since spinach is still kind of crazy...

Dear Lauren,

Thanks again for letting me come over tonight and distract you from homework. I'm sorry you didn't get anything done, but I enjoy talking to you, and it just feels good to talk about things other than science and small talk. I feel like I've been spending a lot of time lately looking for distractions and most of them, while diverting my attention, just drop me back where I started prior to the distraction.

But not tonight! I've come home and put some more thought into your "situation". I think its understandable for you to want to find someone who is doing the same thing you are, but to suggest that they are working at the same young life high school may be a bit of a stretch of a requirement. I put it into context for myself like this: I've come to accept the fact that odds are, the woman of my dreams isn't going to know how to solve Schrodinger's Equation, and I have to be okay with that. That sounds an awful lot like a statement of settling, but I think its more so the fact that I know I'm going to love the fact that she appreciates the overall ideas that lie behind the equations in some other way. 

That being said, hopefully she'll still occasionally listen to a TED talk about science, or watch big bang theory with me, or maybe even read a magazine article, but I don't expect her to be a physics major who wants to devote her life to research. 

Thanks again Lauren. I may be completely off base with everything I just said, but I like that you make me think about it. I'm sorry it comes at the cost ofme prodding your love life and study time. I hope you had a good time tonight. 

I'll leave you with this:

"A scientist or artist is attracted to his vocation because he is in flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing and understanding. This motive can be compared with the longing that irresistibly pulls the town dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent, high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and traces the calm contours that seem to be made for eternity." 

-Einstein

Vaya con Dios,

Danny