I've been stuck on the Judaism chapter of Religions in the Modern World for 21 days now. Not for its content, but because my reading schedule has been shot to hell. This does not augur well for the 14 novels I am supposed to read next term. The reason for this collapse has blue eyes, good posture and questionable driving habits. You are right to think these descriptors are arbitrary, but a full description is impossible. I've been troubling myself less with being deliberate lately anyway, in terms of communication at least.

Things are going singularly well with Roxanne. It's uncanny. If I was a pessimistic person I would be suspicious, but I'm not, now less than ever. I have a theory about how people create problems to the end of distracting themselves, but that's a tangent, and it takes the whole of my anemic focus to resist tangents in writing. I know that objectivity is usually missing at the beginning, but taking that into account, this is still unlike anything in my admittedly meagre experience. I am not so naive to think that it will always be this easy, but it's amazing how easy it has been. Not easy in the sense of being insubstantial, easy in the sense that it's always just been natural; there has never been any pretense or burdening formality. Strange since in the past I have thought I had to be a certain person to be liked. But conventions are rulesets for ambiguous situations.

Mia: Don't you hate that?
Vincent: What?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don't know. That's a good question.
Mia: That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably
enjoy the silence.

[Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction]

So yeah, we've had a lot of comfortable silences and more comfortable, long conversations. We wrote and wrote, before we were together, which is a good way to start to understand someone. Good for us at least, since we are written word people. We're hopeless on the phone, which suits me fine. Phones are like instant messaging: only suitable as substitute communication. We do some interesting things, but it's more the case that boring things become interesting when we're together.

I've got some books to drop-off at the library.
Awesome! I'm in!

We played minigolf in the rain, with 12 of her old friends. No one got hurt, so it can't really be called a successful outing, but fun nonetheless. We played croquet in her backyard, with her family, which was perfect. Croquet is great because you can intentionally mess with other people (and yourself, it turns out). But mostly we just do nothing, the best sort of nothing there is. We inhabit treed areas, and watch the stars. If you are at peace with yourself, and you think that life is fundamentally a positive experience, even the simplest things become fascinating and wonderful.