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September 19th, 2005

01:54 pm - Therapists is Evil. *sigh* Friends in therapy. Friends leaving therapy. Me needing therapy. Friends going into the hospital for MORE therapy... Circumstances tend to stir up sediments in the mind. I've been screwed over by all therapists except one, who is only excluded for the reason that she had no apparent effect at all. Of course, this was when I was much younger and under my parents' insurance. Now that I'm older and uninsured, I feel much less willing to throw money and resources away on such a pointless and difficult endeavor as finding a functional shrink. I went to a child psychologist a few times, mostly because I didn't used to sleep. She didn't help with that. I didn't fully understand the exercise at that age (I've come to conclude) and I said some untruthful things that, viewed backwards from adulthood, make me feel terribly confused and ashamed. I went to a man whom I could make laugh, this made him patently useless. Humor is my shield. I speak of my problems humorously before anything else. He laughed and he never delved deeper than cliché. I reached out the best I knew how, and he laughed for an hour and I went home feeling totally empty. I went to a woman who wanted to know why I was smiling while I tried to explain to her about my grandfather's death, who seemed completely unwilling to accept the true explaination that it was my first session and I was incredibly nervous. I pulled together the willpower to refuse a second session, thank goodness. I went to a woman who manipulated me into promising that I would do something that I knew I couldn't do. My mother used this against me when I couldn't do it, she pressured me mercilessly, said awful things. When I went to my next session, tearful, trying to explain this, trying to explain how I couldn't do it, this woman said, so matter-of-factly, "Oh. I didn't think you could." The doctor who worked with the woman who had no effect at all, he prescribed my medicines while I went to her for therapy. What he had prescribed previously, years ago, after a short hiatus in dosage, began to make me sick. Very sick. He didn't believe me, said it was impossible, did not want to prescribe anything else. Years later, in college, I discovered it was nowhere near uncommon for a medicine to stop working, for tolerances and changes in brain chemestry to build up. I suppose it's understandable that I don't want to look for another one of those. I suppose it's understandable if I'm suspicious, for my own sake and on behalf of those I know. But, well, it's not paranoia if everybody really is out to get you. I think my mom said that a lot of people go into psychology because they want to understand what the hell's wrong with them. Sometimes I think that's true. Current Mood: stressed Current Music: DS9

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August 22nd, 2005

10:32 pm - Faith, again. "I don't understand... I don't understand... I feel like I'm insane!" -The Birdcage Faith. Religious faith. What is it? Where the hell did it come from? What's it doing here? What makes religious faith different from some form of neurotic fixation? For gosh sakes, where's the empirical data? I don't understand. I never have, but I've been thinking a lot about it lately. I wasn't raised with any faith, unless you count Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, and I grew out of those. There was a wealth of evidence against their existence. Racky has faith. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe that in a literal interpretation of Revelations, a seven-headed and be-crowned beast is gonna come out of the ocean and take control of UNICEF as an agent of the Anti-Christ. What the hell? Where do you even BEGIN to take something like that seriously? I don't understand. I've been leafing through Chick tracts, and the Watchtower that somebody keeps leaving in the laundry room. The lunatic fringe, maybe, like snake handlers, but when the question is of faith? Pure belief in the face of all that is right and good and logical and constructive? You have to go to those sorts of people, and there aren't THAT few of them. They are so blind, so secure and unquestioning. You can't just pull that out of your ass. Is it brain washing? Is it... I don't know, a failure to think? Jewish people have faith, though, and their religion is so much about questioning things and studying things. That's not blind, right? Or is it, but selective somehow? I mean, they're still studying and questioning the Bible, the Source, the Divinely-Inspired Pure and Infallible Book of Western Religion. Sort of the core of the whole matter. Eastern religion is more fragmented in its Genesis, more of individuals, more fallable-seeming... But still, everything goes back to a root body of works that's at the very least supposed to be divinely-inspired. Why the Bible? Why any book? Why is it okay to live your life (and expect others to live theirs) in strict accordance to these books and not the Collected Books of Garfield? How can you think any book could be Heaven Blessed to be totally rid of typos and other fuck ups? I feel like I'm insane! Everybody else seems to get it, at least a little bit. They don't see it so abstractly that it doesn't make an iota of sense. Racky says I do so have faith, that I at least seem to have faith in him, but that's Trust and that's totally different. That actually has a basis in reality here. Faith? It seems completely ungrounded to me, like "Where The Sidewalk Ends." I can't take those last few steps alone, I don't get how everybody else does, and just accepts it as completely and utterly NORMAL, of all things! Normal?? How can you do that? Why would you WANT to? I understand wanting a purpose to your existence, but where did all this unrelated, cultrual-type shit come from? How can you believe something so strongly you'd live your entire LIFE in accordance with it? I'm going to try to deconstruct it, like humanity, but it's a lot harder and a lot pricklier than that. And I worry. I have my own conclusions about humanity, and I believe those. I mean, I have evidence. But my beliefs of faith? I have a working model I find logical, but I don't believe it, not like everybody else believes theirs. After I've taken on religion, I worry I still won't believe it. I worry I never will. Man finds his salvation not by works, but by faith? Jack Chick is fond of that one... But what if it's true? Current Mood: confused

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06:22 pm - Uh-oh, humanity! Ape Cultural Traditions Pretty Much Confirmed! So much for communicated traditions being proof of humanity. Now I'll have to get even more persnickety about human use of language to pare it down to a uniquely human trait. I'm curious, if they were to put the two groups of chimps together, would they declare Holy War on each other for perverted food-gathering techniques? And if they did, how would we tell? Current Mood: curious

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July 21st, 2005

12:28 pm - Oh, my cup runneth under... As regards J. K. Rowling's latest missive... ( Obviously, this is a spoiler. ) Current Mood: sarcastic Current Music: The Chain - Fleetwood Mac

