the car and said I needed to go.  I walked back to my car, a block away.  I texted Pandy to let her know it had gone awry but that I was okay. 

This is where I will also interject that I called Bounder.

In the now-14 months since we met, dated, broke up, dated again, broke up again, slept together, slept together again, dated others, slept together again, et cetera, we have continued to have this weird connection.  One of us reached out to the other, usually via text, at just that right moment when the other seems to need us.  We still sometimes dream of each other at the same time, as we'll find out a day or two later. 

But in all of that time, with all of the men I've gone out with, Bounder always seems to know.  He has never failed to text me while I'm with someone new, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments that I don't see until after the fact.  He's never failed to reach within than four hours after I've been with a new guy.  Whether he smells my perfume on the wind or has a bug in my phone (no, he doesn't), he just knows.

It is unquestionably the dance of an Anxious and Anxious-Avoidant.

I'd even joked on Friday afternoon that I wasn't blowing off this first date with S just to go sleep with Bounder.  (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

I hadn't even left my house for the date when his text came.

Totally innocent response to something else from days before.  I was leaving for the date when I saw the message.  The man is uncanny, really. 

And I didn't shut down this thing with S because of Bounder.  He really doesn't have the power to cock-block my dates from a distance.  I wasn't caught up in the idea of him that night; I was completely engaged with S until it turned weird.  (Let me stress here that at no time with S did I feel unsafe or in any type of danger.  I was simply very, very uncomfortable.)

My voice shaking and low, I called Bounder to tell him thank you for having never made me feel like I owed him anything.  Honestly, I was thankful it was a late-night voicemail and that I didn't have to talk to him directly.  For all of his faults, for all of the times I have done this fucked-up pathological dance with the man I love more than any other ever but who is such a heartbreakingly-close-but-terrible fit for me, he never made me feel sexually worthless.  In fact, as I was working through some pretty ugly memories and trying to get past some things, he was incredibly, beautifully patient and supportive with me.  He failed me in a lot of ways, but he never, ever made me feel anything but beautiful and wanted for exactly who I was, not because I should or might be something else, not because there was an expectation.  And that, in and of itself, is its own kind of love. 

So I'm still learning how to step differently, how to dance to a different beat.  It's not like reading this book would suddenly make me not maladaptive.  But it did open my head, giving me some insight and tools to work toward the healthy relationship I likely never would've possessed, had I not started this process of intense self-analysis and re-discovery. 

As shaken as I was when I walked away from that uncomfortable moment, I know I am fully engaged in this process.  I'm not watching from afar, checking out emotionally to just let things happen to me.  Healthy or unhealthy choices are my choices, and they aren't dependent on what Cissie or Quinn might want, though their needs are sometimes still my needs.

I drove us all home and to bed.  Alone.

And as La Bruja commented on Facebook as we talked about this date, "The good things that I see from this: 1) material—duh; 2) nothing happened and you're fine; 3) when you meet the right man, and some hot guy starts flirting with you while you're in line at Starbucks, you won't wonder if you missed any fun experiences by not dating more. You'll know you've got a great thing going and that 97% of all the guys who flirt with you would not come close to measuring up."

 

With one breath, with one flow, you will know.

I have ludicrous amounts of coincidence in my life. 

It's far beyond thinking of someone and then they call.  I have quit being surprised when I dream of someone and hear from them the next day, or even when I dream very detailed, seemingly random events that later come true. 

It's really more a matter of synchronicity.  In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed the term to explain "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be causally related."  It's meaningful coincidence, though the events do not have to happen simultaneously and there doesn't have to be explanation of their meaning in terms of cause and effect. 

For Jung, synchronicity gave a basis to his concepts of "archetype" and "the collective unconscious".

For me, it means a whole bunch of batshit. 

It happens so often that it's become a fucking joke within the Castration Committee.  But what also regularly happens is that these patterns of synchronistic events precede the most poignant and profound moments in my life.  They are like omens for what's coming, both good and bad.

When my crying jag started last week, it took about two days to run its course.  In addition to all of the stress I've been under, Friday brought a series of events that were both unexpected and unsurprising.  Unrelated to each other, but these two currents in my life that should be skew—meaning they are not parallel and do not intersect—began to curve toward each other and resulted in a momentary traversion. 

That continuum of crisscross marked yet another landmark event in my life, specifically with Bounder—the person with whom I am most synchronous.

Days before it happened, I told Hot Pocket and Growler that something was brewing.  ("Something penis this way comes," I said.)  I could feel it, the shift in energy around me.  I'm very sensitive to such things; Absolem once told me I was like some kind of freaky, voodoo static magnet.  I just feel other people's energies.  With the people I'm closest to, I can do it from a distance.  I just know when something is wrong or happening.

