Communication is difficult. There are so many layers involved: what you want to say, what you should say, what you want to be understood without saying, what you actually say, and what other people actually hear, which is usually completely different anyway. Then there are the emotions and unconscious thoughts that get expressed through prosody, body language, and facial expression. For example, I’ve been told I have this “you’re stupid” look I give people without even meaning to. For future reference: if I give you this look, I apologize — I don’t actually think you’re stupid. Unless you’re my brother.

I’m kidding, Max! But seriously, I’m finding my little brother rather intolerable as of late. Max is about as annoying to me as gerbils with unclipped toenails sliding across a blackboard. I have crawled on my belly half submerged in eel-infestested water, for heaven’s sake — why can’t I handle one adolescent boy without rolling my eyes and making snide remarks? I mean, the remarks aren’t even witty! To make matters worse, he looks up to me, and I am proud of what he has done and what I know he can do. We just can’t talk to each other without fighting, though we can hold perfectly normal conversations with everyone else in the world. Me plus Max equals headaches all around.

My solution, to Max and the cold, is to go for a walk. It improves my mood for at least as long as I’m gone, if not longer. At night Auckland looks like a sea of stars. It is by far the most beautiful cityscape I have ever seen. And then there was yesterday’s sunset, a golden fire in the sky that made the clouds into poems of light. I was staring so intently at the sky, I almost stumbled into a bicycle on my way home!

So I’m being distracted by the sky and my brother, but what I can’t communicate, even to myself, is why I can’t focus. I’m restless and I don’t know how to settle. The important emotions seem to have fled to someplace warmer, and I’m left acting pretentious, annoyed, frustrated — the shallow ones. I can’t commit to any of my own projects, and I end up just doodling, reading, or baking, and not feeling fulfilled or relaxed even then. What made Reed or Bainbridge different? A sense of home, permanency, community? Here and now I feel out of place, out of phase.

Maybe my blog moved over to LiveJournal when I wasn’t looking… Oh, but I’m not really full of angst or suffering horribly, I swear! Well, not until Max finds out I wrote about him, anyway. :)