Like sunshine, this morning dawned clear and happy in my life. It's the little things, really...
Oh My God dragging I was this weekend. Thursday and Friday spent in torpid luxury at Michelle's, eating pie and eating more pie. Oh, and turkey.
I even watched the Texas vs. A&M football game more than I read my Mac OsX book, which is unreal. A good game... don't tell Michelle, but I was rooting for A&M because it was more exciting that way...
Texas won, though, even though they played badly.
Saturday I declined to go to Nick's game playing afternoon (Sorry Nick!) so I could do stuff that had to be done... so I did lots of laundry, did a little bit of this and that... moving...very... slowly....
Sunday, practice for Taiji... and another 1/4 of the algebra class.
I'm so much faster than that.
Started two or three times to write this short story, a simple piece, but was clogged and derailed by angst and frustration each time.
Argh!
Even this morning I got two lines in before I ground to a halt... do I tell it as a conversation between roommates, or as entries in his journal?!
But soon after... my mood shifted and the gray lifted and I'm all happy and cheerful again, and even focusing on work.
Well, except for now, when I'm writing here.
And now, with coffee too, I think I'll be able to get my brain back into gear and my wheels on the track and start moving again.
(so much more I could put here, but work calls, and not all things need to be logged in the journal)
Oooh, I spent about 2.5 hours on Saturday twisting skinny balloons into figures at the Harvest Festival at a local high school.
I'm kinda rusty at the whole balloon thing, and I went pretty low-profile (no costume, no colorful hat, nothing really except me and some balloons)... but Anna managed to attract a bunch of kids for me to twist for.
It was fun! But I was rusty -- lots of stuff I didn't remember how to do. Oooh, and twisting uses weird muscles in your hands. I had to stop a bit early when I could no longer do the ear-twist.
From there, we went to Richards for some play, and then to the Haunted Trails wrap-up dinner, where I twisted more balloons to the amusement of the people around me.
It was fun! Fun! I forgot how festive balloon twisting is, how magic it seems to the people watching it.
I should buy another thousand balloons or so and get my skills back up into order. And I could expand on my reference work, too -- put in some stuff for 160's, troll the lists and sites and books for new figures, so on and so forth. Oooh, and flowers. And hats! And sculptures...
... which is why I stopped. It's so easy to get totally absorbed in it!
Anyway, my twisting reference (an arcane piece of work if ever there was one) is here: Twist Reference The twists themselves are described in the back...
What is real?
This is not a straighforward question, it would seem, with a simple answer.
Of course, in some areas, you would _expect_ this to be a hard question to answer. In terms of your personal experience, there are so many things that can affect your perceptions.
When I'm under the foggy blanket of depression, I live in a different world than when I am clear and energetic -- it is a different reality, where I seem to have entirely different skill sets, and my understanding of what is easy and hard, what work is good and what work is poor, all of these things can change.
That kind of personal reality is by nature hard to nail down. It changes with time and mood and attention.
On the other end of the spectrum, some forms of reality are hard to dispute. This pad of sticky notes on my desk is pretty clearly a pad of sticky notes.
But it's possible for a person to perceive it as something more... perhaps you feel that 3M has put nano-probes in the glue of the notes and are secretly monitoring you through them. I knew someone who felt that the red light on a building in the distance was watching her -- seriously felt this to be true.
We laugh at these perceptions, call them crazy, say that these people need to adjust their tinfoil hats. Because to us, these ideas are silly, unreal. But to them these perceptions are as real as anything else.
And there are the conspiracy people, who like to talk about things that seem crazy (unreal) to many people. One, for example, is the inclusion of the All Seeing Eye on the Great Seal of the USA (the eye in the pyramid; look at your money http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/All_Seeing_Eye.htm).
Is this true or just imagination? Perhaps it used to be true and isn't now, or was not true but is because people thought it should be. We can't go back into time and ask the players, so we get to make up whatever stories fit the evidence we see.
That's what people do.
And once we have a story in our head that seems to fit the evidence, we act upon it as if it were real. To my mind, a wise person also adjusts their story when new evidence appears. But I suspect that most people find so much comfort in their mental stories that they will discount and adjust evidence so it fits instead, no matter what.
Now, if your imagined reality does not mesh with the accepted "true" reality, you are considered to be a nut, a deviant, crazy, in need of help. Or at the very least, unwell.
That's the thing, though. Is the accepted true reality the real reality?
I live in Texas. My reality is not the same as the majority reality here.
The bulk of the citizens of this fine state are Christians, and conservative ones at that.
They believe that the set of old, edited, and politically motivated stories in their bible are true stories, reflecting a true reality. In many cases, a literally true reality. In fact, our nation as a whole tends to believe some pretty wild things that lack any kind of real evidence: http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm
How they can be sure that a "day" in Genesis corresponds to 7.94e+14 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom (the diurnal period of this planet around our sun) before God had even bothered to invent light or dark yet, is a mind-bogglind proposition. But I digress.
