When I was younger, it seemed like none of my friends were ever going to actually get married. I even developed an elaborate theory as to why things were being set up in a way that were inconducive to happy marriage down the road. The thinking was that we start looking for a partner in our late teens. The thing about our late teens is that there is frequently a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions. Other than schooling, we have no particular reason to be forward-looking. We’re not looking for a life partner so much as we’re looking for someone short term. Except that we fool ourselves into thinking that the relationships we enter are about something Really Serious and we trick ourselves into thinking that these relatively unserious things are what serious things are made of. These perverse incentives lead us to often match up with the wrong people. Then these priorities become reinforced by our actions and the frivolous desires of teenagers become our priorities as adults.

I do think that there’s something to the theory. I think that the desires that exist in the void that is high school (and slightly before and after) carry on a lot longer than they should. I could possibly even write the novel that I had built around the entire concept. The thing is, though, that the characters would have to be in their mid-twenties, younger, or only a little older. Much to my astonishment, reality did not unravel the way that my theory would have predicted it would. Something, and it’s hard to say what exactly, changes in late twenties and thirties.

Most of my friends and former lady-friends, even the ones that I had my doubts would ever get married, are either married now or are in a relationship that appears to be leading up to marriage. In fact, there seems to be little difference in the fates of those that were serious about relationships during the Usually Lost Years of post-adolescence and those that spent that time making one extremely stupid decision after another. Serious-minded Julie is still single, but erratic Evangeline is not. Serious-minded Dave and Hubert married, but so did more adventurous Kyle and Neverlander Clint may as well be married.

Though I was ostensibly serious during my younger dating days, I was extremely unwise in a lot of my romantic choices. I wasted time with relationships that obviously weren’t going anywhere and ran away from some with grand possibilities. Though I did want to find something serious and sustaining, you could only tell that from my actions about half of the time.

I briefly dated a girl several years ago named Carla Brooks. It was apparent from pretty early on that Carla was more in to me than I was in to her. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her, but she didn’t really jump out at me and I had a lot else going on in my life at the time. So I cut her loose and that was that. The funny thing, looking back at all that, is how similar Carla was to the woman that I eventually married. And in the ways that they differed, it was Carla that I had more in common with. So why did I cut loose from one and marry the other? Some of it may be chemical reaction that’s always so hard to pin down. Some of it, though, simply has to do with age. Had Clancy and I met when Carla and I did, it’s far less likely that things would have worked out. If Carla had met me when Clancy did, we probably would have lasted longer than we did whether we would have ended up together or not.

Evangeline went haplessly from one guy to another in rapid succession for nearly a decade. Her relationships weren’t short, necessarily, but they were almost never peaceful. It was all about emotional and intensity. But she ended up marrying a quite unexciting fellow. Julie, on the other hand, was very serious with the guy before me, with me, and with the guy after me (Tony), but hasn’t been in a serious relationship for a couple of years now and doesn’t appear to be really interested in getting into one.

Some of this makes me wonder if there really isn’t something to the whole “sewing wild oats” theory. I think that one of the changes that Evangeline and I went through was simply being tired of the struggle as we entered out mid-to-late twenties. We wanted something that actually made us happy. We didn’t need to feel some sort of grand intensity to know that we were alive and we didn’t need to feel the intensity directed towards us to know that we were valuable. The signs of love, outgoing and incoming, were somewhat revealed for the illusions that they were. Things like the ability to get through an argument and to trust one another became much more important than how much they viscerally excite us. And in a way everything turns on its head: With stability comes the ability to love more freely without fear.

Clint was in a relationship inside which he had sex with more women than he’d had prior to the relationship’s formation. That could be a stunning warning sign to a woman not to get involved with him, but since then he’s not come close to cheating on any of his girlfriend’s since. Some of his previous exploits can be explained by his dissatisfaction with the girl, but some of it can be described as “Been there, done that” and knowing the trouble that such behavior brings and the peace that finding something that works does.

I think everybody’s story is different. The overarching point, though, is that when people are ready to grow up, they seem to know exactly what to do. They know what qualities to look for and what qualities that attract them that they should be suspicious of. They stop trying to look for “the best that they can do” based on some criteria (that usually involves the bad traits from The Usually Lost Years) and find the person that they are the happiest with. They learn not to create unmanageable tension where there is none. To focus on making a relationship work. And being happy.

That’s not to say that everybody makes this transition. Some people never do grow up. Some have been grown up all their lives but have not successfully found a partner. Or they do everything right and then fate hands them the wrong person to do everything right with. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see how exactly it is that people with such bad relationship habits actually grow up to get married. It’s been an interesting sight.

-{The following was written a couple months ago and apparently fell through the cracks}-

The commute terrors continue. On Thursday my morning drive to work alone took three for no discernible reason. I have discovered that if I leave early enough I can sidestep that. “Early enough” can be defined as sometime between 5am (wherein there was no traffic) and 7am (wherein there is much). I’ve been pondering whether or not to start going in to get there at 7, spending two hours in the cafeteria novel-writing, and then working from 9-6. I’ve also determined that since Friday morning traffic is not generally as bad, if I were to come in early on Mondays and work a couple extra hours and come in late every Thursday I could keep the horrendous traffic down to two days a week (and inconsistent Fridays).

One thing that I have not really considered is public transportation.

