Encircled

"What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules - it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared.

Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?

I didn't know why I yearned after it so desperately. All I knew was that, now that I had it, it was worth every ounce of risk and agony it had cost. It was better than I'd imagined.

It was everything."

- From The Host, by Stephenie Meyer, again.

Love: Accident or Fate?

Good morning avid readers! Let's get this quote on! Yes, I am a nerd but I can still beat your ass, so there! And yes, I am also still in third grade...

"In so many millennia, the humans never did figure love out. How much is physical, how much in the mind? How much accident and how much fate? Why did perfect matches crumble and impossible couples thrive? I don't know the answers any better than they did. Love simply is where it is."

I read this passage last night while waiting for dinner (I had a great chef over last night and it was a treat, since I myself cannot cook worth a damn and I so rarely get cooked for) and also waiting for the freakin' All-Star Game to take a million hours to actually start. Talk about presentation. I think all the introductions and singing and riding around in golf carts over perfectly manicured fields took longer than the actual game! Jeez! Anyway, again I digress. This passage is from The Host (thank you Tina!) and just like always, Stephenie Meyer struck me down by asking the most simple and yet one of the most important questions in our world; whatever culture you may be apart of. I love anything to do with love (I am a FEMALE, after all) and these questions plague me just as much as I am sure they secretly plague you, reader. I keep thinking that if we could just get the formula correct, maybe we could stop making mistakes. But it's not about formula, is it? That's why we have lived for so long and still just don't get it. But perhaps its the "just don't get it" part that makes things in life more exciting, more dramatic and more interesting. If we did in fact discover the formula, there would be no more learning, no more long searches, no more bonding with our girlfriends over misery and margaritas; maybe we would even miss out on meeting some really great people because they didn't fall into our own individual "formula". So who really wants to know the formula for love anyway? It's so much more interesting to stumble around blind in the dark, momentarily touching and changing the lives of whoever we come into contact with, just hoping one day we will stumble into the one person who "fits" perfectly. Maybe that's just optimism, but if you knew me, you would know that is not a statistical possibility.