I recently fell in love. It’s strange because I usually fall in love and make grand gestures like flying halfway around the world in something that is manic, anxious and more an expression of loving love, then loving a person. I like the idea of grand gestures and assume that this person will be the focus of grand gestures at some point, but off the bat things are strangely quiet and whispering, sort of like light wind on a rain flap of a tent out on some frontier. In a serendipitous moment (or coincidental... or... something) I stumbled on something I wrote down in a text editor awhile back and it seems relevant. What was written is as follows:
mutations are forgetting about love. Mutations are kicking and pushing to be in love againmutations are almost chocking on a toothbrushS000-703995
I think the last line is return number for some item, although I’m not sure what. I googled it, and the first result was “Buy Suspension Strut Mount Anchor 703995 Fits 96-05 Toyota Rav4”, which isn’t something I’m in the market for, so we’ll just leave that there as a clue for future generations.
BUT MUTATIONS. I had to write about them for an application to an institution that I’ve now applied for exactly the number of times I’ve been rejected. On the topic, the non-project based part of the text read:
Which brings us to a mutation, which is exactly a point of departure from group to isolate, or isolate to group. It could be said that we live in the age of mutation; “mutation” being a janus word in many facets: one person screams it to show their individuality, while another echos it back describing their inclusion in a group.Consider a mutation of thrushes, indicating a group of birds that have forever only known themselves. Or even a genetic mutation leading to a new group of people, see: Tetrachromacy. A lot of pop culture tends to buttress the beauty of mutation whether it is in teenage turtles or wolverines. In data science, programmers will rally around immutable data structures; not quite a reference to mutation, but maybe a bit of shade thrown towards it.I recently asked my mom about the things she didn’t realize she would lose as she got older (I’ve been recently fixated on the fact that available conversations with friends are constantly burning off in greedy fires) and she said “my face”; which, explained, makes sense, as the woman she sees in the mirror isn’t the woman she sees herself to be. The face becomes a container that is viewed for its structure versus the content that is held within. So at some point my mom is saying that the Self mutates and no longer has a face.
But I had submitted all of that after not remembering about this forgotten text or the more recent turn of events of this love business. WHICH IS WEIRD, because there I was deliberating about love and mutations only to tumble into love, a place both familiar and completely alien. It is the group of all things I am, plus all things I never knew I would be.
To have steps appear as I walk into voids, and airbags deploy gently in all situations social or physical. To ease into the moment. A mutation is the perfect isomorphic partner to the present.
A mutation is being in love.
And I guess it's humbling to try to express something in writing or make some object hooked up with a a bazillion wires and hung even more puppet-like still in papers about Self and Space and Countability (this last bit is a generalization of most the things I think I end up making), and they never seem to be quite as well crafted as sharing lemonade in a hot car, with no air conditioning, while I drive along the ocean with this person.
So I guess you can file this under "amendments to thoughts on mutations. i.e. love".