life goes on

Another saturday is upon me. I had a broken but ultimately sufficient sleep. Hopefully, I'm not in line for another hard fight with insomnia. That would truly suck. Yesterday, my parents and I joined our neighbours for a corn roast. It certainly made for some interesting conversation. The corn was scrumptious and so was the catfish I got to try for the first time.

Psychologically, I'm feeling more able to cope with the life I've got rather than wishing like hell for drastic change. I guess all the isolation finally thumped me against rock bottom. Society sees fit to utterly squander my gifts. Under such circumstances, I'm doing all that I possibly can to enjoy the copious time at my disposal while doing what good I can. I no longer feel that I owe the world more effort than I'm giving. The certainty that things will ultimately improve either by my lucking out in the love department or at least by eventually obtaining affordable housing has taken better root in me. Over the past couple of days, I've actually made quite a bit of progress with Enchantment's Twilight's design document. There's still a ton to do. Even the design document is going to be quite a substantial size when it's finally done. However, I'm hopefully going to avoid the problem of wanting to continuously add new aspects to the game when actual development starts. It'll be especially useful for maintaining a cohesive vision if I ultimately choose to try and turn this into a collaborative Internet community project to be published for free. I'm nowhere near that major fork in the road.

This afternoon, I used Skype to call my grandmother. She sent some money to all her grandchildren and I always like to thank her for it. It makes quite a difference for me. Skype worked quite well as did the new gaming headset. She had no trouble hearing me but couldn't hear other people who were farther away from the mic. Also, she didn't seem to be disturbed by hearing her own voice come back at her despite the pc speakers being on. Dad tried it out also and they had quite a good conversation. It seems we'll be going on a family trip out to Winnipeg at some point. That ought to be a damned nice change of place for me. I've had all too few of those this Summer and it unfortunately shows in my overall lack of progress with Enchantment's Twilight.

Last thursday, I went out with Adam and his latest girlfriend for a meal at Symposium. It was damned good to be there with a couple of people my own age. We thankfully didn't get caught in that major storm walking over there. It struck during our dinner and seemed to be finnished by the time we left. As usual, the conversation was good right along with the food. Keith, one of the waiters there, happened to be serving us and remembered me. All the staff are quite friendly. It's a major reason why I'm fighting as hard as I am to learn how to get there and back independently. Even if, as seems likely, I don't meet anybody new there, I'll still come out ahead. That makes a very nice change of pace when most of the time, my acomplishment and experience don't seem to ultimately count for much more than praze from people I'll never meet. It's the sort of thing that gives me hope for better things to come if I can just hang on, be patient, and try to keep cheerful.

Plentyoffish is a busy place today. I couldn't get in this morning to check on the forums. It seems I somewhat overwelmed the teacher who seems interested in me with too much information. Online dating is so awkward that way. You get no feedback until you've gone and written too much and then, it's done. Revealing too little seems to have made it all to easy for people to keep hold of negative presumptions about me and simply move on. Revealing too much is problematic also. However, at least I'm left with a sense that they've got something to work with if they're actually interested. I've always felt better about things which start with all my cards on the table. I don't want anybody ever to feel that I'm hiding information or less than honest. If they're going to turn away from me, better they do so without any excuse of that nature. There was a time when I had more of a sense of undamaged hope about newly started connections to people. Janene has clearly destroyed a good chunk of that. I fervently hope that some day, I'll meet someone new who can put me on cloud nine again. I'd like to think that I still have enough remaining optimism and faith in people for that to happen. We all need some spark of magic in our lives.

Next up for me, I guess there's church in the morning. Other than that, there's nothing on the radar until wednesday morning when my next lesson comes around. One week has been much the same as the last for too damned long. I'm a bit behind in my podcast listening. By romorrow, there'll be a bunch more for me to grab. Nice to have a small stockpile to give time a good swift kick in the ass when it starts to crawl. I ordered a couple of new accessories for my netbook yesterday. One is a key-operated Kenzington security lock I found a recommendation for in Smart Computing. Subscribing to that website was a splendid investment on my part. I also found out about a new notebook stand which may work better for the netbook and be more portable than the table I've been using. I'll know one way or another about that in around a month I guess.

back from a walk

Hello everyone. I've just returned from this week's orientation lesson. I'm hot and a bit out of breath. My legs aren't too bad but I'm not thinking of climbing any mountains today. Crossing Battleford is going a little better. It'll always be a strenuous crossing but I'm now somewhat more confident that I won't accidentally end up on the wrong corner. The Glen Erin crossing is still tricky due to the curb direction and actually being able to hear the serge of parallel traffic correctly.

