I mowed my prairie of a lawn today. My poor husband worked on the old lawnmower for weeks, however it ended up needing a new carborator which we didn't want to pay for. So I went out and bought a new lawnmower. Funny, when you let someone who has never mowed a lawn buy a lawnmower. I bought the coolest little electric mower. My lawnmower is the most amazing little thing in the world. It wieghs about 2/3 of the weight of a normal mower, starts when I push a lever, doesn't stink of gas, and has a sweet little purr instead of a deafening roar.
It is so the girly lawnmower.
My husband hasn't stopped making fun of me yet. He says my hippie mulching lawnmower doesn't have blades. Instead it has little gentle hands which slowly massage the tops of the grass off. I love my lawnmower!
I enjoy mowing the grass and watching it all level off evenly. So easy to do and it is so perfect and flat when you are done. Plus it stays that way for at least a week or two. Very unlike housework. Mowing time is also thinking time. I like to think, far too much, as sometimes I forget what my hands are doing as my mind is far off thinking. When I mow, I just have to touch base now and then so I don't mow down my son or the cord, and otherwise I can think.
Today I thought about, well stuff I shouldn't mention, hah, hah, That's why I looked so happy mowing the lawn. But outside of inapproriate thoughts, I also tossed around thoughts about society and such. My grand, impressive theory of what is worng with society. For me, being a scientist, most everything falls down into evolved patterns of behavior.
other stuff
NT,god,siva,driftwood,sm
Almost all of our behaviors were developed over five hundred thousand years or so of evolutionary pressure. Our minds balloned enormously. We developed the capacity to speak Some skills helped us find food or find mates, but many of the "personality" traits that we have now evolved as a means to maintain intact small social groups. We lived in small tribes/packs which required intense cooperation to exist over long periods of time. I think of these packs like small towns. You know everyones business and they know all of yours. You grow up surrounded by the same packmates, watch the old ones die, the new ones born. You have a reasonably well established place in the social hiarchy. You know where you stand.
If you become injured, at least in the short term, the others assist you-the origins of empathy. If you help others they most likely will help you in your time of need. A very necessary component of a social group. Each of you gives food, shelter and care to others in the group for the same things in return. While in a small town, you may hate it because you can't be anonomous, for the same reasons, a lot of people return to small towns to have kids. You want your offspring to be surrounded by others who care for them and at keast in some fashion comprise members of a social net, to catch them in case of trouble. We all search for a clan of sorts that will take us in and embrace us. We spend so much time searching for this "group". In the form of fraternities, religion, geneology, PTA, the in crowd, a club of people who do what we do, or gangs for that matter.Or race or my favorite the goth or punk kids who are outcasts and thus part of a group, Even blind patriotism to a country/state/city or sports team qualifies as finding a "group" When we find it, we feel the need to attack others who aren't in our group, as a way of boosting our own self esteem/social standing/survival rate. (if we feel better about our selves we project that externally, and others may percieve us to "better")
These groups and the need to belong to one seems like a double edged sword. On one hand it seems to be the source of most wars that we fight. On a tribe/pack level back in the days of prehistory, it makes sense to have evolved a blind allegience to your group. Your group keeps you alive, and it seems that attcking other groups also keeps you alive. If the "others" don't survive then it makes more room for your and your group's genetic contribution to be carried on. That may be pushing it a bit-definitely in the BS range :) , However blind loyalty to the group and the extreme need to be in a social group was a very selected for trait for highly intelligent, yet highly vunerable pre humans. No matter what your group-giving you security, food, affection,-is put ahead of all others. Your offspring was part of that group-you insure they survive and that your Genetic contribution gets passed on. Now days that blind group loyalty and the intense need to be part of a group gets us into all types of trouble. What is it that you identify with and how willing would you be to fight for it? religion and patriotism seem to be the big ones. How many of us Americans quit eating french fries just because they are french? Why is it worse when one american dies as opposed to one iraqi? It's becuase he was one of us! How dare you kill one of us! You can only hope folks stop and think a bit more before they make snap choices. Sometimes you have ignore the gut feeling because it is grounded in animal instincts. They work well mostly, but the larger the "group" becomes, the harder it is to deal with irrational animal instincts. If nothing else, recognize what you feel , recognize WHY you feel it, then make a choice.
