philosophical thoughts on a sine wave

I want to be a nicer person.

I know that I'm not a mean person. I know that I have good intentions (I'm just waiting for someone to call me Pollyanna at work), but I also find myself being extremely critical and downright condemnatory at times. I'm not sure why I do this - I think I'm having a harder time with events of the past year than I would have guessed. ('Course a complete life-course revision is a bit disorienting.) It just makes me feel bad to look around and realize how self absorbed I get sometimes.

I often chalk it up to the fact that I miss having a guy care about me more than the rest of the crowd. I want someone to sit by me and laugh at all my jokes and have funny asides and personal jokes, but I also feel wary of (sometimes invaded by) people who seem to be trying to do just that. This whole thing has been very hard for me to to get over. I know it may sound like I expect a lot from myself, but it's been six months for heaven's sake - how long is this going to take?! I especially don't like that it makes me have such needy-person tendencies, and I'm pretty sure that I overcompensate when trying to counter the tendency. For whatever (annoying) reason, I've been feeling lonely - I miss being special to someone. For whatever indeterminable reasons, that seems to have made me more critical of everything (others, myself, objects, situation) - why? you ask, I have no idea.

I know this is depressing, but realize it's 1am after a 57-hour week. I do believe that some of this negative introspection is sparked by the long hours - thinking too much is admittedly an occasional fault of mine and lack of sleep makes me prone to self condemnation - but that doesn't excuse/make up for talking bad about people. I find myself saying whatever I'm thinking too few seconds after it passes through my brain, then I get so passionate and wound up about whatever I just said, it comes out much more negative than I intended. I sometimes wonder at the fact that I have kept so many of my newfound friends despite this behavior. What could one do about this?

I've never really tended towards 'critical cynic' before, but I feel like I'm moving that direction and I don't like it. I want to be friendly and cheerful and happy and kind. A recent bit of advice (about a different situation) was to 'go with the flow' more, stop thinking so much about everything, but I keep finding myself stuck on rocks in the 'flow'.

My recent reflections bring back early memories of my dad and his sine waves - I love being related to engineers, they can graph anything.