meiosis

my mother doesn't understand me . . . but when i see myself through her eyes, i understand myself better. does that make sense?

i'm knee-deep in italo calvino's "meiosis" as i work on my last essay for until next semester . . .

. . . narrating this story becomes more complicated than when it was a question of a single cell, not only because the description of the relationship must take into account so many things that happen at the same time but above all because it's necessary to establish who is having relations with whom, before specifying what sort of relations they are.

actually, when you come right down to it, defining the sort of relations isn't after all as important as it seems, because saying we have mental relations, for example, or else, for example, physical relations doesn't change much, once mental relationshop involves several billion special cells called neurons which, however, function by receiving stimuli from such a great number of other cells that we might just as well consider all the trillions of cells of the organism at once as we do when we talk about a physical relationship."