The bright side of a Moon
Remember “Wassup”?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L38wthA4Ld0&hl=en&fs=1]
Hard to believe that was 8 years ago.
Wonder what they’re up to now?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE&hl=en&fs=1]
Note: I’m not endorsing Bud Lite – weak pisswater, ugh.
(But vote Obama!)
It’s not Talk Like A Pirate Day, but since I’m going to a costume party tonight dressed as a pirate, I thought I’d share with you some random pirate Zen:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Rq5wzn-4k&hl=en&fs=1]
Mmmm… manatee.
I have the coolest (fake) parrot for my pirate costume this year!
Out of breath, I had just finished a fast-ish almost-four-mile run in my neighborhood. I walked back from the finish line, cooling down in the autumn evening air. My time and speed wasn’t great. Not bad, but not great. I gave myself a mental “C” for at least doing the run, but not surpassing my personal standards.
I hadn’t taken more than ten steps when I saw my neighbor, Peggy, out walking her boxer, Lucy. I waved from the other side of the street, hoping that would forestall any actual conversation for two reasons. First, I was out of breath and could hardly speak. Second, I was feeling non-friendly in general. Peggy is a nice lady, but I’m a bit of a grump, especially lately.
“Hello!” she called. Apparently my tactic of pre-emptive non-verbal communication did not work.
“Hi,” I tried to project.
“Do you run every night?” Peggy asked.
“Every other day,” I answered, still walking.
“Oh.” She paused while Lucy sniffed a tree. “How far do you run?”
“Between 3 and 8 miles, depending.” I answered.
“Oh! That’s pretty good.” Lucy finished sniffing and continued on, pulling Peggy along. “That’s damned impressive, actually!”
“Thanks!” I called back. I still needed to cool down, but the compliment sank in and I felt a little bit better about my run.
There’s many folk who can run faster or farther than me – but there are many more folk who can’t do what I do at all. I’m probably on the right-hand side of the bell curve, and that feels good.
I was in bed before 9 PM last night.
I woke up around 4:30 AM and, blissfully, was able to go back to sleep.
I didn’t get out of bed until nearly 6 AM. And I didn’t have that “groggy, shaken out of sleep” feeling. It felt… odd.
It felt like that was exactly the right amount of sleep to get.
Grace’s writing is perfect. I mean, the words she chooses and the way she thinks about her internal states matches some of the metaphors and words that I use inside my head about my internal states. Go read her as soon as you have time.
Especially this part:
They gave me a test to take to see if I was depressed. I filled it out with great suspicion. Doesn’t everyone have “persistant feelings of emptiness or worthless”, “cry for no reason” and “feel they are hurting or bothering others just by being around”? That seemed pretty normal. That was life as I knew it, had known it, for almost as far back as I could think. If other people were filling this test out differently, they were kidding themselves. Who doesn’t “think the world would be better off it they were dead”? Nobody can be that happy.
The therapist as Student Health Services said I should think about medication, but I was unequivocal. So instead we talked about my childhood, everything I’d ever felt shit about. It might have helped. I didn’t kill myself. I turned down anti-depressants repeatedly from doctors at the Student Center, and later at the People’s Clinic. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I thought pills were weak. I didn’t want to medicate the darkness in me, I wanted to kill it. Pin it down and choke the life right out of it. Beat it to a bloody shit with my fists. Then I would know that I did, in fact, deserve to keep living.
It matches just as Cary Tennis’ words and metaphors matches.
I am no expert, but I think that killing oneself in order to relieve one’s pain is a special kind of murder. It is a murder of which we might be said to be innocent by reason of self-defense: There is a person inside us who is torturing us and we want to kill that person. We have split into two. There is the torturer and the victim, and the victim buys a gun. Unfortunately for both, they are in the same body.
If we think about it in this speculative way, we might say that suicide is not really aggression toward ourselves, but aggression toward the person who has invaded us and is torturing us, the murderous, sadistic imbecile who is calling us names, belittling us, bludgeoning us.
The problem is not that we want to murder this person within us in order to stop our torture. The problem is that we confuse physical action with symbolic action.
We must murder our torturer symbolically.
See?
