Unexpected journey

This coming Saturday there is an evening planned with everyone I work alongside, much like the one I went to and described in this entry just over a month ago. I don’t think it will follow the exact same routine as last time, for one thing the boss (a middle aged man with a wife and children) will be there this time which means we’re unlikely to end up at a nightclub at three in the morning. I could be wrong, but I feel like it’s probably not his scene. Then again, it’s not mine either. I kind of glossed over this in that entry as I was rather preoccupied with trying to talk about one thing in particular, but that night was actually the first time I’ve ever been to one before. I’m sure that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows even a little bit about me. I’ve been in similar kinds of environments a few times before, but never an actual proper “club”.

It wasn’t a typical experience of course, in fact to see me there accompanied by three women I must have appeared quite different from the complete loser I really am. It’s rather an amusing image given that context. The typical nightclub experience from what I understand, is of same sex packs of men and women, seeking to get as drunk as possible and secure a one night stand. Normie favourite top 40 choons provide the soundtrack as the hierarchy of attractiveness is formulated under dim lighting through the medium of crude dancing, it’s like an absurd game. The abrasive flashing lights and overly loud music the artificial obstacle, the self sorting of people the ultimate objective. In my case the music was there and the lights, but the game was something I was only a spectator of. Me and my co-workers found ourselves in a corner some distance from everyone else in the place.

I did dance, briefly with the girl who was the focus of the entry I wrote about that evening, but we were really just goofing around. I didn’t sense the same connotations as I did when seeing the normies grinding on one another, if anything in my mind I was taken back to times spent dancing around as a little kid with my friends. I haven’t seen here since that night actually, I will see her tomorrow for the first time. Hopefully I can finish this entire entry tonight, if not I at least hope to have it finished before Saturday and the staff get together. This time without being around her has been good, because it’s helped me to get back to normal. In fact some part of me thinks maybe it would be better if I never saw her again, if she hadn’t have come back to work and instead decided to remain back home.

I don’t want to be the person who wrote that entry linked at the start of this one, which is the same person who wrote the very earliest stuff you’ll find on this blog. I want to be someone who remains clear headed. I don’t mean to be excessively self deprecating, but reading that post conjures up an image of someone who is contemptible to me. If I imagine it having been written by someone else that is. I understand that a lot of people reading like that kind of post from me the most, the kind where I am most emotional and expressive, and I do admit there is something there that is rather moving in a way that my other posts aren’t. I’m not intending to hide my feelings, this blog is where I can comfortably share that sort of thing anonymously and I actually do think that something about being in that more emotive state does improve my writing.

I’m really talking more specifically here about the exact feeling about which that post was written, oneitis or whatever you want to call it. I’ve long grown past the age where such thoughts are appropriate, historically speaking I’m of marrying age and yet I’m still experiencing crushes like a barely pubescent boy. People I went to school with have had children, it’s like they’ve had a whole life I never even knew. I’m about the same age Elliot Rodger was on the Day of Retribution, and aside from the murderousness I’m in a pretty similar situation. I really don’t want these feelings, I feel like there’s something wrong with me when I do. I’ve explored the feeling in depth, long time readers will know I’ve talked about on quite a few occasions, I know that it comes from a place of desperation and I hate that.

It’s particularly annoying because after this one post in particular where I tried to examine the idea of “oneitis” in as detached a way as possible, I really thought I had rationalised the feeling away permanently. Oh how foolish I can be sometimes. So now I’m just anticipating having another day like the one I wrote that entry on, all those feelings all over again. I’m really not looking forward to it, I’m half considering pretending to be feeling ill and not showing up on Saturday. I want to go though, we’re all exchanging presents (a game of secret santa, left this late because several people are only just now back from visiting home), I have bought one for someone and will be recieving one. I also just enjoy it, I’m one step removed from being a complete hikki I take what little human interaction I can get.

I wish I could just enjoy it, this will be the sixth of these little meetups we’ve had since I’ve started this job and all the ones which were not accompanied by any of these sort of feelings were actually really nice even with my usual social awkwardness. In fact I talked about the other two previous to the one around Christmas time in older posts on this blog here and here. Neither of those posts were exclusively about those evenings, the second one I don’t think had more than a line or two in reference to it, I just feel the need to always link a post if I mention it just in case anyone is curious. There are a lot more new people reading these now for some reason, who perhaps might be interested in going back to read my older posts. So by all means feel free, but do bear in mind that there are quite a few of them that are pretty crappy.

