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My professor said something along the lines of:

We’re taught that love, at least “real love” is unconditional. If you really love someone, no matter how low they or you get, you are supposed to love them. We’re also taught that within that “unconditional love” is a clause that suggests when we really love them, we love them all of the time and there are never moments in which we do not love them. And that is simply just not true. Actually, that’s impossible.

I didn’t think much into this little lecture hall aphorism beyond nodding my head and thinking, “yeah people I love really piss me off.” The realization and perhaps the real implication of that lesson from my professor came this week.

Sometimes you fight with your family and sometimes you fight with your friends. Sometimes it’s you throwing a (in retrospect not-so) witty retort at your sister up the stairs only to receive an ample glare from your mother. Other times, it’s about something that matters.

You can swear they broke your trust. You can swear “that’s not what a real friend does.” You can swear “This is the last straw.” You can swear “We’re not talking again.” You can swear up and down and cross your heart and point your finger above your head and raise your palm flat before you. You can pound your fist on your desk when you tell your other friends and you can cry or you can be a stone-cold rock.

It is in these moments that my professor’s theory rang true. In those moments of fierce resentment and your roommate pretending not to notice the blood vessel demanding to pop through the skin on your forehead that you do not love that other person. And the thing is, that’s O.K.

The more important and implicit meaning (in my opinion) of my professor’s point–and maybe this is what those people who claim we always really actively love were getting at.

Those punctuated spans of loving are occasionally and abruptly ended with a misplaced period, a misplaced word, a misplaced action in the heat of the moment. But by loving the person at all in the first place, you open the door for the possibility of that moment being punctuated with a comma or a semicolon. Love allows you to finish your thought with the possibility of restarting it again.

Even in the times you stop loving for a brief moment, or three days, or a couple weeks, the cursor keeps blinking. You have time to finish your thought, to start a new thought, to remember what you forgot your train of thought was. You get to fall in love again.

We don’t love everyone all the time or even ever. But we are lucky enough to fall in love with our friends and family. Occasionally we fall out of love with our friends and family. But love means being able to talk, being able to grant space and be granted space. Most importantly, love means being able to forgive and be forgiven.

Unconditional love is not real. We fall in love. We fall out of love. But the funny nature of love is, it plants a comma in our hearts, allowing us to fall in love again. Love is not a continuous stream of doting and fairytale friendship. Love, thank goodness, isn’t a run-on sentence. Love is often underlined in green. Love is written in fragments with awkward punctuation interrupting a thought that was interrupted by something that got in your way. Love is full of dashes and semicolons and commas. Love is a fragmented and claused and a broken up language with half-realized thoughts ended unexpectedly.

But the important thing is that you can always pick up your sentence where it left off.

The important thing is that you can still read.

Love you, G.

I always describe myself as an arts/science person. This is not because I cannot decide which one is more important to me. Rather, it is because both equally fascinate me and one side helps me appreciate and understand the other so much better. I love the science behind why Jesus is positioned the way he is in “The Last Supper” or why Adele’s vocal give us chills during “Set Fire to the Rain”. Conversely, I am a science major because I see the beautiful art that underlies most scientific functions. They are simple and random, but also complex and perfectly orchestrated.

Let’s take a look at the craft of beer making. I truly consider this to be an art form and both my appreciation of science and art make me appreciate this type of art immensely. Let me first start off by saying that I am not much of a drinker. I just personally get a lot of pleasure out of it. While that may be true, I am absolutely fascinated by the art of alcohol production and bartending. I want to focus on just beer for right now, though. All forms of it starts out with the same four basic ingredients: water, a grain, hops (or other flavoring), and yeast. Through different levels of each and addition of other ingredients, beer turns into the thousands of varieties that we can find today. I personally find this stunning and beautiful in its own right. It’s the same reason why I find the brain so beautiful, it is complexity from simplicity. Others may disagree with me, but this is how I find beauty and this is how I define art.

Art and Science comingle in my mind so easily that I can’t really see the boundary that others draw between the two. Science is beautiful and art has reasoning behind it. The two are siblings that exist peacefully and are the ones who force them to be separate. I think we should all take some time to appreciate the beauty of both.

