The last non-book post I wrote was on New Years. Some things have happened in my life since then. Shit a lot of things have happened. I started skydiving in mid January. I have done that a lot. I found out I was not going to do the thing I thought I was going to do around April. This led me to think about what I wanted to do for work as I had to actually think about that again. I started BASE jumping in May. That is really a special thing, but I am taking it really slow. I turned 31 in July, and that did not really change much. I moved to Paris and started working at a startup here in early July. That has been quite the change. I fell in love, and that is pretty amazing.

I am not sure what I actually want to expand on here. I do not really feel like writing about everything, and at the same time I do not really feel that I want to share some things. So maybe I should just leave it as a shitty list of things that have happened and not really expand on anything.

I do not really have a reading goal this year so I have been reading less. This has felt a little more relaxing as I am reading sometimes in the my spare time, but other times I am just doing other things or relaxing. I put some pressure on myself to read more at times and it made some of the things I was reading less enjoyable.

I started writing a bit more this year. Nothing that is ready to share yet, some fiction, some poetry, some just thoughts about things as they are going on. I will put something up here if it is worth sharing, but most of it is personal or not that interesting.

I broke my hand while skydiving in Belgium, the 3rd metacarpal. I already have screws in my 4th metacarpal from breaking it while playing football when I was 17. This break was nowhere near as bad as the old break, so I did not need surgery. Also because of where the metacarpal is and what you use it for, there really is not a cast or anything you can do for it. You just have to deal with some pain for a few weeks.

Since I knew I was going to be out of commission for a few weeks, I decided to get a surgery that I have been thinking about for a long time. Let me just say it was precipitated by something else that happened which combined with the known downtime, as well as expected time before seeing someone again, it seemed like the right time to do it. I am about 9 days out from that surgery and it is certainly annoying. It is healing as expected I guess, but it is one of those things that I really just want to be fixed already.

My french is getting a bit better, I am working on it every day and I am immersed in France, so hopefully I will be conversational soon. I am already at a point where I could probably live for an extended period here in Paris without learning more french and basically be able to get by. There are a fair amount of people who speak english, and I know enough basic french to do simple things. So it is really up to the individual if they want to put in the work to really learn. If I was outside Paris in a tiny town where no one spoke english, then I might be forced to learn a bit more, but even then one could just not talk a lot and be frustrated.

From mid January through basically the 4th of July, I was skydiving almost every day. The longest gaps I took were at most 4 days, until I went to Idaho to BASE jump. Although that gap does not count in some sense, as I was still flying canopies. Then I took a gap to go learn to paraglide, also arguable as to how much of a gap that really is. Now that I have been in France, I have not been jumping as much and I am getting really antsy about it. Part of it now is healing up. I am okay with that. But once I am healed, I am trying to get a sense for how I can work skydiving and BASE jumping into my normal life. When I did not have a job, I just stayed in a tent in Eloy and jumped all the time. Now I am working, in a city that is not that close to a dropzone, without a car. I will figure something out I suppose. I have a few different paths I can see, but I guess I underestimated how much I had gotten into doing that a lot.

Then there is the whole biggest change in my life which is meeting someone that totally alters how I see the world. Lauren and I were together for so long, coexisting to a large extent, and looking back I see in a lot of ways that it just was not a great relationship. I can see that I did not have the feelings for her that I did not know existed or what they felt like. There was something missing, part of it was how I acted and saw the world. But part of it was a fundamental just mismatch. Not that we probably could not have struggled through it, and done some things differently, but eventually it was not the right match. It is tough from the inside to see the possibilities that might exist on the outside. So while I was with her, I was pretty sure either we would get married or I would just be single forever. It seemed like, well there are some things I like, some things I do not, but it was really hard to see the potential for something completely different being better. Like would not everything have pros and cons, would it just be that it would take more or less time to figure them out? And then when I did, would not that just be basically the same. Should I just settle for what I have and try to make it as good as it can be?

I think there is a bit of truth in that, nothing involving another person is ever going to be in a state of pure perfection. That is okay. You want someone that you can grow with. Someone who is going to grow in their own way, while you grow in your own way, and who you have something together which also evolves over time. You want all of these things to be moving towards where you want them to be. So yes there are good and bad times, there are good and bad traits in everyone, but that does not paint the whole picture. There is more to a relationship that the individual characteristics of two people shoved together. There is a whole greater than the sum of the parts. There is also a lot to be said about genuine feelings which can only fully be appreciated by knowing thyself. I have done a lot of introspection as well as expansion of my feelings that have led me to better understand who I am and therefore what I want and who I can and cannot be for someone else. I have also been able to understand better my behaviours and thoughts within a broader context than just myself. This has really allowed me to believe in something that has been really spectacular so far.