Welcome to my public naval gazing

OK, I'll come clean, I haven't blogged in some time, and the last time I did blog it was elsewhere and somewhat abortive. A few things about me:

• I’m not a teenager.
• I'm not a Goth (Although I used to be one along time ago).
• I'm not a girl (Although… nah only joking).
• I'm not a drama queen (OK, I am a drama queen, but only occasionally and usually when a little drunk).
• I'm recently divorced.
• I'm moody, but not manic though.
• I'm cold, calculating and pretty much non-emotional.
• I’m not very physically expressive.

Amongst my peers I am considered to be very successful, what I do is not interesting and more importantly I don't plan to discuss my job, this is to protect the innocent, and of course to make sure that I don't get the sack.

I get to live the life of a comfortable man, but all things in my life are by no means wonderful. I have a number of "issues" and "problems" some of which will get discussed here, and again some are too close to the bone for me to talk to anyone about, although you never know, I may offload into the Ether now and again.

The main problem I have should be reasonable self-evident from the title of this blog.

Although I am not a perfectionist I hold myself to standards that super humans cannot attain. Don't think my insight into this makes a difference, I spend a lot of my time crucifying myself for failing to meet impossible goals.

There are a number of people my life revolves around (both pleasantly and not so) and a huge number of acquaintances that I see regularly.
A quick rundown of the revolving ones reads as follows:

• Parents, B and L.
• Daughter, A.
• Step son, MB.
• Brother & his girlfriend, MJ & T.
• Ex-wife, S.
• Close male friends, P & D.
• Close female friend, J.
• New female acquaintance, don’t think I can call her friend yet, V. [16/09/04: I have been infomed I am now a friend.]
  

My relationships with all the above seem to be reasonably good, although up until a year ago I hadn't spoken to my brother for a couple of years, with good reason.

My ex-wife is quite frequently a bit of user, but luckily when we divorced she was married to someone else within the week, she is now officially someone else's problem also I don’t get to see her very often. This is a good thing. This does not however stop me from worrying about the quality of care the kids are getting, and I know from bitter experience that the quality of parenting they are getting is quite poor and certainly not consistent like kids need.

My relationship with V is a strange one, I have made my feelings clear and so has V, she is not interested, so we will leave it at that. I’m an adult, I can cope with a little rejection, and to be honest she is the most refreshing person I have met in a long time. On almost every issue we have different opinions so there is always something to discuss. I like spending time with her, but being the Anal Control Freak (ACF from now on) that I am, I of course have crowded her, demanding more attention than she is happy to give. She likes to spend a lot of her time alone, I understand this, but once more, don’t let yourself think that insight into this changes much.

The nature of my job causes me to come into contact with a lot of new people on a semi-regular basis, consequently I have a reasonably busy social life, made all the more busy by my recent decision to acquire some contact maintenance skills and use them to improve my social lot.
So there’s your starter for ten… So what am I going to ramble on about now?

Emotions

Seems like a good start.

For many years I was an utterly cold fish, I suspect that I have borderline Asperger’s syndrome some days, my faculties for reading people are abysmal, very close observation is required for me to get a handle on people and their feelings. All my interpersonal reactions are carefully mediated by learned responses to cues I am reading. I genuinely have no idea what people are feeling inside at an intuited level, I have to read it from the outside. This causes me to be trusting too quickly for reasons too complex to explain today.

But that changed, the minute my daughter was born and suddenly I have had an additional delivery of emotions. Before she was born I could watch the news and see kids starving to death all around the world and it was terrible news, but not upsetting for me. Now I have this part of my brain that won’t shut the fuck up, constantly for the last few years I am being flooded with emotions that make no sense to me, and more importantly I feel like I am losing control... imagine how that makes the control freak in me feel. Yay you guessed it, yet more bizarre incestuous emotions on top of the ones I can’t cope with anyway!

So what am I to do?

I have it on good authority (from a semi-trained councillor no less) that I should let the emotion wash over me and 20 minutes later I will be fine. This thought scares the living shit out of me.

Hmmm… More pondering I think.