Another bout of diarrhea kept me inside all day, this time accompanied by stomach cramps. I read Hemmingway’s The Garden of Eden, and remembered why I loved Hemmingway so much in high school. A book may move you to abandon your path or encourage you to stay on it, but the great thing about the gret ones is that they encourage you to think and feel a little differently about things. Hemmingway’s unique combination of machoism and sensitivity leaves me wondering about him as a person. His characters are the kind of characters I always want to be.

It is interesting how making such a drastic shift to a new place and culture can end up being more self-reflective than anything else. What parts of myself are carried from my old life, what new parts develop here, and what parts have always been there? I can only look at myself through the lens of a life for so long before I stop seeing things. The fresh perspective is both refreshing and disturbing. Its like rediscovering an old treasure and remembering there were some things in it you don’t really like.

Sometimes I think I can too easily see different sides of a thing. Introspection from another angle is narcissism, and it seems nearly all good actions can be interpreted as selfish. This sort of double view makes it rather hard to believe in my own character, and though I know that we are all some mixture of altruism and selfishness, I want to walk in this world unheeded by the worry that I am acting selfishly or that what I have done and my reasons for doing it is less than honorable. There is some great conundrum here that I have been stuck on for years, but I am tired of it and the limitations of second guessing myself, and I’d like to move beyond it, wherever that may be. It seems to me that it should not be impossible to rid oneself of hypersensitivity to what other people might be thinking of you, just to give an example.

When I moved to Albuquerque I think I channeled the loneliness I felt into running. It took a lot of conviction to make it up every morning to run, and I can feel that kind of conviction returning. But that itself raises questions as to how capable I am of doing things that are uncomfortable after I have a measure of comfort. It seems like my desire to be physically fit should be rather independent of whether I am happy.

But maybe when I come back I’ll be a baller, cause I’m going to get my rear handed to me in basketball tomorrow. Its embarassing, but they don’t really care that I suck, they just like schooling me.