Love will prevail...
...no matter how hard Ken Starr fights it!
Love will prevail......no matter how hard Ken Starr fights it! |
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| Nov. 19th, 2009 @ 12:08 pm ... | |||
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| I hope that when the world comes to an end, a man in a conductor's uniform comes to each of us and tells us that the ride has ended as we've reached the end of the line, and now we're required to get off. On the other hand, that sounds like something Kurt Vonnegut might write. |
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| Nov. 10th, 2009 @ 03:44 pm sigh... | |||
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| Austin wants you to know that he loves you. <nods> |
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| Nov. 7th, 2009 @ 01:11 am Status | |||
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| I keep having stretches where I don't feel great, culminating in a day where I start to feel progressively sicker and sicker - all the symptoms of the flu are there: achy muscles, sore and tired eyes, head ache, swollen glands and lymph nodes in my throat... And then the next day, I wake up feeling fine. Not great. Just fine. And then the cycle repeats. |
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| Nov. 6th, 2009 @ 07:41 am dreams of darkness | |||
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I had a dream this past night that I was set upon by vampires (actually, not vampires... a race of aliens that spread its lineage through passing its genes on to another species through a retrovirus. They accomplished this by drinking blood from their victims (with the help of their particularly sharp and pointy front teeth - yes, front teeth. Oh, and they had droopy rabbit ears as well, but that's not the point) infusing it with the retrovirus, and then returning it to the victims so that it would transform their DNA. They were insistent upon making me one of them. I ran and hid for a while, but eventually I found myself cornered and as I saw no method of escape, I felt that struggling would be pointless, so I accepted my fate. The ritual went as planned, but afterward I felt fine and perfectly normal. We stood around for a while in the basement of the old house we had found ourselves in (as a result of all my running and hiding) and they kept insisting that the grand transformation should occur at any moment, but as time wore on, they started so insist this with more and more of a question mark at the end of the sentence. Eventually we got bored and decided to play twister while we waited, but Miko woke me up before the game could actually begin. I also had another dream last night where I went to clip my fingernails, but somehow I managed to clip quite a ways into the kin and my finger was bleeding terribly, but there were all these other things that I needed to accomplish, so I kept making makeshift bandages, but kept bleeding through them before I could finish the tasks at hand. |
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| Nov. 5th, 2009 @ 07:21 am Dislike Button | |||
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| Personally, I find myself opposed to facebook adding a "dislike" button, despite so many of my friends thinking that it would be a good idea. I teeter back and forth on my feelings for the "like" button, but a "dislike" is definitely the wrong direction. I feel that the addition of such a thing would limit actual interaction between people by providing an easier and cheaper alternative, reducing the things that should be said and the questions that should be asked - "I hope you get better soon."; "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?"; "If you need to talk about it, I want to be there for you."; "I'm sorry for your loss" - to the otherwise indifferent click of a button. Deep down inside, I am terrified at the thought that we're growing more and more toward a world where the majority of communication can be done through a handful of pre-set auto responses. Is this not exactly what George Orwell warned us about by creating NewSpeak for his novel 1984? By limiting the things that people are likely to say, you limit the things that they actually do say, and by limiting the things that they actually do say, you in turn limit the way that they think. We should be encouraging the world to think broader thoughts and see the world through broader perspectives, not the other way around. Facebook, I implore you, please do not add a dislike button. |
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| Nov. 1st, 2009 @ 08:17 am dream | |||
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I had a dream last night where I pulled up to stop at a green light, and watched as three cars zoomed by in the perpendicular direction. this occurred between times when Miko woke me up, so there really wasn't time for much more than that. |
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| Oct. 30th, 2009 @ 09:15 pm ...? | |||
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With Austin Coté Williams |
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| Oct. 24th, 2009 @ 08:34 pm reference | |||
