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Am ill at home. Going to sleep some more now. I don't feel like going anywhere, I thought I would earlier, but now I'm weak and hot. I fell over before the DASFA meeting last night, no one saw me do that though so it was all okay. I had to go curl up in a chair and sleep though the reading though, I couldn't handle anything. Feel a bit depressed as well.

On Fancying People and Love

Mishalak Babbles On Relationships
Inspired by my correspondence with Constance (green_amber).

I don't like secret admirer sorts of stuff. It feels wrong to be fancying someone or feeling in love without telling him. Or her as the case may be, but I tend to thinking in terms of liking guys due to my own perspective. Being a secret admirer is safe, there won't be any rejection, but there won't be an acceptance either without coming out from behind the safety of being anonymous. And worse it could turn out to be like Christmas where a person is disappointed by the present, not because it isn't wonderful, but because he has built it up to be something even bigger in his imagination.

Love is bright and terrible and if you've got it all that can be done is to throw yourself over the edge and hope that there will be wings on the way down. That is perhaps a bit too dramatic a way of putting it, but it sounds so nice I can't help but say it again. It always feels like jumping off a cliff when a person asks another out on a date, says "I love you", "I find you attractive", or similar. And it feels like fall will crush his fragile body if his love doesn't reach out and grab his hand. But the thing is that though it feels terrible for a while, there is no lasting damage from not being caught by the angel of the evening. Jumping off the cliff feels profoundly dangerous, and always will, but in matters of love we're all vampires, werewolves, or some other supernatural oggy. The fall will hurt, but we survive and are as good new (or better) after picking ourselves up at the bottom.

There is a good bit of a great movie about things like this.
T.E. Laurence performs his 'trick' of putting out matches with his bare hands. One of his subordinates attempts to copy him and yelps in pain. "Ah! It damn well hurts!" he says. "Certainly it hurts," replies Lawrence. "Well, what's the trick, then?" demands Potter. "The trick, William Potter," remarks Lawrence with amusement, "is not minding that it hurts."

I totally understand not wanting to admit fancying someone unless he is reciprocating. It makes it a lot less scary, but I worry that if people rely on this too much it will shut off all sorts of good opportunities. We need the skill or nerve to just ask people if they would like to get to know each other better, go on a date, or whatever. Are things like The LJ Match Generator bad? Not really, but still it makes me slightly worried about my generation being unable to relate to one another except online. But I don't have any answers, in the end I'm just writing in my livejournal because I love the sound of my own words. Let me know what you think.