I've grabbed a nice berry cooler and some ice. Been having one of those on most days lately although not usually anywhere near this early. Mom and dad are babysitting Ava and Amia. I went with them on Monday. The kids were certainly cute but I just found it too long a stretch of time. It was hard to get anything of substance done and I couldn't really help a ton since I don't know where things are. Once I get my own place, I could probably do a better job of it. Yesterday morning, I got quite a bit done on the game. I just hope this creativity lasts. It feels very precarious.

On the plus side, a teacher has shown some actual interest in me on Plenty of Fish. Usually, they've tended to be in the "I don't want someone I have to take care of" category. She seems genuinely interested in getting to know me rather than just about what it's like to be blind. What's more, I believe she may be close enough to actually get together with. How utterly refreshing. Here's hoping this time, things might go somewhere lasting.

another monday

Hello everyone. It's been a good morning so far for writing but my creativity has given out for the moment. This afternoon should also prove productive though. The weekend was alright but there were some damned slow boring hours there. On Saturday, I went with my parents to babysit Ava and Amia in Hamilton. They're certainly full of energy. We were all kept pretty busy by both the kids and their two kittens Pickles and Pumpkin. There were times when all four of the small creatures named above were around me wanting to examine my netbook and bag. Curiosity is certainly a trait widely shared in my brother's house. For a while, we went outside to their backyard where I pushed Ava and Amia together in a swing they have set up there. You could almost call the backyard a miniature park with its swings, sandbox, playhouse and three small slides.

Sunday started off pretty well with church. We had a guest preecher do the sermon. He's another fellow who works with The Dam, a nearby organisation which tries to help youths who are living troubled lives. I tried to volunteer for that organisation but was turned down because I couldn't commit to two years. I have no way to know for certain that a call from the folks in charge of affordable housing won't come before that long although it's probably a pretty safe bet that this will turn out to be the case. They're certainly in no rush to find me a place to live on my own which I can actually afford on ODSP. The only commitment I would be in a position to make would be one which either involved a secure fulltime job which let me afford my own place and got me off ODSP altogether, or a volunteer commitment somewhere which I could leave whenever affordable housing at last becomes available to me. If transportation there and back were provided, I would cheerfully offer whatever assistance I could as long as it gave me the opportunity to interact with people in person rather than through a damned keyboard. There are simply no such doors open to me. Slowly but surely, this frustrating circumstance is chipping away at me. It's eating away at my desire to even keep trying. The rest of Sunday crawled by uneventfully. My father has found a pre-mixed kind of Margareta which comes in tall thin cans. It's quite good and I enjoyed one over the course of the afternoon while chatting with people online. The DNTO podcast on flawes was also an interesting half-hour or so. I deeply miss having a special lady in life to go out and do things with especially on Summer weekends.

I just looked on eHarmony to see whether anything new had happened over the past while. Big mistake! That site is going to eat away at what little sense of fool's hope I have left of finding someone special. I just can't work up the motivation to check on that site regularly. I've started this guided communication process with well over sixty women now. All of them seemed quite promising from what they wrote in their profiles. However, pretty much all of them have found reasons to close off communications. I spent a good fifteen minutes going through and completing the closure process on my end for something like eleven or twelve of them this morning. I'm still technically waiting to hear from three or four but frankly don't ever expect to. Seeing as I paid a fairly high entry fee, I feel compelled to keep checking in and seeing whether anyone has so much as noticed me. It seems pretty damned pointless to invest time in looking for more people to fling multiple guess questions at. I'd merely be setting myself up for yet more rejection. The whole setup seems so badly out of kilter with its objective. It's so utterly demoralising. To engage in it is to truly stare one's sense of hopeless futility full in the face. Still, I suppose I ought to try it with a few more of the matches it throws at me if only to keep the balance of universal justice happy.