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| One of the most amazing things about language and culture is the way that words can be used to express a meaning that they alone do not convey, subtly or resoundingly, through cultural imagery and references. It is, for example, impossible to use the phrase "brave new world" without invoking images of Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel of the same name and the themes that exist throughout the work. A more recent example, the phrase "Don't taze me, bro", though generally used in jest, cannot be uttered without forcing us to recall the viral video that made it famous and the less than savory events shown within. Whether describing someone as a member of the new gang of virtue or comparing them to Leroy Jenkins, we are allowing the words we use to adopt shades of meaning that are not inherently within those words themselves. And so it is that over the courses of our lives, we do not only build in our minds a lexicon of words and phrases that we can use to convey meaning, but also a vast list of events and literary examples that we can reference in order to express ideas or feelings more subtle or less easily describable than words alone with their fixed dictionary definitions would be adequate for. |
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| Oct. 23rd, 2009 @ 07:06 am I think it's a dream about work, but I'm not so sure. | |||
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I had a dream last night where I was at the end of a video game, after the final boss battle. There was a barracks there that was typically empty, but because I was in multi-player mode, the barracks was being used to house a number of other players who weren't playing at the moment. I ran into Jessicka's dear friend Jack there, sleeping in one of the beds. He woke up as we passed, and he and I talked for a moment. I asked him if he still loved her and thought about her and dreamed of her - it was a very important question but I cannot recall his answer. There were random articles of clothing laying about, and I recognized one of the shirts as being Jessicka's (although looking back now that I'm awake, I can identify it as one that Rachel used to own). It was red and black and on the border of being ornate. I asked Jack if I could borrow it, and he said, yes, so I put in on over the shirt that I was wearing. I and the people I was with proceeded to the exit of the level, where there was a dock and a boat waiting to take us back to the world outside the video game. We were instructed to enter the boat and go all the way across to sit, filling first the right side, then the left, but most people were sitting in the seats in the middle. I followed the instructions and found that the right side was pleasantly empty and that I was therefore able to claim a seat for my own. A few seats ahead of me, I saw Bernadette, one of the new staff that we're training to work out of Brooklyn at the moment. We waved at each other, but didn't say anything. The captain of the boat was a woman with a brass stamp on her head (vaguely reminiscent of the seal of Rassilon from the doctor who series) and lips made of a silver metal with hinges where they met. Her make-up was unusual, though I cannot recall the details, and there was a man with her with hair the color and consistency of bee's wax who had the same stamp, this time in rubber, covering his mouth. He made a speech about how he was locked in her thrall and could not escape and then kissed her hand several times (or at least pressed his rubber stamp mouth to her hand and somehow made kissing noises.) The boat returned me to work, but somehow the Red Cross building had become an auditorium and various performers seemed to be popping it and random to be on the stage. I passed a back hall where I saw Michale Jackson preparing for a performance, and Dave Coulier was there was well. I went back to my cubical (which had become an office completely done in stucco and with a Plexiglas door) but there was a large man inside of it, painting it white, and when I tried to speak with him, it became apparent that he only spoke German*. After a few words, however, he lost his balance and fell down. I caught him just in time and righted him, then apologized for the intrusion, though I was unsure if he understood. On my way back to the entrance, I passed Chris Rock, who I complimented on being a "bad ass". I told him that the best thing about working in the red cross was frequently running into amazing people like him. He seemed to pointedly ignore me. My boss had assigned me to a blood drive across the Michigan border, which put me in another region entirely. She wanted me to look at their practices and see if there was anything that our region could take back. I don't remember what city it was it, but it was a big college town. I drove past the high school, which was built out of golden colored bricks. I almost stopped there, though I knew that the drive was at the middle school, so I continued on. The middle school was about a half a mile ahead around a curve in the road, and looked like a castle built from silver colored bricks. the blood drive was being held outside in the parking lot (outdoor drives are, as far as I know, not within the FDA standards, however in the dream, I assumed different regional practices.) I walked up and introduced myself as a training specialist from the great lakes region, but the supervisor was upset - she hadn't been warned that I would be coming, and she said that until I was able to get proof of who I was, she wouldn't be able to let me do more than a cursory overview of their work practices. In the middle of this conversation, Nick's friend James entered the drive, wearing a business suit and a black tutu. There were a