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July 10th, 2005

01:04 am - Alex the African Grey and I are fighting a duel to the death, one of us has got to go. Alex the Parrot is the the news again. His researcher pals, bored with the demonstration that he understands and can speak English, are now demonstrating how he recognizes the concept of zero. There are a few more things I'd like to know about this before formulating an opinion, unfortunately the article doesn't elaborate, and I'm not going to comb through any scientific journals to figure it out. Not without someobdy throwing grant money at me for no reason, anyway. The main thing I wonder is if they've done this particular demonstration under double blind conditions yet, where nobody knows how many of any object we're showing the parrot, and we record his answers and THEN look. This would help them to avoid a "Clever Hans" type embarrassment later on. You all remember Clever Hans? Well, if you REMEMBER him, you're very, very old and I'm so happy you've learned how to operate a computer, but if you KNOW of him, that's just as well. Clever Hans was a counting horse. He'd paw his foot no the ground to indicate numbers. "How many dildos am I holding up, Clever Hans?" *paw, paw, paw, paw* "What if I take three away, then how many?" *paw* They taught him to add and subtract and do many impressive things, for a horse. Well, not really. They really taught him to paw his foot on the ground until all the humans around him relaxed their body posture, which might be an impressive thing to teach a human, but not a horse. When they blind-folded Hans, he was about as dumb as a regular horse again. Alex could similarly be reading physical cues in order to say "none." I don't like to think they'd be going public like this without having done a double blind, but you never know. Another thing I wonder is if they've really TAUGHT him his concept of zero, or they've just taught him to VERBALIZE his concept of zero, and all African Grey parrots have an innate understaning of "none." If parrots were always mathematically smarter than ancient man and most four-year-olds... Well, that would just be really, really weird. Cool, but weird. Racky (if you can't trust Racky, who can you trust?) believes that Alex is 28 years old now, and that African Grey Parrots have about an 80 year lifespan. Well, that's also about right for a human in a developed nation, and I'm 24 years old, myself. I have to wonder if I'm gonna be keeping abreast of new Alex developments for the remainder of my natural life, or if I'll manage to outlive the little bugger by a few years or even a decade. Man, it's weird to think of your lifespan in terms of the intellectual growth of a parrot. Cool, but weird. And a little bit scary. Current Mood: awake Current Music: ABBA vs. A-Teens... FIGHT!!

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July 8th, 2005

11:21 pm - I can really draw! Just... not in colored pencil, not so much. Some things are just inexplicable. I know where this drawing came from, in fact, where it came from is actually pretty simple, but it's still inexplicable. Shy (he has a LiveJournal, but I don't think he's using it) and I were talking about putting our RP characters in goofy situations, as we are often wont. Somehow the subject of what Zadireth (a male dragon) would do to Tareith (his mate) if he found her in the arms of Shyriath (Zad's mortal enemy and now, strangely, housemate) after some incedence of pity sex. The consensus was that Zadireth would go crazy and kill both of them, and then, I don't know why, I added: "Kali would have to take him out. He'd throw himself screaming off the edge of a building." Kali is a completely different character, not involved in any kind of western-style law enforcement or anything that might suggest her as the type of person who would "take out" anybody, but I found the image immensely attractive. Hence, a sketch. It was neat-loking enough, so I redrew it (my things improve immensely upon redrawing, I'll post the sketch later if there's any great clamoring to see the seminal process (which I doubt). I decided to put it in colored pencil instead of graphite, or trying to do computer coloring. I'm not as adept at getting hue and saturation out of colored pencil as I am... practically any other medium, except paints (which I've never used). Of course, I need to learn them, because I really like them, and chalk pastels... There's no way I can color in small drawings with chalk pastels. Don't get me wrong, I can reproduce pictures of things in colored pencil without error, but there's more finesse involved in shading something you pulled out of your ass. So, here, an anthro dragoness, who is neither anthro, nor technically a dragoness, but I drew her like that anyway: ( Kali is a Gunslinger ) Current Mood: artistic

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08:41 pm - CICADA!! I am living in... a horror movie. A bad one, too. Like The Deadly Bees, where the producers can't even afford to make giant bugs, so they film swarms of the regular-sized ones and superimpose them over the actors. There are these bugs here. Cicadas. Not the 17-year kind in the South. These are annual. The most common species is the Apache. They sit in the trees for three or four months, and the males scream for the females to come and mate with them. The females lay their eggs in tree roots and then the larvae stay there until next year when it's time for the males to climb into the trees and scream for the females to mate with them. Cute. Well, cicadas AREN'T cute. They're fat and black, and in the close-up pictures I find of them, they have beady little red eyes. They're not like a grasshopper or a butterfly, you couldn't make a Disney movie about them. They're hideous, evil-looking things. They look like they sting or bite real hard (although they don't). And they're LOUD. What they do, what they do is, the males, they sit in the tree and hold their bodies against it so it becomes a resonating device. They vary the space between their body and the tree so the pitch of the sound changes, or something. They sound like... You know that sound power lines make on a hot day, when they sing? Like that, but, I swear, louder, and it's coming from all the trees around you. I'm inside, it's dark out, like the rest of God's creatures, they oughta be winding down for the night, but I can STILL HEAR THEM. Faintly. At the very edge of one's perceptions, at around the volume needed to drive you insane, although it's hard to tell with the refrigerator running just now... Anyway there are thousands, perhaps millions of these little creatures, pressing their bodies against all the trees around our apartment. If they swarmed, I think they would darken the sky, with their thick black bodies and their buzzing wings. Every once in a while you see one out of a tree, blundering around near the ground like it's blind and doesn't know where the hell it's going. One of them flew past my ear the other night when I went to change out the laundry. A low buzzing sound. It's bad enough now, it's the height of the season, what happens when they start to DIE? They were already gone by the time we moved here last year, that was the end of August. They're not just gonna poof out of existence. Am I gonna walk outside and bang my knee against a treetrunk and get pelted with hundreds of dead, black, vile bodies? Or what if they're just DYING, not dead yet? What if they do that horrible dance around the ground where they're buzzing and flapping and going around in a circle, and they flap less and less and they look like they're spitting their last curse on a world they despise and then they stop moving... Only you know THEY AREN'T DEAD YET, and then you have to WALK PAST THEM, and what if one of them latches on to your leg or... Racky says they do a mating flight. Soon. I didn't know they ever got out of the trees. We don't know this one way or the other, or how long it would last if they did that... All the information out there is about the 17-year cicada, most of it at least. I have a problem with flying things, with things flying at me that don't look like they know where the hell they're going. It's pathelogical, phobic. I have a real problem with being surrounded by trees with things in them that could theoretically fly at me en masse and clog all my visible orificies with their little squashy bodies. I've been limited, in my Califorina residence, to moths, and the occasional grasshopper or butterfly. This cicada thing has the possibility to become paralyzing. Phooo, I need to not actually think about what's happening in nature around me, and hope for the best. Depression is bad enough, I don't need a paralyzing cicada phobia on top of that. Current Mood: paranoid Current Music: fweeeEEEEeeeEEeeeeeEEEEEeee...

