moominmuppet ([personal profile] moominmuppet) wrote2006-05-24 01:36 pm

Thoughts on a meme...

The meme is:

When was the last time you touched another person? Who? Where? How?

I'm not actually sure, and it was almost certainly something very casual and fleeting; passing items from person to person and such. Actual memorable contact with humans would've been Saturday, at the CLAW volunteer party (many hugs).

I don't tend to think about the human contact thing all that often, since the pets fill that need pretty well (when I'm at home it's rare that I'm not in direct physical contact with at least one other living being), but overall it's one of the trends in my life that I'm less than thrilled about, and it seems to mostly be circumstantial stuff that just feeds itself -- the less random contact happens in my life, the less used I am to it, and therefore the more awkward and weird it feels, and therefore the less there is, etc. It's one of those weird areas where my self-image and reality have grown very far apart. I think of myself as a very "touchy-feely" person. I certainly have been in the past, since I was a kid (my personal goal every Sunday was to manage to hug everyone at church before the end of the Peace -- I did a lot of mad dashing about).

Some parts of the change are good things -- learning that not everyone wants the same kind of physical contact that feels/felt normal to me, and learning not to invade their space. Some parts feel more like I've gotten a bit oversocialized by the work world, though, and that I tend to bring the 8-hour-a-day non-touchy habits home. And a lot of it, I suspect, is just changing circumstance. More and more of the people I'm comfortable being touchy-feely with aren't within physical range most of the time (even when thinking about local folks, the difference in face time now, compared to high school or college, is certainly drastic).

Oh, time to go!

[identity profile] dhimahi.livejournal.com 2006-05-25 02:00 am (UTC)(link)
The last time I saw and hugged my daughter.