What's going on, Ralph? I'm around for a bit if you need to talk--either here or via pm.

I wish I could say what's going on. I'm okay so far. Maybe even getting better although going through some pain to get there.

Does that mean you don't want to say or you don't actually know what's going on? Regardless, I'm sorry it's painful. Offer still stands if you ever need an ear.

Take care.

Hope things become easier for you soon Ralph.

Sorry its so painful :(

I don't know the first bit of what's going on. If I tried to put it in words it would be wrong, but I still try. Sometimes I think I'm lying, other times I think I'm mistaken.

Sometimes language is disturbingly inadequate. No word is a perfect label for what it's supposed to represent. We talk with fuzzy approximations.

Approximation is putting it mildly. Our perceptions are not reality but they are our reality. Then we try to put words on it. I prefer math. Numbers at least tell you when information is lost.

Oddly, I almost included a very similar line about math in my previous comment. I've said the same thing before. The beauty of math is there are right and wrong answers and ways to tell which are which. Math is a language in which things can be said perfectly. The drawback though is that it is still an approximation of our reality. Math is something we lay on top of reality as a tool to understand and make predictions, but it will still never perfectly describe the reality.

Art is another form of expressing and relaying information. Sometimes a song will say things much better than a bunch of words. There is something to the old addage "a picture is worth a thousand words" because an image can express what a thousand words cannot. I also do a lot of fiction writing and i've found that sometimes simply telling a story allows me to say something that couldn't have been said any other way--the actions and interactions of the characters are where the information lies, and not just in the words.