my so called life

(Post Card by Stella Marrs)

at times i live a bit too much inside my head. i'm a reader. i love to be transported to another space and time, to travel without ever leaving my arm chair. reading may have had a powerful effect on my vocabulary, but at certain moments in my life i have to wonder if my literary overindulgence has romanticized my sense of reality. surely it has much to do with why i'm so fascinated in art. art is another form of transportation. for those of us who really take our time when viewing art, it is like a mini vacation in an artist's mind, and that space can be very, very far from where we stand.

i don't read much romance, so i had falsely come to believe that my thoughts on romance and relationships were solidly rooted in the concrete, the cold hard facts of one animal attaching itself to another and all the beauty and joy that action can create. my father is a science teacher and i've spent most of my life the one Darwinian hold out in a sea of the spiritually gifted. Eugene is not a widely religious community but there is a great deal of sort of mystic spiritualism. when conversations turned to things like love at first sight or "meant to be" i was always the one bringing up chemically immediate instinctually based physical reactions to reproductive stimuli. but this isn't because i enjoy being a buzz kill or i don't believe in romantic love. i just find the natural world and its processes to be fascinating enough to be spiritual in their own right. i've never found an intellectual curiousity to seek out a higher power. i'm still dumbfounded by the hundreds of thousands of species of flowers on the earth and how they came to be, to me that is god.

unfortunately my intellectual stoicism often gets me in trouble. i miss read peoples emotions. i take things people say at face value. when they say vehemently "i'm over it" i believe them, rather than looking for the subtle shaking of the hands that might speak to doubt. let's just say that i get confused easily. 

 (Crimethinc.com, read their "Days of War, Nights of Love" - it will change your life and how you react to the hype.)

i can be fairly impulsive. i have an infatuation with spontaneity, but combined with my scientific framework that i tend to view human relationships with, this can lead to mass confusion. it seems strange to me that i can supercede the pragmatic side of my brain when i'm thinking about art, but not in my personal life. when i'm talking about/ thinking about art or especially viewing art its as if i leave behind my scientific body and reach another plane, one that i meet people on who i can't seem to understand in the day to day. if i have spirituality in my life its diety is art. when i walked through the Frick collection in NYC i felt like i was in church. i had a profound sense of the unearthly and intangible. 

it seems like lately life has been trying to subtly remind me that i have to be able to blend the two side of my brain more seamlessly, add pragmatism to my interpretation of art, and bring awe into the human relationships that i form. 

  

(Darwin's Finches)

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(Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa)

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(moi)