I like being alone. I’m immensely protective of my space – I’m not a touchy-feely person, and I usually reject outright offers to go out if I can get some time alone with my computer at home. I don’t lack friends but I neglect them like the worst person on earth. My closest friends don’t hear from me for weeks on end and when I have of one my mood-swings I dip into my shell like a forgotten oyster and they let me be. Only a few people I know can make me go out and enjoy it – in most groups I go out with, I’m the black sheep – the X factor <g>, the wacko, until of course something happens when they need me. I’m equally frightened and proud of my spontaneity, it makes me one of the best people to pick if something goes wrong and the worst person to be with if something doesn’t. I don’t make jokes, I laugh at the worst ones, and I don’t respond well to people teasing me. I also tend to be extremely jealous of silly things, and I have a barometer inside me that measures the performance of people around me constantly and which urges me to stay on top of everybody like a fake crown atop a fake king-of-the-world. I tolerate the crown at most times – sometimes (my worst moments) I succumb to it, but most times I fear it. I don’t have an iota of tolerance for ineptitude, but I’m the laziest person on earth. I’m inconsiderate and insensitive about people’s motives (never about their feelings), a few times blatantly so, and when I find something really interesting, I have a single-mindedness that astonishes me. I try to fit in with everybody, and I don’t fit in with anybody. Sometimes, I like myself enough so that some people like me.

I hate being alone. Sometimes, at night, I need a hug so badly my second pillow gets twisted to bits. Sometimes, my heart pings and twangs and throbs and no amount of unlearned oaths or twisting about will make them go away. And after all this, I sleep much more than I want to.

I want someone to talk to. I don’t think I’ve ever had many enemies. I’m tolerably friendly with everybody, and yet every single one of the Vishnu’s that those people consider a friend is only a fragment of me – some so tiny that I’m invisible, and only a few of them encompassing even a half of me. I’m…afraid that no one could ever know who I am. Even yesterday, I was struck by an article which describes extra-uterine births in The New Atlantis. I felt that the author hadn’t explored even a fragment of the subject matter. She hadn’t dwelled on the positive aspects of the technology and had hardly scratched the socio-economic repurcussions. I don’t even think she scratched anything of the ethical issue as well. So I was thinking about it a long time yesterday – I appended it to my list of non-fiction articles to write (The list includes things like ‘Objectvism in the earlier novels of Terry Goodkind’ and ‘A new look at the Reader-Response Theory’) and I made the mistake of broaching the subject at the dinner table. My brother and my mother looked at me like I was a space alien and my mother made me promise not to mention such disgusting things to her again. I looked at it from her pov to agree that it’s quite disgusting. I think, among my circle of people who are close enough to me, only one or two would actually take this as a dinner conversation, and only a few wouldn’t mock it. I don’t mind people mocking it so long as they give me reasons for it, but I think no one shall. This is hardly an illustrative example, but one of the many many things that I keep to myself.

And I vent at you. Now you do realize why you’re here don’t you? 🙂