Thoughts on things

The usual view from my bus stop. I took this last month while the sun still rose late enough to catch it on the way to work.

I’m in the office most of the week now, and that means it’s back to waking up early, rushing to get ready, and catching the 7:10 bus downtown. The commute usually takes anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes each way. I usually read on the way to work, often whatever I have out from the library at the time; on the bus home I don’t feel like I have the focus to do that, and tend to just look at my phone and toggle between apps to see if somebody posted something interesting, or to check my notifications.

I wonder how much of what I post is mainly for the quick dopamine rush that comes from another person validating it, especially if it’s someone that I find particularly cool or good looking. It’s become yet another thing I reflexively do, even though I’m not making a living dependent on online engagement.

Cranes dot the skyline all throughout Halifax and its surrounding cities, and the land has a lot of gaping holes in the ground; the beginnings of new developments, often in the place where some other building used to be before it was neglected beyond repair and torn down. A lot has been or is in the process of being built, theoretically increasing the housing stock; yet most of the city’s residents can’t afford to move into these new buildings even with stable full-time employment.

Is the goal to eliminate poverty in Halifax by making sure the poor can’t afford to live here?

The city’s housing market is ridiculous right now; I’m in no rush to move unless I absolutely must. The commute downtown used to bother me more when I first moved to the city and I wanted to get out more, but now I’m middle aged, drink much less, and a lot of the places I used to frequent don’t exist anymore.

There’s also something nice about there being a buffer between home and work; for a few years I lived in an apartment right across the street from the dead mall where my job at the time (a call centre) was located, and while it was convenient, it was also a constant reminder of how much I dreaded going into work. I was competent enough at it, but I was miserable, and after a few years I burned out hard.

Being downtown more often means more opportunities to socialize, and if someone wants to meet up after work, I’m usually game. It’s not like I have any concrete plans after work anyway aside from eating, sleeping, maybe writing, but I prefer that people let me know before I’ve caught my bus home; otherwise it’s extra effort to get back out again. I live out in the suburbs, and there aren’t as many good places to meet up within walking distance of my place.

I’m not particularly comfortable with visitors in my apartment either. I can handle people I know well if I have enough time to prepare for their visit, but people showing unannounced and inviting themselves over? Nope. I also feel weird about going to someone’s house unless they explicitly invited me and I know them well enough.

There are quite a few people on my mind and I’m trying to find the words to capture the feelings I have when I think about them; memory combined with time tends to flatten raw emotion into vague abstractions that never does it justice. The intensity of these feelings is only real to me whenever I’m in the middle of them; it’s just like how remembering a song is never the same as actually hearing it. I know that I talked about this before in earlier posts.

Do you have someone who just makes you feel some sort of euphoria from merely being in their presence? I do. Sometimes it bothered me that I didn’t get that feeling from other people, but these days I believe that a good thing is a good thing, and it’s better not to overthink it.

I want to let people know they crossed my mind, or that something reminded me of them, but I tend not to reach out as much anymore. I mentally cycle through hypothetical conversations that I would have in case we were to cross paths by chance. It’s a waste of time because there’s no script to life.

Even people that come and go out of my life somehow stay with me long afterward. I tend to remember birthdays, which isn’t as impressive now that Facebook gives everybody reminders, but I still manage to remember those of people who I haven’t seen or talked to in years.

It could just be the isolation of the pandemic that makes me think about this more. I’m glad to be seeing people in the flesh more often these days, though I’m a little sad that we as a society just decided that mass death was easier to deal with than gathering limits and mask mandates.

I hope to see more of you soon.