The cake is a lie.

It's been strange, seeing what gets in this blog and what doesn't. No great chunks of biography, just small, often cryptic notes. For every one I write, at least three don't get written, or hang around under drafts. For four months I've been reevaluating everything, and yet my perspective keeps changing, shifting, and I keeping seeing new possibilities amid the deaths of old ones.

For example, I met someone on a personals site with an entertaining blog, who, while a curvy gal herself, has decided to date only men lighter than her. Why? because the people you hang with have an influence on what you do, and who you become. A heavy partner will make you heavier, an active one the opposite.

The horrible thing is, she's right, you know? It sounds so very cold, but on the other hand, you are what you do, and being inactive will kill you. It's not the weight, it's the lack of exercise. In May, I found myself turning away from a lot of my hobbies - gaming and so forth - because they were sedentary. Married men's hobbies, Settled hobbies. Not places to meet women. Instead I got active, hit the gym, poured energy into constructive things. And I kind of miss the craziness and the horrible energy and the not being able to sleep, because damn it, when you sleep an hour a day you get things done. And yet when I started to sleep and I started to get back to normal and see my friends again socially, what was the first thing to go? Time for exercise. And when I have gotten out and met girls? Well, I've been doing a lot of things with C, but they tend to be things like shows, and gaming. And that's not what I need. Or what she needs, either, come to think of it.

Is that really it? A choice between friends and no exercise (and an early exit), or exercise while snubbing friends?

People say that you need balance. But my life, thanks to my sedentary work that I have to drive to, is already unbalanced. My coworkers eat like birds, trying desperately not to let the job kill them. I step outside and see dozens of programmers and office types desperately jogging around the compound in their every spare moment, trying to stave off the inevitable. It's madness, all of it. And it's my life, at least for a few months yet.

Is the answer really to throw it all out? Throw it away? Renounce my deskwork and do what? Become a day labourer?

I need to throw out scads of my life, I know. May made that clear. The things that used to bring me joy suddenly turned to poison, to reminders of things that will never happen. I have a bookcase full of books about Japan, for instance, against the day I would return to Japan to work, or get that fourth year of Japanese and go work for Monbugakushoo. I could have been a Japanese bureaucrat. There might even still be time now. But I won't go back there alone, and my dream of going with her is dead. She'll go with her lover. Maybe I'll go in five years, or ten. But it's a young person's game, and so all those books have to go. I've started already. I could have been a Lawyer. Could have gotten a masters in English, or Theatre. But there's no money for such things, certainly not if you're over 30. I doubled down on a Library degree and a job with my all-but-fiancee's family, and the house won, hard.

All I can do now is simplify, and so I have been. Giving things away, selling some other stuff, giving some of her things back to her Aunt. But there is so much yet to do. I have been sleepwalking so long, and I awake from dreams, and I awake, and awake, and awake, yet never seem to reach daylight. I am a trained librarian working as an accountant, and the time has come at last, dispassionately, to weed.

Prospero or Faustus, either way, the end is the same, if you want to save yourself.

I will burn my books. Ah, Mephistophiles.