Saturday night things just weren't going very well, for various reasons. Al was out teaching someone to drive a manual, and I was home and being depressed. When he got back, we both decided that we needed to go out and do something, so we went to Scottsdale Skate Park, and rollerbladed all the way to Tempe Town Lake, and around until we ran into a fence stopping us from going any further. On the way back, I managed to fall and scrape my knee pretty bad. If you want to see it, I took a picture of it on Sunday, but figured I'd spare the rest of you and not post it in the journal (at least for now). It looks pretty bad now, but at the time it was more of a nuisance.

Monday at work I spent all day working on one problem, and didn't seem to be any closer to a solution than when I started. In the evening, since I had nothing better to do I watched the weekly episodes of 7th Heaven (which seems to be getting increasingly cheesy and unrealistic), and Everwood. I like Everwood, and I'm not quit sure why. Its about the only show that I would make a point of watching every week - I know, and miss Monday Night Football. I really like when they have the scenes of Ephram playing the piano. I wonder if I could have been that good, had I kept at it. I don't think so, I don't have that much talent, or motivation for that matter. Anyway, there was this memorable monolog from Ephram at the very end of the episode, he was reading an essay he wrote for his english class about his worst flaw. I found the text in a messageboard, and thought it seemed to describe my feelings at that time, at least somewhat, so here it is:

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m not sure who the first person was that said that - probably Shakespeare or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it’s the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don’t think that I’m alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I get to realize it’s kind of everyone’s flaw. Staying exactly the same, for as long as possible, standing perfectly still. It feels better somehow; and if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took that leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected, who knows what other pain might be waiting out there? Chances are, it could be even worse. So you maintain the status quo, choose the road already traveled and it doesn’t seem that bad - not as far as flaws go. You’re not a drug addict; you’re not killing anyone, except maybe yourself a little. When we finally do change, I don’t think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion where all of a sudden we’re like this different person. I think it’s smaller than that. The kind of thing that most people wouldn’t even notice unless they look really really close, which thank god, they never do. But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference, and you hope that it is, that this is the person you’ll get to be forever, that you’ll never have to change again.

It really got me thinking - have I changed? Am I different now than when I graduated college, or high school, or even middle school? Sure, I may know more, be a bit wiser, but have I changed, is my personality any different, from a big picture point of view? If I were to ask people I knew up thru middle school, people I met in high school, and college, and now at work to describe me as a person, how would those descriptions differ, if any? What else can I do to measure this, since interviewing people isn't likely to happen. My next thought was to think of how people treated me, or my perception of that. People tend to treat others based upon the other person's personality, so if my personality had changed it'd stand to reason that other people would treat me different - at least those who hadn't known me previous to that change. As I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that either 1) I haven't changed very much, or 2) My perception of how others treat me is wrong.