Damn you, Marcel Proust! (I realize apostrophe directed to a late 19th-century/early 20th-century French writer is not the norm in the blog-o-world, but tough. This is the Irreverent Times, and we do whatever we blah blah blah blah. We do it proudly, and we do it lazily.)

Everywhere I turn (hate that cliche), love is in the air (also hate that cliche). But really, what I'm trying to say is: emotions are running wild (ugh) and we can't handle the truth (just stop).

Hold the phone. Can I get a redo?

I, too, have had similar thoughts to some of Adam's easy-to-reference numerical ponderings. So, just this once (second time), I'm going to harness the power of self-indulgence: Simply put, there's a girl in one of my classes that I like. In order to be purposefully oblique, her name is in the title of a Beatles song. (Hint: It's not Eleanor, since this isn't 1915.) Anyway, I just wish things were easier, that's all. Easier to tell what the situation is. Easier to do something about it. It's similar to my thoughts on literary criticism: depending on which mindset I choose to adopt, I can find evidence to support my position. On a good day, I can hype myself up. On a not-so-good day, all I can tell myself is that someone that pretty must surely have a boyfriend. Or, if she doesn't, why would she be interested in me? But really, I'm just making a huge deal out of nothing, because nothing is all that's happened, and nothing is all that will happen until I decide to do something. Which will hopefully be sooner rather than later.

And maybe all this inaction and doubt is unfounded, based upon a lack of self-confidence. Maybe this entry will seem silly and ridiculous in a couple weeks, if things go my way. But something tells me it won't.

Which is where Proust comes into play. A bit of advice for the women out there: if you're with a literary-type guy (or girl!), and he (or she!) claims that his (or her!) favorite writer is Proust, get out. Although Proust can craft some wonderfully beautiful sentences and make some stunningly insightful observations, he's also a big ol' pessimist. Great art comes from suffering. Love should be suffering. Pleasure equals pain and pain equals pleasure. Let's get this guy some Zoloft already, for real.

But the fact is, he seems to be right about so many other things that it makes me wonder if he's not on to something after all... I don't want to believe that we fall in love with people we know we can't have. I don't want to believe that we build an archetype for love so that, with each new endeavor, we're only trying to recapture that initial element or experience or whatever it was that made us first fall in love. I don't want to believe that we're blind to our own persona, that we don't really know who we are, that only other people can truly see us for ourselves. But I don't know.

Damn you, Proust.

You are now exiting this time warp from a 2004-mentality. You'll resume with a present day-mentality next time.


Edit at 2:33PM: In the first part of this entry, I was going to add a half-joking rant about how single people should wear a ring on their right hand, married people should wear a ring on their left hand, and people in a relationship shouldn't wear a ring at all. But then I realized: Why should I feel ashamed of asking her to do something, even if she has a boyfriend? Why should I feel ashamed for thinking she's cool, cooler than most other people I've met in a long while, and that I'd like to spend more time getting to know her? Seriously, where's the harm in that?

There. There's your present day-mentality. Told you it'd come back.