I think Grace and Cary should talk. And I’d like to sit in and maybe listen a while. I’d learn a lot.
But Grace is in Texas and Cary is in California and I’m up here in Portland. So it probably won’t happen.
This morning, as I struggled to wake up and emerge from the warm cocoon of my bed into the cold cave that is my house, my brain started composing a letter. The letter was one asking for advice, as from an advice columnist, about the difficulty in waking up, and the near-constant desire for sleep, and if that was a problem, and also what if I really just like dreaming. In fact, I like it so much that most of the time, I’d rather be dreaming than anything else in the whole wide world. And I realized that was, if not an actual, full-blown problem, it is at least an indicator of a problem or a precursor to a problem. Or maybe it’s just seasonal depression.
Anyway, I thought further: maybe I should explore that as a character for my NaNoWriMo novel this year? A main character who just wants to sleep a lot, is avoiding something, and (because a novel that was just a series of dreams interspersed with scenes where the character was just going through the motions until he can sleep again would be, y’know, boring) is forced to stay awake for some reason.
I think the character would be interesting, and funny, and probably grouchy. Kinda like Dr. House, from the teevee.
Then I thought: “But I already have an idea for my NaNoWriMo novel – tell a story backwards!” (even though I haven’t blogged about it yet, yes, I’ve been working on this idea for this year) And I thought further: “I don’t really know how to combine those two ideas – I have no idea where my sleepy-but-not-narcoleptic character would end up.”
And yet, I’m going to intersect those two ideas. Even though I have NO IDEA how it’s going to actually “start” (and by “start”, I mean “end”, because I’m beginning at the end and ending at the beginning).
So that’s what I was thinking this morning.
Does anyone else have dreams with narrative structure, incorporating mythic or religious symbolism and mult-layered storytelling techniques?
Like, do you ever dream that you’re living with your friends in a pre-post-apocalyptic city, when suddenly Kali, Hindu goddess of death appears, hundreds of feet tall, and before she unveils her face, delivers a message of doom for yourself and six other friends.
Oh, and you notice that there are several other Hindu gods watching, and you and your six friends are going to be new incarnations of those deities, after the destruction.
But your closest friend isn’t part of the seven, and everyone else is doomed to die, or something. Something bad.
And you get attacked by people who don’t know that you’re to incarnate a new deity, attacked because of something written on your t-shirt, and get to use your new-found divine powers to deflect the attack without harming them.
Anyone else have dreams like that?
Yeah… me, either.
I stopped by the Apple Store on my way home last night, and I can report that the new laptops are, indeed, sexy. Duh. Water’s still wet.
They feel as solid as… well, as a brick. There’s no “flex” or “give” to them at all, and in spite of that, the 15″ MacBook Pro feels about half as heavy as my MBP, it’s definitely thinner than my current one, and the curves are all nicely rounded (completely subjective measure – in reality, the new one weighs 5.5 lbs and is .95 inches thick and mine weighs 5.6 lbs and is 1.0 inch thick, according to the tech specs for for each. Not sure I can actually feel a tenth of a pound or a 0.05 inch difference. Must be the sexay getting to me).
In the store, the glossy screen isn’t as distracting as I thought it would be, but I’m still skeptical that glossy is the right choice for all lighting conditions. And me and two of the sales folk had our doubts that the trackpad was, in fact, glass. If it’s glass, it’s painted or coated with something because it looks and feels just like the trackpad on mine.
And the clicky pad is… odd. It would take some getting used to. I’m used to touching or tapping the trackpad to do my clicking; the pressure required to click the entire pad feels like too much to me. Luckily, I still have the option to enable tap-clicking in System Preferences.
The thing of it is – yes, they’re beautiful machines, and yes, my laptop is getting older, but there isn’t really any compelling new features (beyond better battery life, more storage space, and a faster overall machine) that would make me want to upgrade right now. My laptop already does more than I need.
So I’ll wait until after the January Macworld Expo before I consider upgrading.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFC9jv9jfoA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]
Speaking of Joe the Plumber, did you know:
Hmmm… Republican, tax scofflaw, practices without a license, family friend of McCain… Wonder what he was doing at an Obama Q&A right before the debate?