pantsfarm

Edit: this feels like a big long waaahhh now that I’ve written it. Just a warning.

Here I am, feeling kind of tired on a nice Sunday evening. The temperature is nice outside (just a bit cool for hanging around in shorts), but it started raining in bursts a little while ago so I had to close the windows.

Through the weekend, though really starting sometime during the week, I’ve been wasting a lot of time wondering about overly-vague questions like who am I and what do I want to do. On top of that, to distract myself from it, I’ve been watching a bunch of TV DVDs, hammered out a tentative lodging plan for visiting Chicago in May, and kept up with reading however many random blogs.

On Thursday, I think, I read this on salon.com and though I didn’t really identify so much with wanting to be a hipster, I was reminded by the passage

You yearn for this thing because humans need to be a part of a tribe, or family, or belief system. This need is felt in the heart. It is an old need. Before, when we lived in places, this need could be met by places. But we don’t live in places anymore. We live in the electronic wind.

of an email conversation I’d had with a friend a while ago about all sorts of topics, one of which was the flux our respective circles of friends were in having graduated from college.

This prompted me to go start browsing wikipedia starting with Tribalism. This led me quickly to Dunbar’s number, which struck me as an interesting concept. I wonder if I ever got close to that full 150, and in addition, how things have shifted with my move to China.

After that, I started on a more random path, and went erratically from topic to topic to arrive at Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development which wouldn’t normally really bear specific mention as relevant to anything except that just now, I read a friends musings on relationships in their blog. I suspect that it was interesting to me because I feel now like I am sort of stuck in the

Most recently, I read a post on a friend’s blog about relationships, and it reminded me a little of the description of the early adulthood stage described by Erikson. This of course prompted me to start wondering about where in these stages I fall, which in a way brought me full circle to spending a lot of time in my little identity dilemma.

I started out wondering what it is important to me in a job, then got sidetracked by wondering what tribe I really count myself as a part of now, and am now on to wondering if I’ve wholly made it out of the adolescent stage described by Erikson yet, and just how much of an “adultolescent” I might be. (The phrase was introduced to me by an old Newsweek article although I find this combination of adult and adolescent an interesting choice in light of the Erikson stages).

But this is all just so much self-indulgent “introspection” and I’m tired of it, so, to hell with it. I’ve got more important things to do.