Sometimes all it is, is about connection. The desire to reach out in this vacuous existence and make contact with something. Sometimes I reach for what I think is a secure, unquestionable connection, and in touching this sure thing, I slowly realize it’s not as tangible as I thought it was. I feel it out, testing its shape and temperature and concreteness. Again and again, my hand falls through the mist. …So sometimes the security is in not reaching out, in refusing to confirm what is feared — that I am alone.

Sometimes I’m not sure whether “alone” is the relief that I tell myself it is. There is absolutely a security in aloneness, provided it doesn’t turn into loneliness. Take me right now, for instance. I’m blogging alone in my house, left heel propped up on the front of my chair in shameless unfeminine form, and I’m clad in oversized plush house slippers and tasteless hipster underwear that loudly declares all of Cancer’s traits in white felt print on the ass of the hot pink fabric, and on top, I’m in thermals. I look ridiculous. I don’t care. I enjoy the fact that this getup is so ill-assembled that I wince unintentionally when I pass by a mirror. It’s asserting my independence from others and their opinions. But give me 3 nights of this and I guarantee I will be lying face down on my pillow wondering why my friends have abandoned me. So maybe I can only take aloneness in small doses in order to fool myself into believing that I enjoy it.

And then when I have tired of drifting alone but have reached out and taken a hold of …nothing… thereby causing me to have convinced myself that I’m okay with being an island, as in the way no man is supposed to be, my self-proclaimed brothers find me. Gerardo tells me he’s right there with me anytime I’m feeling cruelly antisocial, and Josh says he likes me and my edgy attitude when I’m PMSing and he’s gonna start tracking it on his calendar (so he has something to look forward to every month). And they both give me a hug. And I smile through my cramps as I feel truly connected to people who get me and accept me. And I reward them with more cruel sarcastic comments drawing parallels between the new people in jujitsu and the audience in Jerry Springer shows. (Gerardo had suggested Maury Povich, but I feel that the new people’s collective IQs are not up to the sophistication in Maury shows, and upon further consideration and with further examples exuded by the unknowing victims of my criticism, he agreed with me.)