#332

Because of my grimy, checkered past, I find myself in the interesting position of being simultaneously denied the use of my financial aid by my institution, and called to be honored by them for outstanding academic performace. Guess the bodies in charge of these separate processes don't communicate that much, or at a very granular level, or something. An appeal has been filed, and I have been assured that it should be granted, but who knows. Haven't RSVP'd to the honors thing because even if all goes well I have a natural aversion to being honored and even if I got over that it would be too bitter, I think, for the opposite to take place and be honored and denied at the same time. I don't fuckin know. It's so much easier not to think about this stuff. When I got that email, about being denied financial aid despite all my A's and pulling my GPA up more than a full point, an old familiar part of me rose up in my chest cavity and told me to say fuck it, quit everything, go back to just reading whatever the fuck you want all the time and forget this noise. I won't--but can't pretend it wasn't a struggle for a minute. And I do miss being my own teacher and the only one, but this new situation is nice too, and I do like it. Perseverance! How annoyingly necessary, how perversely vital.

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Went to the Toledo Zoo yesterday with Ezra and my mother-in-law. It was pretty great. It's so good to look at creatures. Organisms are fucking incredible. The whole enterprise was lent a special interest because I've been reading the work of Eugene M. Marais, specifically The Soul of the White Ant, and it's amazing work, and has me thinking a great deal about the nature of what life truly is, what constitutes it, e.g. the body and the possible interpretations of what a body is; where it begins and ends, and what life leaves behind when it departs what has been its vessel, or the billions of vessels which make up the vessels which make up the vessel. And in the end, is it all white light? The light of God, as the Sefirot says? That seems to be the secret that lies in quantum mechanics, in the oneness of the universe, in the illusory nature of the separateness of being. That we are vessels made of light, filled with light, and life and death only changes in refraction. A crystal universe, with infinite light radiating throughout. Concretions of imagination, metaphors and stories as atoms and molecules.

Also been reading that book I got about Giordano Bruno. Fucking good as FUCK.

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Dunno. Maybe I'll write a letter to the Pope about it. He's supposed to know. Don't wanna bug the guy, really, but I'm curious about what he might say to me, if anything. I mean, the chances that the Pontifex of Rome would ever respond to any letter my apostasical ass would write him are so slim it is comical, but sometimes you write and mail a letter because it's a thing, not because you seriously expect anything out of it. There's a letter to Disney I'd also like to write, for all the difference that would make in the universe. 


--JL