Annoyances

On September 20th I attended a somatic dating event. The dating event was more guided than speed dating, and the intention was to form stronger connections between people. To do this you would be asked deeper questions, and be guided through a somatic portion such as hugging each other, or placing your hands on each others chests.

The first question that was asked was what your lowest low was in the past week, and what your high moment was. When I answered the question I mentioned that I had tried to bike, and kept getting on the highway. I know I had lower moments that week, but they didn't feel appropriate to share. Later a friend even made fun of me for my lowest moment being getting lost on a bike, and maybe the notion that as a low this was nonsense.

Yesterday I attended a non dating event centered around having more meaningful conversations, and a similar question came up, but centered around the year: what are the top moments of the year, and what are the low points of the year? With 2023 coming to a close, and with annoyances / low points on my mind I figured I'd reflect.

The most recent annoyance is losing a credit card, $20, and a driver's license presumably while biking. Even though I have ordered a replacement id, and credit card, and also reported the credit card as lost I am still in denial over losing everything. I don't remember placing the card in my jersey pocket so I am hopeful / suspicious that it's somewhere at home. I've spent way too much time hoping it will turn up, and going crazy. This includes looking in the trash, behind the oven, behind the fridge, through everything at the top storage in my closet etc. Last night I even dreamed that I found everything, so it's tormenting me through all hours of the day, and night.

I'm annoyed at my inability to find a good therapist. Fitting as I complain publicly online! I don't have a good framework for determining whether someone is good. It feels that even talking to an arbitrary person 1 hour a week would be beneficial, so it's hard to determine what element from their professional training they are contributing. It's often hard to find therapy that is covered by insurance. I don't feel comfortable spending a lot of money on therapy, because I feel like I can obtain more tangible benefits using the money elsewhere.

I'm not pleased with my relationship with money. I think there is a stark improvement over the past where I'd be resistant to even pay for membership at a climbing gym. It feels like my spending has gotten out of control, but this is also related to incurring one time costs of furnishing my apartment.

I'm annoyed at the apartment. It feels squished. I don't have enough organizational furniture pieces to make the place more orderly. I envisioned being able to host more, but now it feels like there is no space for a couch. I paid $300 for a designer to design the space and disregarded everything they said for now at least!

My job has been an amazing opportunity. Nonetheless, the path forward seems unclear and hard to balance a start up that works in the national security space. Personally I feel like I don't do enough at work, and that my focus hasn't been great. On that note I have bad phone habits. Through the course of writing I've already picked up my phone to glance at it several times. A terrible habit. I am way more inclined to read twitter, and watch youtube, and feel like I am wasting my time on my phone relative to other activites I can be doing.

I try to resist the capitalist idea that we have to be productive, but I have not effectively convinced myself of this! One of the biggest annoyances is my foot. I have an accessory navicular, an extra bone in my foot. About 2 weeks ago I rolled my ankle and that has since aggravated my foot and caused pain. I can still do all activities, but I wake up and it hurts to walk, or sometimes when I am walking my foot hurts. I'm trying to rest my foot and not make things worse. This has limited a few of the hobbies I do.

I'm frustrated that I haven't found a lead climbing partner or prioritized this. Generally, I feel like I've fallen off my hobbies. I already wasn't great at them, but not doing them doesn't help.

I've gotten in my head about improv. I had a big mismatch in expectations vs reality. I thought I was better than I was, and now it's harder to be in the moment and it took a lot of the joy out of it. It also brought up past experiences about not getting good roles in theater, not doing well in youtube skits. It took the fun out of it. When I was in high school I auditioned to do music education at two state schools and failed the audition at both. I didn't persevere from that experience, and instead studied other things. Even though improv is a hobby, I was tempted down the path of abandoning it.

Yesterday I watched an interesting video about the weird social script we partake in where someone tells you that you did a good job, and then to try and be humble we dismiss the compliment or contradict it by saying no I am not that good. The thing is Patrick Bartley the person in the video is an amazing musician. In high school he had to be in the top 1% of saxophonists his age. Of course there will always be people better than you, but it's hard to qualify how good you are at something. For trumpet playing I have data points that at the time I was not good enough to pass the auditions for music education. Generally, I don't know what I would point to and say I am good at. Then we have this nugget of wisdom:

I actually do believe that imposter syndrome is often pointing toward a skill deficit - just not in the area we’re consciously focusing on, which is why it feels so confusing.

— Heidi Priebe 🌱🌹 (@HeidiPriebe1) December 25, 2023

I'm annoyed that I didn't write enough. That I didn't do enough. That I want to do too much. That I can't sit still. That I fall asleep on the trains, but at night have a hard time falling asleep. That I didn't read enough, bike, climb or dance enough. That when I danced I didn't let loose enough. That I didn't spend more time on my hobbies. My cooking feels uninspired. I've been rotating between an incredibly lazy Cacio e Pepe, omelettes turned into sandwiches, and risottos. Recently I was just eating potatoes.