The synchronicity often comes in waves, and inundations of it often herald the approaching crazy.

Right now, and especially tonight, I am swimming in portent. 

I don't know what this will be.  I almost never do.  I just know that it is coming.  It doesn't feel bad, though it does feel colossal.  Based on what happened in the past week and what I know is supposed to happen over the next month, I could take a guess as to what (and whom) in involves, but the details won't be revealed until the actual time.

Part of it is that I am open to the idea.  I am willing to see signs and meaning in the strangest of things.  I do actively look for it in my life, though I try very hard not to see more into something than is actually there.  Sometimes when I call something out and name it for being important, the person on the receiving end of the prognostication will tell me I'm full of shit.  All too often, I get to tell them I told you so.

Four hundred years ago, I would've been burned at the stake. 

I pay attention to these things, because my life has consistently shown me that there's reason for me to do so.  I get these vibes, for lack of a better term, and they almost always happen just before my path shifts dramatically. 

In the past, when it's been this strong, Fate has stepped in and forced me to come face-to-face with my next step, the impact so strong that it leaves me figuratively bruised and shaken.  She's a bitch, for sure, but I know better than to fuck with her.  There's a reason for it, every time, although I don't always see it until it's too late to even beg her to let me turn back. 

Whatever it is this time... okay.  I can rail against it and be a petulant, ungrateful little brat about it, or I can just accept that something crucial is about to happen and conserve my energy for when it actually plays out.  Someone important is going to need those energy stores, and I have the feeling that it's someone very, very important to me. 

It feels like a test, of everything that has come before, of everything I have learned over the last three years.  And I hope I'm up to the challenge.  I hope I have the skills to fight this battle—and maybe even the Vorpal sword one of us will need to slay that Jabberwocky. 

 

NOTE:

Just as I was finishing this piece, getting ready to post it, my phone popped up with a push notification from my Facebook fan page.  Earlier in the evening, I posted asking for suggestions for what to write about for a new blog post.  This is what I see when my phone got my attention:

THAT is how my life works. 

 

Just as long as I'm where you're at, I'm gonna have a real good view.

A couple of weeks ago, I was moving on with my life. 

Happily, carefully, trepidatiously (if excited), I had met a couple of new people and scheduled a couple of first dates.  Summer was unofficially here, and I took a couple of days to get away and see some friends.  While out of town, I was trying to catch a cab in the rain and decided to call another friend quickly. 

I stepped into the edge of the rain and hit her name in my contacts, hit her number and heard the first ring.  Shifting my purse in my hands, I glanced down at the phone and saw not that friend's name but a face smiling at me.

Bounder.

The phone rang again. 

I hit END as quickly as possible, and my heart started to pound in my chest. 

Maybe it didn't ring on his end.

It rang twice.  He heard it.

Maybe he won't notice.

Come on!  It's Bounder we're talking about.

I texted him and apologized if it rang through, explained that I was out of town and trying to catch a cab in the rain. 

Ten minutes later, he replied, Fate really is a bitch.

Turns out he was at home, phone in his pocket.  He hadn't heard it ring, though he certainly noticed the missed call and subsequent text.  It also turns out that he was reading Muchness and Light, catching up on what he'd missed in the weeks since he'd seen and talked to me. 

An hour-long telephone conversation in the rain outside the venue led to his coming to see me the next night, after I returned home.  What was exchanged between us is ours, especially his, but suffice it to say that the conversation was intense.  So much so that we agreed to try this again, to not let the fear of emotion and connection and unplanned upheaval keep us from being together. 

With all of our problems and issues and concerns, there is this force that not only keeps pushing us together, but keeps reminding us that we are supposed to be together.  If I doubt for a moment—usually because I am overwhelmed by the fact that this amazing man loves me so intensely and that I love him back just as much—I get some reminder, some prodding of song or feeling or intimate memory, and he usually somehow gets it, too.  There's almost always an immediate text or call from the other.  We are very much in sync. 

And the thing is, I was done.  I was finished with the trying and the crying and the hoping that he would accept how very much we meant.  It was never a matter of his not seeing it; it was all about his being ready for it.  I was over keeping myself from calling or texting, somehow able to talk myself down and not react immediately to the emotion of missing him.  I had stopped waiting for his attention and fully expected that I would never see or talk to him again.

The hardest part was always knowing that I would likely never find that connection with another lover.  Not like that.  My time with him—those incredible moments of just the two of us—had altered my desires and expectations on so many levels.  I honestly didn't think I would ever be able to find it that good again, and I really don't just mean the sex.  And the reasons we were apart seemed ludicrously unnecessary.

As with every bigger picture, there were other, hidden reasons we needed that time out of each other's immediate orbit.  I knew he had things to work out and work through.  What I couldn't see at the time were the remaining lessons I had to learn before we could ever move forward.  Even when I did that work, I had no inkling that the process was making room for Bounder. 