Meanwhile, I've posted my blog entry about my trip to Chicago on the Dating4Disabled site and have so far gotten pretty positive feedback. I have yet to hear from anybody close enough to have any hope of actually meeting but that seems to be true of most people whose blogs I've read on that site. They've formed a kind of online community of friends. That isn't at all what I'm ultimately after. However, on the off chance of striking it lucky, I'll keep posting my writing there once in a while. It seems to interest some of the folks and a lot of them seem in need of such distraction from their own solitude and boredom. There's just so much untapped human potential out there. I'm also still communicating with Nadia. She found me on another dating site which I was very close to abandonning. We hope to get together next tuesday. She's in the process of learning how to drive a modified car with hand controls since she's paralised from the waste down. Again though, the only reason that it's possible at all is my mother's willingness to take me out to a mall in Brampton. I'm very thankful that she's willing to do this but it certainly increases the nervousness of whoever decides to meet me. Nadia has to use Wheeltrans to get there so there's no room for being spontanious. It's damned frustrating not having my own place where I can invite people and not to be settled in a situation where I could more easily get around a community on my own meeting and interacting with people on my terms. I'm going to listen have another listen to the route my mobility instructor Ray and I finally succeeded in recording properly last week and then try to go father towards Symposium this afternoon. I helped my father close the cover on our swimming pool and it seems nice enough out there. Once I'm back from that, it'll be time to return to the design document of Enchantment's Twilight. I've come up with another approach to what could be an interesting early stage of the game. Until now, I had thought of players as each controlling a character in the wizard's trusted circle of leaders who form the island council. However, it might be interesting to have each player control a couple of possible candiates for these positions of honour. They would then have to go around the island earning favour, respect and popularity so that they might be chosen. Presuming I can contribe circumstances which properly balance cooperation and competition, this could indeed be a suitable way of introducing more randomness into the arc of the epic.

a new week begins

Hello everyone. I feel very refreshed and awake this Monday morning. I'm pleased to report that having had good sleeps for the last four days, that I believe this latest long-running tussle with insomnia is at last behind me. I can't say I'll miss it at all and I know it'll doubtless come back sooner than I'd like. For now though, I can look forward to days lived within a more normal framework of time. The weekend was a most enjoyable one. Our neighbours held their Canada Day party on the American holiday. Dad and I went over and spent around four pleasant hours with them. I don't usually see this bunch of people anywhere other than these gatherings but still managed to have plenty of interesting conversation. The sunshine and fresh air has, I think, contributed to this victory over insomnia.

Yesterday was also very enjoyable. A large portion of the church congregation was away camping. However, the rest of us ended up going on a tour around Lake Wabukayne which is right near the church. I've gone on the tour once before but we had a different leader this time. Nikki Hall has been doing everything humanly possible to protect and foster the ecology which has developed around this man-made lake. It was very interesting to hear her take on things and some of her stories. She's clearly been at this a long time. The ducks are so familiar with her voice that as she talked, a bunch of them would swim to a point near where we stood and remain there quacking away until we moved on. It was remarkable to actually hear a relationship like that in action. True testament to the positive impact people can have on nature if they work at it. After this walk, I had a chance to talk with Nikki and get to know more about her life. She seems keen on keeping in touch with me. I think there's a possibility that some of the audio games made for blind people may be of interest to her daughter. However, I'd need a far better sense of where she is mentally and physically before I could be certain of that.

The barbecue we had after this unusual service was a very pleasant way of passing what would normally have been a slow and solitary Sunday afternoon. The food was good and so was the conversation. People who are close enough to visit are actually starting to get to know me more. A damned refreshing change from chatting and emailing people I'll in all liklihood never encounter in any other way. If I'm ever going to find an opportunity for employment or change my life circumstances in some other way for the better, it isn't going to be by sending resumes. I've lived too different a life for that. It's going to be because someone who has taken the time to get to know me is able to connect those dots and show me a place where I can truly fit in and have a meaningful impact.

