The Doldrums

this is the worst part of the vacation.

today, i went to the dentist. which in and of itself is enough to ruin a good day off, but also i finished the book i was reading, i have seen all the worthwhile (and some other) films at the dollar theater, and school starts in about a week. and i miss it. i miss the stimulation, i miss the socialization, and try as i might to fill my inquisitive mind in my time off it is inevitably at my own pace which is admittedly glacial. its so much more efficient to have someone else cramming knowledge down my throat.

Um, so about that book. i just finished "love in the time of cholera". i was supposed to have read it last semester and written a paper on it, only one of those assignments was graded, and that is the one i did. in retrospect, my paper was not that ill-informed for being based on assumptions gleaned from in class discussions. in my professor review at the end of the semester, i promised to read the book in the upcoming break (after having admitted that i did not read it prior to my paper){this did not effect my grade}. the novel is every bit as good as you have heard it to be, and if you haven't heard that you're hanging around with the wrong sort of people- go out and get you some literate friends.

it is a beautiful story that is so well crafted it deserves the praise it recieved, and yet easy to read and become engrossed with. it is about love, and sex, and the passage of time. that is an over-simplification, but thats what we're focusing on here. what i found most poignant was the idea of love between the young, between people before marriage, being entirely different from love between married people, and also just between old people who are "dating". over the past nearly seven years i have learned the differences between dating and being married, not all of them related to sex. this book illuminated for me the results of those years of study.

I will never have the same relationship that i had with my wife before she became such. We are never going to be giddy and amused with each other's company all the time. don't misunderstand me, that is not as depressing a thought as it sounds. But in all honesty, i have tried very hard thus far to try to fight my way back to that place. marriage is occasionally hard, and in those times it has been easy for me to look back with longing for those days and use that idealized snapshot as a blueprint for a future that looks as rose colored as when we were dating. what i should have done, nearly seven years ago, was close the door behind me and build a strong foundation for a marriage that does not mimic the way we were when we were twenty, but builds something that will be sustainable when we are fifty.

so this book has given me a lot to think about, i love that about art, and education, you never know how something will hit you and suddenly other seemingly unrelated things come together. go read a good book, it will make you a better person.