October 11, 2000

This will be the last journal entry at Bad Hair Days.

I need to take a step back. You know I really hate introspection, and I especially hate engaging in it in public. Yes, I've kept an online journal for almost three years now, but if you knew how rarely I talk about what's really going on in my head here, you might be surprised. You might wonder how I find something to talk about every day, with all the things I leave out.

But I'm feeling introspective right now, and I've been doing something I haven't done in ages -- I've been writing in a paper journal. I think that's what I need to do right now, work some stuff out, figure out where I've gone wrong. I don't want to do that here.

I'm going to return to a weblog format for a while, I think. I'm pondering a name change for the page, and maybe a complete redesign. I suppose I'll probably keep a journal again eventually -- I always seem to come back, don't I? But I don't want to do it right now. Bad Hair Days has been the most fun I've had in my journaling experience, but it's time for a break.

The problem is that we're feeling stifled and restless.

Jeremy didn't do anything while I was gone. He tried to go backpacking and was thwarted by an unwilling dog, but mostly he couldn't break our pattern of work, school, home. "We live in that little house," he said. "We just stay there. We don't leave." And he's right.

Some of it is circumstances. We're busy; we're inundated with mundane things that suck up our energy during the week and spit us out on Friday night, tired and spent and unable to muster up any spark or creativity.

But I've been busy before, and I've never felt this closed off and bored and lonely and unstimulated. And I think Sacramento has a lot to do with it. This is, in many ways, a terrible city. The larger metropolitan area is conservative in all the most negative sense of the word. We surround ourselves with strip malls and freeway onramps, and all we care about is how long it takes to get to Tahoe on the weekends. We are dumb and slow in the summer heat, but we don't leave. We never fucking leave.

Even my little oasis, my midtown, can be stifling. We're trapped by these freeways and the river, because we're surrounded by so much that's ugly. And midtown is a small town in every way -- 18,000 people, all with the same friends they've had since grade school, it seems, all complaining that there's nothing to do around here. I spent ten years dying to leave my home town, and in the end, I moved forty miles down the road, and it was just a change of scenery.

I think Jeremy and I are tired of living in a city populated by the people who wanted to leave but could never find their way out. I think we're tired of a lot of things, really. We both spend far too much time missing our former lives, whatever those were, wishing we could move on, wanting to get the fuck out of Dodge.

I'm wondering how much to blame the internet for the way my life has turned out.

I used to have friends, you know? I used to like my life. I used to take chances in the real world, but I don't anymore, and I haven't for years. I stay in a stifling job, a stifling city, a stifling existence. My relationship is sometimes mutually stifling, but it doesn't have to be that way; Jeremy and I like each other quite a lot, really, but we do best when we're out in the world, learning and seeing and experiencing.

I spend too much time here, in front of this computer, interacting in a way that isn't real, doing my daily song and dance but not really connecting. I need to stop, at least for a while, and figure out where I want to be.

I don't know where that is, really. I just know it isn't here.

I'm all out of practice with the weblog, so send me some links and I'll be your best friend.