Every day, I get some reminder from the outside, some little push or sign from the universe or Fate or my subconscious or his, that this is when and where we are supposed to be.  We are supposed to be here now.

Because I lost him once and have been given this second opportunity to be wholly with him, I refuse to waste it.  I am cognizant of our separate and collective pasts, cautiously aware of how close we came to not having each other.  I am thankful and grateful that I've been given the chance to be both truly myself and to be what he needs and wants, but also to have him reciprocate in all of that in a more honest way than any other has ever offered to me.  He is a remarkable man, and we are incredibly lucky to have this time.

So I'm still moving forward, just not in the way I expected three weeks ago.  It is truly better than I could've hoped or wished, and it is happier and healthier than it would've been three months ago.  I have more lessons to learn, more work to do in preparation for whatever path my journey takes from this point.  But now my lessons and my work take on a whole new dimension by accepting Bounder into my life.  It's not just what I get from this; it's what we get separately and collectively as we step onto this path together and head toward whatever is on that brilliant, shining horizon.    

And everyone’s singing like everything’s fine.

I had this really strange experience today, and I wanted to share. 

I left for a while to clear my head and get in some cardio on this gorgeous day in the South.  I went to the park, plugged in my iPod and hit shuffle.  I did my time, was a little more together, and headed for  home.  

I turned onto a suburban street very close to mine, just a couple of blocks from my house.  Beautiful, warm day.  Brilliant blue sky and bright sun.  My windows were down, and I was listening to the Gracious Few.  (For those of you who would care to know, "All I Hear" had just come on as I turned the corner.)

A house on the left side of the street, just a few houses down the two-tenths-of-a-mile-long street, had lots of cars parked outside.  Hanging from the eaves of the small front porch was a blue and white banner, proclaiming that someone was having a boy.  "Baby shower," I thought.  "How sweet!"

Four or five more houses down the street, same side, there was a house with multi-colored balloons on the mailbox.  I could see decorations at the back of the house.  It looked like someone was having a birthday party.

Almost to the end of that street lives a family whose youngest daughter likes to play with my youngest son.  They're a funny little duo when they're together, and they haven't had a play date in a while.  Her father, unfortunately, is battling yet another recurrence of pancreatic cancer.  He's in his mid-40's.  It's a crazy roughness in that house right now, that I can't really imagine.

Three houses down from their house, sits the next to the last house on the street.  It's at the end of the cul-de-sac.  There were several cars parked outside it, as well.  At that house, there have been lots of visitors all week.  In fact, on Wednesday, I noticed a bunch of cars parked in the street near that house.  The next day, I was behind a hearse driving through our suburban neighborhood, straight to that family's driveway.  There's been a constant stream of traffic, relatively speaking, on the end of that street for the last few days.  Today was no exception.

As I drove the last block-and-a-half toward home, I was struck by how there was a strange lifecycle being represented by those four homes, on their porches and mailboxes and at their curbs.  These things all happen every single day, good or bad, but I was blown away by how they were all happening at the same time in such open proximity to each other.

I don't have to delve into the Cycle of Lifeness of it all.  My readers are smart enough to read between those thick black lines.  It was the snapshot of that moment that took my breath away.  Each of these families, in incredibly close nearness, were each a different facet of the same, shining gem.  It was stunning and heartbreaking and beautiful, and it was a glimpse at life that was gone as soon as I turned the corner to go in my own direction. 

So I went home and got the family, and we celebrated my oldest son's birthday.  We were surrounded by hundreds of others this afternoon, who may or may not have been marking their own milestones.  I'll never know.  But the anonymity of their moments, or mine, doesn't make them any less poignant.  We're all shining facets sometime.

 

He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream, too.

I received a phone call today, a little bit unexpectedly.  I had been waiting (kind of) to hear from this person, but the actual mechanics of the phone call--when it happened, where I was, etc.--were totally out of the blue.  In a good way mind you, just unanticipated. 

He said to me that he hadn't called because it hadn't been the right time.  The stars hadn't been aligned for it, he said somewhat jokingly.  He also prefaced this by saying that he's not all about astrology or anything.

This phone call made me think that I should go and read my horoscope for today, which I did.  (I'm a Virgo, by the way.  Screw that nonsense about changing signs.  Don't get me started.  And as the Amazing Sloan said, "Once a Virgo, always a Virgo!")

From Horoscope.com:

Some problems might arise with equipment that you use at home or with the structure of the house, Virgo.  Appliances might go on the blink or the plumbing or electricity could require repairs.  This could be a drag.  It might involve staying home to wait for help.  Still it must be done.  Find a good book and settle onto the couch.  You won't have to worry about this tomorrow.

