And that's my Estonian lesson for this month. It translates more or less to "There is no beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." My students really do teach me the oddest things. When I said it out loud they all laughed (of course) and said I sounded like I was speaking Latin.

Anyway, thank you to the many of you who responded to my last entry, all of you taking the "swift kick in the ass" option, for some reason, you hostile fuckers, and thank you.

I've spent the bulk of the last week on AIM, talking to homies back in the US. I love you all, but I VOW to get more than four hours' sleep tonight, and thus will not be joining the Whole Sick Crew and its ongoing network of gossippy conversations for tonight. It's really funny. This guy actually IMed me with a complaint about me, thinking I was someone else, having clicked on the wrong name... Sick. What WOULD Alexander Graham Bell say.

I'm in love with Donna from The West Wing. She just tried to get a presidential proclamation for her English teacher's retirement.

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The oddest thing happened last night (over AIM, of course...) For one thing, I got into a LONG conversation about love with someone and realized that I can't talk about it, at all; it's like knowing the difference between pornography and erotica, I know it when I see it, but other than that I'm helpless to discuss it.

So I ended up arguing that love is not something that's outside of people; you don't borrow from some universal, collective love pool when you love. I really do resent that people talk about being "in love." It really bugs me. You are not in love, I always want to say, it is in you. A niggling point, you might respond. But I think it's important.

I mean, look at it this way. If everyone looked at love as something that possesses you, as opposed to vice versa, everyone would just run around screwing each other over all the time, doing the worst things with the best of intentions? And justifying it by saying that on some level they were doing it all for love? What a nightmare world THAT would be, especially if folks in general lost the distinction between love of people and love of anything else, like say sex, or money, or friendship, or knowledge, or power, or movies, or drugs, or God... It'd be pure disaster from the word go. Insert bitter laughter.

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The other bizarre thing that happened over AIM yesterday was, I got into a really good conversation with someone I really fucked over about five years ago. It was a short, torrid college affair that ended badly- no, catastrophically, and my fault- and involved bad sex and a sold TV. Money and affection, oil and water.

I thought this girl was a total idiot, and I slept with her anyway, and another friend of mine kept telling me, "She's really sharp, she just doesn't act like it." I was totally disgusted with myself. I felt my standards had dropped. I will never stop feeling bad about this. Especially because after dumping her I talked smack for a good month, only to gradually discover over time that I really DID respect her. To make matters worse, she totally forgave me for having been a dick.

And we had a really good three hour long, friendly conversation last night, about our exes, living in Europe, leaving college, and so on.

And I treated her like shit years ago. Maybe SHE'S forgotten. I haven't. The fact that she'll even talk to me is nothing short of miraculously kind and understanding, and maybe a little scary.