I've been accused of being overdramatic before, so I'm going to warn you right off the bat that this is going to be one of the more dramatic pieces I've written for this site.

That said, I don't want to be an overdramatic person. I'd like to be one of those people that falls in-between boring and dramatic somewhere. It would be great if it were somewhere in the middle, where if I talked someone would find it interesting. If I'm trying to be funny, they laugh or at least maybe understand what I'm talking about, yet if I'm talking about something more serious, I hope that I don't sound like I'm too serious or even pretentious. I also hope that I'm smart enough to just shut the hell up sometimes and listen to others.

When I say listen, I don't just mean that I want my eardrum to decipher the noises made by people and then do nothing afterwards. I want people to know that I'm interested in what they're saying and recall facts later on in coversation to let them know that I am indeed listening. I seem to have a problem where my mind is slightly hyperactive and it sometimes seems like I'm not paying attention when I really am.

Because of this hyperactive mind, I'm constantly gawking around to look at things, pricking my ears up to hear different bits of conversations and cars that are squealing there tires 5 blocks away. Sometimes it bothers me that my mind stirs up everything into one big mixing board in my head and sometimes turns up the channels on insignificant ones louder than the ones I should be listening to.

It's happened before that people have called me narcissistic because of this, and I hate that. If I were thinking of insults that people could say about me, that would be at the top of the list if someone really wanted to cut me to the bone. I no longer care whether someone tells me that I have a big nose or they tell me I look like a slob, but the above statement coming from someone can send me into a spiraling, pensive state where all I want to do is smash every mirror in site and disappear into the masses. It's true that I do take self-portraits of myself with my camera, but that's only because I'm the only person who is always available to myself to take pictures of and I'm often shy even in asking friends whether they want their picture to be taken.

And this shyness is something that bothers me sometimes as well. Unless I've had a couple drinks, I'm many times so shy that it would be hard for me to approach someone simply to ask the time for fear of bothering them. It's not just like that with strangers, either. Although I have many friends that I'm happy and even proud to call my friends, there are times when something inside my head just clicks and I can't even be close with them. Instead, I find myself wanting to be by myself and try to sort out my problems with sad music when it would be better for me to sit with a friend and tell them everything while crying my eyes out.

The whole crying thing is something that's strange as well. I can watch horrible, cheesy movies and sometimes my eyes will well up, yet I've gone to funerals of loved ones and kept a dry eye without trying to choke it back. It's like I detach the images that are coming into my head from the feelings that I'm really having and it becomes something unreal, even though it should be the most real thing in the world.

I've been working on that, though, the turning off and on of feelings. I've been told by many a person that they wonder how I can even do it and in some situations have even been called cold. I suppose I am a little bit as well. It's almost as if I'm actually more productive when I'm not in the best of moods because instead of wanting to go out and be with people, I instead want to be myself and just work on things. I can't even allow myself the time to just vent and instead pour those emotions of frustration and sadness into production of some sort. I am getting better at showing and even expressing my feelings though, really.

Part of this expression of feelings has been coming through lately in some of the best conversations that I've ever had in my life. For the first time in the several years since I've been out of college, I feel like there is more than one person in my life that I can talk to on more than a surface level. I've spent many of the past couple weekends just staying up and talking until 3 or 4 in the morning and there's been something about that pouring out of ideas and thoughts that's simply amazing to me. Whether I'm talking about politics, relationships, or simply music, I'm feeling more woven into a web of lives than I ever had.

The really strange part about the conversations I've been having is that there are some people I've been discussing things with that I've never even met. Through the somewhat strange and cold (or at least regarded as such by many) connection of the internet and e-mail, I've had what I consider to be very personal and inspiring conversations with people who live hours or even halfway around the world from me.

I've mentioned this to people recently, and I've sometimes got the reaction from others that I'm having an internet romance. Without so much as me explaining any further, one person even went so far as to say I was an internet mack daddy. I told them that I was not the internet mack daddy, nor a mack daddy at all. In fact, I may be the anti mack daddy.

Which leads me in a very roundabout way to relationships. I talk about that subject a lot on this site, but haven't much lately simply because I haven't been thinking about them as much. I've been so busy with work, creation of things, and simply having great conversations with people that all of those things have sort of become the relationship that I'm in.

That doesn't mean that I'll never be in a relationship again, although that used to be one thing that I obsessed about. There was a hero of mine (a photographer) who lived by himself in a small house and created and created and was completely absorbed and devoted to his work. What he created was beautiful, and I thought that if I could devote myself to something as fully as he did and create something half as beautiful, then it would untimately be the life for me.

But lately I've been having these conversations with different people, and it reminds me that I wouldn't probably enjoy something like that.

After all the words that I've just written, it really just comes down to that I'm sometimes very happy, and sometimes I find my solace in being sad. If you've read all of the above, though, and I've made any sense at all with it, you'll know that that's a good thing.

That, and this did end up being overdramatic. I'm welcoming myself back to square one as an admitted idiot.

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