05.30.2002 - 1:47 p.m.

A few weekends ago when my family drove up to Michigan for my bro�s graduation, I spent several hours in a car alone with my dad, during which he attempted to explain quantum teleportation by way of Schroedinger�s Cat. The conversation sort of shifted towards relative truth and certainty in general. This weekend, he gave me a book: Goedel, Escher, Bach � an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. To scrunch it into much less space than could possibly hold it, it�s about uncertainty, iteration, and paradox. And why if you ever start in one place and then make repeated moves away from that place, you will almost always end up right where you started. And why �42� isn�t actually the answer.

It is so cool.

And that�s why all the other kiddies used to make fun of me in grade school.

****

Lately I�ve had the urge to indulge in laughter- the slightly bitter kind best used to acknowledge irony or self-contradiction.

My cat likes to sit on our balcony all day. She bats at the ants and entertains bloody fantasies about the birds. But the funniest thing is the way she reacts to people. Whenever someone walks past, she shoves her head right up against the railing bars to stare, absolutely still, as if she were the hunted, not the hunter. If those people start to talk, and especially if the voices happen to be male, she lets out a sort of throaty squeak and sprints back into the apartment as if pursued. Where she skids to a halt, looks around for a frozen moment, then hurries back out to watch. Hahahaha.

Last time I kissed a guy, I broke it off and fled back to my friends� guestroom, where I decided there wasn�t anything to be afraid of. Really. But I didn�t go back out, or even really talk to him before he left the next morning. And the last time I met a guy I thought I really liked, I wasted most of the time watching him while I flirted with the safer people on the other side of the bonfire. (Safer = less likely to matter.)

Hahahaha.

-stonebridge

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