For these people, the reality of the universe is such that good (them) and evil (everyone else) are locked in an epic battle that, while possibly fore-ordained that good will win, requires efforts on their part to make it happen.
To these people, anything I say that is not in line with their teachings from church is most likely motivated by a personal demon of mine, that is feeding me clever lies to confuse them and test their faith.
For them, to give the appearance of sanctioning the evils of homosexuality, would be to lose a battle in this war. So when they vote to define marriage according to their religion's preference, they are striking a blow for goodness and godliness.
This is real for them. Their reality. They are living their lives according to, what to me is, a misunderstood fairy tale. And to be honest, they aren't even doing that correctly. But again, digression threatens.
These same people celebrate when Target supports their "right" to not sell you Plan B if they choose not to. And they would feel that our complaints and points of view are simply ignorant, or influenced by evil powers that we are not aware of. And that we should pray to Jesus and turn our hearts to him to find happiness and clarity.
When we talk of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, do they understand what we mean? To them, the FSM is just a silly story, a political tool. Nothing at all like their stories, which are the true words of God and the one correct guide to life, the universe, and everything.
Nothing at all in common.
This is their reality.
But then, to other people, the stories in the bible and the precepts of the FSM are all too similar.
So the accepted true reality in my world appears to actually be a form of insanity. My personal beliefs are such that my reality is not in step with the majority reality around me. Does that make _me_ insane?
I don't think the blinky red light is watching me, and I have no fear of my Post-it notes, but neither do I think that God hates homosexuality, the world was created in 6 days with one day of rest, that Sunday is holy, that Jesus learned to bypass the fermentation process, and so forth.
To my point of view, if you think that the sun stopped in the heavens (literally) because God said so, you are probably insane... that is, holding a view that is out of touch with what is real.
But I'm in something of a minority.
Does that make me crazy?
Because I feel like a sane person in a world of crazy people. And, even worse, the inmates are running this asylum, not just inhabiting it.
Our country was founded by sane, intelligent people. Every time I read something by, for example, Thomas Jefforson, I am impressed by his insight.
On the contrary, some of the things I hear from George W. Bush makes me ashamed not only of my country but, sometimes, of my very species.
I think part of the problem is that the really crazy people are very, very sure of themselves. Their reality is more real than ours. And, as long as this reality is not immediately destructive to their survival, this certainty of theirs turns them into effective leaders.
People like certainty. It feels like safety.
Sometimes it seems hopeless. These fairy tales are compelling, so they collect converts quite easily. Are they true? Who knows! But they have a psychological benefit -- they are a form of mental parasite. They gain life, and we gain... peace of mind. At the expense of living our lives with a mental model that does not, as far as I can tell, reflect a true reality.
And on top of this, many of these lifestyles promote breeding, so these communities grow from within as well as from without.
What does the future hold for people who live in my reality? We don't offer the same comfort, we don't breed as fast, we aren't often charismatic leaders. Are we trapped? Destined for extinction? Or will there always be a thin film of us to help moderate, to leaven if you will, the fermenting majority that are not like us?
I like our planet. I love the beauty and power and ferocity of it. I love people (as individuals, though as often as not I dislike people groups or categories). I wish I could have a thousand lifetimes, so I could love more people, to have more friends, to do more things (except for those days where I'm too burnt out to care anymore and all I can do is sleep; but those days always pass).
So I feel a real dismay at what sometimes looks like the inevitable destruction of what I feel is good and beautiful about humanity.
Cultures have been overrrun and destroyed before, by the violent or stupid or corrupt. They usually come back again, too, some hundreds or thousands of years later.
But is that recovery guaranteed? Or would it be possible to be caught in a cultural revolution, a new Dark Ages, a spasm of fundamentalism, that could go on for a thousand years or more, or forever?
There are people, many people, who are actively working to do this. Fundamentals of several stripes, Muslim or Christian, or whatever, would love to see their fairy tales overrun the consensual reality so hard that we never recover.
For us, this is madness, a short-sighted foolishness that boggles the imagination.
For them it is reality, it is their holy battle, it is their very reason for existence.
Take a plain, thick, athletic tube sock with that thick toe-seam, you know the kind. Put it on kind of crooked, so the seam kind of interferes with your toes. Don't pull it all the way up, so the tip is a bit floppy. Now put on the shoe.
When I was younger, that feeling of the seam-wad-lump-wrinkle of the sock in the shoe drove me crazy. I hated it! Argh!
Some days my whole body feels like that, like my spirit has been stuffed crooked and rumpled into a too-small container.
And on days like that, when I do Taiji, it's even worse since the exercise and the focus increases my energy far beyond normal. And then when the focus ends, it's all loose energy rattling around in a defective container.
This sense of malaise peaked for me yesterday and now this morning I feel clean are refreshed, alert and well.