Just reading through that first post of those two I just linked, I’ve been reminded that I didn’t just talk about how I enjoyed the evening so much because I didn’t have feelings for anyone there, but I also kind of predicted the exact feeling I’m dreading experiencing this coming Saturday. In some sense any interaction with her will feel tainted by my feelings, and insincere because of course I’m hiding them. When before as described in that very entry I was really pleased at being able to just enjoy the company of these people I work with without there being any kind of hidden desire being held. I was just appreciating the company of others, and I went home feeling perfectly content because there was nothing I had felt I had to achieve by being there other than merely being there.

Last time just before Christmas however, I spent most of the evening wondering what she was thinking and just longingly staring at her like a simpering pet, it really was pathetic. And even though I am not, and was not at the time, affording any validity to the idea that there will ever be anything between me and this girl (or woman I suppose, she is in her late 20s) I still felt a failure after the evening was over. That is the problem with this feeling, I call it oneitis but I suppose the more widely used term is unrequited love, every interaction with the object of it ends with you feeling like a failure. These evenings much more intensely so than the brief ten minute interactions we usually have most weeks, but it’s definitely there for every single one to some extent. It has been a breath of fresh air to have that dissipate as she’s been away, and I do not welcome it’s return.

I wasn’t experiencing it for that long before that last evening out though, it has been relatively recent. Perhaps the feelings I have began to develop again only a month or two before that evening, it’s not like they’ve been there all along and I was just lying (either on this blog which I have no reason to do as it’s completely anonymous, or just to myself) when I said that I had exorcised any budding interest for her after she first started and I found out she had a boyfriend. I really did manage that somehow, and it’s important I make this clear because I don’t want that post I was just talking about a couple of paragraphs ago to be invalidated by the more recent one. At the time it was written, those were my honest feelings. It’s a shame that things didn’t stay that way, but they were that way. The question is, why didn’t they stay that way?

I know it can be annoying when I keep referencing back to older things I’ve written, but in that one post I linked earlier where I tried to really analyse the idea of oneitis in as detached a way as possible (naively thinking it was something I wouldn’t experience again, and that it was something I could choose to stop feeling), one of the main conclusions was that in most cases the person experiencing the feeling doesn’t actually really like or know much about the person they claim to have feelings for. I was mostly drawing on my own experiences, though I have read a lot of greentext stories about these kinds of things over the years as well. Yet now I really do feel like I genuinely like this girl. I don’t know a great deal about her, but I know far more than I did about any of the other girls I’ve called oneitis.

More importantly we get along, I feel comfortable in her company and not awkward at all which is pretty weird for me. Even if I don’t know much about her interests or anything like that, it doesn’t matter because those things are kind of superficial anyway. I know I like the person I’m interacting with, her temperament and demeanour around me inspires a fondness that I do think is genuine. Then I start to wonder what the chances of that really are. I write a post and find myself with this new revelation that I never really truly liked any of my past crushes and then a few months later I just happen to find someone that I really do genuinely like this time. I can’t even trust reality, I can’t even be sure if I’m actually experiencing the things I think I’m experiencing.

One thing I’m sure of is that oneitis is an evolutionary strategy designed to inspire those who are not currently procreating to… do so. There’s a reason that the phenomenon is associated with my fellow losers from 4channel.org rather than billionaires and movie stars. Of course we are complicated creatures and so all our personal baggage complicates the feeling, but at it’s core that is why the experience exists in humans. It’s also pretty much a male phenomenon only, again because for the most part women can get laid or find a partner if they want to so there is no need for this “push in the right direction” that I think oneitis essentially originally developed to function as. How powerful is this feeling though? Is it genuinely capable of convincing me I actually like a person that I otherwise wouldn’t? Because that is actually quite a scary prospect if you think of the implications.

It would mean that you can’t trust any of your feelings, anything opinion you have at all in fact. This is why I hate these kinds of evolutionary explanations for feelings or behaviour, the all emotions are just chemicals in your brain bro rick and morty talk. It really does depress me when I’m forced to think about it, I don’t like the idea that my thoughts and feelings are anything other than what they appear to be. Even though that does seem to be the case. I really do feel different with her though, and I noticed this before I started to develop feelings for her this more recent time. I know that she’s very friendly with people as a rule and so for her part nothing is different when interacting with me than with anyone else, but for me I do find myself acting differently.