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July 5th, 2005

02:20 pm - Semi-Freudian Time for the sorta-weekly, I'm-Bored-But-Not-Ready-To-Start-Playing-The-Sims-Yet Me Update: D'ya have any idea how much more smoothly my social life would go if I just had a dick? Man, I just can't relate to women at all. Interactions with females are entirely too convoluted. I try to socialize with them on their level, but it's like when I try to speak Spanish, only I'm better at faking it. Maybe it's actually worse than when I try to speak Spanish, because I still don't really understand WHY they act that way. I do understand WHY someone would want to speak Spanish, given that they're of Latin descent and that was the first language they learned PLUS it's a lot simpler in construction than English. Women don't learn to engage in Machiavellian social behavior first thing out of the womb, do they? How could they? Does your MOM teach you? They're already doing it by preschool... And it's NOT simpler. Is it the estrogen? Nah, can't be. Preschoolers are prepubescent and I'm at least two decades away from menopause. I relate to men, and I like being around them. Not sexually. Even gay men. Even really effeminate gay men. There's just a certain straightforwardness that I can expect and that I've learned to appreciate. Racky (delcan) can take me to a paranoia game with four strange men I only know by annecdote, and after dinner, when he says to me, "You don't have to do that... Why are you clearing the plates?" I can reply, "Because I don't have a dick." And I know there will not be a sudden, quiet undercurrent of discomfort. Not like when I was at my Aunt Jan's house and I told the joke about the seven dwarves and the Pope. Of course, because of this attitude of mine, men tend to like me. After a sincere friendship and getting to know me even better, guys start to do more than like me. Maybe I'm like a breath of fresh air. I went through a period where I had three different males in love with me. Two different sets of three different males. Not, "I want to get into your pants" love. Sincere, long distance, tearful "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" love. At least in most cases. This, of course, is not good. I had to learn to protect myself from this kind of thing. But I'm still not entirely certain I have the hang of it, and my only best friend is still male. Not to mention the person I live with and plan to spend the rest of my life with, but that's to be expected. I wonder, absently, if I could be a lesbian or transgendered. I don't wonder for long because I know either one of those things would mean having (at least wanting) to fuck women, and I could never, EVER do that. Could I be a GAY guy trapped in a woman's body? Well, I guess I might have a somewhat easier time of things like that. I'd have to convince Racky that he's ALSO gay, but if I really put all my powers of persuasion into it, I could probably manage it for a while at least. But it seems an awful lot of trouble and expense to end up right back where one started, only with scars and intolerance on your ass. Besides, I like my breasts. I want to keep my breasts. I wish I had another couple sets of them someplace. Of course, it could be much simpler than that, and it probably is. I like RP. There aren't nearly as many women as men who like RP, so I don't meet a whole lot of ladies in relaxed social situations. I like sci-fi, too. Star Trek. I like computers. I like movies where stuff blows up spectacularly. I like it when Inuyasha screams and vaporizes improbably huge monsters. I'm not transgendered, I'm a gamer girl geek, and it's real hard to meet more of those IRL. I got lucky with Jessie (amethystrse), but now we don't live anywhere near each other anymore, and she's got more pressing matters than enlivening my social existence long distance. So, back into predominately male RPGs for fun and human contact. God is a comedy writer. He makes me like this, and then he makes my life-calling childcare, which is almost entirely infested with women. Yeesh. By the way, the joke with the seven dwarves and the Pope goes like this: Dopey: Your Holiness, are their any dwarf nuns in the Vatican? Pope: No, my son. Other dwarves: *snurk* Dopey: Your Holiness, are their any Dwarf nuns in Italy? Pope: No, my son. Other dwarves: *snigger* Dopey (desperately): Your Holiness, are their any dwarf nuns in the entire world?! Pope: No, my son. Other dwarves (bursting out laughing): Dopey screwed a penguin! Dopey screwed a penguin!! Current Mood: envious Current Music: Star Trek TNG: "Ba bababa, baBAbaba!"