On the flip side of the groups. We need them. As the group gets too large, we feel lost, alone. We no longer have the feeling that someone is there for us if things go bad. If we are "injured" or "hungry" metaphorically or literally, will there be someone there unconditionally to help us? In a small town, quite likely. In a big city, likely not. As we, at least in America, move large distances away from our families and early childhood friends, we , at least subconciously, loose the net/group. Even worse, we never have the group in the first place. Single parent families (I was one for several years) and a collapse of "raising the child by the village" , drug and alcohol abuse by parents, and on and on lead to an apathy of sorts. I see this in my family, the "white trash" approach to life. Why should we bother helping anyone else (not littering, not stealing, mowing the lawn, smoking around our children, roadrage.....) when no one will help us. Our group has been decimated and so we no longer feel empathy for how our actions will effect other members of our group. Who cares. it's not my problem... Or perhaps, external stressors (bills, debt, terrible jobs) leave us so energetically drained that the necessary mental and physical energy needed to feel empathy is totally absent. We can't care about you becuase we can't keep our own heads above water. Perhaps in a group, your actions that hurt other members of the group would leave you outcasted. Now days we have become used to not caring about others and made our group so tiny,
Rates of "induced" mental illness have increased quite a bit over the last century. By induced I mean Depression /alcoholism/drug abuse/stress induced exacerbation of more permenant disorders like bipolar/ADHD. In almost every mental illness the traits that in extreme make it negative, can be seen in a positive evolutionary light. They served a role. Now as we have lost our group, we are much more prone to developing mental and physical disorders. It used to be that psychsomatic meant you were imagining it. Now days it means that you feel physical pain induced by a mental condition. If being a bit loopy is grounded in biology, than the same biological "flaw" can cause you to feel pain or become sick. Stress makes all these things worse. As we become richer, "happier" and more independent we become more miserable.
What is true happiness? How do we recover a group without being idiotic and letting our blind faith in the group lead us into trouble? How do you teach folks that it is this group idiocy that leads them into war? How do you recover our ability to work as a group and feel empathy for each other? Interesting book called emotional IQ that addresses how, at least, to teach social skills to kids. Perhaps it would be a start. Boy, long winded today. Gotta go plant the flowers now. In the driftwood of course ....
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Friday, May 28, 2004
election year
Dumpling is running to be his second grade class president. I helped him outline his speech in which he said that he felt the community center needed more trash cans as the class was very messy.
His slogans:
1. I don't bite ... please vote for me
2. vote for me ... services free (ie my mom will pay for field trips)
3. please vote for me (with a flag on the poster)
4. It's like a cookie ... just voting
He'll make a good politician some day.
His slogans:
1. I don't bite ... please vote for me
2. vote for me ... services free (ie my mom will pay for field trips)
3. please vote for me (with a flag on the poster)
4. It's like a cookie ... just voting
He'll make a good politician some day.
Friday, May 14, 2004
water
The sky was incredibly blue. So deep blue with amazing puffs of white that drift along floating by. In resonance with the clouds, I bobbed up and down in the water, water that had that weedy mud smell that resovouirs seem to have. My little orange life vest hugged me and I bobbed with hair a mass of tentacles surrounding my head.
Off to one side giant cliffs of white limestone rose out of the water. lines of interspersed color splahed along the surface of the limestone. At the top of the cliffs, trees peered over to see us down below bobbing in the water. And of course always present was the buttery, golden, baking sun, an unchanging feature of the Texas landscape.
Funny thing about Texas. We only have two real lakes (so I've heard.) The rest were reservoirs created by damming up the ever flooding rivers that crisscross the state. It was amazing when I moved up north to see houses built right next to big broad thick rivers. In Texas our rivers are puny little dried up creatures. People throw trash in them, or fish out tiny rainbow colored perch, but certainly there are no barges or boats or drawbridges for that matter. And certainly no one builds houses next to our rivers. Our little puny rivers are caged by massive hills a hundred feet tall and at least a quarter of a mile on either side of the river. These massive hills surround a tiny puny dribble of a river-at least until it rains.
