Sunday, January 06, 2002
Some life
Lets see what sort of trouble I can get into by sitting down to compose
a journal entry without having any good reason.
First, a dance over the ephemeral trivialities of my existence:
The surf has been, and continues to be, BIG. Lots of sessions that have
kept my adrenal gland active.
The wind has been strong off shore. Had a wild windsurf go out yesterday,
tearing along in the turbulent gusts, then swimming against the wind and
current back into shore with the rig.
It seems like it's quite often that I'm the only surfer or windsurfer in
the water. This should probably cause me to worry more than it does.
I continue to beat my head against quantum gravity, currently by trying
to get the Hamiltonian variational formulation of general relativity
done properly, which has been taking MUCH longer than I thought. And
this effort is just to be a warm up for taking the same approach to
Kaluza-Klein and the quantum.
Living in the new house is great, for the most part. Good view, good
breeze, good kitchen. There's an ugly computer monitor hovering in the
middle of the living space, however, and my eyes seem drawn to it,
wherever I am in the room.
The feature "bug of the month" is the earwig. We live next
to a pineapple field, and every month a different species dominates and
makes its proprietorship known to us. Last month it was the gnat, and
before that, a brown cockroach-like thing. The geckos enjoy a varied diet.
A neighbor's tangerine tree is being very generous.
On into the emotional realm...
I've been on relationship autopilot for the past two months. A has been
in San Diego, building up enthusiasm and making preparations for her move out
here. I've seen J a handful of times, but mostly she's been avoiding me
-- largely (in my opinion) due to the influence of her live-in non-boyfriend
boyfriend, Bl, and because she is filled with feelings of ominous doom over the
arrival of A. Turns out the two of them may end up taking the same
class at MCC. Heh. So, except for the occasional phone conversation
with A and hug from J, I've been living a quiet life of solitudinous
bachelorhood. Which isn't so bad. And it's good to have B here to
share the solitude with, which sounds oxymoronic, but seems accurate.
But B is being hormonally drawn towards the Mauitian culture and the
feminine allure of swishy sarongs and mystic love pie. Can't say
that I blame him, and I would head in the same direction if I didn't
have A showing up in a matter of hours with a large carry-on bag full of
love.
Our long distance relationship is about to become very happily short
distance. It's been very odd, digging back in my poor memory to it
being really good to be with her, and looking forward to having that
again, while at the same time being and feeling as my usual alone self.
Anyway, my world will change a lot when she steps off that plane.
I do still think about T occasionally, and probably more than I should
at that, but it's been a couple of years now and the thoughts, though
still torturous, don't carry the same emotional hooks they used to. I
sent her a book I hope she likes. She's still oddly enmeshed with
mutual friends in San Diego. I can't do other than not bother her
much and think maybe she'll see me as friend again rather than enemy
some day.
I seem to have headed back into that emotional state where I can spend a
long time in a good relationship without a lot of emotional strain,
which is something that causes me some emotional strain, and perhaps is
a sign that I'm heading into a better emotional state. Anyway, it seems
good to be having these sorts of emotions again at all.
And so back to a deeper look at the aforementioned ephemeral
trivialities... as what meaning would these activities have for me if
they were only the habitual motions of body and mind?
Perhaps I enjoy the fear and only feel really alive when I perceive
myself to be cheating death. That would be odd, since I'm rather fond of
living, but not so odd, since it's the dynamics of living that makes it
attractive, and a part of that dynamic is the ending.
And, OK, I do get an ego boost from looking back at the crowd of people
and other surfers lining the cliff at Ho'okipa and all wondering who
that one crazy bastard is out there about to take a twenty foot set wave
on the head. But I'd do it if they weren't there, and have. It's fun.
In a big way.
I like to think of myself as different. As above (sometimes literally,
which explains an affinity for high places) and better than others.
It's the same hubris that lets me work on physics that everyone else
has failed at, and has even driven others, some smarter than I,
mad. It's not so much that I'm fool enough that I think I can do it,
but that I think I'm fool enough to give it a shot, and just maybe get
lucky.
And what more is a life for than to risk on great things?
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