I bring you love

God, that line kills me everytime.

First and foremost, thank you everyone who replied to my last post. I should probably respond to some of the responses, but I'm feeling rather...what's the word...self-absorbed right now (as opposed to when I'm not? [rolleyes]). Actually, I just want to get this post out first, and then I will (hopefully) go back and reply to other folks. My point was that even if you don't get feedback from me, know that I am reading all of the comments, and I do appreciate people taking the time. =)

The title of this post is from one of the greatest episodes of the Simpsons ever, and it's gonna be all about that freaky emotion known as love.

To tie back into the previous post, I wanted to bring up a point I forgot to last time. One of the draws of Christianity is the aspect that Jesus (or God) loves you no matter what. They have an unconditional love for you.

This is really pretty darn cool sounding, and I can see how a lot of people would want to believe it. It bothers me tremendously that we live in a culture that has had to create such a foma (Vonnegut reference), though.

I want my girls to never ever doubt that they are loved. I went through a good portion of my teenage years absolutely convinced that not only was I not loved, but that love itself was not real. Heh. I remember in 11th grade I wrote a 7 or 8 page essay on the illusion of love in an English class. The teacher ended up giving me a D, because what I had written about was not what the assignment was. Funny (in a extremely sad way) how often calls for help go ignored.

I'm jumping all over the place. Damn. Someday I will make an orderly ...something. Not today, though.

Love is a funny thing. You ask 500 people the deceptively simple question, "What is love?" and you're likely to get 500 different answers. I can think of at least 5 different ways to answer that question just off the top of my head.

In my life I've experienced a few different types of love, but I whole heartedly believe that the love I feel for my kids is the strongest I'll ever feel.

Something that is odd (and I don't know if it's just me) but I value my friends love more than that of my family (meaning my parents). And even more alarming (maybe. maybe not.) is the fact that my friends are all online people. My "real life" friends have all vanished, the way that friends sometimes do. Sure, Jared still calls once every month or so, and we talk about getting together, but it never seems to happen. And it's not that I don't want to. For better or worse, Jared is my best "real" friend (outside of my wife, of course. Stephanie is my best friend.).

I can easily say that there are people online that I love, and I'm fairly certain that they know it.

Of course, the question of whether one can truly love someone they've never even met is raised, but I feel that the answer is yes. In fact, I think the question would be why couldn't someone do that? Granted, it may just turn out to be that you are in love with the person's persona, but is that that much different from real life?

Bah. I'm psychobabbling again.

Here's something that's not very fun to do: explain why you love someone. Pick anyone in your life, and then analyze why you love that person. I've toyed with doing this before, and I don't enjoy doing it. Mostly because it's difficult (for me, anyway, maybe others have an easier time). The reason I think that it's such a hard task is because love is an emotion. Perhaps pure emotion. And logic just doesn't enter into it. Trying to explain why you feel a certain way about certain people is impossible because emotion and logic don't mix.

I know I'm forgetting some points I wanted to make, but I guess I'll save those for another time. As it is I've now posted two "thinky" posts back to back. Maybe I should have instead taken a page from bettie, who was taking a page from the Hulk, and just said:

Love wacky. Me like.