Ask King Status the First on His Crowded Throne (1/28/09 Wednesday)

My boredom is only a lack of challenge. The challenge of reading is more than finishing the book, but the challenge it presents to my mind is not often the challenge I seek. If I could define what I seek I could refine my choices to match it. The challenges I can't define are the ones I don't make for myself. They present themselves, unbidden, and I accept them or don't. In setting no schedule, talking to no one, doing no chores, I am not challenging myself, and into the breach steps boredom, a new challenge. Boredom challenges me to fail at putting emotional distance between myself and Julie, which, with mention of her name I have just done. I'm kidding no one--myself, that is. If I took a year off and came back to work and saw Julie, all would be lost. I did not succeed in ignoring her for very long, and now I feel she's won. Won what? I have no regrets anymore over the email I sent her; it said things that had to be said and gotten off my chest. And though I knew damned well she would not respond in any concrete way, I, of course, still hoped. There was no communication at all about it, except for the first few days afterward, when her behavior toward me mirrored mine toward her, tacitly acknowledging my email. Those were my last satisfying days at work, bitterly ironic as that satisfaction was: Her acknowledgment of my deliberate cruelty (though it could only be cruel if she cared) was the rise I used to want to see as a blush. Then Saturday we exchanged smiles and shared a spontaneous laugh, and, suddenly, the status quo was back in power.

Is this a challenge I just can't give up? Am I destined for another humiliation? What's to gain in continuing? What's to lose in giving it up?