I wish I had a little haiku or something for you guys, after not being around for so long.

I'm currently frustrated because I had this really beautiful thought about grace n' stuff, but I can't remember what verses it was actually based on so. I think I wrote it down somewhere, but I can't find it anywhere. guh

I'm quite peachy. I have...plans for the future. Neat plans. :D

...I think it's in Hebrews...

I'm just going to leave this here.

Wait. No.

I was thinking about words. And the brain. Honestly this isn't my forte so this might not seem very profound to you...but the brain is friggin' cool. So much of what we do is just done automatically by little parts of your brain without you needing to worry about it. Like words. We have a thought we want to express, and some part of your brain internally translates that into bite-sized chunks, and then into the actual words. And then some other part automatically translates that into the muscle movements that form the sounds that other brains will translate back into raw thought and emotion.

But what if we didn't have those embedded functions? I'm not talking about neglecting to learn language. I'm saying, what if your brain didn't translate your thoughts into words? What would you have left? If we can't order our thoughts into words, even internally, how much room for thoughts do we even have? Assuming we have souls that "live" outside of our brains, how much of that capacity is included in our souls? Speaking of which, if memories are chemically etched into our brains, and a soul is somehow non-chemical in nature, do our souls have memories? How does that work?

mmmm

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As always, I find that it's most difficult to begin. Once I make myself log in, it's almost easy!

news. news.

So, to reiterate, I got dumped. That's been a journey. I like to think I'm dealing with things much better than the last few times I've been dumped (or rejected!) but honestly, who's to say? The most recent news on that front is that I just learned that homegirl is NOT interested in picking up a friendship. Sure, maybe some time in the future (after I move away lolol) but apparently not now. This befuddles me because:

!) We have literally dozens of dearly loved friends in common and we see each other roughly every weekend. At church. You know, unity in the body and all that.
!) You said (when you dumped me) you valued our friendship and that you wanted to be friends.
!) You told my friends (about two months ago) you were sad that we couldn't talk, that you would like to be friends again soon, etc.
!) Your friends have been telling me (this whole time) that the best way to consider you would be to make efforts to bridge the gap so we can be friends. (Now they maintain the opposite.) Such discrepancy. Wow.

I am dumbfounded. I am found dumb.

So obviously that's confusing, more than is apparent here, and hurtful. See how I switched to the second person up there? Yikes!

OTHER NEWS
I'm planning a second tattoo. I have this really cool idea that combines math (golden ratio mostly, also with lots of circles and fractals!) and spirituality (I actually got the idea from reading John 17 where Jesus prays for unity between the disciples.) Basically it's about how everything is connected and the universe is founded upon the concept of relationships.

Since the concept is strongly mathematical, it's impossible for me to explore ideas by hand. So, I wrote a tiny bit of software in order to generate an image based on my idea. If that isn't geeky then I do not know what is. It looks something like this:



It needs a lot of work before it becomes anything resembling art, especially TATTOO art. But it's a good start.

Now the only problem is finding an artist with the right style to pull it off. I discovered David Hale yesterday and almost peed my pants in excitement because this man's stuff is gorgeous. But today I discovered that he doesn't accept appointments from new clients anymore. Sort of. He sends on about a dozen original designs once a month in a newsletter, and people have to pick from those. One customer per design. That disappointed me greatly because the dude is less than an hour away from me!

I'm thinking of exploring my thoughts on forgiveness here. Let me get back to you.

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This is less dramatic/emotional and more story-telling.

I was considering the pros and cons of approaching homegirl and letting her know that I didn't feel great about the way she's been acting since the breakup. I'm not going to get into it anymore here because it isn't that important. Anyway, I was planning on maybe talking to her this weekend or even next week, but at our service on Wednesday she actually approached me and asked if we could talk afterwards. I was caught off guard, after ~3 months of silence.

It was a pretty minor conversation. She'd found out that I'd been hearing she wasn't interested in being friends, and she was pretty upset about it and decided to set the record straight herself. It's sort of a moot point now, since she just announced that she's moving to another state in a few weeks. But I still appreciate the thought. I took the chance to let her know that I wasn't feeling very well-considered, blah blah blah.

At one point she looked absolutely miserable, and the following occurred.

"You don't have to look so sad."

"Well I'm sorry, it just makes me sad that you're sad!"

I paused. I was not trying to garner pity or anything similar from her, and I certainly didn't want her to get the impression that I'm falling apart or anything, though of course I'm not exactly peachy either. The problem is she's extremely empathetic and emotional, whereas I'm so over-logical sometimes that I barely register my own emotions, much less those of the people around me. I tried briefly to explain that being sad isn't the worst thing in the world, that life is actually going pretty well for me, etc. None of it really sounded convincing and I didn't want to keep pursuing that line of thought, so I finished lamely, "Besides, I'm not really that sad."

Uh oh.

"Wait, I mean, at least not right now."

wait wait wait

"...you know, I'm just going to let that one go."

Thankfully she laughed a bit, but MAN that could have been a doozy.

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In college I had a joke with some of my friends about how streetlights seemed to turn off when I passed by, slightly more often than you would expect. When it happened, we would all burst out laughing. It was an obvious example of heuristics gone wrong, but it was still amusing. Even last week, walking my friend's dog halfway across the country in my new home city, I still texted them when two lights on the same street went out as I passed.

It's kind of reassuring that those jokes won't go away. Kind of like this community. The website is quiet, for the most part, but it's neat to be able to come back and poke around.

I got a job. I moved (again?). I'm making friends. I miss you guys though.

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