this is cartography for beginners

If you showed me the heartbreak, if you showed me that every time I loved someone they would break my heart, I would still choose love every time. Tennyson is right, this is what it comes down to, that it truly is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. Even with the whole of this summer, the hell of this summer, love is worth it. Even with the year-and-a-half black hole I seemed to fall into in high school, love is worth it.



Q: If love is a game, why do I take it so seriously?
A: It is not a game.



The rules keep changing and I keep losing, and we play love like a game, but it is not what we make it.

I've spent most of the day curled up on my bed (at least I am not pregnant) reading about physics, from Aristotle to Gordon Kane (maybe he is well-known in the realm of physics, maybe not, I have no idea), and including: "Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution" (Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson).

Grand unifying theories just seem like god, to me.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about god, lately, too, what with my New Testament class and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but mostly it is the Hebrew god that I've been thinking about, and how demanding he was. He was just as needy as the other gods, he too demanded steaming blood on the altar, is it just that gods are envious of our corporeality? I've always been fascinated by the evolution of sacrifice in the whole of the Christian Bible: the near-slaughter of Isaac to the blood of animals to the crucifixion of Jesus.

But now my head is spinning with things like Planck's constant and effective theories and grand unified theories, and I keep thinking about my secret attraction to science and math. I'm actually pretty good at science and algebra, but I declared my alliance to literature back when I thought there had to be divisions and I have stayed in that camp. Because of that, I was decidedly not a "math and science person" so I never really tried. I shone in anatomy & physiology, though, and I was pretty good at algebra. It is that old truism, the more I find out about, the more I find there is to find out about. This world is filled with so much, and there is beauty to be found in all of it.



Also: see this. This whole snake thing goes back further than I think.

what i've learned most lately is that you can't force things, because too much of my life has been me trying to force things into being something they're not.

i don't want to be here, mostly. missing things is hard.

love is beautiful and powerful and it hurts so bad and we all need more of it.

oh oh oh, i think i've really gone insane this time.