Lena's Engagement

Yesterday I had a late dinner with Lena at her apartment. I got some fancy takeout and lugged it uptown, and it turned out to be way too much food. But it was a green day for both of us, which is a whole 'nother blog post unto itself; so lots of excellent food was, almost literally, just what the doctor ordered.

She was also nervous about her impending marriage. What had started out as the very practical idea of marrying one of her lovers for the favorable legal benefits, had turned out to mean much more to her, and also to some members of their respective families and friends. And she had a lot of ambivalence about this, especially since most of the married people she knew had also gotten married for the favorable legal benefits, rather than out of a true desire to spend their lives together. What was all this emotional stuff doing, getting in the way of her participation in a standard, practical element of her immediate culture?

The stress of it was having some commonly recognizable stress-related symptoms, such as not eating enough; another reason to bring her yummy delectables, though I didn't know about the stress until after I'd already brought the food. Happy coincidence.

But it wasn't sad stress - she was stressed by the happiness and excitement of marrying someone she really loved, and how much she was looking forward to it, both for the marriage itself, and the fun adultery play it would allow her to engage in with her other lovers. (All of which would be thoroughly approved of by her husband, but that too is a whole 'nother blog post).

So I got to spend the evening with one of the most happily stressed out people I'd ever encountered. Maybe it was just because I don't spend too much time with engaged people in general; but even among the group of such people I think this must be a particularly special case, since the whole engagement had started out as - at least by intention - a merely ordinary decision based on the merits; and both the happiness and the resulting stress had been just a pleasant (?) surprise.

On a completely different topic, Lena, who is one of the few people I've told about this blog, also told me at one point in the evening that she had considered asking me that day, whether blogging had changed the way I narrate my life to myself; and I joked that if she had asked me, my response would have been, "well, it will now!"

Here's the real answer. Yes it does. And that's why I started writing it. I wanted to write something that would be very personally revealing, about the thoughts and experiences that I find so fascinating in my own life, but that are so difficult to hold onto, as time passes and leaves those moments behind. And what I found is that, while I'm able to do that to some extent, there's also a lot that I'm not able to write about. I don't like saying negative things about people, for example, and so when I have something negative to say about someone, I tend to leave their name out of the post. And I don't feel the same desire to write about negative feelings and experiences, that I do to write about the things I find great and fascinating, or that I'm enthusiastic about. And so when I think back over my recent past, about what to put in each new post, I think about my life in those particular terms; and that tends to color my sense of those events. I see the moments of my life more in terms of how positive and interesting they are, rather than just as a set of particularities that occurred in my life.

Another part of the answer is that blogging has also changed the way I think about all my New York friends. When I was in California, almost every day I had a new experience with someone I rarely got to see, in a situation I rarely got to be in; but in New York, all my experiences tend to be, to some extent, repetitious. This may just be because in New York I have a group of friends that isn't in massive fluctuation, and so I tend to see the same people again and again. Or it may be that I just personally seem to prefer a more repetitious existence. I don't know. It's certainly not a difference between New York and California, except to the extent that I live here and not there. If I lived there, I'd have a different group of friends, but I'd have the same social patterns as I do here. In fact I did live there, and that's exactly what happened. So, writing this blog has made me aware that instead of writing about entirely new experiences each time, these posts may collectively start to reveal more and more about the particular people I know; both about their personalities and their identities. And that's something I hadn't anticipated. So yes, to that extent this too changes the way I narrate my own life to myself, because it's created an informational tension that I feel compelled to consider when composing each post.