Abstract of an Abstract Amore Hoosywhatsit

or
Cupid Never Took Algebra

What is love? Is it a smell? A feeling of comfort? The taste of really ripe cheese?

In Spanish, when you say “I love you” you say “Te quiero,” which literally means “I want you.” You could say “Te amo,” but this type of flowery language is generally considered tacky and reserved for sad sacks and saps and Oscar Wilde.

In Farsi “I love you” is “Dust-e daaram,” which means something like, “I have a friend.” [Dust = friend, daashtan goes to daaram = I have. The –e at the end of Dust is tricky, but for the sake of this essay we don’t need to go into particulars.) The word for you (to) is nowhere evoked in the Persian phrase for “I love you,” which I find strange. How can you express love without even mentioning the other person? I called my buddy Narcissus but he said he was too busy to answer my silly queries.

Mark Twain, though not generally recognized as a romantic or wimp or any of the other things we associate with love, is crucial in my scientific analysis (er, correction: my pseudo-mathematical, hackneyed study) of love, though something he said will assist me in my efforts. Twain wrote or hollered or something using either his stubby fingers or the resonant repository beneath his monstrous mustache, “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.”

From this I conclude the following: numbers are as useful in quantifying love as dried turds. So Twain wasn’t talking about love, but indulge me, because if you look closely at this statement he wasn’t really talking about anything specific, he was generally generalizing about generalities.

So number are as usefull as dried turds. Well, I’m not a fan of turds nor the process of drying them, so let’s just leave the turds out of the study altogether, okay. (I know, big sigh from the copraphogics. I hope you all brush your teeth often.) So turds are our, unless of course you’ve eaten beets, which makes your turds red like your heart, then maybe your offal offering will be somewhat relevant to my study, though I’ll leave it to you to determine just how crimson crap will factor in. But for the time being forget the turds, as hard as it may be, forget them, okay? Onward and upward. And outward.

I’m going to type Twain’s epigram into my infallible Rectify-O-Chamber (just three easy payments of $79.95 to Swindle Corp. - worth every dime by the way), press compute, wait for the file to upload, wait for the Rectify-O-Chamber to wirelessly connect to the Center of Rectify-O-Cation located in Myanma, check my watch, wait for a response Center of Rectify-O-Cation, wait for the Rectify-O-Chamber to translate the supreme knowledge into intelligible words and phrases, have a cup of strong coffee, realize that all this time I forgot to actually hit “Send” on the Rectify-O-Chamber so I’ll have to repeat all the above steps except for the coffee drinking because I’m on a one cup a day kick. This time I hit send and in the intervening 15 seconds I scream, “Jeez! Damn computers are always slower than they will be in the future!” Then, once they’re printed, I read the results.

When typed in my Rectify-O-Meter, “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics” becomes “There are lies, the human memory, and then there are statistics. The Chinese particularly like red turds.” This is our starting point. (“You mean for starting the perfect Communist Turd Vilalge?” you ask. No, idiot. This is our starting point for a real, quantifiable, qualifiable, qualintifalible study of love. Love is realest of real realies. “Red turds are real,” says smarty-pants. True, red turds are real, but irrelevant. Let’s continue.)

Seeing as Twain and Myanmar contend that the human memory exists somewhere between lies and statistics, I think the mind is a favorable source from which to draw the data for our study. What? I didn’t mention my hypothesis? Oh, I’m sorry, I should have done that first, but I’m a little rusty on the scientific method (I haven’t actually used it since my 11th grade science fair project where I boiled gasoline and played with pure lead).

Hypothesis: Can you quantify love using common objects and experiences, yielding results that are either useless or useful or somewhere in between? I predict yes.

Red turds. Damn! Out of my head red turds! (If only I had a nickel for every time I said that…)

So how do we quantify love? Well, I’ve said “I love you” to many a women and a handful of lucky men to whom I was either related or were dressed up as a woman only to later reveal their giblets to me in uncomfortably close quarters. Friendly and familial “I love you”s aside - and times when I said “I love you” but was clearly lying to either get alcohol, sex, free pens, or a combination of all three - I have been provided in my life with four sterling examples of love or near love that we shall us. And given that all evidence will be provided by human memory, namely mine, let’s began when I’m ready. Go!

