Long-distance relationships.

The wife and I in April 2000, the site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, when I was up in Massachusetts for a visit during my third year at Goucher. Bought a nice new disc today: Ben Jelen. It's apparently three months late coming out -- or something like that. I saw him on Craig Kilborn a few weeks ago and wrote down in my Moleskine that his record was coming out on April 13th. But I wrote it in the journal, not the planner, so I forgot all about it until yesterday. This is a very fine record, despite its emo-boy cover art. I think I should drop out of my PhD program and go be Ben's bass player. I always wanted to be a rockstar. A lot of the songs on this disc seem to be about a long distance relationship. I went through one of those dreadful things a few years ago, during my last three years of college. I actually used to work too much to forget that my lover was not there with me, and waking up from dreams about David Hume and Immanuel Kant was not at all uncommon. Such a viscid nadir of existence was worse then my melancholic teenage years of reading far too much Edgar A. Poe. Doubt, despair, solitude and introversion reigned then. No, I was not always the sunny person that I am now (wink). Luckily for me, she came back a year early. That was a long time ago, and I'm a [slightly] totally different person now, four years later. Different and married. We stuck it out, through the worst times and that sweet time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we would only be apart for two weeks, instead of seven or eight. It all paid off, and we both know first hand that there is more to love than convenience, habit, sex, compatibility or even being in the same state. I like to think that our union is actually empirical evidence of something transcendental behind it all, proof that the answer to the question "Is that all there is?" is an emphatic NO. If this is all there is, what can love be? Is love confined to here and now and to physicality? If love can exist between Baltimore and Boston, isn�t it indicative of something more than bodies and stones and grass? I know, from my own experience, that it is. This is, indeed, not all there is.