I wanted to focus on the negatives. I've been told at work places that I am too negative. I feel like I've progressed towards providing a more balanced view point. I believe you magnify what you focus on, which sometimes feels like one of my annoyances with therapy. The process is there to work through your grievances and problems, but sometimes things are going well, and it's worth focusing on the positives. For me the annoyances although varied, and extensive are the small dark spots in what otherwise has been a very bright year, but the brightness I'll discuss later!

There's this feeling that the older I get the less certain I am about my social abilities. For a long time I didn't prioritize dating, but I felt certain that when I tried, things would go great. Now I wonder if I'll meet someone that I'll get along with and find attractive. I'm super lost about attraction. Of course as you get to know someone your attraction for them can grow. I both am reluctant to approach people solely for the sake of beauty, because I don't know much more about them, and don't want to approach people romantically that I don't find attractive. I find this idea superficial, but also accept that it's an important piece of the puzzle at least for now.

I moved to NYC for dating, and after a few months of online dating here decided that online dating isn't the path for me for now. Even though the standard way to meet is online dating.

I'm annoyed that this blog post is so haphazard. There are so many separate ideas here, and the connective thread is weak. I don't understand my audience, and I don't have an audience. Generally, I think I should share my thoughts, but don't know in what way and to what extent. Even though the event yesterday said it's pretty hard to overshare I think it makes sense to be cautious. It feels like your past online history can come back to haunt you, and yet there are a lot of benefits to being online!

before becoming wildly public, pushing all my insides onto the internet, I could have predicted all the downsides that occurred in advance. "Stalkers, people tryin to cancel you" - easy. But I could *not* have predicted all the upsides. So many good, unforseeable things.

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) December 14, 2023

Earlier this year when in San Francisco I attended a board walk, and they introduced the notion of floating from conversation to conversation this idea paralyzed me. How was I supposed to know if I could find a better conversation elsewhere. Wouldn't it be rude to leave the current conversation I was in? Aren't all these thoughts the antithesis of being in the moment? To make matters worse I HAD to bring this up to my conversation partner. Then yesterday something similar happened. To not pressure your conversation partners you could write your number on a slip of paper, and hand it off to them. This way they could chose if they messaged you. During my last conversation I also brought this idea up again. Should I have shared my number with everyone, and create more opportunities to meet people, or is it more beautiful to have the chance encounter and not need anything else from it?

I'd be pretty happy if someone shared a number with me, and therefore I should've applied that thought to sharing my numbers with others. This wasn't even a dating event! When a social norm forms though it's easy to go with the flow. I've also been pretty frustrated with elements of social interaction particularly responsiveness. There's been dates that claim they want to be friends, but obviously don't in hindsight. People who reply to invitiations I make as if they want to meet up, but are probably only being "polite". When I hosted my going away party there were people that never responded until after the event passed, there were people who rsvped and didn't make it. When I hosted a small birthday celebration in NYC only one of my friends brought a gift, and this annoyed me. There's definitely more context here.

I think what I care about is the thoughtfulness that giving a gift signals less so than the gift. As my brother mentioned gifting me is hard which is true, and a lot of the people who were invited don't know me very well! Of course you can tell people how you feel because they can't read your mind, but it's an uncomfortable conversation to have and not sure if it accomplishes any goals. For instance, the point is not to ask for gifts, and there is something to be learned for being able to give and not expect things in return. Easier said than done though!

I recently reached out to some friends from high school and college that now live in NYC as well. There are read receipts, so I know they are ignoring me. Even though being ignored is annoying I'm inclined to reach out to more distant friends that live in NYC to get a better guage of what my expectation for responsiveness is. In these situations I am also inclined to respond to people like "hello if you don't want to hangout just say that" although I also understand that this is an uncomfortable thing to say.

It's been raining lately, and getting rain boots has been its own saga. I first tried to buy the boots at a sports store that didn't do price matching, and I had found the boots for way cheaper. My card was declined so I took it as a sign that it wasn't worth it. Then I ordered the boots for like $50 but the boots ended up not being in stock. Then I ordered the boots from another store. At one point I was possibly going to have two rain boots, but the first ordered did get canceled. Unfortunately the second order shipped to my parents address due to Apple Pay issues. On that note I also tried to change my Apple Pay to point to a different e-mail address and that didn't work.

On a technology related note earlier in the year my brother brought my laptop for me, beause we were meeting in Florida, and I was traveling other places beforehand, and then the laptop just broke on me. It wouldn't even turn on, and then I had to deal with getting a new laptop which wasn't a huge deal!

Sometimes complaining is catarthic and sometimes complaning further angers you, but provides no productive outcome. There certainly were more lows than biking accidentally on to the highway. The same friend who critiqued me for not having good lows also buried $100 alongside a pack of cigarettes in a symbolic gesture to kick her cigarette addiciton, and it worked. With that I'll claim that my lost id, credit card, and money were "buried" to bury my annoyances for 2023. I actually don't expect my annoyances to disappear. I am sure I'll have more frustrating social encounters, lose more things, have more questions around how to interact, what to write, how to balance my time, and that's part of the human experience. It's good to reflect, and this is one means of putting myself out there, and connecting with others!