The Infinite Number of Truths

I guess there’s a lot of things I could talk about: the Royksopp show, free drinks at the top of the Marriott, soccer today. But I just don’t want to. I’m feeling melancholy today and I’m not sure why.

Luckily, Symbion Project is just the perfect music for this mood.

So you know my whole thing about how relationships are really dependent on circumstance. I’m always kinda bummed out about this because, of course, who knows what might have been, in an ideal world? One in which jobs, distance, age, societal constraints, prior/current relationships, and so forth are never factors. It seems that circumstance is especially relevant when it comes to marriage: marriage necessitates a certain maturity and mindset (“Okay, I’m ready to settle down for the rest of my life…”), and how many relationships fail because the people involved just didn’t happen to develop that mindset yet? It seems like it’s totally independent of everything else that makes a great relationship, which leads me to feel that you get married to the person you happen to be dating when you finally acquire a proclivity for marriage itself.

All this aimless thinking has had a good effect, though; I realized the other day that I’d like to forego the foregone conclusion (har har) and fight circumstance… and end up marrying the right person, not just the “right now” person (to paraphrase the Nields). That is, I’d like to find marriage before it finds me.

Before everyone starts emailing me, no, I have no plans to get married soon! Just my usual rambling thoughts….

Here’s a meta-thought: I can’t decide if I think too much. Well, I think all the time, constantly; I just can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I can’t help it, either way, but then again by extension I can’t help thinking about thinking either :). The positive thing about thinking all the time is that when I have a discussion with someone not only have I thought out my side of the argument to a ludicrous degree, but I’ve also thought out the opposing side of the argument (and my corresponding counter-arguments), often in greater detail than the person with whom I’m talking. So it’s easy to lay out my position and rebut just about every opposing point thrown at me, simply because I’ve thought of all of them already. The bad thing about thinking all the time is that it sometimes drives me nuts (twice, once in college and once here, I’ve bought a discman simply to drown out my thoughts on the way to and from class). The worst thing about thinking is that I have to fight doubt all the time.

Why doubt? Let’s say you’re trying to prove a theorem. It’s really hard to prove that it’s true, because you have to show that for every case, it works. But it’s really easy to show that it’s false: just come up with one counterexample that doesn’t fit the theorem. Same, for me, with matters of character and action. I can think of a lot of positive things, but they’re never conclusive, and that renders them ephemeral; but if you think long enough, you can come up with doubts, no matter how obscure, and doubts linger and accumulate and debilitate. Having doubts is bad, not only because there are things you are not sure of (“am I a good public speaker?”), but also because that uncertainty itself is paralyzing (“I can’t even convince myself that I’m a good public speaker; how could I convince anyone else?”). The person who thinks he’s good has a much better shot at actually being good than the person who doesn’t.

Consider the arrogant jock who is so sure of himself that he never stops to think — and therefore doesn’t doubt — and therefore has nothing to doubt about.

P.S. Andrew, welcome :).

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