Within minutes during a big storm, the puny rivers becomes frothing, brown monsters. Before the hills in ft. Worth were built my grandmaw said she saw the entire downtown area flooded to the forth floor of the montgomery ward building. Downtown Ft.Worth was a lake just for a bit. If you ever drive through Dallas or Ft. Worth you will see the hugs hills that bank the various branches of the Trinity River. If you drive along 30 from one city to another, you'll encounter Arlington, shopping mecca with more retail establishments per square mile than any other city in America. Then you hit this empty zone. The highway stands out above it and it is kinda flat and empty of houses and such. When it rains you understand why as the whole place becomes a big mud puddle.
So at any rate, the rivers, and water itself, are slightly more menacing for the avarage Texan than say for the New Yorker or Michigander. Thus the resoviors were born, as a source of energy and a way to control the flooding rivers.
Funny thing about a resovior , is that far underneath the surface, you still kinda have a river. It comes in one side, and if the dam is open it goes out the other side. A bit like the jet stream only far below the water.
So there I sit in a resovoir, surrounded by family, both human and my Texan family made of rock sun and water.
My aunts are there. I don't know them very well. They like horses and I love horses so I think they are neat, but from a bit of a distance as I am really a very shy kid. My two cousins are there, floating in my vicinity. They are funny and friendly. Joy who is a bit more restrained and Marlina who later became a buety pagent contestant and laughed a lot. But they aren't laughing. They are crying. I can't find my dad. I know he is around somewhere, but you know how life jackets are. They push your head forward so it is hard to turn, especially when you are little. My sister is somewhere but I don't know where. She is smaller than me but I love her. Off to the far line of my vision my aunts fiance is in the water too. He was the first place I ever learned the word fiance. He seems very sick but I don't understand why.
Ahhh, the family reunion. It was the family reunion. The ever ubiquitous green bean cassarole, fried chicken, blood red beets and a never ending assortment of pasta and potato salads. All on the shores of the beautiful lake whitney, grateful resovior to the sweet Brazos River. Only one of many I assume. My dad loves boats and cars. He comes to pick us up from my mom in his blue truck mostly, but sometimes he comes in his white cadillac convertible. We always stop at Dairy Queen and get ice cream cones however. The ones dipped in chocolate. Mom said he would spend hours and hours in the old garage working on the cars. When they would fight, she would scream and scream, and even throw things at him. Off he would go to the shed to work on the cars, till she simmered a bit. Eventually she dumped him for some other guy who was more exciting.
Today my daddy brought out his new boat. It was white with red inside it. The last boat had been brown with blue interior I think. He had traded and borrowed to get the new boat, as I guess it was better. We run around the family reunion meeting all the odd, unfamiliar people. So many relatives. Then we all go out on the lake in the boat.
When you are in a boat, you fly across the water and if you hit the rough spots, where other boats have left wakes, you bounce up and down a bit. Always surrounded by the muddy resovior water smell. Funny thing about resoviors is that they just fill in the big valley around the river. They don't cut down the trees or move anything thing that is there, they stop the river and wait for the valley to fill, So sometimes, especially near the shallow areas, you see trees coming out of the water. Skeletal and dead of course but trees all the same. Seems on that day, that butter yellow family reunion day we might have met up with a tree. No one ever really knew.
Flying along in the water, but there was water by my feet. The floor was coming apart-into pieces. The square floorboard pieces were floating and we were no longer afloat. Soon we were all bobbing in the water, confused and enclosed by white rocks, blue sky and muddy grey blue water. Seems like my dadddy shoulda got a better boat. I vaguely recall the boat sinking below the surface. Only vaguely.
My daddy had been holding me while he drove. So he held me while we sank. At first as we bobbed he was behind me. That's why I couldn't see him. The water was in my mouth for a bit and I choked as I went under, then I popped back up. Somebody had their hand on my foot.
We all sat and waited. For what? I am far to little to know. I am scared but my family is close by and they will take care of me. The fiance is choking and gagging on the water. Turns out he wasn't wearing a lifejacket. He was lucky . he almost drowned. His mirror fiance held him up as she was wearing a lifejacket. It apprears that the river running under the surface of the lake was a bit close that day. It also turns out that Lake Whitney is well known for it's victims, like sacrifices it pulls them down, into the murky darkness, so calm and peaceful there.