number of girls there as well, fawning over him. He asked why I was wearing my dress so strangely, and I realized that the shirt I had borrowed earlier from Jack was actually a dress, but the rest of it had been tucked up inside. I pulled it out so that it covered my pants, and it was black and translucent and shimmery. I made a comment about how it didn't seem particularly professional for work, but the staff there seemed indifferent towards it. My friend Sam Paul Allen was there as well, working as one of the phlebotomists. I hadn't realized that he was working for the red cross and I told him that he ought to have told me sooner. The drive was running alarmingly smoothly despite the fact that their region didn't seem to be using the computers - everything was done on the old manual blood donation records, and the ones that they were using came on a number of sheets of paper stapled together, rather than the single sheet ones we use where our computers aren't working. Despite this, they were processing donors through faster than our region can. I was about to take a closer look and try to find out why, when Molly, one of the team supervisors from Kalamazoo approached me. She was alarmingly pale and clearly having trouble standing up. She told me that she had donated, but wasn't doing well and needed to get back to Kalamazoo, but couldn't drive. She and I hopped into the little silver car that she had there and I drove away. * The first time I visited Lindsey in Germany, there was a mix-up and somehow they thought she had already moved out of her dorm room about three days before she actually had. she went off to run some errands, and a painter popped by to re-paint the room he and I were unable to communicate and it was particularly frustrating for both of us. Apparently I'm still anxious enough about the situation that it appears in my dreams. |
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| Oct. 20th, 2009 @ 08:16 pm pride. | |||
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| I feel compelled here to point out that I am proud of my sister. |
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| Oct. 19th, 2009 @ 01:40 pm Perception and Happiness | |||
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| What a person perceives to be true will remain true in their mind (1) until they allow (2) their perception to show them otherwise. 1) Of course this means that what is true in a person's mind and what is true in the real universe can be entirely conflicting. This is problematic as people, of course, tend to act on what they believe to be true, and when this conflicts with what is actually true terrible things can happen. 2) Just because a person experiences evidence that something that they believe to be true isn't true doesn't mean that they will immediately abandon or rethink their belief. It's not atypical for people to cling to a belief with no grounding in reality in spite of an insane amount of evidence to the contrary. Before something that is true in a person's mind can change, they have to make the decision to allow it to change, and the more ingrained their belief that it's true, the more a conscious decision this has to be. While everything above is a little bit complicated, it's all relatively straightforward until a person's emotions* come into play. A person's emotions are often times influenced by their beliefs. If, for example, a person believes that rainy days are depressing, they become more likely to become unhappy on rainy days, and since they are able to perceive their own unhappiness, their belief that rainy days are depressing becomes reinforced. It is for this same reason that some people can find lightning scary and others can find it awe inspiring, and both groups of people will invariably react appropriately according to their beliefs, despite the opposing group failing to fully empathize with their reaction. This becomes especially problematic when someone develops beliefs such as "If a person loves me, they will buy me things", or "if a person loves me, they will show it by inconviencing themself for me" or "I can only be happy if I am in a relationship with someone who loves me." In the first two examples, love can easily exist without the conditions given, but so long as a person believes them, they will never feel loved until those conditions are met, no matter what other steps are taken to express that love. I knew a person, for example, who's entire family seemed to think that love couldn't be expressed without the purchasing of gifts. Her relationships always ended with her feeling unloved because the boy that she was dating had gone a week without spending money on her. I heard from a friend that eventually she found her way into a lasting relationship with a guy who treated her like dirt, but always bought things for her, and thus she felt that he loved her. In the third example, (and lets' ignore the potential ramifications of what might happen should the person who believes this also have a belief about love that makes them unable to perceive the love of another person) we find ourselves trapped in a similar loop as we did with the weather - so long as that person isn't in a relationship, they remain unhappy, and so long as they perceive their own unhappiness, their belief - that being outside of a loving relationship results in unhappiness - is reinforced. And until these people allow themselves to perceive something in contrast to their belief, and then consider whether or not such a perception might actually indicate that their beliefs ought to change, these conditions will undoubtedly remain true. The above is, of course, my take on things. Should your beliefs contradict with what I've said, definitely feel free to share them with me, and perhaps through perceiving your viewpoint, I'll choose to allow myself to believe something entirely different. * It should be noted that no person is capable of perceiving another person's emotions, only that other person's external reactions to their emotions. |
