My love letters right now are a back and forth about the nature of truth. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time. Wonderful because there has never been anybody else like him for me. Terrible for the same reason. He has not the slightest idea that these are my way of saying I love you.

I’m reading Le Ton beau de Marot and wondering about translation. In the basic model of communication, I’m sending a message that he is not decoding. It’s much like Warren Weaver’s idea that an article written in Russian is really written in English but in code. That’s nonsense and so is my unicorn’s blindness of what I’m saying to him. He’s assuming that he speaks the language of my mind when I’m really speaking to him in the language of my heart. I can never hope to express to him how I feel because words are an unworthy medium. There will never be a way to tell him. I feel safer that way. Vulnerability is terrifying.

My love letters right now are a back and forth about the nature of truth. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time. Wonderful because there has never been anybody else like him for me. Terrible for the same reason. He has not the slightest idea that these are my way of saying I love you.

I’m reading Le Ton beau de Marot and wondering about translation. In the basic model of communication, I’m sending a message that he is not decoding. It’s much like Warren Weaver’s idea that an article written in Russian is really written in English but in code. That’s nonsense and so is my unicorn’s blindness of what I’m saying to him. He’s assuming that he speaks the language of my mind when I’m really speaking to him in the language of my heart. I can never hope to express to him how I feel because words are an unworthy medium. There will never be a way to tell him. I feel safer that way. Vulnerability is terrifying.

My love letters right now are a back and forth about the nature of truth. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time. Wonderful because there has never been anybody else like him for me. Terrible for the same reason. He has not the slightest idea that these are my way of saying I love you.

I’m reading Le Ton beau de Marot and wondering about translation. In the basic model of communication, I’m sending a message that he is not decoding. It’s much like Warren Weaver’s idea that an article written in Russian is really written in English but in code. That’s nonsense and so is my unicorn’s blindness of what I’m saying to him. He’s assuming that he speaks the language of my mind when I’m really speaking to him in the language of my heart. I can never hope to express to him how I feel because words are an unworthy medium. There will never be a way to tell him. I feel safer that way. Vulnerability is terrifying.

I was thinking today about how unknowable someone can be. My boss has a terror of taking someone for granted - of settling into old, sad, boring patterns.

I think that is impossible for me. It’s been a complaint and it’s been a compliment. “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass’d my window home yesterday, I was fill’d with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time,” said John Keats. It’s impossible to learn everything about me, even if you are my constant companion for two years.

I know, because it was a complaint during a two-year relationship. I have too many facets for anybody to learn in a few years or even a lifetime. I am so many contradictions that I don’t even know myself what I like and what I don’t. It’s a superficial draw - believe me when I say it’s difficult not to fall in love with me - but it’s taxing after the initial mystery. I cannot be unearthed by force. I can’t even be unearthed over a course of a few years. Knowing me takes a lifetime and the excavation is so complex that men have thrown down their picks and sworn not to try again. They pick up their picks soon to try and try but it’s like trying understand a piece of clay that constantly morphs. I am not a static thing - perhaps, if I were, I could be put on display in a zoo and viewed from every angle. Even then, it would be impossible to see my insides, the memories and the impressions and the experiences that make me who I am. I acquire more experiences every day; I’m constantly finding new things to do and experience.

If you froze me, like Faustine in Morel’s Invention, and studied me constantly like the fugitive does, maybe you could understand my movements.. But you would never understand my motivations and I would never be able to express them. I can tell you things about my life which have shaped me, but it’s impossible to communicate the entirety of my experience verbally. It simply cannot be done.

I am a mystery. I’m a mystery not only in romantic relationships, but in friendships. My best friend has described me as incredibly mysterious. The poor girl has a log of our friendship as documented online but still has no idea who I am or what makes me tick. i am so many things and motivated by so many things that it’s simply impossible. 

I appeal to those with a sense of adventure, the kind of person so unlike myself that we clash. That was a major problem with the unicorn and me. He’s adventurous enough to try, but so unlike me that it was impossible to understand how my mind worked. Being misunderstood is its own kind of island, a kind of isolation that has nothing to do with strong tides and detachment from land.

Society assumes that you have with daddy issues if you want to sleep with a lot of men. 

In a 2006 tongue-in-cheek article in the Onion, Becky O’Flanahan lays it down: it is necessary to sleep with many men before you find the right one to resolve your daddy issues. I’ve dealt with it with people who don’t know me very well. When I’ve come out and talked about my sex blog, there’s a silly assumption that I have to have problems with my dad. 

I have a great relationship with my dad. What’s worrying to me is that my sister is going to marry a man who is scarily similar to our father - close enough genetically that there is a faint worry of some incest. We don’t know how or if his family is related to ours, but there’s some evidence that our grandparents came from the same place and had the same last name. He’s an engineer like our dad, too.

A woman can want to have many partners without having a broken relationship with her father. She can want to make her own choices without regard for society’s rules without needing to be driven by some unresolved daddy problems. We can want to wear makeup without being driven by some a need for male validation. The whole idea of daddy issues shows that we’re stuck on the past, not looking towards a future where women can just express their desires honestly and do what they want for themselves.

Truth is a harsh mistress, a scarier one than my boss. Her burning kisses and the licks of her flame warm and scorch at the same time. It is impossible to live without its fire, but it hurts.

At a recent meet-up with my friends, we were talking about what we find attractive in potential mates. We got the normal responses, like attractive and intelligent. Then, one of my friends chimed in with an interesting criterion: honest 90% of the time.

This group of friends knows about a promise I’ve kept for a while: I don’t consciously lie. I’m terrible at telling absolute whoppers, and I eventually just stopped because there was no point to me lying. I leave that to people who are far subtler than I am. 

Most people want to have a relationship with someone who is trustworthy and honest, so it was interesting me that he didn’t want her to be honest all of the time. It’s necessary in relationships to lie to people occasionally, so that you don’t rock the boat. You also want someone who is going to be on your side, even if your side might be wrong. You want loyalty.

Being in a relationship with me is fairly disconcerting. It’s easier on someone who has never had a real relationship before, because I can mold their expectations. If someone has already been in a fairly long-term relationship, that person will think that lying is the only way to keep things running smoothly. They don’t have to be big lies - they can be little ones to keep the peace. I know that I’ve startled significant others when I’ve been outrageously frank - or at least what seems to be ridiculously honest to them.

This blog is about my journey. It’s written as a record of me finding out what I want. I’m naked in a strange way to my readers, who know intimate details about my life without having met me. I am bare and transparent in a way that I am not in real life.

I read Magellan’s log book in high school and I think that this journey is more wondrous and more treacherous than Magellan’s journey around the earth. Love is scarier than circumnavigating the globe for the first time. My journey is fraught with danger - I don’t even have maps that say “Here be dragons.” I’d like to think of myself as facing my future with a gleaming weapon in one hand and a grin on my face, ready to hack at whatever comes.

I write about bad things. I write about good things. The good is better because of the contrast with the bad. There are nights when I drink in the smell of my lover and lay in his arms, praying for dawn to never come. If those nights were not transient, I would not drink him like a person coming out of the desert for the first time. I only understand good things if I’m exposed to bad things.

The truth is that I’m just a girl. Joy or despair, ecstasy or pain - all of those are part of life and this record would be incomplete without them.