what we talk about

I spent a good part of the evening at Koffee Too alternating between reading EKGs (electrocardiograms that record the electrical activity of the heart) and reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (short stories by Raymond Carver). The EKGs are supposed to be literal translations of how the heart is beating and what its shape is. Learning the code is fun, mostly because you feel like you're in on a secret. It's nice to have on paper what something inside is doing. Though at times what I translate is just that, a translation, two phrases for the same entity. And as we're all familiar with, more often things are lost in the switch than gained, not just due to elusive nuance but also because being caught in a mere transfer makes you forget to understand, sometimes. But still, in the moments of coming in and out of focus, I remember part of why I like the stubborn elegance of science. You keep whittling away at it with more and more why's, and it ends somewhere, but how surprisingly nice it is to find mystery in your lap after so many steps of rationale. The Carver stories, as expected, are not romantic. And the title made me think that it's true, we always have to explain our words; there's always a representation for the real thing. And we're always trying to get at these real things, the beats of hearts that don't look anything like <3 and the people carrying them. Maybe this is why today I nursed a stomachache with pumpkin cake and cream cheese frosting, steamed milk with Irish cream, and milk chocolate, hoping that the saccharine would dissolve the ache--shove the stand-ins in to understand them, and then out of sight to prevent their camouflage of the actual thing. I don't know; I don't know much of what I talk about.