Work and I are getting along quite nicely.

I really want to go on a date, the kind where you stare into the other person's eyes as if you were looking for all the secrets in the world and hoping that they were falling into your gaze searching for the same things.

I'm now certified with the knowledge of how to safely escape from a helicopter ditching (the "official" term for a helicopter crash). I'm sure that my first trip on a helicopter in another week will include me obsessively holding the seat back between the exit and myself with one hand (my "reference") and clasping my seatbelt buckle with my other hand, thumb smushed between the metal buckle and my jeans (my "release"). I also now know how to take off and inflate my pants (and shirt, actually) to be used as an emergency flotation device.

I got into an impassioned argument about voting Wednesday night on the way home from a bar that lets you take your glasses home with you, furthering my new belief that it's ok to talk about sex, but not politics, with new acquaintances. Especially new acquaintances from work.

Part of this is because I feel like I have to shout, scream who I am - I must actively define myself to my new friends. I've spent ten years figuring out who's inside this overactive smile, and I don't want to be redefined - not yet, anyway. I want them to know me like I know me and you know me, forgetting that part of the beauty of friendship is just that discovery process of testing each other, poking and prodding the other to figure out their shape. I don't want to rush the wonderful swirl of getting acclimated or lose sight of the excitement of this time, but I also am ready to feel like I'm with people who know me, you know?

Sunday night I ended up hanging five pictures in a horizontal row in the den: a monkey, two beetles, a howler monkey, a dragonfly, and a sloth; I took all the pictures last summer in Costa Rica and am impressed with how professional the shots look considering a. I took them and b. I printed them at home on my HP printer with Canon photo paper.

I feel more like a real person now than I ever have before. College independence was a farce, comparatively. I have my own space in the world, that is all my own; my time is my own; I bear responsibility to very few others in the world. I clean my sink (almost) every night. I feel uniquely normal.

Enough of this randomness - off to lift weights.

Is it weird to feel like everywhere I go, I'm searching the faces of the people I pass for something, some sign or clue - but for what?