I need someone to hold me to a higher standard. I need someone to challenge me to be better than what I am right now, to keep learning and growing and not just sit here in my mind stagnating. It seems that the people around me are afraid of talking about anything too personal. Maybe it's because we're all afraid to push the lines since recent events have shown how fuzzy and mutable friendship is. We're afraid to have real conversations because they're serious and not the sort of carefree fun were built our friendships around. But I need my mind to stretch, be told it's wrong, be intrigued, to be sustained and capable of having carefree fun - how can you live a life with half of your faculties turned off for fear of the specter of "seriousness" poking in? Maybe this is the difference between making friends in college and out -- in college you're supposed to be finding yourself, having the big talks, figuring out how the world works, but when you're where I am now the world tells you you're supposed to already have everything down and know how it works.

But dammit, I'm younger than many college seniors! I still feel like a baby in the world, hungry for definition and guidance, but only being fed harsh lessons in the real world without a proverbial mom to come and cradle me under my flailing arms. I had assured myself that having close friends in far-flung places wouldn't make the friendships that much harder, when in college we were all so busy and running different places anyway. But I'm learning that the hardest part about being miles and miles away from each other is not being able to look into each other's eyes and see the friendship so clearly. Now, we're only able to trust the inflection in the voice on the other end of the line to mean everything you want it to. To trust that the other person knows how much you're trying to put into your voice to mean everything you used to just know from their expression. Deep conversations about nothing at all lose something when there's not a shared small portion of the sky speckled with glistening stars overhead or a shared tightly-looped, industrial-grade, blue-gray carpet underfoot. I miss you guys.

I was so excited about having made a new friend recently (and a non-work friend at that!) because so far all our friendship has been was conversation about the real world, philosphical probings of the each other's worldviews. But we haven't talked in a little while and my mind is filled up again and bursting with things to understand and vague notions of ideas to discover, without another mess of gray matter to do so with. And there's only so much philosophical pondering you can do alone over a slice of toasted bread with cheese with MTV on in the background. And I've come to find that there's a finite amount of satisfaction to be gained from doing anything excessively singularly -- only so many nights I can enjoy the solitude of reading a book on my couch or vegging out to a movie or going to sleep early or cooking for one before it just becomes pitiful and boring and lonely. Only so much contemplating my changing outlook on the world and my role in it without another person's thought process to clarify what I see of myself and what's around me. So now I'm left with the sadness that comes with feeling like you lost a friend you never even really had and the frustration of not having anyone to talk to.

I'm tired of not being accountable to anyone but myself, because most times I don't feel strong enough to hold myself up. I want to find ways to stop my nightly struggle to not feel sorry for myself; I'm need to find other ways to pass the time other than reminding myself of all the tangibly good things that make life worthwhile when I'm really just longing for those abstract things that make life life and not just a catalog of events and time's waysigns. I just don't want to feel broken anymore. And I want to have a meaningful conversation about life or the world without feeling like I'm being a downer to all the people around me.

I want to write about things other than my repetitive posts about being sad, even if that is why I started this blog in the first place so very long ago - for seeking relief from those thoughts I'm not comfortable talking about.