A boat arrives. An old silver fishing boat. They pull up the drowning fiance first. Then we, being the future generation, are pulled in one by one, little soaked dolls with sraggely brown and blond tendils clinging to us. Another boat comes and gets all the aunts. So we all return to shore. They are crying and sobbing, which I don't understand. We have been saved, by the silver fishing baot. We are out of the water. Later it seems , upon counting heads thrirteen went out but only twelve returned. The cousins, the aunts, the sister and the fiance were accounted for. It seems the only two had been without lifejackets and one had a fiance to hold him up. The other only had a tiny little smidgen girl, in a tiny little lifevest only meant to hold up fifty pounds, not two hundred. When the river under the water came alive, and pulled at our feet as we sank into the water, all the swimming imaginable was useless.
What goes through your mind, in those slow, lightening fast seconds. You sink and you hold on to what will keep you afloat, realizing, you will pull it down with you. Maybe only a few feet, enough to save you as you kick and splutter to the surface for the occasional breath. It however doesn't understand and would need more than an occasionally breath. So you begin to release it and it pops back to the surface, inces higher as you sink inches lower. Do you decide to let go or does instinct (or the opposite of instict) take over and make you release her? What do you think as your hand runs across her toes and she rises higher while you are pulled lower? You sink down so fast and of course struggle to get back to the surface. How long before you can no longer hold your breath. Not very long, as you are very upset and your body demands oxygen. The water rushes in and fills your lungs, and you should cough, but how do you cough when every breath is filled with water. How long do you suffer with pain as you can no longer breath before you black out and are claimed by the beast river. What are your last thoughts as this happens. Do you realize that you are going to die and give in or do you fight till the last second. Do you think of us bobbing high above you? Do you even have time to consider us in those last few moments?
I often wonder, do you watch over us, do you exist somewhere else, keeping us out of trouble. (Watch that little sister-she needs more help than me I think.) Even with crazy mum, it seems we will end up okay. We miss you, even the dumpling who never knew you. I never understood how much you loved me until I held my son one day, close to me. I knew that this was the way me dad felt about me, an intense, powerful urge to give everything to keep me safe. You felt joy to watch me walk, and talk, and felt sad when I cried. Now I cry so many years after the fact, because I miss you.
Off to one side giant cliffs of white limestone rose out of the water. lines of interspersed color splahed along the surface of the limestone. At the top of the cliffs, trees peered over to see us down below bobbing in the water. And of course always present was the buttery, golden, baking sun, an unchanging feature of the Texas landscape.
Funny thing about Texas. We only have two real lakes (so I've heard.) The rest were reservoirs created by damming up the ever flooding rivers that crisscross the state. It was amazing when I moved up north to see houses built right next to big broad thick rivers. In Texas our rivers are puny little dried up creatures. People throw trash in them, or fish out tiny rainbow colored perch, but certainly there are no barges or boats or drawbridges for that matter. And certainly no one builds houses next to our rivers. Our little puny rivers are caged by massive hills a hundred feet tall and at least a quarter of a mile on either side of the river. These massive hills surround a tiny puny dribble of a river-at least until it rains.
Within minutes during a big storm, the puny rivers becomes frothing, brown monsters. Before the hills in ft. Worth were built my grandmaw said she saw the entire downtown area flooded to the forth floor of the montgomery ward building. Downtown Ft.Worth was a lake just for a bit. If you ever drive through Dallas or Ft. Worth you will see the hugs hills that bank the various branches of the Trinity River. If you drive along 30 from one city to another, you'll encounter Arlington, shopping mecca with more retail establishments per square mile than any other city in America. Then you hit this empty zone. The highway stands out above it and it is kinda flat and empty of houses and such. When it rains you understand why as the whole place becomes a big mud puddle.
So at any rate, the rivers, and water itself, are slightly more menacing for the avarage Texan than say for the New Yorker or Michigander. Thus the resoviors were born, as a source of energy and a way to control the flooding rivers.
