Fire and Ice

I went to Improv last night, but left before it started. The Black Box was packed, mostly with people who irritated me just by existing, and it was one of those nights when I didn't want to be around people at all, really, so I left. I went to the Algebra instead.

Mark was there, fiddling about seeing a show and joining a band, and left pretty quickly after I got there. I sat at the bar with Phil and watched him roll a cigarette while I drank my water. And somewhere between actual closing time and when the patrons began to leave, things fell into place for the kind of conversation you remember for years afterward. We talked about being antsy, about wanting to get out and away, about the sense that life should be more joyful than it is right now.

I told him that I'd seriously thought about running away to San Francisco with someone I barely know, just because it wasn't what I'd been doing and maybe I needed a change. He talked about trying to graduate in a year and taking full-time summer classes and wanting to be able to be engaged in his learning before he went to med school. We talked about love, about our significant others. About our careers, about our fear of settling down and becoming more of the newspaper-subscribing population. And I said two of the saddest things I think I've ever said:

"Everyone falls in love. I mean, you want to think that it's this blissfully unique experience and that no one else evers loves like you, but it's a fact: most people fall in love, and most people get married. Love is so mundane."

"I looked back at a past relationship, and I realized it was abusive in a few different ways, and I was in love with him. Really, really, in love with him. And I don't think I ever want to be in love like that again. It's just easier, more comfortable, to be cold and to not be in love."

I feel like right now is the time to change, if I'm not going to be this cold and hard for the rest of my life.

Phil also said something else much more interesting last night, about related connotations of words. He started out talking about Arabic (and I wish I could relay this conversation the way it happened, with lots of scribbling in Arabic on random pieces of paper) and Hebrew and how the word for peace--shalom in Hebrew, salaam in Arabic--is related to the Arabic word for submission, islam. We talked for a while about how this connotation is buried deep in the subtext of a language you can only really have spoken since birth, and he brought up the following sequence of words in English:

endure, endurance, duration, during, durable.

I found this to be easily the most cool thing I'd heard all week.