The night before I left for America last November, my boyfriend spent the evening continuing his unending pursuit to understand the philosophy behind my morals and daily opinions.  He refused to accept that I had no definite philosophy behind any of it.  Perhaps he strives to understand how he can love someone who he considers a Republican, never mind the fact that I find that a bit insulting.  I’m independent, thank you very much.

I told him that, since he said he’d actually like to write letters, that he can ask me these questions in letters, and I will answer them better since I will have the time to sit down and think about my answers.  I am virtually unable to answer questions like that while thinking on my feet.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve never taken the time, but it’s more likely to be because I am easily intimidated in deeper conversations.  I know little will come out of debating other than someone thinking less of me for my opinions.  Generally I find that with my boyfriends I end up feeling as though my opinions are unintelligent and illogical.  I suppose that is what comes with dating an economist.

So I write to him: What you might not see, my love, is that while you analyse people and the world through books on philosophy and politics and logic that line your shelves, I can look at the world through no other means than love.  How we love, our lack of love, our inability to, or our prejudices concerning love, I believe, make up the drive behind our decisions.  It’s not always even the love of people.  Love is entirely immaterial.  Some people love the feeling power and influencing the world around them gives them.  Some people love themselves more than anything else, and hat will naturally be their driving force.

Perhaps I have trouble voicing opinions on things like politics and philosophy because I love having people like me.  In college I got tired of being criticised for saying anything positive about writers like Ayn Rand, because clearly it meant I was a right wing conservative nut.  I know that opinions and views on life are like clothes, as silly as it may sound: what works for one person may not work for another.  So much of what I base my decisions on is what I think is ‘right’, tempered by what I considered acceptable in the society in which I live.  Anthropologically, I see nothing wrong with molding to the socially accepted norm.

So I suppose we will continue to go on looking at the world in completely different way.  He will look for the logic and I will look for the beauty.  But if we look at the Golden Ratio then we also know that there is logic and beauty, and any mathematician worth his salt will defend that there is beauty in logic.

And isn’t a great relationship, after all, supposed to made up of parts that complement each other?

While I do not yet consider myself a writer, I’ve always found writing to be the best way to release emotions, to better understand my own thoughts, and to keep myself creating.  Over the last few years I’ve made attempts to keep a journal, and since moving to England I’ve gotten much better at making entries at least once a week.  I find myself very frustrated when I’ve gone more than a week without taking the time to sit down and work through everything in my head on paper.  A writer’s block for a journal-keeper is probably the most frustrating type of block—for me it feels like I have no thoughts in my head at all when I can’t think of something to write.

The best part about journaling is going back through your entries and being able to see how you’ve changed over time.  My journal from my senior year of high school is a form of endless entertainment and heartache for me.  Reading through it a stroll down the clichéd memory lane that I could never do on my own.  Over the last few years I’ve realized that I have a horrible memory.  I have difficultly remembering why I ever liked certain bands, or how music affected the passion I felt for my high school crush, or why I even liked a guy whose face was covered in cocktail-onion sized zits (my oldest sister’s characterization of him).

More recent journals remind of topics that affected me or even inspire new ideas that I want to explore in writing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much Ugly Betty recently, but I want to start actually writing about things on this blog- not just documenting events in my life.  What good is telling the world about what you’re doing if you can’t offer a way for other people to connect to you?  So, while I know I have about 2 people who actually read this, I want to turn this blog into something worthwhile.  If I’m so desperate to get into the world of publishing, then it’s time I started proving that I actually have some ability.

Since graduating from a masters program I’ve had a lot of time for reading- or at least few enough things to fill the day with that I’ve done more reading than usual.  I’ve gotten through the first four Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, Love In The Time of Cholera (finally), The Power and the Glory, My Name is Red, and sadly Twilight, New Moon, and Skinny Bitch.  The last three were mindless distractions, but were at least enjoyable.

Of all of these, the two that have affected me the most are Love in the Time of Cholera and My Name is Red.  Perhaps it’s the descriptions of emotional passion, be it for people or careers or memories, that put these two books in my top book list.  After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude a few years ago, on the suggestion of a dear friend who did an entire art project based around the imagery in the book, I’m suprised it took me so long to read another Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. And even though I loved Cholera, I still think Solitude is the better book.  Reality is s ofar removed from the book that you spend half of it feeling like you’re reading it while standing on your head, which I can’t help but find more interesting than a love story- albeit beautifully written and constructed with moments of such truth that you have to stop to record sentences so you don’t forget them.

And what I like about both books, Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is the cultural settings that I am so far removed from.  Marquez’s South America is a place I understand only through being not so far removed geographically, and from knowing  people from that area.  Pamuk’s Ottoman Istanbul, though, is a world I will never experience beyond the pages of his book.

The romance in the book is not it’s strength, which was just the author’s intention, I think.  The best moments are the inner thoughts of the Sultan’s miniturists and The Murderer.  The passion he gives to their beliefs and convictions make me wish I could feel a calling the way Pamuk’s artists do.

In both cases, I am left longing to be doing something other thant tearing through books, sending out job applications, and knitting all day.  Can something please finally break?

Now to decide between finishing Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or starting either Middlemarch or Eclipse (darn you Stefanie Meyers and your addictive story-telling).