validation, reinforcement, identity

I got a little closer to figure out what it is I'm looking for every night when I return and return to the computer instead of going to bed.

Tonight I stood at the door of the office for a minute and tried to find the feeling, what would satisfy me, what would make me feel like my search had been satisfied?

I couldn't think of a thing, a thing in particular, but I got a sense of a feeling, like I feel when practicing guitar (sometimes), or watching a TV show that wholly absorbs me (Sopranos was the best, although the effect has been lost), or reading a very well-written, smart, funny article on something about which I am passionately interested (when you scan down the table of contents in a new New Yorker and gasp and immediately turn to that page and read it all in one go, wherever you happen to be sitting down). Emails from certain people will satisfy it, or sometimes a new Astrobarry horoscope or excellent comment thread on Cute Overload or certain All Men Are Liars blogs on the Sydney Morning Herald, but usually not a single xkcd cartoon, and since I've read them all I have to enjoy them one at a time now and that won't do. A long IM chat with almost anybody would to it, but some maybe more than others and I hate it when they say goodbye first. YouTube videos usually, although lately it's taking more and more of them for the same effect (I had the first one at a party, the guy just gave it to me....).

The colours of this mysterious thing are lots of black and red, and dark wood grain, with little bits of white to highlight or to provide contrast for text.

What is it? What do they have in common, and what is it they're doing that allows me to go to bed, and the lack of which makes me unable to go to bed?

I think it's some kind of validation of my personality. A mirror, maybe? A member of my tribe, who comes from my same planet and is like me and understands me? The success includes a feeling of absorption - I lose myself, my selfconsciousness, in my experience of the thing, my consciousness is all directed outward for that minute, or 2 minutes fifty, or 48 minutes because the DVD doesn't have ads. I lose myself in the thing and I also find myself in the thing. The thing makes me feel like myself is okay. And it also entertains me - gives me enough to think about, uses language artfully and cleverly, provides insights, or portrays a rich and engaging human character, is funny. There's an emotion to it too - detached and funny, but also melancholy, or something darker than melancholy. Think of Christopher on the Sopranos. The tone of many of his domestic scenes - not the later seasons with the cardboard cutout of a wife, but with Adriana or with Tony or Carmela. Just home from something intense, but dealing with it as a man. Really clever in his use of words, flashing eyes, amped up from some adventure but also a bit doubtful about the meaning of it all. Working, struggling really hard for a goal that's a long way away, full of passion for it but not sure the work is ever going to get him there, and it takes his all.

Yeah.