The main reason for that is that there is no direct route from Soundview, where I live, to Enterprise City, where I work. In order to take the bus, I’d have to drive to a Soundview Park’n’Ride, take a bus to Zaulem, then hop buses to Enterprise. On a good day, that alone would take me two hours. It’s not hard to imagine days where I miss the connect and it takes considerably longer. The upshot would be that I could spend my time doing something other than driving. But that’s about the only upshot and right now audiobooks are keeping me somewhat entertained.

Historically, I would love to take public transportation to work. When I had jury duty in Colosse I had a bus pass and it was awesome. I drove to the PnR in Mayne, got on the bus, and got off near the County Courthouse. To anyone that lives in the suburbs and works in downtown, it’s absolutely great. What a lot of boosters of public transportation don’t realize, though, is that that’s actually only rarely the case. Newer cities are not generally built cleanly around the downtown/suburb model that many people imagine and may see in their own Historic cities. Had they been built around public transportation from the outset, public transportation would likely make a lot more sense for a lot more people and it’s quite likely that we would all be better off. Even with that admission, though, the facts on the ground don’t particularly support public transportation in most cities. The main reason being is that only a fraction of a city’s workforce typically works downtown except in very few metropolitan hubs. Instead you see more things like my current situation where you’re driving from one part of a metro area to another and everybody is driving too and from separate parts.

I frankly have difficulty seeing a more robust public transportation changing that. The industrial parks have already been built. Housing patterns have already been established. It’s possible that in rapidly growing smaller cities like Boise or Reno that they could make a dent, but not in cities that have downtown areas that are simply too small to support the bulk of the city’s workforce. Colosse has an economically robust downtown area in the daytime, and maybe if the incentives were in place more taller skyscrapers would be built, but never enough to keep up, really. You could set up alternate downtowns and the Colosse has done just that, but not enough to justify direct public transportation in many case and the only places for further growth are in the suburbs, which makes it so that public transportation is only supportable from that half or quadrant of the city.

On the other hand, if the goal is to get more cars off the road, it does seem to me that there are cases such as Soundview to New City to Enterprise might be a good idea even if not economically profitable. That’s certainly a case where a not-insignificant number of people would likely take advantage. I think that the biggest problem at the moment is that any such bus route would involve the same Splinterstate that I deal with day in and day out where the HOV lane often gets just as backed up as everything else and for it to work you would need constant back-and-forth which is probably not supportable by the current commuting population. What Cascadia (in concert with my employer, Mindstorm) has instead done is double-down on Vanpooling.

The basic idea behind Vanpooling is that if you can get enough people, the Cascadia Metropolitan Transit Authority (CMTA) will spot you the vehicle and Mindstorm will give you primo parking. I’ve thought about going this route, but the problem with that arrangement is that you lack flexibility. You have to all go and leave at the same time, and in a dynamic work environment like Mindstorm and really most every job I’ve ever held, that’s not realistic. You don’t always know when you leave in the morning what time you’re leaving for home at night. With regular bus service this isn’t a problem because you can just take the next bus, but when you’ve only got one ride home that’s a problem.

What I guess would be ideal would be some sort of system where enough people could pool in together in order to have one bus arrive at 8, one at 9, and one at 10 and then leave at 5, 6, and 7 respectively. That’s a lot of cats to herd.

I was all excited when I got a newsletter thing from Amazon that said:

BIG BOOT SALE!

Cause I have big feet and need big boots and it’s so rare that big boots are on sale.

You’ve probably figured out the error in my thinking. They meant that the boot sale was big, not that it was a sale for big boots. That reminded me that the English language really needs to become more mathematical. In math, you can group things together easily so that you know what’s referring to what. So for instance, you could make it:

(BIG BOOT) SALE!

or

BIG (BOOT SALE)!

This is actually one case where Pointless Quotation Marks, which usually drive me nuts, could be helpful. That way it could be:

“BIG BOOT” SALE!

or

BIG “BOOT SALE”!

That way I won’t get my hopes up about getting a good deal on something to take care of my large feet.

I’ve been downloading a couple Open-Source operating systems over the weekend.

By “over the weekend” I don’t mean that I downloaded one on Friday night and the other Saturday afternoon. I mean that I started two on Friday and one is 30% done and the other is 9% done.

Comcast has been very annoying lately. If I didn’t know any better, I’d wonder if they cut me off except (a) it seems extremely unlikely that I downloaded 250GB, (b) they’re supposed to call if that’s the case, it’s been spotty rather than down and (d) Today a new month started, so I should be back up and running.

So I’m a little piqued at Comcast. I’m also piqued at one of the people I’m downloading from. Sometimes companies will want you do downloading through an install file. In other words, you download some dinky file, after which that dinky file downloads the 4GB file. This is annoying because it means I have to download it once per install. So I can’t just download it once and install it in as many places as I like. This would make sense if it were a for-profit app, but the dang thing is free. But even that I could put up with if their downloading application didn’t suck.

To software developers: If you’re going to make me download something through your application, make your application good. Don’t let it freak out in the event of a stalled connection. Allow pause-resume. Break it up into little bits. Do something that doesn’t require me to have my laptop hooked up upstairs (cause I can’t trust wireless) for days on end because my internet connection is irregular. Comcast may suck, but this is hardly the first time that I have been in this situation, a lot of Comcast users in the Zaulem Sound area are in this position (taking a poll from work), and a lot of people all across the country are in this position.

That’s one of the two providers. The other I’m downloading directly from my friend Tony. Tony can’t be bothered to put it somewhere that I can download it with a utility that allows resumption after a broken connection. Since he’s doing me a solid I guess I shouldn’t complain. On the other hand, he’s the one always pestering me to give Linux a shot.

Grumble.