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| Oct. 17th, 2009 @ 09:19 pm Humans are neat | |||
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| One of the greatest strengths of human beings is their ability to give parts of themselves up left and right, or have parts stolen away without a moment's notice, and still be able to heal themselves and go back to being whole. |
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| Oct. 17th, 2009 @ 12:51 pm Grandparents | |||
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I ran into Rachel's grandparents during a dream last night. I was dating a girl with chin length dark hair, and I had to explain to her who they were. They looked well... Joe didn't speak much. I had a dream last night that my grandparents on my father's side own two houses with a strip of property between them. they were letting me stay in one of them - it had blue/grey siding and seemed to be only single story. The other was the one that they lived together in for the majority of my life. They had gone somewhere and left me taking care of the two of them. I exited the one what I was staying in in order to check on the other ,but the door locked behind me, and the doors on the other were locked as well. I tried to go in through a window that I had been able to get in through before, but there was a screen there. Somehow in the dream, the presence of this screen implied that winter was approaching, and suddenly I became cold. And then my brother showed up. I explained the situation to him, but somehow all the doors he tried opened right up for him. And immediately it was summer again, and there was a swimming pool there between the two houses that we contemplated going swimming in, with clear blue water. |
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| Oct. 16th, 2009 @ 03:23 pm ...in the future | |||
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| "I will be more careful in the future." I should know the answer to this, but why is it necessary to have "in the future" in this sentence? It's already in the future tense, so isn't "in the future" already implied? Is there something about the tense or the wording of "I will be more careful." that somehow implies a pseudo-near future tense, and "in the future" exists to clarify that this is not the case? Might the words "in the future" be there to indicate the difference between what's going on in the present? I'd think that that would be the purpose of the word "more", but maybe I'm off my rocker. But "I will be more careful." somehow just doesn't sound like it shows the whole picture... |
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| Oct. 15th, 2009 @ 07:36 am Broadcast | |||
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I had a dream last night that I and my friend James, and Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, were all part of an underground news program on the west coast. We'd go to back roads or sneak into abandoned rail-way stations, set up cameras and lighting rigs, film for a half hour, and then leave. Granholm was the anchor woman, and James and were were part of the ten or so person crew. During one filming, I randomly started singing a medley of Christmas carols. Everyone else joined in, despite the fact that we were filming outdoors and it was obviously mid fall. Then when we all became tired of singing, we returned to the news as if nothing at all had happened. |
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| Oct. 14th, 2009 @ 03:17 pm Explaining the contents of my last post | |||
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| I was thinking this morning about the book 1984 and how in it they were working to create a language with a vocabulary specifically limited in such a way that made it difficult or impossible to think about various crimes. If reducing a person's vocabulary can limit their available range of thoughts, does it not stand to be the case that increasing their vocabulary would broaden their ability to understand the world around them? Case in point - I was re-watching an episode of a television show the other day and pausing it on occasion to take notes. Mid way through the episode, I came upon a sequence that I had completely forgotten about, despite having just watched it not a week previous. I remembered thinking at the time that it must be important to the overlying symbolism of the entire series, however, the visuals and sounds within were so undescribable that my brain simply put it aside and forgot about it. Now that I've forced myself to put it to words, I am able to remember it more clearly, however previous to doing so, I was all but unable to remember the raw sights and sounds at all, due to the fact that I hadn't made my brain describe them. Truly, if that is the case with visuals and sounds that I am capable of describing (although imperfectly, I'll admit) it must certainly be true of situations that I don't have words to