I was recently at a party where the subject of man-cuddling was brought up and became a point of debate. A friend of mine made it clear that he was afraid, for allegedly unknown reasons, of cuddling with another dude, and everyone else (most of whom were girls), naturally tried to pick apart why he felt this way. What could cause a fear so limiting as that of man-cuddling?

There is the obvious gut assumption made by many a Women’s Studies students that his masculinity must be so precariously balanced as part of his self-identity that he cannot indulge in the finer things in life. Buddy cuddles are such an integral part of any deep relationship that I cannot imagine what it must be like to deprive oneself of that. It became clear rather quickly that this did not explain his apparent phobia of the cuddles, however. The “fragile masculinity” explanation seems pretty extreme (I’m a Women’s Studies minor and even I think it sounds a little radical) and doesn’t usually translate well to the average Joe who doesn’t want to snuggle up with his best bro. So what is it? Why does my friend have real fears about hitting the cuddle couch with his friends?

Has he never experienced the glory of laying back and relaxing with his best dudes? Nope. He has in fact had perfectly fine cuddle sessions in his past, always with some dude named Ben, and never with any traumatizing side-effects. We can cross aversion off the list, along with any worries about finding out a deeply buried sexual preference, which he explained rather eloquently using a very specific and very vivid stand-up bit performed by Louis C.K. (if you want to watch it you should probably go seek it out yourself, and maybe turn on safe search while you’re at it). We were able to conclude that his fear was in no way the result of any past experience or prospective future experience.

At this point we were at a loss. None of us could see any reason why my friend should be afraid of being a cuddle bug, and neither could he. Perhaps some of it is rooted in his idea of what it means to be a man of his specific point of identity – his ideas of man-cuddling from the perspective of a straight male could differ from those who identify as LGBTQ. Or perhaps his views on cuddling are truly unique and dudes everywhere are settling down with a nice blanket and their best guy friend as we speak. We may never know, because we don’t really talk about dudes cuddling. We don’t really talk about cuddling in general, as if it’s not the most spectacularly comfy experience in the world (even when your arm is falling asleep and your neck is forming a kink from being at a weird angle). Maybe the solution is to bring cuddly conversation into our daily lives. When did physical contact become such a taboo talking point?

I have no idea why or if this is important, but I do know one thing. I am about to go cuddle with my roommate, and you all probably should, too.

Sunday I will present my Senior Recital and I’m scared.

I have never been one to get nervous before a performance: shaking and breathing heavily as I struggle to get the nerve to walk out on stage. Or to panic the night before, jumping out of bed to check my score unsure of whether it was an eighth or a quarter note rest.

No, I have never had these concerns. Of course I’ve gotten the usual butterflies but I have always refused to acknowledge them as nerves. No, I never get nervous – only anticipatory.

Yesterday, nerves and that little voice in your head that says “I can’t” got the better of me and I struggled to get my head in “the right place”. I wasn’t able to function as a person, let alone as a singer, and for the first time in a long time I was scared: scared of the future, of jaw tension, and tuning, scared that I would forget the words to pieces memorized weeks and months before, and scared that I wouldn’t be enough. Enough of a singer, enough of a performer – simply that I wouldn’t be good enough to met the expectations of family that has financed my education, friends who have heard incessant chatter about Anna Netrebko for the past four years and my own lofty expectations.

For me, the difference between this recital and every other performance that I’ve done is simple and boils down to two main points: the sheer quantity of music and the fact that on Sunday it will be just me on stage. On Sunday there will be no costumes or sets to hide behind, no co-star to steal the lime light and no blocking to distract from the fact that it is Alexandria up on stage – not Phyllis or Brooke or Servillia. This vulnerability is what frightens me. If the audience doesn’t approve, there is no character or director to blame – just me.

I know that things will be fine on Sunday – better than fine. I am well prepared and love the music which I am presenting. Now all that remains is to turn the lingering butterflies into anticipation for what is sure to be an amazing day.