How sad is this?

Picture it; it's a Saturday night. It's fifteen minutes before eleven, CST. I am chez moi listening to Fem FM on the local NPR station, after having been the babysitter for a gorgeous couple whose life includes two sweet children and a more exciting social life than I, the young college student, am currently enjoying. It's hard not to feel a little self-conscious.

In the midst of it, however, I am happier than I have ever been. I am more aware of what I possess as a person and how I fit into a larger community. Frankly, I'm thrilled. So, why the blog? I feel compelled to write that I might cherish these emotions later as the weeks and months pass. My luck being what it has been so far in da '05, I figured I shouldn't trust my typed trifling to the hard drive of a computer whose basic functions are utterly unknown to me. Thus, I's puttin' it all out on the ether of the twenty-first century.

Okay, but why exactly the need to write? Today, I believe that I have come to a thorough realization about myself that I should probably work out more fully, if that’s possible. I need to feel able to discuss it and to visualize it externally as I am becoming more comfortable with what I assume to be a rare station for me.

I, for the first time since middle school, feel completely unattached to men. It is the oddest thing. That is to say, it's a new feeling. I have become unfamiliar with the notion that I desire romantically no man that is currently in my realm of existence. Not one.

It's both liberating and simultaneously frightening. It makes any sexual aspirations all the emptier. I don’t feel obliged to any man. An air of autonomy is the best way to put it; the void abounds and has become something real and recognizable.

What does this mean? Where do I go? For years, I had always been able to identify myself with the many liaisons of which I was a part, or, at the very least, with those liaisons toward which I pathetically aspired. And now, absolutely nothing. I am Christopher; I am no one's boyfriend and only the beloved of absent men. If anything, I am now fleeing the affection of a few with a new ability to be guiltlessly apathetic. There is inside of me the loss of a former sense of an almost chivalrous responsibility to men. I find myself asking, who am I?

Meanwhile, I look and feel better than I have in over a year. I have a much better sense of direction, despite being in my early twenties. It seems, then, that I can safely conclude that what I am doing on this Saturday night, my first weekend after classes have resumed, is not sad, but much appreciated and all-too needed.

I am fabulous, a notion coincidently reinforced because, even as I type, an empowering and uplifting song has just come on the radio. Talk about timing! I'm glad that I've got it. It's something for which people will wait a lifetime. So … if you'll excuse me; I'm up.