I like watchin' the puddles gather rain

I stepped outside my comfort zone this weekend and visited someone I knew a fair bit from the internet. They'd moved into a new house so I went for a visit. I travel light, but I took my laptop with me also as I pretty much take it everywhere. It's the only thing I have of any real value so I don't like leaving it at my flat when I stay somewhere else. It doesn't have any monetary value, but it has all of my email, documents, and a lifetime of dead projects for which one day I may unlock a spell to resurrect. This laptop is my whole world.

The friend that I went to see was quite typical in that their life seems to revolve around other people. I found it quite exhausting just listening to it all, and in a way it made me feel quite odd too. It's hard to explain really, but it was a mix of inadequacy and confusion. When people are so fascinated by things that you have no facility for processing it's hard to imagine how normal people think. It's not like someone liking sport but you don't, or someone liking pop music and you don't, but when people's lives revolve around bonds and interactions with others that you have no means of creating, and they have such glee in knowing information you yourself have no way of amassing it's a glimpse of a world you'll never know. But that's how it is for people not like me. It brings home that my solitary world goes beyond just doing everything on my own, it brings home that I'm not just like normal people only a little different…it shows me that I'm nothing like normal people. At all. Everything that is life to them means nothing to me at all.

Something else I learned was that other people's lives seem so…complicated. It's like the more people you involve in your life, the more complicated your life is. As if their problems and issues osmose into your life, and your issues and problems into theirs. The more people you surround yourself with the larger the collective pool of conflict you bathe in. I couldn't do that. On reflection my own life is incredibly uneventful, my problems minor and my drama almost non-existent. Not only that but my problems are seemingly my own…they are neither shared nor halved. I have no particular desire to involve people in the issues I do have. The whole experience was quite eye-opening, but it isn't a world I could live in, the idea frankly terrifies me.

So in the morning I picked up my laptop, my light travel bag…tossed my only baggage over my shoulder and came home to my DVD, my XBOX. My so-called life.