Last night's post

Hi everyone.  This is the post I wasn't able to put up last night...
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Hi everyone,

Here I am: 10:00pm on Monday evening.  StarStuff is on the iPod, the a/c is on, and I'm shaved and showered and blogging before bed. 

It's been a good day.  I woke up feeling refreshed and fighting fit.  I had one of our articled clerks make my appearance in the Magistrates Court for me this morning and put the time to good use on another couple of files that craved attention.  Then, prepared for case reviews with my boss this afternoon.  Probably my most successful review session so far: I was able to answer all of the questions that came my way and generally impressed.  Things are looking up!  Otherwise the day was pretty quiet.  Well, I got a message that the birthday package for the girls is held up in Anchorage, Alaska.  They say the contents were inadequately described on the consignment slip.  If it's not moved by tomorrow I'll see if I can email a clarification and get the damn thing moving again.  So near and yet so far...  Hell, the package has so far passed through the Phillipines, China and Taiwan; what's the problem now?!?

I had to go a bit later at work to finish off one of the case review actions from today.  I was home by 8pm.  Then, dinner was some of the hambone soup from the other night - really good!   A few chocolate biscuits and a nip of whisky for dessert.  Then a clean-up and blog.

I've been looking at my life, especially pre-Joni and a bit post-Joni, and seeing I was incorrect in being such a hermit.  You can only grow so far as a person when you're on your own, even if you do choose to be alone because being with others isn't your natural fit.  After a while, you run out of ideas, and just begin to tell yourself the same things over and over again.  Even if being with other people makes you feel a bit of a fish out of water, you should still do it, because otherwise you're not growing and developing; you're remaining obstinately the same.

And without other people, well, you might as well be a zombie: Zombieland (2009)

I think that's why my stubborn rejection of fiction was a mistake too, in hindsight.  Reading non-fiction, you're getting reality, no doubt.  Maybe someone elses analysis of reality, but reality still.  Fiction, in effect, takes you into someone else's dreams, and into the inner reaches of someone's mind.  It occurs to me that this is true whether it's the pappiest Mills & Boon novel or the plays of Sophocles (not every mind is equally worth exploring, but the principle is still sound).  [this raises an interesting question about social development and story-telling, but that's something I'm sure an anthropologist somewhere has already explored in massive detail].

Being self-sufficient and self-contained is great.  It does make you a person who can survive just about anything emotionally speaking.  But, that's still all you'll be.  To steal a line from one of those survival shows on Discovery Channel though: "I don't want to survive; I want to live".

OK, it's bed time.  See you all tomorrow.