Funny thing about a resovior , is that far underneath the surface, you still kinda have a river. It comes in one side, and if the dam is open it goes out the other side. A bit like the jet stream only far below the water.
So there I sit in a resovoir, surrounded by family, both human and my Texan family made of rock sun and water.
My aunts are there. I don't know them very well. They like horses and I love horses so I think they are neat, but from a bit of a distance as I am really a very shy kid. My two cousins are there, floating in my vicinity. They are funny and friendly. Joy who is a bit more restrained and Marlina who later became a buety pagent contestant and laughed a lot. But they aren't laughing. They are crying. I can't find my dad. I know he is around somewhere, but you know how life jackets are. They push your head forward so it is hard to turn, especially when you are little. My sister is somewhere but I don't know where. She is smaller than me but I love her. Off to the far line of my vision my aunts fiance is in the water too. He was the first place I ever learned the word fiance. He seems very sick but I don't understand why.
Ahhh, the family reunion. It was the family reunion. The ever ubiquitous green bean cassarole, fried chicken, blood red beets and a never ending assortment of pasta and potato salads. All on the shores of the beautiful lake whitney, grateful resovior to the sweet Brazos River. Only one of many I assume. My dad loves boats and cars. He comes to pick us up from my mom in his blue truck mostly, but sometimes he comes in his white cadillac convertible. We always stop at Dairy Queen and get ice cream cones however. The ones dipped in chocolate. Mom said he would spend hours and hours in the old garage working on the cars. When they would fight, she would scream and scream, and even throw things at him. Off he would go to the shed to work on the cars, till she simmered a bit. Eventually she dumped him for some other guy who was more exciting.
Today my daddy brought out his new boat. It was white with red inside it. The last boat had been brown with blue interior I think. He had traded and borrowed to get the new boat, as I guess it was better. We run around the family reunion meeting all the odd, unfamiliar people. So many relatives. Then we all go out on the lake in the boat.
When you are in a boat, you fly across the water and if you hit the rough spots, where other boats have left wakes, you bounce up and down a bit. Always surrounded by the muddy resovior water smell. Funny thing about resoviors is that they just fill in the big valley around the river. They don't cut down the trees or move anything thing that is there, they stop the river and wait for the valley to fill, So sometimes, especially near the shallow areas, you see trees coming out of the water. Skeletal and dead of course but trees all the same. Seems on that day, that butter yellow family reunion day we might have met up with a tree. No one ever really knew.
Flying along in the water, but there was water by my feet. The floor was coming apart-into pieces. The square floorboard pieces were floating and we were no longer afloat. Soon we were all bobbing in the water, confused and enclosed by white rocks, blue sky and muddy grey blue water. Seems like my dadddy shoulda got a better boat. I vaguely recall the boat sinking below the surface. Only vaguely.
My daddy had been holding me while he drove. So he held me while we sank. At first as we bobbed he was behind me. That's why I couldn't see him. The water was in my mouth for a bit and I choked as I went under, then I popped back up. Somebody had their hand on my foot.
We all sat and waited. For what? I am far to little to know. I am scared but my family is close by and they will take care of me. The fiance is choking and gagging on the water. Turns out he wasn't wearing a lifejacket. He was lucky . he almost drowned. His mirror fiance held him up as she was wearing a lifejacket. It apprears that the river running under the surface of the lake was a bit close that day. It also turns out that Lake Whitney is well known for it's victims, like sacrifices it pulls them down, into the murky darkness, so calm and peaceful there.
A boat arrives. An old silver fishing boat. They pull up the drowning fiance first. Then we, being the future generation, are pulled in one by one, little soaked dolls with sraggely brown and blond tendils clinging to us. Another boat comes and gets all the aunts. So we all return to shore. They are crying and sobbing, which I don't understand. We have been saved, by the silver fishing baot. We are out of the water. Later it seems , upon counting heads thrirteen went out but only twelve returned. The cousins, the aunts, the sister and the fiance were accounted for. It seems the only two had been without lifejackets and one had a fiance to hold him up. The other only had a tiny little smidgen girl, in a tiny little lifevest only meant to hold up fifty pounds, not two hundred. When the river under the water came alive, and pulled at our feet as we sank into the water, all the swimming imaginable was useless.