express. Imagine, for example, that the only word we had in our vocabulary to express the concept of a human being moving by foot from one place to another was "to walk". descriptors could be added to further describe the style of walking that we were attempting to describe ("walking slowly", "walking at a brisk pace", "walking with a limp") but these are lacking in the depth of description that they allow us. It becomes nigh impossible to express the concepts of "to amble", "to prance", "to meander", "to plod", "to tip-toe" etc. Not only would this limit the mental image that one could pass on to another when describing a situation, but it also serves to limit our own mental image of the event that we ourselves perceived. As we recall events, details tend to fade unless they are held in place by words to describe them. Therefore, I feel comfortable in my belief that the smaller a person's vocabulary is, the less rich and detailed their perception of the world becomes. |
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| Oct. 14th, 2009 @ 07:20 am advice | |||
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| Your understanding of the world is limited by the vocabulary through which you're able to express the things you perceive. It's human nature to forget the things that they're unable to put into words, even if they seem significant at the time. It is because of this that the fewer words you have to work with, the smaller your world becomes. Learn a new word today and broaden your horizons. |
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| Oct. 13th, 2009 @ 08:15 am Riddle | |||
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The camera pans across the backdrop of an ancient temple, finally stopping upon a group of people wearing robes that look to be traditional of some eastern religion and sitting in the lotus position with their eyes closed. The group consists of seven young boys, perhaps ten or twelve years of age, facing toward an older man. All are shaved bald. Thee older man opens his eyes and all of the students follow suit, despite there having been no audible cue to do so. For a moment, they simply stare at one another, but finally the older man speaks. Teacher: Students, I hope that our meditation has guided at least some of you to the answer to the riddle that I set before you. Which of you can tell me: what is the sound of one hand clapping? None of the students answer at first. After a moment they begin to glance nervously at their peers, as if all are afraid that they answers that they've come up with might be incorrect. Finally one of them timidly raises their hand. Teacher: Billy, the meditation has led you to find an answer to the question? Tell us, what do you think to be the sound of one hand clapping? The student who raised his hand looks nervously among his peers, as if he's beginning to have second thoughts about volunteering to answer. With a worried look upon his face, he opens is mouth, forming his lips into a perfectly round "ah" shape. Billy: (The sound of Mario from the original Super Mario Brothers going down a pipe escapes his lips. Once its finished, he closes his mouth.) Teacher: (smiles) That is correct, Billy! (He too forms his lips into a perfect circular "ah" shape and makes the sound of Mario going down a pipe) is indeed the sound of one hand clapping! Now, let us all try! As one, the teacher and students all hold one hand in the air and make clapping motions with it. The air is filled with multiple iterations of the sound of Mario going down a pipe. Fade to black |
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| Oct. 12th, 2009 @ 06:30 pm The Turban Guy | |||
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| There's a fellow who lives in my neighborhood with a number of turbans of various colors. Sometimes I see him in the morning or if I stop home for lunch taking a stroll, and he always smiles and waves, so I smile and wave back. He's a minor detail in a life of far more significant details. Today I realized that when I move out of my current apartment, he's what I'm going to miss the most. The shops nearby and the scenery are all things that I'm sure I'll see again, and the apartment itself isn't much more than a place to live, but after I leave, I'll probably never see the friendly fellow in the turban again. |
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| Oct. 11th, 2009 @ 10:00 am dreaming | |||
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I had a dream last night that I was in a doctor's office, but it looked run down and disused. The fluorescent lights kept flickering and humming in a way that told me they were old. I was wearing regular clothes, though I felt as if I should have been wearing an examination gown. The doctor that was looking me over tapped my knees with a rubber hammer and stuck a tongue depressor down my throat. He pried open my eyes and shined lights in them, and in my ears and in my nose. And then he told me that I had Dostoevsky Syndrome. For some reason, I've always thought that Dostoevsky Syndrome was something where a persons dreams seemed more real than reality... so upon waking, I thought this to be ironic, as I can often identify dreams when I'm inside them by recognizing the ways that they don't match up to my expectations of reality. However, the reading that I've done this morning has shown me that Dostoevsky Syndrome is apparently something else entirely... |
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