confusion

It’s been two and a half years. It’s been forever and it was just yesterday. I stood on a street corner this morning just outside a tube station. I stood for an hour. I can’t even describe the feeling except to say; home.

I hated London when I first got here in 2001. Now I miss it more than any other place I have ever been. When I first got here the relationship I was in was on the rocks. I was alone and, to be quite honest, lost. I don’t make friends quickly as I am shy and don’t approach people. In the first three months here I found every reason I could to hate London; the people were rude, the streets dirty, the weather bad. I walked around quite a bit but never saw the beauty of the city because of my emotions.

I guess things started to change around the start of December. I was sitting on a bench in one of the gardens in the Barbican when a guy stopped to ask me for a light. I told him I did not smoke. But he stopped to talk a few minutes because he recognized me; he lived on the same floor as I did in Finsbury Halls. It was through P— that I met most of the people I became friends with in London. I traveled all over London with these people, partied and shopped, studied and talked. I started to be able to appreciate the city. I came to understand what Dr. Johnson meant when he said, “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

As I approached the end of my stay in London I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to extend my stay. Being an American it is nearly impossible to find a job here however without a great deal of experience. So all my efforts led to naught and I had to leave. Leaving was painful. By this time my life was in London; my girlfriend, most of my friends and everything I wanted to do was in London. I left quietly, early in the morning. I called a cab, loaded my bags and said goodbye to no one in person. I guess it was selfish but I did not want to deal with leaving. I wanted to just be gone.

Yesterday when I got back I felt the most satisfying sense of peace that I have had since I left. Stepping off the plane and hearing the accents, walking past the HSBC ads in Heathrow, riding the Tube into central London, seeing the black cabs, even the gray sky and misty rain were perfect. I feel at home just standing on the street corner. I want to come back. I have found nothing better in my travels.

Well not quite. But I will be traveling for work:

London: Oct 19th—23ed

Virginia: Oct 23—31st

Paris: Nov 1st—5th

I would like to catch up with people. Alas many people I do not have phone numbers for as I lost my phone a few weeks ago and some of the number were not backed up…

Normally I don’t have dreams I can remember but I had a strange dream on Saturday night (most likely this is somehow related to the level of alcohol in my blood when I passed…went to sleep.) This particular dream I only remember parts and the part I remember best was sitting in my parents back yard and digging in the ground. Why was I digging? I was collecting the buried Star Wars action figures I had left there years before. For some reason there where groups of three or four of these figures scattered around the back yard. I have no idea why I was collecting these long lost childhood toys just that I needed to find them all.

What does the title of this entry have to do with my intoxicated mental musing? On Sunday I called my mother to catch up—trying to get a hold of someone when you have a 12 hours time difference is a real pain and I had not talked to her in a month so I thought I should call her. Anyway, at one point she said ‘Oh, guess what I found while working in the back yard yesterday?’ I had absolutely no idea, I mean it could have been anything right? Wrong; ‘I found a couple of your old Star Wars figures where the old sand box used to be.’

How crazy is that?

Since I got here I have not had a lot of time to myself. There has always been someone to go to dinner with, or someone to ride back to the hotel with, and usually more work to do. Tonight I rode back in a cab by myself for the first time. A lot of things were running through my head while I was stuck in traffic. Sitting in the back of a dark cab, looking out the window as the city lights in the rain and listening to sad Chinese music can have that effect on you I guess.

The main thing going through my head was about personal lives. I find myself talking to one of the people at work about the situation they find themselves in. They know they have set themselves up for heartache but can’t seem to stop themselves from getting more involved with someone who is about to move away. I have no problem talking with them, giving them advice on what they are doing, but I as I sat in the cab tonight I found myself asking if I am in any position to give advice to anyone about relationships.

I have had my share of relationship that where bad ideas, relationships I messed up and relationships that emotionally damaged me and it took time to recover from. I would like to think I have learned something from them, but I am once again questioning myself.

It’s been about a year since I had a girlfriend—and to be honest more like two years as we were physically separated for more than a year before she finally called it off. I knew it was bound to happen at some point and I know I should have just done it long before she did but I could not bring myself to do it. Anne, one of my ex-girlfriends mothers, told me once that ‘relationships end for many reasons, some end not because of the people but because you meet at the wrong time or place and the world is staked against you. There is nothing you can do sometimes.’ It’s a fatalistic statement but I think it holds some truth. It didn’t comfort me when her daughter broke up with me.

Since my last relationship ended I have been emotionally shut off from intimacy. I have not even asked a girl out. To be honest I have only found myself even thinking about asking two girls and I never got up the nerve. They are both dating someone else, and now I’ve moved to Singapore. Somehow here I find myself in a situation that could prove very bad. I find myself attracted to someone I am working with. I can find any number or reasons to not be attracted to her; she smokes, she is too young, etc. But it doesn’t matter, the bottom line is I find her physically attractive and I am attracted to her personality. I work with her everyday and she feels like she can talk to me when she needs something or has a problem at work. So I can’t help but think about it.

It also does not help that I think she is making a mistake in her current relationship. But if I tell her that she is making a mistake I can’t be sure I really think she is making a mistake or that I am telling her that because she is or because I want her to think she is. I can’t help but think I am trying to undermine her relationship so she will end it, which makes me feel bad.

I think having a girlfriend again would do me a lot of good actually. While I like to think I am a person who does not get stressed out about a lot of things the fact is I do get stressed. Over time the stress builds up and I think it manifest itself in how I act and talk. In short I become bitter. This is not to say that I am not happy with my life, just that without someone to share my day to day life will I have no emotional release and all of it gets bottled up inside.

I have come to this conclusion several times over the last few months and looking back through this lens I don’t really like the personality that has come about. I am too quick to anger with people over things.

What really got me thinking about all this was when someone at work asked me if I was dating this girl I like. We spend so much time together that they thought we were dating. That should be my warning to back off, but I know myself too well. I won’t back off and I won’t go forward. In the end I will end up in the same situation I was in once long ago—the best friend who wants more but can’t have it. The emotional crutch she leans on. I’ve been there before and I can see myself headed back that way. But I can’t stop myself.

So tonight as I left the office she was on her way out to have dinner with her boyfrined and I was on my way back to the hotel alone. It’s not where I expected to be a month after coming to Singapore. Sitting in a dark cab, watching the rain and listening to sad music.

I drug one of the girls from the office out last night to take two other Americans and myself to the Mid-Autumn Festival [ wikipedia.org ] here in Singapore. She did not want to go but I think she had a good time showing the crazy foreigners around. She told us the whole thing was ‘for kids’ and she was not kidding. I said before that Singapore is Asia by Walt Disney and if that is true then the Mid-Autumn Festival is like the electric light parade. The whole showcase—the Chinese Gardens—was filled with ten foot statues of Mickey and friends. There was Disney music playing everywhere. It was quite surreal. When we first got there they were playing ‘It’s a small world!’ We walked around for a while, I took pictures but none of them really came out as I did not take my tripod. Silly me thinking that we were going to China Town to see this and it was going to be crowded. But no! It was like going to Walt Disney Land only all the songs were playing at the wrong exhibits—and there was no haunted house! (The song thing is true—if the scene was from beauty and the beast they would have a song from Aladdin, and if the scene was from Aladdin they played something from The Little Mermaid, crazy!) But it was a fun night, hot and sweaty but fun. I expected some interesting Asian celebration but got Disney gone native!