The day is almost over and <knock on wood> nothing has broken in the house.  (It's really hard to type with crossed fingers, by the way.)  I still haven't ruled out curling up with a good book, though. 

From ProAstro.com:

A surge of independence, a need for freedom, and an interest in trying new and different things may take hold of you.  Unusual or unconventional behavior, an interest in the exotic or in eccentric friends.  During this time period your thinking is intense and penetrating.  You tend to become impassioned about your ideas, and you are inclined to feel very strongly about your ideas.

Oh, yeah, I'm all about the new and different today.  I did have lunch at a new Vietnamese place.  Then I spent some time with my friend Christine, taking pictures of trees on the side of the road at a busy, major intersection.  (The knotholes and scars on the trees gave them interesting faces.)  I'm definitely wrapped up in my own, intense head tonight.  I feel very strongly about this. 

From Astrology.com:

You need to let the day take you wherever it wants today, even if you’ve got serious reservations. Sometimes struggling just makes things worse, and this is definitely one of those days!

The day took me to IKEA, though I'm happy to report that I didn't buy anything.  It also took me to the gym.  I definitely didn't struggle too much--when the 100's were too hard, I just refused to do them.

From DailyHoroscopes.com:

There will be beneficial opportunities at work and through co-workers to help you capitalize on some moneymaking matters. A combination of intuition, common sense and a couple of inspired ideas will bring you the answers for which you have been searching. Your thinking is clear for any project you may care to attempt. Give a stretch to reach for the stars through your thinking. Possibilities are open this year and this month of January is a time of planning toward the direction in which you want to take your dreams. You will have the universe and its energies on your side. If you are ready for romance, it may be a scintillating stranger has turned your head! If you are free to involve yourself in a new relationship, now is the best time!

Lots of projects have been in process today, in lots of good ways.  Including the original, blog-provoking phone call.  Hopefully some of those will pan out in financially beneficial ways, for me and the others involved.  This blog post has me stretching to the stars through my thinking, certainly.  A scintillating stranger... hmmm....  (I need to talk to Absolem about this.)

From NYPost.com:

There is good and bad in everyone and if you keep that thought in mind today you should be able to stay on friendly terms with just about everyone. Try not to be judgmental -- it never leads to anything positive.

I've bitten my tongue a few times today.  I've also reigned myself in and not sent some messages that I really wanted to send.  I absolutely took a moment to imagine the recipient's reaction, how that could pan out, and thought better of it.  I'm not in the mood to upend anyone else's psyche today, and I really don't want or need the bad karma.  Sometimes I think I get too concerned with the good in people, though.   I would also argue that remembering people aren't perfect has its own benefits.

But is there something to this idea of star alignment, or kismet or fate, or seemingly random events that have meaning?

I like to think so.  I fully believe that we have lessons we're supposed to learn while we're here on Earth.  I don't think it matters if we're learning them for use in another life, in the afterlife, or in this life--those uses can be equally significant.  But I definitely believe things happen and people come into our lives for a reason, whether or not we ever fully understand what that reason is.

The problem for me, I guess, is that I tend to see the import of events and people where it may not actually exist.  I will sometimes assign significance to things that may not necessarily warrant it.  I'm sure some will argue that everything has importance.  I don't know that I believe this human condition deserves a value of that magnitude, given the expanse of the Universe, both literally and figuratively.  To believe that I will ever know the truth of that struggle seems the height of hubris.  I find it best, for me, to acknowledge that there are huge questions that I will never be able to answer, or even to fully comprehend. 

That doesn't mean I don't try every day, to strive a little bit to understand something outside myself and my own nature.  I get off on seeing what makes people tick, on figuring out what drives them to do the things they do and to think the things they think.  I love to see connections between external things and events, but I especially love to see connections within the people I know. 

There are a couple of people in particular who are über-fascinating  to me, and I love to spend time talking with them, just to be able to touch the beauty of them, even for a fleeting moment.  What I find, though, is that sometimes it's incredibly difficult for me to pull back from that.  I'm so mesmerized and enthralled that I want to stay in constant contact with them, but also with the fascination of them.  The allure is, in and of itself, engrossing and sometimes rapturous. 

These are the people whose horoscopes I will also read from time to time.  Sometimes I think that maybe I will see something special that's happening in their inner lives.  And sometimes I will see correlation between their horoscope and my own and hope that I'm not imagining the connection between them and me.

I like to imagine that my stars are aligned with those of certain others in my life, at least for a while.  I know that such connections are often fleeting.  But if it means I get to gaze upon the beauty of the synergy, to let the synchronicity of us pass through my fingertips even for a moment, I will revel in the glory of such ephemera. 

And I absolutely bet I can find a horoscope that says it's supposed to be that way.

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