On the dating front, things are getting a little more interesting. A lady in Niagara Falls seems interested in getting to know me as a friend. She's actually willing to drive all the way from there to meet with me. Another woman who is paralised from the waste down is also interested in meeting me. Apparently, something has come up for her which will prevent us from doing so tomorrow as we had initially hoped to do. However, she's actually taken the time to read some of my writing. The conversations we've had have also gone well. I think she'll turn out to be a good and interesting friend at the very least. Meanwhile, there are at least six hundred presumeably fully able women within ten square miles of me acording to Plenty of Fish. They could come around and take me out for a coffee or dinner on me without breaking a sweat. Nor would they have to bother dressing up for the occasion. None of them have shown the slightest interest in me. Go figure. Other factors seem to be well and truly trumping geographical proximity. eHarmony is showing yet more signs of having been a complete waste of cash. At one point, I had initiated communication with something like twenty-five matches whose profiles sounded quite promising despite hearing them in male British synthetic speech. All but five of them have found reasons to close off possible communication. I'll keep going through the motions but believe the next three months are going to pass without even one set of multiple guess questions coming my way. At least on Plenty of Fish, the forums provide for some honest open conversation. I don't feel like I'm getting absolutely nothing for my efforts. In contrast, eHarmony is already starting to feel too much like my years of job searching which have only served to give me a clear conscience about not doing that anymore.

Now then; I've been nibbling on some pecans while I've typed all this but it's past time I had the rest of my breakfast. There weren't too many podcasts this morning but there's the Big Ideas lecture awaiting my attention. The speaker's name rings a slight bell and if I'm right, the lecture ought to be interesting. After I take that in along with some food, it's time to take another crack at smashing through this writer's block. I suppose I've probably cheered some people up and helped a number of folks with technical troubles over the past while. However, I keenly miss being able to work on one or more of my writing projects. They haven't lost their sense of worthiness. If I manage to finally finish the game or autobiographical book, I know they'll have a positive impact. I haven't been getting anywhere with attempting to write short stories so I may actually try to kick-start work on the game again. There's also the small article for the church bulletin about my trip to Chicago. After the lecture and breakfast, that'll get my first attention. The latter part of this week is going to be more busy. I have a mobility lesson on wednesday. It's been two weeks since the last one and due to rain and insomnia, I haven't gotten any practice in. My grandmother is coming for a visit on Thursday. I know we're going to see some other family friends while she's here but can't quite remember who and when. Guess I'll find out.

rainy afternoon

Hello again everyone. It's a rainy slow Sunday afternoon. Thought I'd drag you along for a slice of it with me. Last night's get-together with Mark and Wendy was excellent as always. We went out to dinner at South Street Burgers and they use New York fries. I haven't had those in ages and enjoyed them thoroughly. The burger was first-rate also. After that, we went to Stony Creak Ice Cream where I treated for dessert. I hadn't thought about how long it's been since I enjoyed ice cream standing outside with a couple of good friends. The conversation was as stimulating as ever. Mark has a very dry sense of humour which plays off Wendy's tendency to take things literally in interesting ways. Both of them are also ready to hear a little about my frustrations. Even a good listener like me needs people like that from time to time.

I'm in a much better frame of mind about life than I was when last I wrote. It's damned easy to fall into the trap of not enjoying what we have and focusing on what we don't. This is particularly the case once you've experienced and then lost a woman's love. Thankfully, the service at church today helped me see that frustration in myself for what it was. I was starting to get bitter at how no woman would even give me a chance while people who behaved far worse than I seem to have no problem finding them. I've got an old school friend who's a perfect case in point. He's gotten drunk enough to be dangerous, irresponsible enough to accumulate a tremendous credit card debt. Despite this, he has a subsidized apartment of his own. He has an ex-girlfriend with child. They don't even know who the father is and he's already found a new girlfriend. As thankful as I am to have avoided such sheer messiness in my life, the question stands. I just can't help thinking that surely, there's a woman out there for someone as loyal, responsible and easy-going as me. If other less scrupulous people can seemingly go through them like some sort of bag of chips, why doesn't one come along who would truly be willing to settle down with me? You read and hear about even worse situations women find themselves in all the time. While I've always felt sorry for them, the thought that if they had just given me the ghost of a chance at a better life with them, they wouldn't be in their predicament is all too often present. There doubtless is one out there who could find me worthy of that kind of commitment and love. However, that doesn't mean that God will just move her to find me because I happened to think that he ought to. The pastor today pointed out the difference in "deserving" something and being found worthy of something. Love is something that we can only hope to be found worthy of. It's not about how hard one tries to live a good life although I still contend that this puts one in an ultimately better path for long-term happiness. Love is a force for good which goes far beyond that. We're such complex creatures that it's a wonder it happens at all. There are just so many aspects to our individual lives that finding two who connect in that way is akin to winning a lottery. I've put myself out there as much as it's humanly and economically possible for me to do now. I've left no stone unturned there. Other than try to make the best of life with all its frustrations, there's nothing else I can really do. Nobody truly deserves to have another's love bestowed upon them. It's a gift of unmatched splendour we can never earn.