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12:52 pm - Humanity Part 3, The Rational Animal I was just going to lump this one together with "souls" and dismiss them both out of hand, but that's cheating. So I'm going to try to deconstruct it as the other two definitions, although I find it rather more distasteful and riduculous than either of the previous. After all, for as long as we've been calling Man "the rational animal" people have been pointing at human behavior in reference to that and giggling hysterically. What's rational about us? Murder? Stamp collecting? Modern dance? Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we act like idiots, and we know it. Sure, individual species often exhibit idiosyncratic behavior; I believe Erma Bombeck points out the existence of an Australian marsupial that will carefully peel a sweet potato, eat the potato, and then eat the peelings. But, really, natural selection is remarkably efficient at weeding out pointless or self-destructive behavior. Most dumb-seeming instincts in animals served them well for thoudands, even millions, of years, and only proved to be "dumb" after the introduction of Men, Cats, Rats and Dogs. Drawing from this, many armchair philosophers have turned around and called man the "irrational animal," but that doesn't exactly make sense either. We rarely act without thinking. In fact, we usually only act after obsessive amounts of thought. Sometimes it's not "right" thinking, in fact sometimes it's really narrow minded and uneducated thinking, but we do think. As Descartes said, that's the one thing a human being can never doubt: "I think, therefore I am." (Although I'm still not really sure how he managed to get thinking as proof of existence out of the certainty of thought. Seems to me more like you'd get proof of existence out of the certainty of... existence? Maybe?) Only in the most dire and primative situations do we proceed without conscious thought: when the rapist pops out of the alleyway, when we're falling off the edge of the cliff, when we're blinded by fear, or hate. However, conscious thought is not necessarily rational thought. I suppose a great majority of acts that appear irrational on the surface have resulted from a rational thought process that was based on incorrect information and beliefs. Or maybe even information and beliefs that are a matter of personal opinion, I'm sure that's where modern dance and stamp collecting come from. But murder, maybe some murders, or most murders, have this sort of root cause as well. But there are times, and I've experienced this myself, when you think about what you're doing, and you know it's stupid or wrong, but you decide you're gonna do it anyway. Maybe you decide that partly even BECAUSE you know it's stupid or wrong. Neither the pondorous "rational animal" nor the flippant "irrational animal" can fully account for these times. I propose, perhaps, a compromise. Maybe no more accurate, but at least more balanced. Man is, the rationalizing animal. We might not always find meaning, but we look for it. When we think at all, we look for it. We don't always find it, maybe because it's not always there, but when we do find it, it makes us happy. When we don't find it, well, we make something up. We make something up, or we put the incedent aside, because acting without meaning makes one very, very uncomfortable. Perhaps we've bought into the idea of "the rational animal" more than we like to think. True irrationality scares the hell out of us. Maybe it should. Current Mood: loved Current Music: Send Me On My Way - Rusted Root

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July 1st, 2005

04:12 pm - Nee, Mama! Well, first of all, do you have cold water? I mean, what comes out when you turn the "cold" tap? Cool water? Go ahead and check, I'll wait. Well, you don't really have to. But did you ever stop and think how your "cold" water is really "ambient temperature water"? I don't think this really occurs to a person until the ambient temperature is 110 F and the shower is still making "warm" water by mixing "hot" and "cold". In other words, I would pay cash money for a cold shower right now, or a cool bath. Nothin' doin'. Were I to go into the pool, it would still be bathwater temperature. I know, I've been. It's bathwater tmperature when it's 90 out, I don't want to know how it is when it's 110. (Now, the rest of this post... Beware spoilers? I don't think so. Unless you consciously put your powers of deductive reasoning into it. If you can't help that, and you want to go see the USA version of Dark Water, maybe you shouldn't read on.) The other reason I'm uncomfortable in the shower lately is delcan and I just rented the Japanese version of Dark Water. It's actually servicably creepy and surprising, I wouldn't mind trying the American version when it gets to the cheap theater down the street (that might be a couple of months, if it does well) but the ending irritates me. Not because it's inappropriate to the movie or anything, just because my own life experience indellibly colors my point of view. When mothers come into play, I still have an uncontrollable twitch reflex, like a mental patient. The movie, and other movies (White Oleander comes to mind) make the postulation that a mother can screw up repeatedly, in any number of ways, and yet redeem herself via one final sacrifice for the sake of her child. Because mothers just do that; it's their true nature. There are scenes (it's a leitmotif) in Dark Water of a little girl waiting and waiting and being the absolute last one picked up from school, late, by her mother. And I want to start punching the TV set, because that was ME!! I don't, because that would really hurt, but I still sort of want to. Not that this was the most egregious offense (if you want to read about some of those, file back through these posts for about a year, or just wait, I'll probably get around to some more eventually) but it was symptomatic of a pattern of behavior. Sort of a repeated thought process of "she won't mind" if that even occured to her. "I'll just throw this full grocery bag on top of her in the back seat, she won't mind." "I can sleep for a few more minutes before I got pick her up, she won't mind." It offends me on a basic level that she could, or even would, eliminate all that negative behavior by some ultimate, poetic sacrifice. Not that I subscribe to the right wing Christian idea of eternal damnation, I prefer to think of it in terms of Karma. Like one lady put it in the History Channel's program on Hell: It's a natural consequence. Like eating a lot of bad food. If you eat a lot of bad food, you get sick. It isn't because anybody is punishing you, that's just what happens when you eat bad food. If you spend your life doing the equivalent of eating rancid meat, I don't like to think that you can purge once and be done with the matter. On the other hand, I know I should be serene about the whole thing, secure in the faith that my mother is on her own pathway to happiness, that it just might take her a longer, harder time to get there. But I have issues with faith, particularly when it comes to someone I dislike personally. As Wilde said, it's much easier to be kind to people you care absolutely nothing about. Current Mood: hot Current Music: Hot Blooded

