a welcome
The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" feels like it's pulling on a muscle I haven't used in years.
---
COA is friendly and has real people write me letter to ask me to ask questions and to generally welcome me. So I'm writing a reply, with some questions. First I wrote an introduction:
"Right now, I'm pretty sure that COA is where I want to go, though to be honest, I felt much more sure about it last week."
And that summarizes my life.
No, not really. My life is not actually summarized all that well by the word "inconsistent". "Desultory" is closer, as it implies a sort of vacillation between a couple ideas, whereas "inconsistent" means several other unsatisfactory things like:
a. "Not regular or predictable; erratic" - I hate being predictable, but I am unfortunately a pretty predictable person - know me for a bit and you'll invent or notice a pattern I have of oscillation. You might decide that I'll hate you and love you, or that I'll leave and come back, or that I'll care and I won't, or I'll be sad and then happy, or I'll be honest and then an imaginative liar - it's all a matter of relying on my contrariness.
b. "Lacking in correct logical relation; contradictory" - which is not true for most of my vacillations, which are always induced by logic. I change my mind not because I'm nervous about sticking with something, but because I never stop reevaluating what I'm doing. "Contradictory" maybe, but not illogical.
c. "Not in agreement or harmony; incompatible" - largely incorrect again, as even through the different opinions and choices about living life I hold, I'm still convinced that any of them will work. It's a matter of choosing between things that seem to be equally wonderful in entirely different aspects.
But even "desultory" has its problems, as it uses the word "disconnected" in its definition, and I definitely see a pattern here, a chain of reasoning, or perhaps a cycle of reasoning. It also fails to include an essential element of my vacillations and life - intensity. I feel strongly about everything I feel, this is true. I worry, not unreasonably, that the people I'm around think that I'm faking at least part of my persona, when I laugh and cry within the span of 10 minutes, repeatedly.
I thought at first that maybe my desultory-ness was also desultory, which might explain how although it is predictable for me to go jump between perspectives, the time frame between them is not. But then there too, "disconnected' is a problem too. Triggers only seem arbitrary in retrospect.
I wanted to make a mathematical model of this, to make some nice curve (like a half of a parabola) and use derivatives to find a slope of desultory like a sin graph. I wanted to have derivatives upon derivatives of desultory-ness, but when I thought about this for more than a millisecond, I realized that the integral of a sin graph is still another version of a sin graph, as are all possible derivatives. Perhaps whatever adjective is more appropriate than "desultory" is necessarily fractal-like, and only caught up in tangles and mirror-images and bad translations of its original idea.
Perhaps the adjective more appropriate than "desultory" is "human", as I am.
---
COA is friendly and has real people write me letter to ask me to ask questions and to generally welcome me. So I'm writing a reply, with some questions. First I wrote an introduction:
"Right now, I'm pretty sure that COA is where I want to go, though to be honest, I felt much more sure about it last week."
And that summarizes my life.
No, not really. My life is not actually summarized all that well by the word "inconsistent". "Desultory" is closer, as it implies a sort of vacillation between a couple ideas, whereas "inconsistent" means several other unsatisfactory things like:
a. "Not regular or predictable; erratic" - I hate being predictable, but I am unfortunately a pretty predictable person - know me for a bit and you'll invent or notice a pattern I have of oscillation. You might decide that I'll hate you and love you, or that I'll leave and come back, or that I'll care and I won't, or I'll be sad and then happy, or I'll be honest and then an imaginative liar - it's all a matter of relying on my contrariness.
b. "Lacking in correct logical relation; contradictory" - which is not true for most of my vacillations, which are always induced by logic. I change my mind not because I'm nervous about sticking with something, but because I never stop reevaluating what I'm doing. "Contradictory" maybe, but not illogical.
c. "Not in agreement or harmony; incompatible" - largely incorrect again, as even through the different opinions and choices about living life I hold, I'm still convinced that any of them will work. It's a matter of choosing between things that seem to be equally wonderful in entirely different aspects.
But even "desultory" has its problems, as it uses the word "disconnected" in its definition, and I definitely see a pattern here, a chain of reasoning, or perhaps a cycle of reasoning. It also fails to include an essential element of my vacillations and life - intensity. I feel strongly about everything I feel, this is true. I worry, not unreasonably, that the people I'm around think that I'm faking at least part of my persona, when I laugh and cry within the span of 10 minutes, repeatedly.
I thought at first that maybe my desultory-ness was also desultory, which might explain how although it is predictable for me to go jump between perspectives, the time frame between them is not. But then there too, "disconnected' is a problem too. Triggers only seem arbitrary in retrospect.
I wanted to make a mathematical model of this, to make some nice curve (like a half of a parabola) and use derivatives to find a slope of desultory like a sin graph. I wanted to have derivatives upon derivatives of desultory-ness, but when I thought about this for more than a millisecond, I realized that the integral of a sin graph is still another version of a sin graph, as are all possible derivatives. Perhaps whatever adjective is more appropriate than "desultory" is necessarily fractal-like, and only caught up in tangles and mirror-images and bad translations of its original idea.
Perhaps the adjective more appropriate than "desultory" is "human", as I am.