dual worlds

I think that I am rarely clingy. I avoid it like the plague, because I know that clinginess can really annoy people and cause them to leave, and because I don't like being dependent on people (it's emotionally dangerous). But today I was really clingy and really dependent. More than most of the time, I really needed people. I just needed to be with people I loved. I really needed hugs. I don't hug my parents very often, but I hugged my dad today (the last time I hugged him was almost two years ago; I should probably work to make those time gaps shorter).

I am quite hypomanic today, bordering on manic (but not quite that bad). Everything just feels kind of weird. I have been thinking so much about physics and such that everything concrete has seemed really far away, and the world in my mind has seemed much more immediate. I was trying to pull myself back into the "real" world today and away from that crazy, dangerous bit of my mind (it is dangerous because I can see easily how I could retreat into it and cease to need the outside world of things at all; it's like retreating from imperfect reality to a dimension of Platonic forms). Subsequently there were a lot of conflicts going on within me, and the hypomania made me full of tension and charged energy. I think I really needed people because I needed an anchor to keep me from buzzing off into all of the kinds of insanity that pull at me.

When this happens to me, I can describe my day in two ways. I can describe the reality of mind, or the reality of my surroundings. For instance, today I went to school, I went to work on my semester math project with Tony, I went to cello, I played at a violin thing, I went to my cello recital (which went pretty well), and I went out to "coffee" with Erin and Jill. Now it is 10:40 and I have three hours of homework in front of me (at least), including studying AP government for the test tomorrow, finishing my math project, and writing two essays.

Seems real, right? But in my head today I thought about branes and the idea of our dimensions existing only on one brain and exchanging gravitrons with some parallel brane. I thought about string theory and M-theory. I thought about symmetry. I thought about how AP government was a waste of my time when so many more mathematical metaphysical things were more important. I thought about meaning. I thought about our lives, and the way they look. I thought about the hologram idea, that maybe our universe is just a projection (like the shadows on Plato's cave wall) of a higher dimensional world. In this reality, everything feels like it is on the brink of fitting together into some supreme grand unified theory, but it is not quite there. I'm missing something. There's something bigger; there's more dimensions.

When I get too lost in the second world (which is ironically about the big picture idea of matter), I lose a sense of all of the matter all around me. I drive through stop signs. I trip a lot. I take government quizzes that I can't remember taking. I can't think about people, and the relationship they have with me as an individual entity. Erin is physically in front of me, but it doesn't seem like there can possibly be a real relationship connecting us.

I think my dependence today came from the fact that I had been existing primarily in the idea world for the past few weeks, and the reality of people had begun to fade away. Today I kind of jerked into the concrete world, and I was starved for human contact. I was starved for details, like how pink the blossomed trees are, so pink they hurt my eyes. The relationships, the hugs, the blossoms, the holographic world, reminds me that there is something important in this world that I don't get when I get lost in the other one.

In a way, it makes me nervous to be dependent on my friends and surroundings when I am going off to MIT in August. But I can't push everything away. I can't get lost in my mind so that I cease to exist physically.

In the concrete world, I now have a job. I work at Tropical Sno. I start May 14, and during the summer I will work about four days a week for four hours each day. I get a free Tropical Sno every time I visit or work. In the concrete world, state music festival is coming up in one week, and the AP government test is coming up in less than two weeks, followed closely by the AP literature and language tests. Mixed in is the Vigilante Parade and prom. The topic for debate nationals comes out on May first, so I will have to start practicing a lot, and I have to organize and carry out a fundraiser at Taco Del Sol. I have friends that I love and a boyfriend that I am so excited to spend infinity with. Some of these things don't really matter. Some of them (like my friends and boyfriend) are really important.

At the same time, though, I am thinking thinking thinking. If T-duality exists in which really large things become the same as really small things, and the either six or seven unseen dimensions (depending on which theory you look at) exist as manifolds within our usual spacial dimensions, curled up within tiny circles that are smaller than the smallest quantum particle, and our universe is expanding in a radial fashion, as our universe expands and the manifolds remain consant, is there some point at which T-duality applies so that our huge, radial universe is physically the same as a tiny, circular manifold, so that our universe of ten or eleven dimensions becomes entirely curled up in a manifold smaller than the smallest particle of a higher-dimensional universe?

It's a cool idea. Almost as cool as prom.