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June 27th, 2005

01:14 am - I (heart) English Your Linguistic Profile: 75% General American English 15% Yankee 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Dixie 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? But what about "Hella"? I was so proud of myself for getting through UCSB with people from the Bay area and not picking up "Hella." And "like!" What about "like"? I did, unfortunately, absorb that one, but I was, like, too young to know any better. And I only do it when I'm not sure how I'm going to end my sentence and I'm stalling. At least, I THINK so... Current Mood: amused Current Music: I've Seen All Good People - Yes

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June 26th, 2005

08:34 pm - A Very Good Game Here's a fun one, when you're bored and/or confined. Pick an object, anything nearby, or something you happen to pass and recognize. Imagine what aliens would think, and what they would be able to deduce about humanity, if that were the sole surviving relic after a total species destruction. Liiike... Well, what's on the desk here? Okay, a battery. Duracell. What if the last remnant of the human race were a Duracell battery? What would the aliens think? Well, there are enough repeating characters on it to deduce that we had a written language, though probably not enough to figure what it meant or how it was pronounced. They could probably crack it open and from the remaining residue figure out that it could produce a mild, electrical charge. One end is labelled "<-+" so maybe they'd figure out that referred to a specific property of the electrical charge, althought the opposite end is not similarly labelled, so that'd be more speculative. They'd also see we knew how to produce pigments, and plastics. And they'd probably assume we made small electrically operated appliances that one, or maybe multiple batteris of this strength could power. They couldn't figure on bigger devices, though. Maybe they'd think it was some kind of portable religious device, given that if you can lick it, you get a charge. Of course, that's assuming they have tongues and a similar electrical resistance to human flesh and saliva. All-in-all, not a bad thing to have left over. Which leads us to the next level of the game, trying to figure out the best and worst objects in your immediate area for the aliens to find. Delcan and I figured the best thing around our place is the game IZZI, which is a maddening puzzle with a million ways to do it wrong, where you have a bunch of tiles and you have to match the black bits to black bits and the white bits to white bits. The box is the best thing, it's got plenty of text, and also pictoral demonstrations of how to play, squares made with the tiles with white and black matching. There are also alternative ways to play pictorially demonstrated, as is lining up the segments so they make a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line through the center of the squares, or two lines, or a "frame" design. The worst thing, we figured, in general but not in our apartment, would be a spork. As Gallagher said, "it's not a good spoon, and it's not a good fork." It's a flimsy, plastic thing that isn't a weapon, or a utensil, or anything obviously useful at all. There's no writing or directions to help out, no pictures. It seems, even upon detailed examination, to be a patently stupid tool. Maybe the aliens would figure that we had manipulted our environment sufficiently to be able to use such a delicate tool, but would be unable to actually think of what we could possibly use it for. They'd probably pity us. Go ahead, try it out, it's fun! Current Mood: listless Current Music: Law & Order, SVU

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June 21st, 2005

07:40 am - Time to watch me now... I suppose it was only a matter of time before I backslid and started posting faintly morose things about myself again. I don't know if that's positive or negative, although I know the way I put it SOUNDS negative. I mean, I guess it's all well and good to use my journal as a repository for arcane, philosopical arguments, but when you stand up on a mountaintop and just issue decrees, nobody talks to you. Not that I get a lot of people talking to me (historically, I mean, in LJ format) when I'm down on the earth bitching and moaning like a regular human being either, but... Anyway, that's not the point, although it would be nice to get into a good debate with somebody I barely know again. The point is, being back in the LJ community (sort of, vaguely) I happened to be signed in the last time I looked back through Delcan's old entries and I found a long locked one. About me. About him being really worried about me. He posts about me, which is weird enough I guess, but I've posted about him. The only thing is when I've posted about him it's been because I was ticked off or because he did something silly. He posts about me for much sweeter, guilt-inducing reasons. It's not that I don't have those kinds of feelings for him, but I don't post about them. I make pancakes or something instead. One time I left him a long "I love you" note on the door that stayed up for weeks 'cos he liked having "warm fuzzies" every time he left the apartment. But the substance of this post, being really worried about me, and depression, and anxiety, and things, and the replies... I don't know. Mixed feelings. Not exactly betrayel, but an unpleasant variety of surprise. I've seen me worse than I was at that point, and he's seen me worse too, although he might not have realized it at the time. It seems weird to me to have him asking other people for help, about ME, like he doesn't know what to do and is really scared, when it's happened before and we've managed to muddle through it. And it's not like I sensed it, it's not like I thought, "Boy, he's not holding up very well in the middle of all this, I wish there was somebody to help the both of us out." I mean, heck, I thought I was doing fairly well, actually. I didn't stop functioning, not until after I got back after that Xmas vacation and my "co-teacher" and "aide" were talking in muttered voices when I came in, and they looked up and very pointedly did not say a word to me, but said "Hi" to the parent who came in right behind me. At that point I just sort of realized how awful it had been, and how awful it was going to continue to be, and later that week I spent a night crying and got up and quit over the phone the next morning. Geez, man, I was able to pick up the phone, all by myself while Racky was at work, and not-cry long enough to tell my boss I had to quit and explain why. For me that's strength of epic proportions. I'm not saying I could've done it without him entirely (I know I couldn't have), but he wasn't there for any support when I did do it. The thing is, after the worst incedent that he's been with me for, there was a long stretch of time when he treated me like I was made out of glass and anything upsetting might break me. And I knew he was doing it, and why he was doing it, and it drove me crazy. We had an awful, nasty, entirely unpleasant argument about the matter and managed to get things back to normal, better than normal, I thought, because I'd managed to impress upon him that although my chemistry may be FUBAR, I'm not like a badly-made doll. No matter what might happen, I'm gonna come out of the other side of it, maybe a little more cynical for wear, but not broken. But that post, I don't know. It was like "Help me, I'm afraid I'm gonna break her again" and everybody else chiming in with helpful ways to NOT break me and how to lovingly manipulate me into quitting my job. The kinds of things people say about you behind your back when, to your face, they want to smile reassuringly and pat you and back away slowly, maybe after giving you some thorazine. The overwhelming theme was "GET HER TO A THERAPIST." And I'm not gonna sit here and say I don't need therapy, because god knows I do, and lots of it. But there is a lot that I can do for myself, with patience and time, and there's a lot that Racky.. Er.. Delcan, that is. There's a lot that he does for me, even if he doesn't think so. And I know this was nobody's intent, but at every other occasion in my life when therapy was reccomended it was a direct result of my loved ones not knowing how to deal with me anymore, and/or not wanting to. That, and I've been to a lot of therapists, and a lot of them have things seriously wrong with them and are not at all helpful. The last thing I needed, at that point in my life, was to go out and wander around in my self-hating daze, trying to find a therapist who at least wouldn't damage me. THERAPIST is not the end-all and the be-all solution for depression. Neither is MEDICATION, although over time I think I've had considerably more luck with that than therapists. MEDICATION never tries to trick you hurtfully into admitting some psychologically-valuable detail about yourself, even if, one time, I got very sick and couldn't get up and saw the walls get melty. And now I understand why he's been so kind and so supportive, even though I've been too frozen to force myself to go out and get a job for six months now. It's because he thought I was a lot more fucked up that I thought I was myself, and he understandably assumes it's going to take a long time to come back from that. I don't know how fucked up I was, I can't be objective about the matter, but I don't like a group of others I barely know getting the idea that I was THAT fucked up, am prone to it under certain circumstances, and am stil fairly fucked up even now. There's a certain treatment that goes along with that, and when Racky treated me like that before, it was bad enough. With people who don't know me, who don't speak to me, who wouldn't know how much I would hate it, being thought of that way (possibly) is even more intolerable. I don't know. I'm not really mad. I'm even a little perversely intrigued. But it's still rather uncomfortable. He revealed more about me in that one post than I think I have in my entire journal so far, and that tends to cut one a little deeply. What's worse is that I didn't suspect anything, but one supposes if I really was that fucked up I wouldn't have had the free brainspace necessary to do that, and it wouldn't have helped if I had suspected it anyway. Christ, I've really been through worse than that, it was such a little thing. I've been through worse and I had my parents there to needle me constantly and make me feel more horrible. I don't think I've ever felt suicidal of my own volition, I'm way too scared of that sort of thing, I don't have any faith-based afterlife paradigm to fall back on. But throw a parent in on either side of me yelling and screaming about how ungrateful I am and I'd better not hurt myself or they'd DIE and I'm at least ready to make a grand sort of "cry for help" gesture. I don't have to deal with that any more ever, though, except in the occasional nightmare, and nobody has to worry about me hurting myself, at least not severely. I guess there's really no need for me to defend myself, but, there you have it. And I'm leaving it up public. There's a certain anonnimity in confessing one's sins to the world, even if no one's actually looking. Hell, especially if no one's actually looking. Current Mood: shocked Current Music: Barcelona, mostly