Having things in this clearer perspective doesn't get rid of my frustration entirely. I miss those long, deep and often late-night conversations with someone who truly appreciated where I was coming from. I know that I'll never again be as able to be satisfied with my life as a single man. There'll be times when my frustration will get the better of me. However, my poise and a degree of patience with my situation has been restored to me for now. I'm beginning to have more confidence that God has given me enough support to get me through these rough patches of too much solitude. Solitude and writer's block are a particularly bad combination. My family can't really help all that much since these feelings are so strongly tied in with having a life of my own apart from them which circumstance has largely denied me. I'm just glad they're able to understand that it isn't their fault and that I don't love them any less.

That rain certainly hasn't gotten rid of the humidity out there. I've been lethargically plodding through this afternoon. Sky FM's new age music station has proved quite excellent listening as I've written this, checked email, etc. I have a bunch of podcasts I haven't gotten around to hearing just yet. No tremendous luck on POF or eHarmony. However, a 23-year-old Floridian woman has added me to her favourites for some unknown reason. That's quite a distance away but it certainly makes a nice difference than the 50+-year-olds who seem to appreciate my writing enough to do that. Perhaps, there is someone my age who shares enough of or respects my outlook on things enough to want to take the next step. I can but hope and soldier on. Thanks to a very good sermon and two very good friends, I feel far more able to do so with the balanced equinimity I'm more used to having.

this week's happenings

Hello everyone. It's approaching nine o'clock in the morning as I start writing this entry. I've been awake since around five thirty. Thankfully, my new Steelseries headset designed for gamers arrived yesterday. It looks like I've made another excellent move on the technology front. The headset works brilliantly with my soundcard. I'm hearing details through it that I've never noticed before. It took a lot of tweaking with Winamp's equalizer presets to get music sounding good but I've figured that out now. Movies have yet to be experimented with but I predict damned good listening without too much tweaking required on that front. When it comes to accessible games, I've had a few rounds of GMA Tank Commander and Superdeakout. My ability to move and act with precision while playing sound-based accessible games is definitely improved by this headset. I don't put enough time into gaming anymore to have any chance of making those top scoreboards many of them feature these days. However, if I had discovered these headphones five or six years ago, they might very well have given me enough of a technical edge to have achieved that. I'm likely going to be grappling with insomnia and these needless damnably early morning rises for life. Now, I can face that prospect a little more cheerfully. I can listen to things at a reasonable volume without waking either the dead or my parents. Also, as this morning has shown, I won't end up with that headphone fatigue you get after an hour or so of using less costly headsets by the time it's reasonable to go downstairs and grab some breakfast. A very worth-while investment indeed.

