On complexes?

Sometimes I feel like people demand complexes (complexity?) of me that I can't deliver. I don't remember the first time I felt this way-- it was probably a long time ago, or maybe it wasn't; anyway I don't want to think that hard. I don't know if its evident worsening is me getting simpler or people coming to expect more. Or both.

There was S.L., a piano/composition student I knew in college with an Oppenheimer Complex large enough to be vicarious for all the world's scientists. He saw in me (which I cannot argue with and do not regret) a mind with which he could correspond. But what he thirsted for most, I think, was an antagonist, and I could only wearily 'get' him. Which was a connection, of course, but since I could not tear my soul for him, I ultimately couldn't grant him a piece of it.

Years later, a minister of mine announced to me that he perceived me to be an "intellectual," and asked confirmation.

"I cannot venture to say," I counterproductively replied.
"I also perceive that you have a deep testimony of Christ."
"That is true."
"This puts you at a precarious position with you faith."
"No, sir, I do not feel at all precarious."

He had nothing more to say to me. What was he expecting? What did he want? Was he hoping to catch me as I fell?

That's it, mostly, the main manifestation; people expect me to be very torn between my religiosity and my ("my"?) science. I'm not, and what's even more disappointing to them is that I don't even have any formulated rhetoric about it.

I'm sorry, and then again, I'm not.

C.B. is the worst for the cause. Also a scientist, and a physicist no less, he bypasses the expectation of philosophical complexes in favor of the social. It is my motivations he demands so much of-- I can only assume because his are so overwrought and convoluted. C.B., I will discuss with you laser energetics, gating currents of ion channels, Charles Mingus, and the works of Turgenev, but if you turn to some self-created social miasma you assume I share, I can only blink at you.

Blink. Blink.

I regard this recently discovered simplicity with gentle curiosity: affectionate and detached. I don't want to make too much of it, and yet I'm kind of fond of it; I don't want to hurt it by having discovered it.

There is N.T., who claims we are kindred spirits because of what she interprets as my liberality, feminism, and urbanity. Her face sags with certain disappointment when she sees my glee when I play with a child, or my consistent delight with herds of cows on the roadside. I have these simple pleasures; does it make my more esoteric ones fraudulent?

Of esoteric pleasures, or of cows:

A month or so ago, I fell into a particular book. An autobiography of a man raised in tsarist Russia and left homeless, ill, and dissident in occupied Paris, the book absorbed my senses. From it I got that most particular of glorious feelings-- the "I could be happy just reading Russian books forever" feeling. (I intend no mockery, self or societal, in the specificity of this feeling, it's just one I get sometimes.) But this feeling was, at the time, chasered with self-reproach and even dread. Were I to truly throw myself into Russian novels, I feared, it would only serve to make me less approachable, less "matchable," more-- complex. And so I hastened to dumben myself and my glee.

No! I was instead scared of the simplicity of the fact that I am in fact capable of finding Happiness and Beauty in things. I suppose I needn't apologize-- not to S.L., or C.B., or N.T., or those hypothetical folk that would (hypothetically) be alienated or disarmed by my (hypothetical) Lermentov literacy.

I have always aspired to be disarming, anyway.

*Illustration: it doesn't take much to love a Mandelbrot set. They're so pretty and math-y. But the point is that fractals aren't complex-- they're a symbol of simplicity. You can write a Java program to draw one in just a few lines. I did once, but it wasn't all cool and orange like this one.

On Opposable Digits

A big innovation in the history of evolution was the opposable thumb.

Little did nature know what a big deal this would be. Today the thumb is perhaps the most important feature of the human body. It can hold pencils. It can open doors and can and jars. It can play the bassoon. But most importantly, the thumb can press buttons on a cellular phone!

Ah yes! The thumb is by far the most important tool in modern communication.

Faced with possible imminent failure of my SIM card, I spent parts of today and yesterday transferring all the names and phone numbers in my cell phone on to a Google spreadsheet so that in the chance of a true SIM card death, I won't have to send out one of those dreadful "I lost my phone in a public subway toilet!" emails or form my own Facebook group. As I went through and typed each number in by hand, it also allowed me the opportunity to edit a phonebook that had been accumulating, but not purging, for at least my last three years of my life. So who, you may ask, was important enough to stay? Well I'll tell you:

A hit man in the Korean mafia in Salt Lake

My ex-boyfriend's sister who I met once for lunch

Two blind dates from Ohio, one of whom is engaged

No less than five currently engaged men, not counting the Ohioan blind date

Marlene, the widowed mother of my best friend from college

A gay man at Harvard

The passcode to the Cell Science Imaging Facility

All those, among others, were deemed worthy to stay. But alas, not all were so lucky. Among those deleted forever from my cell phone and my spreadsheet (and thus my memory) were:

My brother-in-law

An Olympic volleyball player

A former blind date from MIT who now consults for McKinsey

My second prom date

My roommate of two years

and Everyone named Rachel

I feel much better after deleting these people from my phone book.

The truth is that I could resurrect any of these numbers fairly easily. I'm probably still friends with all of them on Facebook, and if I'm not, I will be eventually. So why let their numbers needlessly clutter up my phone? As I've been reading this week in Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, globalization 3.0 means not having store everything in my house and home when it can all be stored on a server by someone else virtually!

Taking this to heart, I used my most advanced technology-- my thumb-- to delete all those extra numbers from my phone. Turns out these opposable digits come in handy in dealing with disposable digits all these millions of years later.