Don't you nosy snoops have anything better to do than to wonder about my clumsy old love life?
Sigh.
Didn't this post tell you all you needed to know about how it went?
Don't you know that I have no interest in becoming Stephanie Klein: mining my own and other peoples' emotional vulnerability and then cutting, shaping, and polishing the fragments into glistening shiny pieces intended to dazzle a hungry flock of spectators? She's a terrific writer and in moments real, wise, and luminous, but so much of her writing lacks kindness. She tells other people's secrets without hesitation, and although she appears to expose everything about herself, there's something contrived and at times a little bit cruel about her confessions. I have the same impulse to tell all, to sort and process my experiences by writing about them, but I am very, very suspicious of that kind of narcissism in myself. I hold back a lot.
Sheesh.
Plus, what is that physics principle that says you affect the nature of a particle by observing it? Is that Heisenberg, or someone else? I think Heisenberg said you can either know where something is in space or time, but not both. And related to that, somehow, is the fact that you change something just by looking at it. And plus plus, he's one of you, a blog reader. How would you feel about dating me, if you knew I might process my thoughts here?
So lay off if I don't say too much. Those are my disclaimers.
Now I'm going to go ahead and tell you about my weekend.
Good things: He's great. He's kind. He's smart. He knows himself, without pretense or shame. He's easy to talk to, and to be silent with. He knows a lot about sailboats, and loves them maybe even more than I do. You can look out on the water from his kitchen, or walk down to a beach littered with big and small round rocks and chunks of soft driftwood. You can walk toward a point and look across to the lighthouse and when you're walking you can jump from stone to stone and he'll hold your hand and help you make the biggest jumps. If you are cooking him breakfast, he will pick up his guitar and play you a song, and maybe you'll both start to sing. If he's cooking, he'll make friendly conversation or let you read undisturbed, maybe bringing you a glass of red wine. He reads, and he writes. On walks, he notices big trees and stops to look at them and points them out to you and tells you what he would like to make from their wood. The place he lives is lovely; the place he works is a fairy tale. He seems to understand me, and he likes the things about me that I like about myself. I make him laugh. He thinks about what I say.
Bad things: He's still half broken-hearted. He's unfinished, in transition. He needs a lot of time, and I think I'm muddying up the waters and opening up some wounds that haven't finished healing. And it's mutual -- although the memories he stirs up are much older and less intense for me. His world -- the rural landscape and the frost heaves on the road and the cape houses with acres of woods and fields, the boatsheds and the men in Carharts wearing sanding masks and the trucks and the Co-op bakery cafes and the reddish-black blueberry fields, burned for the season with granite boulders poking up out of the lumpy ground -- all of that imagery reminds me of the world I lived in right out of college, off up the coast, far from friends and family. That time of my life wasn't great for me. I was lonely and unsure. I gave up too much to be with a man who didn't give me much back. There is a beauty about that world that pulls on me -- again -- but when I left it and came down here I built a world that fit me much better. The three hour drive between us is a drive for me back to a world that reminds me of a time and place I was far less happy than I am now. Navigating the long-distance part of this long-distance relationship is fraught for me with the idea of compromise and sacrifice and failure.
That's all you're getting, and probably that was too much.
No, not too much - just enough, I think.
By the way, I would never compare you to the loathsome Stephanie Klein. I hate her writing, both for its overwraught style and its viscious narcissism, and after a very brief foray into her horrible blog have stayed far away. You, on the other hand, write with a clean, honest, forthright, beautifully evocative style, and your posts are a lovely part of my daily reading.
Posted by: mad | April 27, 2005 at 01:02 PM
Wow.
On a simpler note, Heisenberg said that there is a lower limit to how well you can know the combination of where something is and it's momentum (how fast it is going, for most purposes). If you know exactly where it is, then you have no idea where it is going (take a picture of a ball in the air, got any idea which way it is headed?); If you know exactly where it is going, you have no idea where it is (harder to illustrate).
Posted by: David | April 27, 2005 at 01:31 PM
footnote: in quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum.
--Wikipedia
Posted by: Sui Generis | April 27, 2005 at 01:31 PM
I thought it was Shroedinger (spelling?) who made the observation about the particle. There's a book about it as well... Schroedinger's Cat or something.
Posted by: Scheherazade H. | April 27, 2005 at 01:47 PM
Actually, I thought the sunshine/rain post was excellent. No need to add to it.
Posted by: boo | April 27, 2005 at 01:49 PM
I'm sorry if we pried too much. Thanks for sharing, though. I wish you much luck in this uncertain time. I know something about blogging too much about personal relationships. I think you've gone about far enough (IMHO).
Posted by: Denise | April 27, 2005 at 03:03 PM
In re: Schroedinger:
You can formulate answers to Schroedinger's Equation, which is the basic idea behind quantum mechanics (there are more sophisticated ways to describe it, but it gets you into philosophical, almost religious debates). The answers describe a state of 'being' for an object. Then you can describe the act of observing a particular feature of this state of being. An effect of the way that we describe this observation is that it changes our initial formulation to something else.
Here is a pretty bad analogy. I'm Mark Mcgwire. I am watching a fastball. I swing the bat and connect. I have successfully measured the location of the fastball by putting the bat on it. But, by measuring it, I have knocked it asunder and probably couldn't even put it in a thousand cubic foot box at any later point in time (until the bleachers do some observation of their own). So, by 'observing' it, I have changed its state.
It starts to make more sense when you try to 'see' things that interact on scales where, say, a photon has influence.
Posted by: David | April 27, 2005 at 05:18 PM
Sheesh. I pour my heart out, and all you guys want to talk about is whether I got the reference to physics right? I'm laughing here, (at least on the outside).
Of course you're welcome to comment on whatever captures your attention.
I guess I feel a little vulnerable here, with a post like this.
Posted by: Scheherazade | April 27, 2005 at 05:23 PM
Didn't want to comment too much on you for a reason. You did pour your heart out. Apart from "Wow," I can't really say much more because I will pry, pry, pry (I'm nosy like that). I'd hate myself to run headlong across the line and piss you off. Physics is otherwise pretty safe.
Remember, I like your blog because you are the gregarious stranger in the cafe. I don't want you to pick up your coffee and move to another table.
I can understand how you feel when going someplace harks back to a different time and place in your life. I regard myself as having lived in two distinct places prior to settling in New Jersey. I basically grew up in Maryland and I spent several years in Arizona.
When I go to those places to see the important people from my life then, I get a little out of sorts. I'm not that person any more and don't really want to do the things that I did when I was there.
When I am in Tucson, I don't want to have dinner at Frog and Firkin, I don't want to have drinks at Maloney's, and I don't want to race home so I can watch Seinfeld re-runs. But those are the things that I feel like I should be doing when I am there, and it is UNCOMFORTABLE to be drawn back into those ruts.
I would be much happier if I could see my Tucson people somewhere other than Tucson. I think that I know how you feel when you make that drive.
Posted by: David | April 28, 2005 at 12:39 AM
Please don't become Stephanie Klein. Reading her blog is like talking to a 13 years-old girl who believes that everything she says is insightful and worth hearing. Frankly, it's a bore.
Posted by: | April 28, 2005 at 08:51 AM
Stephanie Klein thinks she is Carrie Bradshaw.
Posted by: girltuesday | November 10, 2005 at 11:33 AM
Where did you meet Stephanie Klein, I'm her number one fan, Nobody does the work that she does in our company.
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