Love is...

I think I have decided that I like sitting at home and doing nothing. The time went by so wonderfully slowly today. I would normally feel guilty about watching movies and eating yoghurt, but that’s just not going to happen today. Damn you, silly guilt.

I thought this morning, probably because our 7-year-old niece will be spending the weekend with us, about what sort of lessons I would teach a child. I have always said that the number one challenge of this life is to love and accept yourself. If everyone would do that, I am sure we would all feel a little more love from one another. It’s funny, you know, they always say that one has to love oneself in order to love others, but they don’t really talk about how it is that you can love yourself.

Anyway, I tried to love myself today and it really worked. I had a great day!

I even crack myself up sometimes when I'm in a good mood. I know that it must seem weird to just see me sitting silently somewhere and to then just start laughing for no apparent reason.

One thing that made me crack up: I used to work for the government answering questions over the telephone about the FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.) It is a form that you have to fill out to apply for any kind of money from colleges or from the government. I.e., just about everyone who has gone to college has filled one of these babies out. Occasionally, when parents would call asking about why their kids weren’t going to be receiving any federal grants to go to college (in spite of the fact that the family’s gross income was 6 figures), we had to break the bad news to the greedy bastards.

We were instructed to say that all of the numbers that the parents had used to fill out the form were then put into a big computer somewhere. It then calculated what the parents should be able to pay per year for the potential child to go to college. When the people would then invariably ask if they could see the equation, we would say, per our instruction, that the equation was so difficult that you would need to be a mathematician to understand it, but that, of course, we would be glad to send them a copy. (I think that I sent maybe 2 in the more than 9months that I worked there.)

I just thought it was so funny, though, when I said the line one day “well, the equation is very complicated and you would need to be a mathematician to understand it.” and the man on the other end said “Well, I AM a mathematician.”