Example #1: I was in love with L.P. in high school. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the world, but then again neither was I. I was a manish boy. Gender confusion aside, I did fall in love with L.P. for various reasons: she wasn’t hard on the eyes, she wasn’t hard on the hands, and she wasn’t hard to tease. And she was smart. And volleyball players have tooshies like the moon cleaved in half.

I knew I was in love with L.P. and fully aware that she didn’t love me back, but I didn’t care because she didn’t take advantage of my infatuation with her. She was flirty but friendly and always let me know that the intimate moments we shared were not going to last, but were purely for fun in the hear and now. She was realistic, which made loving her less painful. And did I mention the hienie shaped like a cleaved moon?

But enough exegesis. Science ahoy!

One night L.P. called me late. My parents were asleep and I was giddy with delight to be receiving a phone call so late. L.P. asked me if she could borrow a baseball bat, for what I don’t remember. I agreed, but told her that she would have to come pick it up. A few minutes later L.P. drove to my house and, after sneaking outside, I handed her the baseball bat. As a reward for the bat, or because it was dark and basking in the gauzy moonlight made me look dreamy, L.P. and I kissed for the first time over the perimeter wall that surrounded my parents’ house. It wasn’t the first time I’d kissed a girl, but it was the first time I kissed a girl I loved.

This case of love includes two elements: 1) a wooden baseball bat that had been with my family for years, and 2) deception. I was a good kid, and I considered sneaking out at night, even to lend a friend a baseball bat and get a little action, a naughty thing. If my parents had caught me they probably would have just thought I was smoking a cigarette. But I didn’t like deceiving my parents and sneaking out felt like I was lying to them in their sleep. Had they later asked me where the baseball bat had gone to, I would have casually lied and said, “ I don’t know.”

So you see, in this situation: 1.0 baseball bat + 1.5 acts of deception (1 for sneaking out and 0.5 for the future prospect of lying.) = Love.

When I put this equation in the Rectify-O-Chamber it prints out a picture of Paul Newman straddling a camel with Paul Simon’s head and wearing Paul Westerburg’s pants. Mr. Newman is wearing a sundress and “whipping” the camel with a large peacock feather. The expression on Mr. Simon’s face seems to be saying, “I think orthodontia would have been far more rewarding.” But that’s science for you; it doesn’t make sense to anyone except for the person, or machine, performing the study. On to the next case!

Example #2: N.A. and I hadn’t been dating very long, but our relationship was already different from my relationship with L.P.: A) Instead of sneaking out at night like I did with L.P. I simply stayed out all night with N.A. and never called my parents to let them know I wouldn’t be coming home. B) N.A. bought me a loaf of bread once when my friends and I were really high, which we devoured gleefully. C) N.A. and I drove up to the Los Alamos gorge and simply stared into the nothingness below, knowing that should either of us really want to we could dispose of the person with a simple shoulder nudge, sending the other to certain death over the ledge.

But the saddest part of A) defying my parents’ rules, B) senselessly stuffing Wonderbread in my gullet, and C) risking developing cancer by going to a township with more radiation than Chernobyl is that N.A. and I were never in love. We were nearing love, but I could tell our relationship was to be short-lived because of her stunted emotional development, so I held myself back for fear of being hurt, which I later was. Had I let myself go, I would have been hurt even more.

As a teen, I performed A, B, and C knowing that they were acts of love for a love that didn’t ever, nor would ever, exist. So you see, the equation of: [1 staying out all night divided by negligible importance of broken curfew - prospect of making out] + [1 loaf of bread x drug euphoria] + 50% chance of radiation poisoning did not = love. Sad but true. The figures don’t lie.

Maybe A+B+C does not = love because the real equation was divided by the fear mentioned above [see: fear of getting hurt]. In this case, fear is represented by 0, because fear is a void of faith, and anything divided by 0 is not love. [A+B+C]/0=error.

