i'm stepping up to indicate the time has come to deviate

I can't figure out why I'm in such a great mood, considering that I should be miserable; it's after midnight and I'm at the office, but that's partially my fault because I decided to blog from work before going home. Also, I wasn't at work the entire time; after a meeting from 6:30-8pm, I decided that I desperately needed a steak and a glass of wine, so I went out for dinner to this tasty (if overpriced) place underneath the DART rail line a couple of blocks from the office. I sat there for quite awhile, enjoying the fact that I wasn't working, eating my extremely rare steak, and drinking wine and cappuccino. Mmm. Then I came back to the office and did some housekeeping-type stuff that I've been putting off for ages, and now it's time for me to go home so that I can come in and do it all again tomorrow.

While I was at dinner, I had the pleasure of listening to a raging fight between a couple sitting two tables away from me. I felt sorry for them--it would have been one thing if they were just on (what should have been) a final date, but clearly they were living together or married, since they were talking about their yard and each other's families. It was not exactly pleasant to listen to, especially since they weren't trying to keep their voices down much and she was really laying into him, but it was certainly thought-provoking. Of the three couples in the restaurant whom I could observe without being obvious, one couple was fighting, one couple was talking quietly, and one couple wasn't talking at all. I'm becoming more and more convinced that I don't care about getting married unless I can avoid the fighting and the silence; it's one thing if it's a comfortable, companionable silence, but it's another thing if there's silence because you no longer have anything to say to each other.

It's interesting, though--I don't think I've changed much at all, but the things that I'm obsessing over have changed, which theoretically implies some growth/change within me over the past few years. I spent a year or two obsessing over whether or not guys are willing to date girls who are funny, but I'm pretty much over that--if a guy can't handle that I have a sense of humor and am not a completely vacuous, boring loser, then I don't want to date him. I also spent awhile obsessing over the fact that no one ever calls me 'Sara', but I haven't been thinking about that at all because it turns out that I typically love the people who don't call me 'Sara' more than I love the people who only know me well enough to use my conventional name (with the obvious exception of my family, although many of them call me 'Sara Jane' anyway).

There are other things I've gotten over, but I don't want to share all my secrets. I'm currently obsessing over a) what to do with my life and b) the end of the world, which is refreshingly different from my lamer obsessions with popularity and self-confidence. By 'end of the world', I don't necessarily mean armageddon (although that's fun too--Mayans!). Rather, I've been thinking a lot about all of the traveling I want to do to find those 'end of the world' places that exist around the world, scattered at the edges of lost civilizations. I felt that Dun Aengus on the Aran Islands was one; Fatehpur Sikri in India is another. Now, I want to find as many of them as I can. This may not address my other obsession of what to do with my life, but it sounds like a fun thing to pursue while I'm figuring out everything else.

Okay, that was enough introspection for one night. Time for bed!