That turns out to be surprisingly important. The routine while working settles down fairly quickly until even given the time and opportunity to head out and entertain myself, I simply don’t have the energy or will to do so. Living the drab life isn’t awful in any traditional sense–I still exercise, eat, sleep, work; strictly speaking I’m pretty high up in the hierarchy of needs–but it makes me feel more than usual like a machine. Without creativity, without the mental energy to exercise that creativity, I’m more or less going through the motions of life.

Vacations are the only time I know of in which I can refresh that well of creativity and start feeling human again. I could tell that it was working about halfway through when I started cleaning and cooking for the friends with whom I was staying. I’ve made, or had a major hand in the making of, cuisines from three continents (including General Tso’s Chicken, from scratch!), a bunch of writing, three or four toy programs (including a full implementation of Pong!), and a yet-to-be-launched website for a friend while out here. None of this, strictly, was required. All of it was a wonderful exercise in proving that I am in fact more than a machine which takes in money and churns out work.

The vacation is nearly over: I fly back tomorrow. I’ll have spent a ton of money and nearly all my accumulated leave in exchange for these 30 days in the US.

It was worth every bit.

I want to be able to walk up to someone at a party and start talking about why investing in space technology is a good idea (There are finite resources on Earth, and finite amounts of energy that we are able to harness. Though this is still true of the universe at large, there are enough orders of magnitude of difference even within the solar system that we shouldn’t need to worry about resource starvation for a long time to come. No, we don’t have the technology yet to harvest these, but we can at least lay down the infrastructure which will dramatically ease the process when the technology arrives. Furthermore, the act of laying down the infrastructure will spur development of the tech. needed for more ambitious projects.), and have them contribute. I want more than just nodding and smiling and letting me rant, I want people to come up with points that I hadn’t thought of. I want people to shoot down my ideas as completely impractical! But I want them to be willing to explain to me why my ideas won’t work.

I don’t have a very complete understanding of the theory of relativity. I know two tenets: the speed of light is an absolute limit, and speed is relative to the observer. This means that if I have a reference point, and send off two probes in opposite directions, each at .9 of the speed of light, their relative speed will not actually be 1.8 times the speed of light, that being impossible. What I don’t understand is exactly what their relative speed will be, why it will be so, or how to compute it.

The thing is, I can only ask so many questions. What’d be really nice would be if people would be willing to educate each other about their areas of interest in the context of casual conversation, so that I could learn arbitrary interesting things without having to go seek them out. I’m sure that everyone’s got something to focus on, something that they are expert in which might potentially be interesting. Maybe any one person will have only a few of these topics; I can talk about computers, games, computer games, and science fiction. But in a culture in which it’s acceptable to just offer discourse on something you like, there are enough people around that surely something would find something interesting to say.

I often have a hard time in casual conversation with strangers, because I don’t watch TV, rarely see movies, and thus have nothing it’s socially acceptable to talk about except the weather. The weather is, at best, a limited source of conversation. How do I get people to respond to the things I’m interested in? How can I talk about extremely high-level computer languages (meaning, more near natural languages) without someone changing the subject before the third sentance?

Do I really have more varied interests than the common person? I don’t think so, or at least I hope not. I want to think that if there was a social convention for it, I really could talk about the things I find interesting and have people respond intelligently, even if they have no training in the area. I want other people to be talking about the interesting things they think about, so that I could occasionally think about something different.

The basic problem is that I’m not sure how to accomplish this.

I think I’m reverting to the persona I used in grade school: devoting a lot of time and energy to schoolwork, and excelling as a result. Of course, this doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for anything else… luckily, I’ve already got friends, who don’t have to deal with how I am in the classroom like this. Because I don’t think that I’m going to make any friends being the teacher’s pet.

So, now I’ve been thinking. How can you really define love? Coriolinus, the more I think about it the more I agree with you. Like I’ve said before, while I don’t think I need to wait till I feel ready to marry someone to tell them I love them, I do think it holds a lot of meaning to say you love someone. I want to be sure of my feelings before declaring my love because to me it’s a declaration of strong feelings and increased commitment.

The bible says “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. – I Corinthians 13:4-8. Out of curiousity I looked up the definition on dictionary.com. Dictionary.com defines love as “a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance” and the Oxford English Dictionary defines love as “that disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities or from instincts of natural relationship) manifests itself in solicitude in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment”. This bible passage along with both defintions seem to emphasize the significance of love – it’s not something to be taken lightly.

