It's been a really strange couple of days, full of things like boxes of sausage and boys chasing me down the street and late-night visits full of psychoanalysis and awkwardness. When I used to get drunk and talk about theoretical physics I'd get excited about the possibility of parallel universes, about the thought that everything splits off in different directions all the time--about the idea that sometimes these different worlds could intersect and that we could enter them without even knowing it. (What? Shut up, drunk logic is awesome.) The past few days have felt like that very thing has happened, that everything is a couple of degrees to the side of where it should be.
The reason I am on hiatus from boys is because I can no longer stomach the possibility that someone will ask me in all seriousness, "So, what do you think about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby? They're saying it might not be his." No really, that actually happened to me today. I quit, and if that makes me shallower than a kiddie pool, well, so be it.
I've been reading lately about prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces. It's interesting because people will sometimes have a measurable emotional response without conscious recognition, which suggests that something just below what they realize actually does recognize the face. It suggests that hearts and brains are disconnected.
The other side of prosopagnosia is the Capgras delusion: the delusion that someone close has been replaced by an imposter. In those cases the emotional response is gone even though they understand the face.
Sometimes these things come from a head injury, and sometimes they just come. In whichever case, we've always known that heads and hearts are usually out of synch--that they're just a few degrees apart from each other's orbits.
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