The other investment I made this week is one in which I have a lot less faith. You've doubtless heard of the dating site called eHarmony. I don't watch a whole lot of TV as a general rule but have heard countless advertisements from them. Frankly, I've spent too damned many lonely days and nights feeling like my potential for contributing to and experiencing more of life has gone untapped. It's like I'm a car whose engine is going at full speed but whose wheels float mere centimetres above the road spinning uselessly. Church certainly helps as do friends when they aren't otherwise busy. However, when you get right down to brass tacks, I don't think anything else can ever fill that void in my life other than a loving woman. I've never felt more at my best than when I was in a relationship. Given this, I would be less than human if curiosity plus the prospect of more solitary time stretching endlessly ahead didn't finally get the better of me. As with Lavalife and telephone dating, I just had to find out what was behind the door. You can read about my oh so frustrating and fruitless experience with Lavalife if you delve far enough back in the blog. It'll be in that large first entry which contains what can still be found in my initial blog at
www.blindspots.net
I signed up for a three-month subscription. Clearly, eHarmoney has some serious psychology behind it. The report it generated about me was pretty much spot on although the system may perceive me as a tad more athletic than I think I am. It certainly picked up on my creative nature. What it couldn't grasp was how much my disability has forced me to live a different life than I otherwise would. I don't think they expected unemployed blind folks to avail themselves of their services. Despite that, I've found the site pretty accessible overall with a few unfortunate exceptions. Uploading my pictures could certainly have been made easier. I had to use my jaws cursor to pull that off. There were also some parts of the initial questionnaire which I can't be completely certain were filled out correctly. They had to do with how important things like age, ethnicity, etc were to me when it comes to my ideal match. Beyond a certain point, none of these things are overly important. I wouldn't feel right hooking up with somebody my parents' age and would have reservations if she were much younger than twenty-five. Ethnicity doesn't factor into it at all as long as she can communicate reasonably well in English. Education-wise, I just need my partner to be able to appreciate and participate in deep conversation about things. I've met enough people to know that you don't need a degree to do that. Life has its own way of teaching us without classrooms. It's called the passage of time. As to income, what matters is how she approaches the fact that we would largely be living off of what she made. I'm used to living with very limited personal income available and certainly don't need her to be rolling in dough. As long as we have a roof over our heads, if she can face life cheerfully without a lot of spare cash, so can I. There are certainly things I'd love to experience with a loving woman at my side but they're secondary to actually sharing life with said woman. Given a small community of people who I could get to know, I could be quite happy. What's important is that there's respect, love and appreciation on both sides.

Another area which could definitely stand improvement there is their highly touted "guided communication". Basically, after going to all the trouble of finding likely matches for you, you're supposed to see if there are any sparks between you by exchanging short volleys of multiple choice questions at each other. I'm completely serious, folks. Had I sat down and actually tried to conjure an extravert's worst nightmare, I couldn't have beaten this in a million years. If anything screams: "You've reached the very bottom of the barrel in your quest for love on Earth!", this setup certainly lets you know how disconnected and desperate you truly are. Most of the people in the matches I've received so far seem to prefer this inhuman mechanistic method of introduction. For someone in my position who desperately wants to connect more with humanity in general and a loving woman in particular, it seems like a colossal step backwards to introduce yourself to prospective lovers in this way. The only place one can display any degree of his or her actual soul is in one's personal profile. Just like on Lavalife, I can see myself fiddling with mine until kingdom come given its sheer importance. If you flunk out there, you never even get the stimulation of multiple guess quizettes. Due to how the site is constructed, I can't even look at the possible answers to the questions I choose. I presume it's possible for sighted people to do this but my speech software doesn't read the information out other than the actual question. I presume I'll be able to actually read the answers to the questions I administer but won't even know that for certain until I'm found interesting enough by some woman out there to actually bother with answering them. One thing I'm a bit worried about is the potential for sending the same question more than once to a potential partner. Presumably, given the care they've taken to automate damned near everything, they've covered that possibility. I can't imagine a more thunderously insulting blunder to make than that. Nor, at the same time, do I think I should have to keep careful note on which questions I've sent to which matches. I'm searching for a shot at true love, not hoping to pass a bloody university exam. I've done a life's worth of those damned things already while getting my BA.

