Friday evening, we had some roleplaying, during which I could focus on something else. I started calming. Yesterday, I did some packing, some talking, and watched a few movies. I was doing halfway decent. I thought that I might possibly be returning to normal … at least, as normal as one can get when one is facing what seems to be a largish debt, with extremely vague plans for coping with it, and with seemingly few prospects and little in my past history to suggest I will be able to.

Then I went over to Mom's to hang out for awhile. Not a huge critical error, but it did remind me of my problems, set off another bout of introspection, and trigger some annoying dreams about next year's graduation and the potential severing of most of the ties that I've managed to make at school.

Those dreams may provide some insight, however. I think a lot of my emotional difficulties right now may be because I'm be getting a sense of precisely how tenuous my connections to life really are.

Life is a terminal disease. Time marches on, and we all get closer to death with each passing day. I've always known it, intellectually, but it never had much impact for me before. People like my brother probably have little sense of it … my own has only been developing in the last decade or so, especially in the last five or six years, as I began to approach my thirties and realized that carefree youth was coming to a close, and I was Getting Old (dum dum dum!). I know most people realize this eventually. Somewhere, dimly, I even knew that I would. But not today, thanks. I'm too busy killing time to notice that I'm killing MY time.

The closest I have ever really come to permanently losing family is when my mother's parents died in the 1990's, and even then I wasn't as close to them as I've been to my dad's parents. I've never had to face that sort of loss. Same goes for friends; I've never lost one due to accident or illness, even though I've always been aware that the Reaper has been stalking on the peripheries of their lives all along.

I play at being reclusive, and to a large extent that is exactly what I've always said it is (a natural inclination that I've always had). But I can't be sure that, somewhere deep down, I'm not trying to retreat from making yet more connections that I know are inevitably going to be cut … sooner or later.

It's the eternal dilemma. Make more connections to try and spread the pain of the loss (or in my case, merely imagining the loss), which provides more opportunities for loss. Or refuse, in an attempt to shield yourself and get in a position where a mere handful of tragedies at the wrong time would leave you completely cut off from everything that ties you to life right now.

I'm not certain that's part of it at all. As I said, I can't be sure.

I pay too much attention to statistics. If you gathered together all of the people that I know personally into a room, you'd still have less than were wiped out in the intial impacts on 9/11 … much less the final total.

Thinking about this sort of thing tends to remind one of how important each one of those connections are, which tends to remind one of how easily they can just go away, which tends to remind one of how important they are, … and on and on and on. Left in that state, it's just a bunch of pointless, venomous tail-chasing.

And, as always, Time and his low-life cousin Entropy are the enemy. The amount of Time we have left is constantly decreasing, the amount we've wasted (on pointless bickering and griping, and sheer mindless self-interest) is constantly increasing.

Who designed this whole Life thing, anyway? I think there are a few fundamental design flaws… :)

There's more to say about this that isn't dealing with tragedy, but I'm going out to lunch with some of my connections.