You can file this one under "complacency." And "smiting."

There are times when I'm sure that "smitten" really is the past tense of "smite," because I feel like I've been hit by something blunt and heavy (that's the smiting part) and I don't really mind (that's the smitten part).

A long time ago, when it first occurred to me that I might like the idea of dating Matthew (which was about year before I did date Matthew), I remember Katie telling me about the undesirability of long-distance relationships. (At the time she was engaged to someone who was in Washington D.C., which is sort of far away from Minnesota.) So, much later, when I had a reason to, I mentioned to Matthew that Katie had told me long-distance relationships are no fun. He said, "That's not true. They're sometimes fun."

Indeed. They are sometimes fun.

It's not just the actual rarity-of-seeing-him factor of the long-distance relationship that bugs me, it's how that causes us to act when we are together. In contrast, my previous boyfriend lived a few minutes away from me, so we'd randomly visit each other (or not, if we were busy), do homework, watch dumb stuff on TV, and in general live our lives with the other person as a nice component of said life.

But now I live most of my life without Matthew around, so when he is here I pay attention to little else. Usually when I miss someone it's for some specific reason, but I find myself just wishing he was around. So when he is around, I have all that's necessary to make me happy and so I can't think of anything else to do. And when I'm around he's less inclined to do the stuff he usually does, which mostly involves computers and being antisocial, because he can do that more often than he can spend time with me.

So this makes it sound like we don't have any fun together. Which of course is wrong, but hey, I could stand the chance to get complacent! (That's a joke, of course. I don't believe in complacency! I'm smitten, remember?)

Yet despite how much we like to spend time together, by no meand do we spend it all with each other exclusively. There is the implication of comfort or security implied in not feeling like you need to be conjoined twins--in the metaphorical if not the physical sense--and I really like that. I thought of this on Sunday when Matthew and Seth were putting Slackware on Seth's secondary or tertiary hard drive or whatever it is, and I was in the living room watching the Twins. He doesn't like baseball and I don't know anything about Linux, and we are not delusional enough to think that only the other person is interesting. As fun as it is to be with Matthew, it's also fun to live fairly normally while he happens to be around.

Nice and helpful

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seent he shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision ... Will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
--The Republic, Plato

This is from the famous allegory of the cave, of course, in which prisoners have spent their whole lives in this cave, chained so they cannot move and can see only the shadows of things behind them that obscure the flickering firelight. The above quote is what happens when one of them is released and shown what he has been missing.

And I think I have found an instance in which I am that prisoner, because I have been freed. I am no longer the driver of a crappy station wagon, but a free (and frighteningly powerful) tank. Things here are somewhat like what I'm used to, but sometimes unrecognizable, and it's then that I'm told I'm living in a truer world. It blinded me at first, but I think I'm slowly becoming acclimated, and realizing that though there's a lot I don't know yet, I know there are people who know a lot, and I believe them when they tell me it's better here. In the course of a weekend I went from (nominally) being lke 90% of computer users to being in some much smaller fraction of the population.

And when he remmebered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity him?
--The Republic again

Yesterday I told Katie about how it took half an hour to get the CD-ROM drive to work, and then remembered that she might not know the context of this epic battle, so I asked if I was making any sense, and she said, "Yeah, the 'Linux,' " and it sounded like it should have quotation marks around it like that, which is why I put them there. And then it occurred to me that there may be a person or a few people around here who have only heard of Linux because of me or Matthew or Seth.

Yeah, Seth was caught by its allure too and asked Matthew about putting Slackware on the part of his hard drive he doesn't use much anyway. Another freed mind. Ha!

Yestrday Josh said he didn't know if he'd ever want to switch to open-source software. Until he got to the last word of the sentence I'd been expecting it to end differently; I told him there's a difference between open-source software and an open-source operating system, and that I'd been using stuff like Gaim and Mozilla for most of a year, after being introduced to them when they showed up on my laptop, which Matthew put Linux on when he borrowed it last fall. They're basically indistinguishable from the programs he's used to, I told him, except they make sense and people actually try to fix things when they go wrong. He wasn't convinced, but that's okay.

Matthew: I've probably written almost half of this report now.
Me: I wish I'd done something so productive.
Matthew: Like what?
Me: My inability to come up with a good answer to that question is probably my problem.
Matthew: You could have been learning programming languages!
Me: I suppose. Why do I want to do this again?
Matthew: Right now, because you wished you were productive.
Me: Yeah, but what do I need programming languages for?
Matthew: Being a geek.
Me: Oh yeah.
Matthew: Actually you could just start with figuring out more of Linux.
Me: Hey, there's something useful.
Matthew: Since Seth has it, too, you'll have to be careful or he'll get ahead of you.
Me: He knows more than me anyway!
Matthew: Then you're already behind! You'll have to work fast to catch up.
Me: You're so mean to me.
Matthew: I'm not.
Me: This is all your fault. I could be a happy, stupid Windows user, but no, you had to go and enlighten me.
Matthew: That's not mean. It's really a very nice, helpful thing.
Me: Oh, so you're nice and helpful.
Matthew: Yes.

It's a rough job. But somebody's got to do it.