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06:03 am - Bervinishe 8 Adz The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Coincidences appear to be so commonplace in the known Universe that we should perhaps be more shocked to notice the lack of any apparent conicidence than we are at the actual occurance of one, if that were the sort of thing anybody seemed to be able to notice. Such is the case with one of the more minor, inexplicable coincidences, which is the publishing of a series of five fictional books on a backwater planet in an unfashionable sector of the galaxy under the collective title of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. These books, billed by the publisher as the "increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker Trilogy" were evidently the brainchild of a single insignificant earth-creature known as Douglas Adams. The way it happened was simply this, one day Mr. Adams woke up (perhaps, scholars speculate, after a particularly indulgent night) and thought to himself, "Wouldn't it be nice if the entire Earth were plowed under to make way for a new hyperspace bypass?" Being unable to produce such a result with primitive, human twig technology, his only rational course was to pen a radio comedy, a series of five books, a television show, a computer game and, eventually, a movie. Although through these works he became moderately wealthy and famous, he was able to make less of a dent in the science fiction community than Star Trek, Star Wars, or even, arguably, Lilo and Stitch. Being allotted more years of life than average for his species, but not for his race and class, he impolitely shuffled off this mortal coil before the movie came out, and before he was even able to adequately explain his intense hatred of digital watches to a young college student who put the question to him, probably neither for the first or last time, and whose copy of So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish he evidently signed "Bervinishe 8 Adz" but was discovered, upon later examination, to read a woefully unpoetic "Best Wishes Douglas Adams" in the extreme shorthand of a man who has signed so many damn books he just doesn't care anymore. But all of this is incedental to the nature of the coincidence. What is truly surprising (or perhaps not, given the afore-mentioned nature of coincidences in general) is that Mr. Adams managed to infer the existence of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and reproduce a select few of its entries verbatim (this was before the advent of the Internet or even Wikipedia). Unfortunately, this was of little aid to the earth-creatures, only a few of whom could actually read and only one species of whom was so dense as to require warning of its own demise and then ignore it. Most scholoars agree, then, that this coincidence and most others are totally pointless and really shouldn't be worried about, so you would probably do better to have yourself a nice cup of tea and a long lie-down. Incedentally, video records indicate that the entire planet Earth, with the exception of the five books of The Guide was destroyed in the year 2045, either by a widening hole in the atmosphere caused by the earth-creatures' overuse of hair fixadent and underarm deoderant, or the selling out of the Republic to "Emperor Palpatine" by a hated entity known only as "Jar Jar Binks." Both of these ends, coincidentally, are also considered woefully unpoetic. ((Methinks I doth presume too much. Oh well, I never claimed I was able to write a Hitchhiker's Guide entry... until just now. Sorry, Mr. Adams, wherever you are. I wonder if this darn book will ever be worth anything, as represented in $$$. I don't suppose anybody would ever authenticate "Bervinishe 8 Adz." Ho... hum.)) Current Mood: melancholy Current Music: ABBA & A-Teens