Thankfully, there is a facility for exchanging standard but anonymous emails with each other if both parties agree to this. I just hope I manage to start up such a dialogue with one or more of these ladies before the three months I've paid for expires. Even if, by some act of God, it were made financially worth-while for me to keep at it for a longer time, I just don't think I'd have the sanity to spare. As always, I'll give this my best shot and represent myself as honestly as their pre-scripted "guided" communication lets me presuming that I actually get sent any questions to answer. As crazy as it seems, I'll also keep initiating this process with people who I find of interest. I did find one lady who preferred "fast-track" communication, otherwise known as saying what you actually want to say via anonymous email. Dare I hope that there are any more who will even come within my per view? I'd love to be dead wrong about eHarmony. Right now, that's pretty much all the hope I have of getting anything other than frustration and perhaps mild amusement for a little over a hundred bucks. Isn't that pathetic? My only sense of hope comes from my having been completely wrong about other things before and having lived to enjoy that. I had been saving up my money in hopes of starting a new life with Janene. Now, I've spent most of that saved money either on places which offer the only faint hope I have of finding someone new to love, or on things to make the single life I see stretching ahead of me more bare able. I still have a good safety margin as I utterly refuse to go into debt. While I certainly don't regret the decisions I made on items, my investments in escaping single life are somewhat more suspect. With nothing else happening over the Summer, there's no better time than now to explore these avenues. It just seems so unlikely to work though. If there were a place I could get to where people came with the expectation of meeting new friends, I would far more cheerfully put my money in getting there. However, there just isn't a place like that. You bring your own crew to bars and restaurants these days.

On that front, I had another mobility lesson earlier this week. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that the grand idea of attempting to master even three routes was simply biting off more than I could chew. We're just shy of July and I'm still a long way from feeling very confident that I could make it all the way to Symposia's and back on my own. The route has yet to form a truly cohesive chain in my mind. I've already zoned out a couple of times today so don't feel at all safe heading out there now. I need a really good night's sleep. Presuming I achieve one of those, I feel quite confident in starting to practice roughly the first half of the route on my own. I'm going to try to do that at least four or five times between now and my next lesson the Wednesday after next. I ought to have enough source material to put some sort of audio documentary about this Summer's mobility experience by the time September rolls around. By that point, I should have getting to Symposia's and back mastered. The trouble with the bus routes is the sheer amount of time it would take to learn them. I'd go through all that trouble and then have it all blown out the window when I finally get a subsidized apartment in Hamilton or, dare I hope, find someone special to move in with.

As comfortable as living here is for me, I hate being in this Limbo in life. There's just no affordable alternative. When I ultimately get into a place I can afford, there's the question of whether it would then be considered at all responsible of me to leave it in order to be with someone I loved. Given that I've waited my entire adult life to have the opportunity to live in my own apartment, could I ever trust someone enough to let it go again? Especially after how much all of us, my friends, and my family, trusted her to actually marry me. That still hurts a lot. It's going to be a much slower process building that kind of trust presuming I'm ever given the chance to try with another woman. I can just hear a chorus of voices saying: "well then why not go for quantity and the short-term fling rather than this seemingly unattainable permanent marriage?" Because, readers, I just can't be at all comfortable with that. I'm not built that way. Just like I can't see my way to intentionally getting drunk, high on drugs, or wracking up a mountain of debt for instant gratification. That kind of human intimacy simply demands a deep love and level of commitment to be fully enjoyed. Shortcuts only diminish the experience.

Thank God for good friends. Mark and Wendy have rescued me from yet another empty Saturday. We're going to have dinner tomorrow evening. Thanks to my camping trip as well as the trip to Chicago, I'll have quite a lot to tell them about. Those two have really stuck by me over the years. It certainly takes the edge off the glumness of lethargy. It's just getting on five o'clock now. I zoned out at my desk for a chunk of afternoon but didn't type anything in my sleep. That phrase I entered among all the garbage I typed during one night's doze at my desk still sticks in my mind: "They're here because" I've never been able to pull the foggiest notion what I meant by that. Hundreds upon hundreds of random characters with that odd phrase stuck smack in the middle. I got a brief second wind and made another stab at the shorter article I'm writing for the church about my conference experience in Chicago. I'm inching closer to something good but it doesn't yet snap crackle pop like it deserves to. Damned earlier this morning, I did manage to help around ten people with their computer questions. Neither of my two short story ideas aren't going well at all. They seemed so promising when they first occurred to me and they're all I have at the moment. Guess I'll take this weekend off and try again on Monday. I'll feel a heaping bunch better once I've finished *something* and my money's on the church article. That conference was a terrific experience. If I can write something which conveys enough of that to motivate someone else to go on one of these things, I'll have done another bit of good and scored an important victory for my own peace of mind.