Relationships are adventures. I think now, more than ever, that love is best when it grows with time. I’ve come to think that a relationship does not need to start off with a declaration of love, but rather it starts off a little unsure, a little unsteady, and grows over time. If it is strong enough it will eventually blossom into love – the kind of love the bible passage I quoted earlier speaks of – a true love where those involved hold back nothing, realize that every moment is meaningful despite how insignificant or ordinary it may seem at the time, enjoy the little things in life, and find themselves smiling just because they’re together.

There are as many definitions of love as there are people; it’s just a poorly defined word in English (and I suspect it is in most other languages as well.) It’s easy to point at a rock and identify it as a rock; it’s easy to call it grey, or drop it and call its motion falling. It’s not nearly so easy to point at a couple and say “they are in love;” that’s why a huge amount of popular entertainment involves setting up scenarios where love is clearly involved.

Real life is (almost always) much less clear cut; it’s full of doubts and fears. That’s why my definition is different from the bible’s; though it’s a wonderful piece of prose, I don’t think that it works out so well when you try to apply it to the real world. If you look at people who get divorced on amicable terms after 20 years, by the bible’s definition, you have to say they weren’t ever in love, because that would contradict the last clause, about love never failing. That hardly seems fair, not to mention inaccurate. The way I see things, love is like a fire: it burns hot, warms you and lights the world for you… and it requires maintenance, or it’ll burn out, and even with the best of maintenance there could be a downpour and you’re suddenly just out of luck.

Another way to look at it is that to lock it down, to define your life strictly by it, is almost to kill the whole notion of love. People are always learning, always changing, always growing. That’s why the whole notion of a romance that lasts until death is so appealing; it means that the people involved were compatible enough that even as they grew, they grew together. But it’s entirely possible for people to be in love, but slowly grow in different directions. If they decide to stifle themselves for the sake of their love, to cease their growth or shunt it in an unnatural direction, then they’ve stopped being in love. I’m not exactly sure what to call the situation at that point, but it’s not healthy, and it certainly isn’t love.

You’re absolutely right that relationships are adventures: they start off uncertain, unstable, unskilled. However, as time passes, you grow more confident, more comfortable, better at it… Relationships end either because of disaster, or because it’s simply not fun anymore. In that respect, they’re exactly like adventures. Again, that’s why long relationships are impressive: they speak of both compatibility and luck.

I’ve been going on about how people keep growing, changing. Or at least, I probably should have been, as it’s a cornerstone of what I’m trying to say here. What about the people who don’t change, the couples whose relationship is exactly the same after 40 years as it was on their third date?

Entropy can, in general, be considered a *bad thing*. It is responsible for all inefficiency (in purely physical systems); it will eventually cause the heat death of the universe (assuming the universe hasn’t collapsed in on itself by that point). The way people usually visualize this is that everything runs out of energy; this is of course impossible. I’m pretty sure that’s the First Law of Thermodynamics. What actually will happen is that all the energy in the universe will get distributed absolutely evenly across the entire volume of space. The only things that will go will be concentrations of energy, like matter.

However, entropy is an inescapable consequence of the progress of time, in conjunction with the presence of randomness in the universe. You could stop time, or you could eliminate all randomness and uncertainty… either way, you end up with the same thing: stasis. True, there would be no entropy, but at the same time, nothing would ever happen, ever. I would consider that fairly hellish, actually.

The last two paragraphs were actually a huge analogy designed to answer the question in the last sentence, three paragraphs ago. There may be people willing to live their lives without any change, without any risks, without any growth. But the very thought of trying to live /my/ life like that makes me feel faintly queasy.

I’m fully aware that many people have definitions of love far less strict than my own; it’s the only way the concept of love at first sight could possibly exist. Who am I to tell them their definition is wrong, either? Even so, what it comes down to is that they’re using the word love where I would use a milder word, like ‘interest.’ Interest at first sight seems perfectly reasonable to me. But then, say they’ve determined that they’re interested in someone, and called it love, and gone to great lengths to establish a relationship with that person. Say things go well, and there is romance and fun and all sorts of good stuff. How are they to even begin to communicate the extent of their (hopefully now deeper) feelings?

It’s getting harder to get everything done.

School is over in 4 weeks.

Pershing Rifles pledging is done in 2 weeks.

Sigma Pi pledging gets done around the same time school does, but it’s more flexible.

For all of these, there is studying, work, activities that consume my time and my energy.

And in two days, I’m going to be dead because several of these deadlines pile up… now I know why they’re deadlines.

Let’s just say that I’m not looking forward to the number of pushups it’s likely that I’ll have to do then.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my primary meal of the day yesterday was the Mexican dip; I’m pretty sure that it had enough calories so that yesterday I didn’t actually lose energy…