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June 12th, 2005

07:31 pm - Science is the Mythology of the Western World Phew, that's a heavy one, isn't it? One of the girls in the dorm where I lived in college had that pasted on her door. Deep thoughts were en vogue for doors in college, deep thoughts and simplistic representations of penises, but that's another essay. Certainly sparks the intellect. It did the first few times I walked past it; what if what we believe to be scientific cannon is just as inaccurate as the prehistoric beliefs in the Rain God, Human Sacrifice, and the Oedipus Complex? Okay, for the first few times, but I kept thinking about it. Eventually my thought processes came to a screeching halt: Y'know, that's a nice, revolutionary idea, but science is still TRUE! Let me divert the topic to the other end of the spectrum for a paragraph or so. Also in college, I had a professor make the case in one of my classes that scientific progress always goes forward. Theories may not always be correct, but as time goes on, they become more correct. Example: beliefs about the shape of the world. Stage one: Flat world. Totally inaccurate, but the best we had at the time. It sure LOOKED flat. Stage two: Round world. A forward leap of epic proportions, much better for making maps and calculating distances, but still not strictly, totally accurate either. Stage three: Oblique Spheroid world. Using sophisticated measuring techniques and physics calculations, we figured out that because the world is spinning on its axis, it's pulled out just a little bit at the poles by centrifugal force, making it a slight oval shape. Stage four: Pear-Shaped world. This is the latest. Using even MORE sophisticated mesuring processes and calculations, we've discovered that the world is slightly, very veeeery slightly, fatter on the bottom than on the top. In galactic terms, the difference is microscopic. On a much, much smaller scale, you can do the same things with the model of an atom. It's a damned convincing argument, and yet, something in me instictively rebells at the idea of Science (the highest-held belief system in the west these days) being somehow historically infallible. It just smacks of hubris, doesn't it? And people have been making this same kind of argument for the belief systems that benefit them the most personally for centuries. The Victorians had a very popular theory of evolution in which everything in nature was becoming more intelligent and refined, more "human." This had the nice visual and visceral effect of putting them at the pinnacle, bacteria in the basement, and Negros and the great apes somewhere in between. Of course, now most of us know this is completely stupid and a lot of us begin to suspect intelligence may not even be the best thing ever to stroll down the evolutionary pike. (Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut, among others.) Another proof that science always moves forward, or just an incedent showing people can be found to be stupid at any time? But could this kick science down to the applicable level of ancient myths and theories? You can make that argument, but let me make another. Through the centuries, using scietific theory, we've been able to extrapolate furher scientific theory, and then later prove the first theory, and the second theory to be true. If I can't pin you down to "true" at least let me say "workable." Gravity is still a theory, but the suggestion that if something falls it's gonna hit the ground has yet to be disproven. If you're going to do a BASE jump, it wouldn't make any sense to leave your parachute behind because gravity might not exist for the reason we think it does. Of course, it's possible to make the argument that if the Theory of Gravity was that Boonga the Demon Creature had us all on invisible wires and we hit the ground because he was evil and liked to yank on them it would still be just as applicable as the Theory we have currently. Dilbert creator Scott Adams made the argument on one of his books that gravity merely exists because everything in the universe is doubling in size constantly, and that works too, sorta. They work okay for the everyday world, but where would the Theory of Boonga leave our space program? We'd waste a lot of time trying to cut our invisible strings, and then maybe hit on the idea that we can only sever them if we push off the ground really hard, and even then they're not totally gone because something makes us stay hitched to the Earth and go around in circles, and we could probably make another theory to account for that. Likewise, doubling in size constantly would cascade into a lot of practicable problems and spawn other mutant theories of its own. But we don't have either of those theories. We have another theory that allows us to calculate something called "escape velocity" and the size and duration of orbits, even the direction of light. We can even calculate how, using gravity and trajectory, we can get expensive ships to land on other planets decades from when we launched them. And if, say, the ship crashes into a moon instead of landing, we go back to our calculations and we WILL find and error That error will not have resulted from a crash landing of the science itself, but some problem in its application ("Oops! We forgot to convert to Metric again!"). I guess my argument, then is that bad science and mythology (no great difference) are reactive. Something happens, and we explain that, then something else happens, and we explain that. We play catch-up forever. GOOD science is predictive, and it is predictive of further good science. That's what results in that "forever forward" motion that my professor believed in so ferverently. The caviat is, though, that sometimes science moves sideways, and after moving sideways, it can go backwards, too. "Science" with a capital "S," is a mish-mash of good and bad and mediochre. Tracing scientific progress is like tracing evolution; to give in to the Victorian idea of "forever forward" is to miss the larger picture. Bad science can lead, over time, trial and error, to good science. Aristotle thought a rock fell to the earth faster than a feather because it was made of earth. We never really abandoned that idea, we just slowly, carefully, evolved out of it. Good science, poorly interperented, leads to bad science and backward thinking. The Theory of Evolution brought us Social Darwinism and Eugenics, neither of which had a particularly auspicious end (and would've been even less auspicious if we'd persisted in employing them). So science isn't another dark god we're building a bunch of altars to, but it's not a panacea either. Likely, you won't really have to unlearn everything in order to acheive enlightenment (in the practical, not the spiritual sense), but between now and death, you're gonna have to unlearn SOMETHING, and we don't know what it is yet. The sky isn't falling, but don't get settled. Now go out there and try to figure out what we're getting wrong. Current Mood: curious Current Music: 80's CD

