Fixed patterns

It gets a tad personal here, I guess. I want to go back home. I am homesick and irritable. I went through old photographs, old memories, and I so badly need to return. I had this hobby of bike riding every single day when I was younger.

I want to ride my bike down the old driveway and up the hill on the front yard and all around the left side of the house, past the trellis, past the backyard, and onto the driveway again. I want to do that again and again like I did when I was 8 years old. It was such a big feat then and I don't know why I grew out of it.

Britney Spears came along, I suppose. Wait, no. Spice Girls came first. Bikes were not nearly as cool after that musical revolution. I even had the Union Jack on my wall. It's still there, I believe.

I hope.

Make-believe doesn't do me much good. Unless I'm self-servicing or playing dress-up. Yes, I still play dress-up. I've got to figure out how to coordinate the new shoes I buy after all. What better way to do that than to concoct some hypothetical situation where I would need those shoes, eh?

It's 12:35am on Thursday, January 8, 2009. Eight days into the new year and I'm already regressing. It's a wonderful start. The more I reverse and remember all the little things (and I mean little things, like the colors of the pegs we'd use when we hung up the laundry on the deck or the fact that my dad finally succeeded at growing some really nice clematis flowers on the trellis), the more I want to move forward so I could go back. See, I know how to drive in circles mentally. Now, when I finally get my license, I could probably do that in the physical world quite literally.

But I do that anyway without a car.

I'm always going back and then moving on (or so I think) but only to go back to a different version of what I began with. That's a terrible way to end a sentence, so I apologize.
It's like my boyfriends. "Oy vey," I heard you say?
It's true! I don't know how to stop it. I'm serious.
Maybe it's genetic predisposition or environmental reinforcement that causes me to pick the same people over and over so that I'm inevitably stuck in the same pattern of emotion, or at the very least, action.
They're all different versions of the same guy: the ego-stroking, smooth-talking dreamer who's good between sheets. Sometimes he's smart, too. One time he played the guitar and another time he played Halo III. Other times he's not even a smooth talker. Shit.
It takes me about a month to realize I'm bored. I think for a moment. I don't understand why.
UMM: NOW I DO. They're the same fucking person.

It's like riding that damn bike around the house again and again. It's so exciting until you think you're too old for it, or you just tire of it because there's no challenge anymore. I mean, really, is there anything new I'm going to see on the other side of the house? Is there really anything new I haven't seen yet?

Sorry, but I'm bored. What's keeping me occupied is page 153 of the Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience. This is not the first time bound worded pages has filled a void that some other "hobby" once took up. End rant: I am still homesick and I have done nil to break this pattern.