the problem with love, as i've discovered before and will no doubt discover again, is that you get so caught up in thinking that a person is exactly your image. that you vest so much into the idea that you literally can't realize it's wrong. it's impossible; it becomes a faith thing. you might say, what vesting? it's purely psychological, which doesn't make it any less powerful.
being in love, in retrospect, has helped me to understand religion. i've always thought of religion with the cold, dissective glare of the scientist, taking it apart, seeing why the memeplex has such a pull on people, seeing how it propagates, studying the spread and extinction of religions as one would detail climactic changes on a map of the earth. but i understand how it can feel to the people inside it; i understand how implausible it is that one could be wrong. you can waver, but you know what answer you want to be correct and you know that your weighing will always come out on the side of that answer. it's rigged.
i'm not sure where the difference between religion and love comes in, or even if there is a difference there or if it's just a difference between deists and me. both are purely psychological, and, as one train of thought goes, their holders are wholly responsible for their beliefs, in a way that children or drunks aren't. and usually i feel that way about them as well.
i've written my weblog software in such a way that i can't go back and edit things. more than a few characters, anyway. partly this is because it was easier to do and i didn't have to learn a particular thing about perl that i've been putting off; false laziness. but in retrospect it's good, it's interesting. it forces me to complete every train of thought i have; it forces me to deal with situations that i would otherwise just erase. it's a learning experience.
what's motivating a lot of this is reading ender's game and speaker for the dead. card's basic point in these books is that there are drastically different ways of thinking, so different that they can't be expressed in terms of the old ways of thinking. like all sufficiently arrogant people, i compare myself to ender. it's an interesting comparison. bear with my ego trip for a second; if you want, mollify the words by multiplying the force by one-half.
in ender's game, he is revered by the world for his numbers. for what he can do in the game, for his practical implications, for being able to plan and do tactics and whatever. but his real strength lies in perceiving people; he is able to grasp situations very quickly, which allows him to calculate instantly. this continues in speaker; he is accused often of having a plan, but really he's just acting on intuition all the time.
i often feel the same way, except without the billions of admirers and enemies. adrienne spoke once of a conversation she had with her father during which he was peppering her about me, trying to find some imperfection that he could latch on. but i had the numbers. and the numbers impressed him, and eventually he grudgingly accepted that i had the proper credentials. and to some extent i still have the numbers.
ender is much better than me at one thing: controlling himself to the extent that he can act on what his intution tells him is right. i mean this in the courageous sense; there are times when i can't bring myself to do what my intuition tells me. these crop up all over the map, and no one domain is particularly more representative than any other.
kelli, or perhaps i should say "you", is ("are") doing something very clever. she's realized that i write here far more often than i'm in the mood to write her. she's figured out that i'm exactly the sort of person who responds in kind, and she's baiting me on her webpage. it reminds me of the plan games that i played in college. i can't abandon the medium; it doesn't work that way. and there will be at least a couple more precious months, until i move on to the next phase of my life, until this becomes one more past project.
like ender, i feel pretty lonely. i feel that everyone who's ever been friends with me has moved on to something else. this is obviously a ludicrous statement; there are a lot of people in whose lives i haven't been replaced, and i know it. but there's no one who needs me. perhaps in my haste to construct such a person i issued dire, dire warnings to kelli. i'd like to think not; i'd like to think that, like ender, i never let my feelings get in the way of discerning the truth.
when i was younger, i invented a measure of the worth of one's life. (this time i do mean younger as in 11 or 12, as opposed to my stories that start this way and end up with me being 18 or whatever. but i digress.) it was simple: the number of people who consider you their best friend. i don't remember the rationale behind it, but there's something similar at work here: it's a quantitative measure, and i'm not used to being defeated in quantitative measures. reading ender only firmed this up; they stacked the deck against him and he won, so why can't i do the same? i refuse to believe the answer that it is because he is fictional. in any case, in the need department, i am "losing," 1 to 0. and a whole book could be written about that.