It's part of a long cycle that feels like a week-long seizure. Since I was sick last week a bit, I didn't notice the headache Tuesday as being part of it, but there is usually a headache involved near the end of the "event", corresponding to increasing tension and bad mood. I thought Tuesday was a relapse, or that all the water I was drinking was flushing toxins, or because I hadn't had coffee, or... and it may have been those, too.
You know how, when you drift off to sleep, your body might twitch or spasm? Sometimes it's big enough to wake you up again. I have the joy of getting those spasms at odd intervals, pretty much any time.
Usually, they are associated with a mental fugue -- where I'll catch on a particular thought, often involving an intense physical image (e.g. cutting off a finger, any violent thing to myself or to another, but sometimes just anything) that escalates and then releases with a spasm. It's really weird.
At the peak of these long, slow, uncomfortable "events" my body can be on the edge of these for a long time, just tense, and anything, a touch or a thought, can trigger one. Like a coil of sissal twine wound too tight, where the strands are breaking one at a time...
There's also an emotional component to the "event", often just an escalating (ummm, sinking?) depression, but also anger, frustration.
And then the creeping headache, that's especially fun.
And it peaks, and it's gone, and everything is good again.
Sometimes it's a few days to cycle, sometimes longer. And there is no noticable schedule to the events, no apparent trigger to start them.
It's been years since I've taken my sanity for granted, really. And you notice things when you don't assume that what you are feeling is "valid" (that is, connected to events around you), odd cycles of mood, or correlations of physical and mental state.
Sometimes it's like the "me" who I feel that I am has been stuffed into a defective robot, whose mechanics force upon me alien feelings or moods, whose electronics affect my clarity of thought, my memory. Sometimes the noise is so great it almost obscures who I am entirely, so my actions and presentation to the world is a lie, doesn't represent who I feel I am on the inside.
Is it any wonder that people have developed the notion of a body/spirit separation? That we would not think of ourselves as our bodies, but as some entity parked in this flesh?
Because some days this impression is very vivid; it's the only thing that makes sense, that feels true.
I just wish I could upgrade the motherboard on this thing. And maybe get a flashier case. And some neon. Definitely some neon, and move from those clunky flat cables to all-new SATA wires. Or something.
Ahhh, if I weren't sick right now, I would be recovered from my Halloween experiences.
As it is, the sore throat (and, now, cough and general malaise) have been making me sleep more, which has helped with my recovery. Or something.
It's weird, when I get 8 hours of sleep, I actually feel refreshed and alert! I should try that someday when I'm not sick.
Haunted Trails was reasonably fun this year -- I was a guide again, as I usually am, and I made some this and that. I didn't go all out this year, though, taking a bit of a break.
As it turns out, there was not nearly enough hands on deck to build the show, or even run it except for the last night. Through superhuman efforts by Tall Matt and Paul (and Chip, and Andy...), and some skilled CSR workers I believe, the major mechanical room effects got built. Falling ceiling, sinking floor -- good stuff.
With Halloween falling on a Monday, well after the Saturday final run of Trails, I had enough time and energy to actually _do_ something for Halloween! Woo!
The week before, I submitted a unique pumpkin to the pumpkin "carving" contest: I made a foam-gelatin face from a lifecast mold I had laying around and deck-screwed it to the pumpkin.
On the inside, I made a foam-gelatin brain and covered it with bloody slyme. I named my pumpkin "Gloria". It was good. I'll put up pictures in the Haunt section soon.
Ooh, it wasn't until Marla asked me why I named it Gloria that I realized (remembered) that I name all of my female heads a 'G' name: Gladys, Grace, and now Gloria.
For my costume, I went as "the guy who made the Gloria pumpkin", in a homicidal-maniac theme. I sculpted a large-ish cut and cast it in foam-gelatin. For the first time, I got a good result from a gelatin prosthetic! The edges were thin and stretchy; the witch-hazel dissolved them into my skin; the spirit gum held it all down (though next time I'm trying prosthetic adhesive).
My only challenges was getting the makeup to blend, to be consistent across the prosthetic and my face. But it's easier with gelatin than with latex, and if I didn't have spirit gum residue on my skin, it probably would have been easier still.
Using some clever tweezers and a steady hand (hah!), I ran three safety pins through the wound and then decoreated it all in a bruised and bleeding fashion.
Then I liberally decorated myself with fake blood (on a white shirt, lovely and bright) and went on to win the scariest costume contest at work.
Sadly, the pictures I took at home don't show the face very well -- the safety pins are not very visible. I'm hoping I can find/get the picture they took at work of it. The bozos haven't posted anything to the web, though! I need to find a name and ask...
Monday I went to bed with a sore throat, which has persisted through to today; the sore throat bit has diminished but the germs have expanded into a cough, too. Whee.
I'm looking at doing a project referred to me by Wittlock Engineering - what may be a simple re-targetting of a program from old DOS to new DOS (plus possible enhancements; we'll see).
Outside of that, my only project this month is getting ready for Black Sash.
Oh, and school. I need to mail that contract in.
~bleh~