Better to Keep Your Mouth Closed...

and thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt. (sometimes attributed Abe)

I've missed some weeks on my Blog. Honestly I've been too busy to have much time to thinking about anything interesting, and I didn't really feel like rehashing my responsibilities and stresses and all that. I'm sitting here with a highly unidentified knot in my stomach.

Have you ever caught yourself furrowing your eyebrows, or sighing, or...biting the inside of your cheek. I can't remember not catching myself doing one of those things.

So good luck to you in these last two weeks. I hope we both make it.

Big Brick Buildings

At the time, I was complaining about being in love. It’s hard to think about much else when you think you’re in love. So my sister told me a story our neighbor, Mrs. Becky, told her. She was an art teacher. In college, all she could think about was her boyfriend, who I've only ever known as her husband, Mr. Jody. She painted a building, and in every window, she painted his face. It was hard to imagine that anyone could be in love with Mr. Jody. I never saw the painting, but I’ve always pictured a big brick structure, perhaps with a looming metal fire escape, with lines and lines of Mr. Jody in the windows. Lines and lines of arms posed just a little differently each time, lines of blue and green sweater vests and a psychologist's thin-rimmed spectacles— and a serious faces, half obscured in shadow.

Mr. Jody has scared me ever since the day he turned me out of his house for dipping my finger into his daughter’s bowl of strawberry yogurt. I was only eleven when it happened. That kind of thing sticks with an eleven year old, especially one like me. The image of Mr. Jody lurking behind a hundred windows haunts me like one of those ghost stories that you don’t really believe, but that makes too much sense to write off altogether. I’ve never really been able to picture anyone in love with Mr. Jody. But what do I know about love?

I’ve not got any tenants these days, no one in residence in the space between my ears. And I don’t mind, really. Except for the shadows. Black forms moving listless across my eyes, making me seem dark and the world seem dark and we’re all in this together aren’t we? But it doesn’t really feel like it. It doesn’t feel like our world; it feels like someone else’s, like rented space. There’s no way to belong in a world like this. I don’t know a thing about love.

The Second Law

I've been a little obsessed with the first law of thermodynamics since I heard it. "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed." I've just always found it a very elegant concept. When I think about it for a while, I start to picture the universe like a great big undulating mass, pulling and thinning in places, forming mountains and planets...people. All the complexity of life contained within each of those things is part of the greater complexity that is all those things. But then I peer in real close and think, It's all the same. It's like when you zoom into a picture until it becomes all pixilated. Eventually it just looks like a bunch of squares. I like it.

But recently, and this might be kind of ridiculous for a sophomore college student, I learned the second law: "Energy prefers to exist in a state of chaos." What a gorgeous sentence, and so true. I mean, it's true molecularly. But it applies to people too. There is something so beautiful and vibrant in chaos, and this is coming from a girl who likes order. I mean really likes order. But I'm not sure that chaos is the absence of order. To me it's more like a different arrangement of the same energy everything is made of. Maybe exposed, searching for purpose...like all of us. But essentially the same.