I’d like for her to be secretly harbouring similar feelings, and because I’m a narcissistic mental case part of me thinks she might even though there is no good reason to, but I am also capable of thinking rationally and I realise that it’s incredibly unlikely for reasons I’ve gone into already before. So her being easy to talk to and very friendly might partly explain why she isn’t interested in me, but it doesn’t explain why I don’t find it awkward interacting with her when I do with almost everyone else. In fact I recently talked about how few people there are who I can really relax and be comfortable around in another post, and other than her they’ve all been male. I’ve known plenty of very friendly and open people both male and female, and them being that way didn’t help me feel any less awkward around them.

There’s this awful normie term to describe it when two people are somehow compatible, they say “they have chemistry”. Another similar term is “sexual tension”. I wouldn’t say that I have that with her, I just don’t have that energy and I never will in any circumstance. I’m not that kind of person, I have this naïve vibe that I can’t ever shake and honestly I don’t really want to. Even when in an environment with a woman who I know for a fact is attracted to me, because they’ve asked me out, there is no chemistry or tension I don’t believe. I’m too obsessed with purity, I am in all senses anti-sleaze. There’s something though, something that may very well be entirely one sided, and it’s making me doubt everything for reasons I’ve just explained. I don’t want to deal with it, and all the other feelings that I was dealing with this time just over a month ago that might come bubbling back up again after Saturday.

I just need to get away from everything, from all the people I know and everything that is familiar to me. Luckily I will be, I’m going to be leaving soon. I actually already attempted this right after writing that post I’m responding to in this one. After the feeling continued for several days I couldn’t take it any more and the only means of escape I could think of was the most literal kind. There’s only one place in the world other than the city I live in where I know anyone, Rome (I also happen to really find Roman history fascinating so that’s a bonus too), and so I began making plans to leave as soon as the decade started. I was going to leave on the first Monday of January, but I was told that I was really needed at work as we were understaffed already.

By this point a week or so had passed and I was starting to feel normal again, but I knew that the feelings would likely return as the dinner we’re going to this weekend was already planned back then, and upon thinking about it I realised the trip would be a nice idea regardless, and so I rescheduled it by a month. So, on the first Monday of February Anon is going to Rome. The eternal city, not just the once great capital of European civilisation but to this day the heart of Christendom. The city I live in is also very important historically, but it’s a very different place. It’ll be a really interesting experience I think, and if nothing else I’ll be able to get away from this godforsaken situation I’ve been living in for way too many years briefly.

I was intending to spend quite a bit of time in this entry talking about the idea of travel, specifically travel or travelling/ tourism in the 21st century, as it is something I have quite a lot to say about. I think I’m going to leave it though, I’ll write about that to be sure but I’ll give the subject it’s own separate post. Spoiler alert, I’m going to come off like a cynical and bitter faggot when I do write it, but I won’t be as harsh as some people on /r9k/ tend to be regarding the subject. I’m also not going to bring my laptop with me, so as well as being away from everything else in my life I’m going to be away from this blog for the first time since I started it. Which is something I am not entirely happy about, but I know that even if I took my laptop with me on the plane I’d still have very little time to write anyway. I will bring a notebook with me to keep notes, and hopefully the trip will inspire a good post or even several when I return.

I’m hesitant about it because over the last couple of months I’ve very suddenly grown an audience almost out of nowhere. I’ve been essentially writing to myself for over year, there have been a couple of you since the beginning but at all times there was the thought in the back of my mind that any day could be the day I stop getting visitors for good. I frequently went weeks without anyone visiting, but now I get multiple visitors every day. It’s strange, and I’ve been wondering if it’s actually the same people coming back or if for some reason I’m being promoted somewhere without realising it. Either the wordpress reader could be doing it, or some search engine, or who knows. So I know you people don’t comment, but I’ve made a poll to try and figure out what’s happening here and if you could just quickly respond to it I’d appreciate it.

Here’s the link https://www.strawpoll.me/19290209/. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become a tradition it’ll be a one time thing. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of the sudden change not begin harvesting your data for the Chinese government. There probably won’t be another upload before I leave, I’m working five days next week and will be making some preparations for the trip, so it may very possibly be three weeks or slightly over until there is. It’s going to be difficult for me to see the visitors every day on the stats page if current trends continue, the one good thing about having almost no audience was that I didn’t feel like I’d be letting people down by not posting frequently enough. I’ve announced it as clearly as I can though, so at least I know that no one is expecting anything.

Maybe I’ll have time to write the next section for the Pre-Socratics post, I’ll probably read the next chapter over the next couple of days, and I’ll maybe at least start the next full post before leaving which will give me something to quickly resume and upload after I return. It is going to be quieter around here than usual though. Thanks for reading, as always.