I'm 5 hours from departing Florida on my transcontinental bus ride. Today I rented a motorscooter and rode around the area for an hour. I've had a great time in Florida. Katy and her father are wonderful hosts. He owns a nifty pool table, on which I have been playing frequently with Katy's grandpa Noltan. Noltan is 82, but he is almost as good as me at pool. He beat me in 2 of the 5 games we played. If you look below, you can catch a peak of us playing pool.

While in Florida, I had the privilege of meeting Katy's sister Stephanie. Stephanie is one year younger than Katy, and although Katy and I dated for about 2.5 years, this was the first time that Stephanie and I ever met. Stephanie is shy and introverted and always smiling. Katy is an emotionally complex person who makes no secret of how she is feeling at any given moment. Katy's emotional depth has always made her a compelling person for me. I'd imagine that Stephanie has a similar degree of depth, given that the two of them grew up just a year apart in the same household, but she does not show it. Someday I'd like to write an angsty Victorian-style novel, in the vein of Wuthering Heights, about these two, where they both fall madly in love with the same inaccessible, raving, brutal individual and both go mad, in apparently contrasting but ultimately similar ways, as a result.

Currently I'm reading the collected works of W. Ronald Fairbairn, the founder of object-relations psychology. Fairbairn worked as a psychotherapist rather than an academic, and it is obvious from his writing. The questions and concepts driving his work are derived not from existing theory but from his interactions with his patients. It is refreshing. It is also refreshing to read work that tries to theorize regarding something as impenetrable but central to the human condition as love. Most academics would never care to be so ambitious, if they could more easily advance some existing but arcane debate within their discipline.

Fairbairn posits that some people, after being rejected a lot, come to believe that the love emanating from them is tainted, dirty, foul, polluted. They therefore turn this love inward and seek fulfillment in a self-contained fashion, through distance running or becoming attached to a particular theory or the like, rather than directing their energies outward and seeking fulfillment from the world and people around them. Such introversion was considered abnormal, somewhat unusual, and definitively pathological at the time when Fairbairn was writing (1940s), but I believe that it is thought to be normal, even optimal, nowadays in much of America, and certainly in NYC.

Look how many New Yorkers are more concerned with successfully running the marathon than with developing emotionally rich, mutually caring relationships with friends or significant others. I'm not saying that people should define themselves through others. But there seems to be something cold and inhuman about a city where, for so many people, "me" is mostly a set of relationships with inert objects (most predominantly money) and activities rather than a unique set of ways of reaching out to others. I reject this model, and I look forward to crossing the country and back again to pay homage to some of the most rewarding and deepest friendships I've developed over the years. I've already done so successfully, I think, in Florida. I'm also looking forward to some hot hands of blackjack in Vegas!

Currently listening to REM's Out of Time with Katy's father and getting ready to work my way through Thucydides's History of the Peloponessian War on the bus. I've been assigned, for the spring semester, to TA a class on the sociology of war. Hopefully this will help.