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June 8th, 2005

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March 31st, 2004

01:43 am - Time out from philosophy for egotism. (delcan's meme.) These musical works make me smile. Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi Alanis Morrisette - Hand In My Pocket ABBA - Nina, Pretty Ballerina The Association - Windy These musical works make me laugh. Bob Dylan - Everybody Must Get Stoned Sam the Sham and the Pharohs - Little Red Ridinghood Captain and Tennille - Love Will Keep Us Together Los Del Rio - Macarena These musical works make me energetic. Vengaboys - We Like to Party Seal - Fast Changes Moody Blues - Wildest Dreams Cherry Poppin' Daddies - Zoot Suit Riot Glenn Miller - Sing Sing Sing These musical works are powerful to me. Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe - Barcelona Janis Joplin - Me and Bobby McGee Janis Joplin - Piece of My Heart John Denver - Calypso Paul Mauriat - Love is Blue These musical works make me cry. Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Janis Joplin - The Rose Moody Blues - Dust in the Wind ABBA - Chiquiquita Rufus Wainwright - Hallelujah These musical works make me calm. John Denver - Calypso Simon and Garfunkel - Scarborough Fair Harper's Bizarre - The 59th Street Bridge Song Frank Sinatra - Fly Me to the Moon ? - Somewhere Beyond the Sea Of course, I could put some classical and opera in here, but you can't dance to it. Current Mood: quixotic Current Music: Mercedes Benz-Janis Joplin

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March 26th, 2004

08:10 pm - Humanity Part 1, "Tool Users" Humanity. It's bad enough trying to talk about it with normal people, but when the great majority of one's friends consider themselves transcendental members of some other race or species... I'm going to piss people off, I know it. And it won't even be about the issue I'm discussing here. My issue is, what makes us human? And if you can look at that sentence and just placidly think to yourself, "I'm not human," then I am sorry to tell you this but you are copping out. If you are using 'kinness of any kind as an excuse, or as a dividing line, or as a tier above the rabble of "ordinary people," you are missing the point. Hell, that goes for anything you could use like that. Intelligence, religion, all that good stuff. But what makes us human? Scientists and philosophers have been struggling with that one ever since Plato's plucked chicken. By defining what we are, we hope to gain some grasp of why we are here. "Tool users" was one that lasted a long time. You still see it in textbooks, even if we've found primates and birds that do it. It's a definition that we've lived up to. As a species were are absolutely obsessed with our tools, an obsession that may have grown out of need. Because, lets face it, without tools we are the animal kingdom's equivalent of canned Spam. Not even canned. Opened Spam, soft, pink and oily. We are the only animal capable of dying of exposure in its own back yard. Without the tools, and the brain to use the tools. But with the tools and the brain we are masters of our own universe! We scale the heavens, we light the world, and we can blow shit up! And on the more appealing side of things, where would our art and music be without tools, without paint brushes and paper and instruments? Alone in the environment, we totally suck. So we have tools, and the purpose to which we put those tools is conquering, molding and changing the environment that we can't handle otherwise. So, maybe there's a deeper level to humanity's tool use, even if it's not unique in the animal kingdom. Perhaps humankind is the only animal driven to use tools by such an absolute hostility to its environment, brought about by a physical inadequacy. Could it be that we're the only species that actually has cause to be, and is, BITTER at nature? So what do we do about it? Think about it that way, and take a good look around. Odd and disturbing, isn't it? Not to mention a little funny. What if all this luxury is the result of an almost Freudian psychosis? And if it's Freudian, what do we do so that in the end we resolve it? Do we learn to accept our own inadequacy, or do we lash out, destroying everything that mocks our supremecy? Do we live harmoniously with our environment, or do we subjugate it utterly to our will? I won't judge either to be a bad or good result, but I'm curious as to how it will come out, if indeed it will at all. Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Incredibly repetitive Final Fantasy Tactics music

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March 17th, 2004

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March 16th, 2004

06:04 am - Still ahead, a look back... Now. You know, that which exists between later and before. Or, to narrow it down as much as I can, that which exists between a little tiny bit later and a little tiny bit before. We, the sentient ones, have an incredibly limited capacity for "now." Children spend theirs wishing to be what they perceive to be adults. Adults spend theirs wishing they had appreciated what they perceive to be childhood. Our brains are wired to process information and extrapolate, not to appreciate, except in the abstract, in the past or the approaching. Infanthood is no better, then we lack even the capacity to understand, past, furture or present. Some of us never leave infanthood. We are blind, encapsulated in darkness. The dust from the chariot wheels conceals the path and the other riders, as the ancient Greeks or Romans were wont to say. It doesn't matter. We move, or we believe we are moving, down a course laid out by time, but with no vision of our surroundings. All we have is the projection, the fantasy of past and future, from which we take our bearings. "Now" is incedental, ephemeral, too difficult to grasp before it is gone again. Information for the sentient ones, now, to be understood and assimiated later, or before. Cruel kindness of life, "now" is all you get. Tomorrow never comes, yesterday was never here. Here is what you can touch, sense, taste. All else is memory and fantasy, one in the same. The mind takes offense at the very thought, denies it, drowns it. Some can never some to accept it. Some are miserable over it, past and present all out of proportion, closet monseters looming enormous. Some suicide over it. Now. That's it. This is your life. Be happy now, be sad, be silly, be angry. Be it with every fiber of your being, pure and complex. Sense. Appreciate. Let go. Do not expect to understand, if not now than maybe never, and if never then it's not important. Do not waste time yearning for what isn't, wishing simplicity, nonsentience, infancy. These things do not exist the way you think of them, never existed. Now. It can't be any simpler than that. It can't be any more complex. It can't be easier or harder, more sweet or more painful. Now. This is what you get. I offer my few remaining readers a big cup of now, right now. Drink it up. Current Mood: moody Current Music: Bookends

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