The previous week has really flown by. One week of leave is definitely too short. But at least I was able to clear my mind a little. I think I was way too obsessed with my own feelings and thoughts lately, and the previous week really gave me the opportunity to just loosen up a little.

I didn't do a lot during my vacation. I celebrated my birthday on several different occassions with different people, which was very nice. I don't normally care much about my birthday, but it does remind me that there are people out there who cares about me.

I also worked out a bit, and I thought the last workout went a lot better than the previous ones. I'm still not quite at the same level I was when I was in Korea 2,5 years ago. I definitely never felt better physically than back then. But like my little brother said, that was probably because it was a much more relaxing period with almost no obligations whatsoever. It is different if you go work out after a long day at the office. I also finally had time to make use of the sauna facilities at the gym. That was great, definitely have to make time to do that more often.

I spent the rest of the week reading or playing computer games. I didn't manage to read as much as I liked to, but it was still more than I managed in the last couple of weeks.

Ah well, it was a pretty good week, too bad I have to go back to work on Monday again :).

Being in love is the worst feeling in the world. The first couple of weeks may be great, when it's still exciting and when you still have genuine hope that it will all work out. But before long, that hope is bashed in and will quickly turn to disappointment, frustration, sadness, pain, etc.

If that was the end of it, it wouldn't be a big problem. But once you're in love, you'll do anything to maintain a false and unreasonable hope for yourself, which you cling onto with all your might, because the alternative is even worse. This causes you to think, talk and act in an increasingly irrational way. When I look back, I know I've done some incredibly stupid things in the past, all in the name of love. Things that I would normally never do.

And besides, even when you're doing all those stupid things, you still know deep in your heart that you're waging a losing war. And yet you can't stop doing them, because the alternative hurts even more.

Being in love sucks. That's why I hope I'll never ever fall in love again.

Or at least, that's what I've been telling myself for months, and there are times when I almost started to believe what I said. But who am I kidding? Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I still believe that being in love is the greatest feeling in the world, even though I haven't found the ability yet to actually do something about it. Sure, it brings with it a lot of pain and sadness, but the alternative is even worse.

And I know I'll keep on doing all those stupid things even if I know deep in my heart that I'm waging a losing war. Because the potential rewards of winning just one battle outweigh all the pain and sadness by so much more (or so I would imagine, since I never actually experienced any of those rewards before).

Being in love definitely sucks. But I hope that I will always be in love with someone special.

P.S.
If I fall in love with a married woman and who has two kids, does that make me a bad person?

What if a (small) part of me is actually hopeful and happy when she decided to leave her husband. Does that make me a bad person?

And what if that same part of me is insanely jealous when she decided to give her marriage another try? Do I qualify then?

I really want to believe that being in love, even the inappropriate kind, is never bad. But I'm just not sure.

Yes! The last day of work before I have an entire week off. It's been a while since I had more more than 2 days off (the last time was when I got sacked about a year ago, so that one doesn't really count). Not that I'm complaining, since it was a conscious decision to earn more money as a temp as opposed to having time off. Now that I am contracted, it would just be plain stupid not to take some time off, since I get paid anyway.

The last couple of weeks especially has been a huge drain on me mentally, and I desperately needed some long-overdue quality time with me, myself and I to recharge those batteries. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up on my reading, since for 2006 I'm actually behind my not-so-ambitious schedule of reading at least a book a month on average (I know, a terrible score for someone who presumedly loves to read). And who knows, I might actually even do some writing.

A while ago, I suddenly realized that I have barely written anything in the past year or so, or even so much as thinking about writing. Not that I was a consistent writer in the past, but at least it did it more often than now.

The one thing that worries me the most is the lack of ideas I have nowadays. I used to have thousands of thoughts swirling in my head all the time. I would mentally write a new scene while walking to the train station for instance, or make up new characters while lying in my bed. I just had to figure out how to make all those separate ideas into a coherent whole while filling out the many gaps.

I believe the reason for this was when I consciously put a temporary stop to those thoughts, because I thought they were hindering my personal progress in the short run. There were days when I really tried to work on my thesis, and wound up spending hours giving in to my creative urges. I figured it was more important to concentrate on finishing my thesis (which I decided to drop anyway) and finding a steady job first. Once those worries were out of the way, I could start concentrating on my writing again.

As it turns out, it doesn't work that way. In the past, the reason for my lack of writing was that I tended to dwell too much on the details, and because I hated what I did manage to write. But now I don't even know what to write about. Which is one of the (many) reasons I started blogging. I hope that by forcing myself to write on a regular basis, I would to able to lift the mental block I put upon myself.