Solo

Long and rather emotional ramble follows - breaking my rule of thumb for keeping this blog for matters unrelated to my mental state.

I'm like a bird
I only fly away
I don't know where my soul is
I don't know where my home is
- Nelly Furtado, I'm Like A Bird

We watched Keeping the Faith tonight - it's a movie with Ben Stiller as a rabbi and Ed Norton as a priest (yay!) and they're both in love with Jenna Elfman, who I think has the best-known example of what Michael Ooi calls "phoenix-sharp eyes". It's a great movie - romantic comedy and buddy movie in one, and excellent at both - but it reminded me uncomfortably of something I've been thinking about off and on lately. That is, the question of finding a mate.

I thought I'd had, once, but SD realized before I did that the different directions we were aiming ourselves in weren't compatible and took it upon himself to break up. With EK, there's always been an explicit acknowledgement that neither of us will be in Madison for long from the beginning (okay, the beginning being when we ended up making out in my bed the fourth time we went out).

Aside from that, there's the issue of him being an American, and also an atheist - that one standing out in big blinky neon letters to my more conservative friends. Aside from that...I've been doing a lot of empathizing and quietly embracing and being a comforting presence, and let me tell you that comforting a depressed boyfriend when you're feeling "miang" sucks - okay, that's tangential. The issue is that I've never had any reciprocal compassion or empathy from him, not even when I fell off my damn bike and kissed the pavement a couple of weeks ago (some years back after I got hit by a car while riding, SD freaked out when I told him why my knees were scraped). I like EK in many ways, but trust is not one of them.

Things have worked out unexpectedly well between us. I wanted to see if it was possible to date someone 'for fun' and not 'for serious', the "poke it and see if it moves" scientist's ethic (obviously not a Joshua Harris fangirl). Funny. He's had sex with girls, but says I'm the first time he's had "anything approaching a girlfriend." Ah, the decadent American culture. It was alarming some time ago when he said he loved me, because I would use those words for a psychological state of a totally different order of magnitude, and as above I'm somewhat doubtful that they represent that state in him.

Maybe I'm scaring myself, because when I make the commitment to start grad school later this year, it really will put me on the road to becoming a career biologist. The character Piya in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide embodies the idea of the female biologist that I'm worried about turning into - someone very capable of being attractive but is too caught up in world-saving activities to have the time to even make a home for herself, let alone finding one with another person. I mean, that's clearly not true for people who've settled down as uni faculty or in some other institution, but for people whose work involves a lot of international travel, it probably is, and that's going to be me.

I listened to Ghosh's book on audio, and the 15th CD is a bonus interview of him by the reader, Firdous Bamji. Ghosh talks about how he met one of these young wildlife biologists (somewhere in ex-French Indochina; forgot which country) and talks about how much he was impressed by her dedication, but also says how she was living alone with "only a little dog" as a companion.

Jodi said something while we were in the Philippines (it's amazing how much about your professors' personal lives you can learn by going to a small college): "No, you should marry early. Don't be like me."

Someone asked me recently, "But what if Mr. Right is here and you're missing out because you're dating this guy for fun?" Answer: He can't be. No relationship is going to become "serious" until I figure out where my life is going. People talk about singles having a lot of free time, and of marriage as "getting hitched", like a horse hitched to a wagon. On the other hand, unless you're some sort of complete hippy, being single doesn't mean you have no commitments, merely that you're committed to other things - ambition, career, living or wanting to live in specific locations, groups of friends, etc. Maybe being with someone for the long term would provide a different kind of freedom, in that one could work out one's life with a mate and let the other aspects of life work themselves out.

Look at life in terms of desire: what do you want most, and what are you willing to trade off, and are you sure that trading one or a number of things for one other thing will, eventually, give you something you would have wanted more?

You can characterize love in many ways. I think - not sure, certainly - that for me, the defining characteristic of being deeply in love with someone would be that I'd be willing to change my life for him, and I would want him so much more than the train tracks of my freedom that it almost wouldn't hurt.

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Yeah...very personal. It's 2:31 am and posting this will probably be a cause for regret when I'm more awake.