When the equation (A+B+C)/0 was typed into the Rectify-O-Chamber I received a slight static shock. Then the chamber made what sounded like the mating call of a wild turkey. Then it seemed to mutter, “Sissy,” under its breath.

Example #3: In college, B.S., who admittedly had been drinking heavily and didn’t weight more than 100 pounds, called me and asked me to come over to her dorm room and partake in some forbidden beer (my campus was a dry campus, ironic because it was also in the desert). I agreed, adding that I would be over momentarily. Before hanging up, the B.S., said, “I love you.” Not knowing if B.S. was mistaken in saying this – perhaps she momentarily thought she was talking to her mother…I’ve been known to have that effect on women – or meant the “I love you” in a platonic way, I felt it uncouth to say nothing. So I said, “I love you,” as well. Later that night I ended up kissing B.S.’s roommate C.Lifeguard. Her surname wasn’t really Lifeguard, I never knew it, but for the sake of the study Lifeguard is as good a name as any.

The situation with B.S is a classic case of Love Confusion. I believe Freud would have called this a “Me slip.” Modern street vernacular has labeled this a “my bad.” In any case, 5 or 6 beers + the amplitude of fuzzy telephone reception + unexpected emotive confession + awkward silence + an arguably over-active sense of decorum imbued by mother does not = love. Even though all the symptoms are there - words, alcohol, fuzzy things - love was absent. B.S. didn’t love me and I didn’t love her. In fact, quite the opposite; in the above case, all emotional feelings were displaced onto B.S.’s very bosomy roommate C.Lifeguard. (I felt like the captain of the SS Bosom.)

When I enter the above scenario into the Rectify-O-Chamber it prints out a man wearing an “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, though the arrow on his shirt is pointing not to anyone standing next to him but rather to the man’s crotch.

Example #4: This example is the most painful, because it is the freshest. D.M. and I started dating in Baltimore, went to Costa Rica, fell in love, and eventually moved to Nashville in together. But through a series of unsightly pratfalls we began fighting a lot (she wanted to be a lawyer so I guess in some way fighting was “homework”). D.M. began upsetting me and I began upsetting her. She abandoned me without a car or telephone shortly after we moved to Nashville and then lied to her mother about why I “wasn’t able to make it” to the weekend the three of us had planned. As a result, I said some nasty things about her. As a result of the nasty things I said, D.M. started, behind my back, talking to an ex-boyfriend she voluntarily promised she would never again contact. But the icing on the cake was that when the ex “mysteriously” got our new address, he started sending gifts (one box of Mrs. Field’s Cookies and a backpack). Sure the gifts seemed innocuous enough, but I didn’t like that D.M., the woman I loved and who said she loved me, could so aloofly (and selfishly) accept gifts from her ex and not see that the situation was problematic.

D.M. refused to send the gifts back so I refused to be her boyfriend, and ended it on the spot.

The math on this one is tricky.

2 plane tickets to Costa Rica + me quitting my job and moving across the country to be with D.M. + good sex + my parents’ obvious favor for her – her mother’s dislike for me = Love. Yes, even though her mother never liked me, we were still in love. And how.

To top it all off:

Love > fighting + weekend abandonment + nasty words + fighting + less sex + fighting + lying to her mother who already didn’t like me.

Yes, our love was still greater than all of that. It was. Which is why I find it even more baffling that

Love < 1 box of cookies + 1 back pack.

Our love was not stronger than a nylon sling bag and the chewy, chewy goodness of Mrs. Fields. Mrs. Fields, your cookies vanquished me!

When I typed the above mathematical tomfooleries into the Rectify-O-Chamber it simply shut down and could not be resuscitated, even with offers of higher dosages of electricity and a date with my iBook G4.

Conclusion: Love is the Chaos Theory of math. Mark Twain shouldn’t be allowed to co-author studies of love with tired writers. And beets make pooing even more fun that God intended.

(image from: http://www.babygorilla.com/warehouse/art/oldportfolio/cupid/cupid.html)