My problem in about 17 sentences

Hi everyone,

It's 12:20 AM. Do you know where your child/dog is?

So as we move down the icy, slippery concourse that is the November offramp and stumble our way into December, the dark pit of sadness that wells up from within casts its self-torturous aspersions upon my hopes, dreams, and any other bits of self-confidence that are easily pliable.

In other words, it's late; it's cold out; and my post tonight will not be very heavily focused upon happy things.

(Sometimes I like to look back on these posts, just out of curiosity's sake, months and years down the road. For the most part, I find them boring, narrow-minded, and lacking in the depth of human understanding. Even back in the pre-blog days, when I'd write my unhappy thoughts exclusively to K [or Mr. Henshaw, as I liked to joke at the time], I generally wrote some pretty boring stuff. It all seemed to important at the time.

Then again, that's probably how most of life is, isn't it?)

Anyway, tonight I have decided to bemoan the fact that I'm probably going to end up alone and childless. That's probably not a huge loss. I mean, I like kids, but I'm really more of the uncle type, anyway.

Now calm down! Don't go getting all argumentative on me. I feel reasonably grounded in the facts on this one.

Consider: My uncle, the person I am most like, is unmarried and childless at 45. My father is even more introverted than I am and pretty much ran into my mom by accident. I've only had one honest to goodness girlfriend in my entire life, and, the way that went down, it was at least as much of a fluke as anything else in my life. I have ridiculously high standards, but don't personally meet any comparable standards that any potential girlfriends might hold. I'm messy. I don't have very many matchmaker friends, and the ones I do have always think I'd best fit with quiet, ugly girls. I'm not particularly tall, not overly attractive, and - pink elephant in the room - I'm obese. I have low self-esteem and no ability to recognize when others are attracted to me, mostly because I don't believe that's possible (unless the person is already significantly less attractive than I am willing to go). I am shallow. I'm lazy. I'm unlikely to get a well-paying job to compensate for my faults, and my writing will probably never be publishable, because I'll never have to will-power to go back and edit and re-edit like all good authors have to do. In other words, I'm going to be middle-income at best. I'm not good at connecting with people. I'm friendly enough to smile and wave at people, but shy enough and introverted enough to not go very far past that. I've spent so much time holding my physical impulses back that I wouldn't know how to outwardly show interest in a girl if I wanted to. When people make jokes about stalkers, I find myself growing defensive. I don't find excessive freckles attractive, but am relatively freckly myself.

Alright, that last one was a stretch, but the rest is pretty accurate. Actually, that last one is also accurate, it just doesn't cover as many broad categories as everything else.

Wow. That's a good list. Honestly, I'm not sure if I've brought all my fears and doubts together as succinctly and accurately as this, before. As far as I can tell, that covers almost all of my major issues. Neat.

You want to know what brought this on? It's a combo of a few things, most of them pretty embarrassing. I'm not sure what I did exactly, but I think I messed things up with that girl. There was this two week "honeymoon" span where she was friendly and talkative and responsive, and all those good things. And now that seems to have all gone down the toilet. It isn't that she's openly rejected me. It's that she's begun ignoring me, or at least not responding to me. I take this as a bad sign.

The other thing, which is even more embarrassing, has to do with an odd bit of internet surfing. At some point, I was reminded that Marvel Comics has placed the first 100 episodes of a number of old comics online to be read for free. Naturally, I checked out the first few X-Men comics, then decided to fast-forward a little and see where Jean Grey and Cyclops were in the current xmen universe.

Much like in any other superhero-based soap opera, it isn't looking good. As far as I can tell, Jean's dead; Scott (Cyclops) has been dating some chick named Emma Frost; and at the moment he appears to be drifting in space, potentially dying.

For some reason the futility of their relationship, coupled with the recent string of sad, personal events, led me to ponder my future.

I don't imagine I'll be having the same problems Scott and Jean face, namely, mutual death, but this is most likely because I'm not a comic superhero.

No, my problems are of a far less epic and literary nature. I'm just a sad, lonely guy, bemoaning my lot in life.

BTW, if you get a chance, check out the trailer for "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With." Sounds pretty good.