Two months?

I broke up with Susan somewhat under a year ago. It seems longer. In reflecting on what I wanted to do next, I realized that I wanted to try and work on taking advantage of opportunities as they became available. I felt that I had been missing out on potential friendships and relationships because I was moving somewhat too slow: I took too long pondering whether someone was actually interested or how to best respond and life intervened. It turns out that this has been a real problem. Over the past year I learned about several opportunities ranging back as far as 14 years ago that I missed because of timing or lack of perception. Some of these were opportunities for deeper friendships, some potentially for fulfilling relationships. I wasn't going out of my way to look for missed opportunities in the past—doing so seems unhealthy or creepy—but I was thinking about the problem and when you do that, you seem to just happen to run into data that interests you.

Over some time between a week ago and two weeks ago, I've fallen into a new relationship. I think I'm nearing the end of the initial exploration part of the relationship where you end up spending insane quantities of time with your new lover; things may be calming down a bit. We were realizing how much had changed in the last week and were discussing when we had first met. I went back through email logs and realized that we met April 15. Before that time we'd never interacted at all.

Two months! Sure, I am working on taking advantage of opportunities, avoiding unnecessary doubt and improving situational timing. But two months from not knowing each other at all to being important in each others' lives. I'm not sure whether to be delighted, shocked, scandalized or amused. I think I'll be all of the above and enjoy the situation as it unfolds. I can afford to just live for the most part. Sure, there are things to consider, problems that will develop, but I can worry about that in the fullness of time.

The last year

I was recently reading over some of the journal posts from the last year. I'd somehow gotten it into my head that the last year had been relatively calm and not much has happened. Not true at all! Professionally, I'm a manager, I'm on the IESG and work to set up the Kerberos consortium is going better than I could have hoped. None of that was true a year ago. Even Netzah has changed significantly over the last year although I've not been involved in it much. Personally, I've managed to get out of some ruts I was in regarding how I thought of myself and to continue to grow. Socially, I've managed to strike out and build a number of new and wonderful friendships here, in Austin and around the world. I'm not spending as much time with any one group of friends as I used to; that doesn't mean that I care less about existing friends, simply that time management has been hard. If I haven't been around and you want to get together, feel free to give me a call or drop a note. Anyway, I'm just amazed at how much has actually been going on over the last year. I think that I had concluded not much was going on because my stress level has been relatively low throughout most of it.