I want to be a catch, not a catch and release

Hello again, dear imaginary readers. I'm not exactly sure that what I want to talk about has a concrete introduction, or even body and conclusion, so I think I'm just going to blather on for awhile. A shocking development, I know.

I want to go home. Problem: I don't know where that is. I don't think it's in Monroe, or Bothell, although I'm pretty sure that neither of those places are inherently bad, just too full of terrible memories.

I've been running for so long. I started to realize, as I was staring thirty in the face, that I was exhausted. And now that I've officially kissed my twenties goodbye, I'm antsy. I'm terrified, I'm lonely, and I feel exactly as lost as I did at seventeen when I thought all I wanted was to disappear to California. This city feels at once warm and loving but cold and dreadfully standoffish. There are so many wonderful people who love me everywhere I look, but none of them can help me.

 My thirty-first birthday is tomorrow, and I'm officially upset about it. Hurray, I've reached that age where impending birthdays result in a depression spiral during which I contemplate my own mortality and palpable lack of suitors. Thanks, societal conditioning.

I am afraid that I will be alone for the rest of my life.

So many of my friends tell me that "Of course you wont be alone forever, you're so pretty and smart and awesome!" These sorts of statements, while probably true, are basically worthless. Because yes, if there were a bell curve grading people on how much other people like to look at them,  I'd probably fall somewhere right of the middle. Yes, I am intelligent. Yes, other people seem to enjoy my company.

None of this matters.

Finding that "special someone" is basically a combination of proximity and dumb luck.

It's one hundred percent about finding someone you connect with before someone else, who they can establish a similar connection with, stumbles upon them first.

I'm being characteristically hyperbolic of course. My being attractive/intelligent/enjoyable company may make the pool of people who will desire me slightly larger that say, an orc, but really when you factor in all the people I meet in a day who rule me out because they would rather be with someone with different qualities it all comes out in the wash. Peter Bakus, while an economics grad student at Warwick University, used the Drake equation to calculate his odds of finding a girlfriend. For those of you who don't know, the Drake equation was used to estimate the number of "us" like civilizations that might exist in this galaxy, using variables like rate of formation of stars capable of supporting life, fraction of Earth-like planets, etc.  Bakus tweaked this equation for things like the number of women in the UK  and the fraction of those who might find him attractive.

 His odds of finding a potential mate on a given night in London were 0.00034%. That is a 1 in 285,000 chance.

Peter Bakus is an attractive, intelligent and (I imagine if he's writing papers like this one) awesome. And alone.

"What about dating sites?"

I'm not talking about dating sites, because I hate dating sites. Nevertheless, since you brought it up: yes. Same rules of firstsies applies here, only more aggressively, and with greater success. You are choosing specifically from a pool of individuals who are available but you still have to navigate to the person you click with before someone else does.

Here is a list of Things I Want:

1) Someone to love, and to be loved by, who believes that they can love only me until I'm dead and reincarnated/rotting/in hell/whatever.

2) A cabin in the forest, near the forest, or at least in some podunk little neighborhood close to a forest, where I can grow vegetables and where a big floppy golden retriever and a smushy-faced english bulldog can run around together. The kind of place where teenagers (like me, circa 1998) dream of breaking out of, except for different reasons than I had. I was (am?) running from my small town because it was full of ghosts that I wanted to be rid of. This place will be full of love and beauty and simplicity, and those teenagers will be like the amish on rumspringa.

3) To keep experiencing things.

A good friend of mine told me that I am "hyper-monogamous." Because I don't date around, I don't play the field. If I have one date, I don't want another one with someone else. I fall fast and hard. I give everything to one person, and then I find out if they deserve it. This has gotten me into trouble because, well, usually they don't deserve it.

I don't have a clever way to end this blog.