You may be right about my history; I don’t know what your standards are for “extremely hot” and “extremely smart”, outside of Meng. We’d probably agree on a few cases, and it’s true I haven’t dated any of them (or, as is more your style, gone on a wild existentialist goose chase after them).

The dangerous thing with looking for an extremely hot, extremely smart girl is this: by my own standards, I’m extremely smart. Or at least, I think I am smart in the particular realms of intelligence I care about. Thus if I find a girl who is, by my standards, extremely smart, she’ll be more or less like me.

2 problems: first, what is “smart”? What if my standards of smartness are all fucked up? What if I’m an arrogant, elitist philosopher from Stanford who has an impossibly narcissistic view of intelligence? (Bingo!) Second, why should I think that a girl like this would be good for me?

Anyway, you’re the one going through the existentialist crisis, so I don’t have to tell you how these decisions always lead to a leap of faith anyway (which I feel, ironically, much more in the case of romantic love than I ever have in the case of God-love). Smart/stupid/hot/cold… I don’t think these categories are going to help me.

From where I’m standing, it looks like the recipe for me is going to look like this (kudos to Donnie Darko):

Love = Attraction + Divine Intervention

But keep me posted with your philosophizings and your very radical intermediate positions. Occasionally, that is: you know me; you know I’ve never been interested too much in your willful quasi-solipsist independence. I’m much more of a singular romantic interexistence guy. Which is why the temptation to settle has never really bugged me as much as it has you!

The only reason you lack my optimism is that you have not gotten to indulge in an extremely hot smart girl. Beauty and intelligentce together render all imperfections and mistrusts obsolete. Come to Vanity Fair pilgrim, the city of reflections escapes and the future, and dwell there a long long time before you go on towards the river.

If it’s similar to what you’re looking for - my radicalist sentiments would never like to call it an intermediate position - I’m intent on finding the proper synthesis between willful quasi-solipsist independence and singular romantic interexistence - such that solipsism can be at once conceded and overcome. (Hmm I wonder who demands such a synthesis.) I’ll let you know when I find something, but I presume now the solution should either depend on absurd mutual mystic faith/trust/surrender or basic embodiment. One seems like cheating, the other seems a bit, well, base.

Writing philosophy at work is a joke about a joke.

Maybe I just don’t have the kind of optimism you do about supremely worthwhile objects (at the moment). Neither is Nietzsche attractive. Is my intermediate position impossible? If I had to choose, I know which one it’d be.