#generationintrovertoriginal

This girl is coming home with me today

Another half in the books.

Even though I love to travel, I do need to overcome all sorts of anxiety and self doubt whenever I go on a trip. The land mines I create for myself include: location, language at the location; transportation around that location; what's the budget that work work in that location and more! Luckily, I don't become anxious about those things until after I have paid for a plane ticket. It is usually that commitment that brings on the agony of those factors. Fortunately, my introversion is wiser than my anxiety and finds a way to sneak the excitement of booking to the top of my priorities, for which my soul is very thankful.

I consider myself a generous person in that I have no issues in giving of my time or money to things/people I support and I also don't quibble over splitting a bill to the penny. I have loaned money before to friends with no intentions of ever seeing a dime, but they are the ones who try hardest to pay back the fastest. However, I do become very agitated when I loan someone money, and they tell me they will pay me back, and do not. If I front money for someone with the means and they are continuously forgetful, I become upset because I feel I shouldn't have to ask for it more than once. I don't wish to have a feeling of greed for doing something that was meant to be a convenience for you.

I spent the weekend with family recently and for the first time, I observed that my dad was really slowing down. In recent years he has had a couple of surgeries (knee, hip, heart), and each time he bounced back without much noticeable difference from who he was before. However, at Sunday brunch, I watched as he spoke or as he ate, and it was all painfully slower than ever before. As an introvert, I can't help but feel that this awareness has been preoccupying my thoughts for the last days. I know the inevitable, but I never expected the decline to be happening so fast.

As an introvert, I often preoccupy my thoughts with made up conversations with individuals I may not see very often. This is a blessing and a curse as it helps make me feel connected to them in their absence. I hate admitting that silence can further fracture the friendship due to the lack of communication and this practice probably makes for disconnection. To fill in these gaps I create fictional exchanges as a binder, but many times I get tripped up when, upon reconnecting and learning that their real world truths don't match up with my imagination. This is when being a good listener pays off because they think I am giving them my full attention because I'm interested in them, when in reality, I'm just seeing how close my fiction was to the truth.

How was it possible, with my education and circle of friends, that I ended up having to take a “pro-position” on the existence of gravity? The “con-position” argument included “gravity is just a theory”, “gravity can't be proven” and “why does water fly off a tennis ball if you spin it”? Further defending the “con” perspective was the passionate plea of “I've been doing research” and “I can send you the links!” First off, reading is not research and secondly, when choosing to ignore hundreds of years of supported, tested, challenged and repeated work and then supporting loosely constructed, poorly conceived, oversimplification as the constructs of your reality, I think there is very little I can do to help educate your mind. There is a movement toward ignorance sweeping across the masses because learning and the ability to think critically is “too hard” and soon “Magic” will be an acceptable answer to everything.

I think my introversion is a benefit when I am sitting in traffic. I live about twenty miles from my office and really bad days it can take me an hour to get to my job. The alone time driving suits me fine and I am lucky enough to have a position where my arrival/departure time is really flexible. “Road rage” is not part of my make up and though I like my job, I feel no urgency to get there. I aim to get there at 8ish o’clock, but if I am running late, the likelihood is that I was procrastinating at the side of my bed by scrolling through tumblr.