What goes through your mind, in those slow, lightening fast seconds. You sink and you hold on to what will keep you afloat, realizing, you will pull it down with you. Maybe only a few feet, enough to save you as you kick and splutter to the surface for the occasional breath. It however doesn't understand and would need more than an occasionally breath. So you begin to release it and it pops back to the surface, inces higher as you sink inches lower. Do you decide to let go or does instinct (or the opposite of instict) take over and make you release her? What do you think as your hand runs across her toes and she rises higher while you are pulled lower? You sink down so fast and of course struggle to get back to the surface. How long before you can no longer hold your breath. Not very long, as you are very upset and your body demands oxygen. The water rushes in and fills your lungs, and you should cough, but how do you cough when every breath is filled with water. How long do you suffer with pain as you can no longer breath before you black out and are claimed by the beast river. What are your last thoughts as this happens. Do you realize that you are going to die and give in or do you fight till the last second. Do you think of us bobbing high above you? Do you even have time to consider us in those last few moments?
I often wonder, do you watch over us, do you exist somewhere else, keeping us out of trouble. (Watch that little sister-she needs more help than me I think.) Even with crazy mum, it seems we will end up okay. We miss you, even the dumpling who never knew you. I never understood how much you loved me until I held my son one day, close to me. I knew that this was the way me dad felt about me, an intense, powerful urge to give everything to keep me safe. You felt joy to watch me walk, and talk, and felt sad when I cried. Now I cry so many years after the fact, because I miss you.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
interview questions
What is it that you could bring to our company?
Hunger. My drive to succeed is directly proportional to my desire to eat. I like food. If you hire me I can eat. I think we'll be a great match. Of course you might also want to keep me in a state of semi starvation to keep up my work ethic, however don't we all want to look like supermodels?
Hunger. My drive to succeed is directly proportional to my desire to eat. I like food. If you hire me I can eat. I think we'll be a great match. Of course you might also want to keep me in a state of semi starvation to keep up my work ethic, however don't we all want to look like supermodels?
tomatoes
I am so lax about posting in the blog. I think to myself that I would like to write but I get caught up doing other things and just don't get the chance.
I am writing from work and I just want to note that my UNIX sucks ass. It seriously has given me a window two inches wide to type into. On many web pages I get messages about "your browser does not meet basic internet standards". I tried to get a new netscape however it seems that nobody likes UNIX anymore and no new versions have been made in years.
The dandelions have been mowed and returned as tall as ever. On a wierd side note many of them seem to have undergone a very odd mutation developmentally. The flowers will grow on a stalk an inch wide and four flower heads will be morphed together into a single wide flower. I was going to make dandelion jam, however I am a bit scared that I live on a nuclear waste site. Wonder what the tomatoes will look like?
Interesteing non plant, semi plant observations. I can't keep my mind quiet. On ritalin (for ADHD), it will sit there quiet when I try and meditate. It observes my surroundings but there is little internal "talking"-you know the voice in your head sort of talking. Off the meds, the voice never stops. Idea after idea pops up and they merge and split. It is like a vast web of chaotic colors all blending together. Like a toddler given two pieces of a puzzle. It bangs them together over and over again in different ways, till something fits. My brain does this with ideas. They get blended and churned and brought to the surface over and over again.
At night when I dream this is most obvious. On meds I sleep like a rock. It is so funny that I take a stimulant and I sleep so deeply. I still dream but can't remember it. My guess is that it enhances, not REM sleep, (perhaps supresses REM?), rather the periods of deep sleep that surround REM sleep. If I drink a big cup of coffee or take sudafed before bed I also sleep much more deeply. When I don't take meds, I dream all night long and almost always remember my dreams. It is very easy to interact in my dream stste as I usually know that I am dreaming. If something scares me in my dream , I can choose to calm down and move away from it or morph it into something else. I can also see the same blending of ideas occuring in dreams even more than when I am awake. My brain will take unrelated ideas encountered during the day and force them to be mixed. It will sometimes get stuck in a rut and hash the same idea over and over again till I get up because I can't stand lying there dreaming about it anymore. It actually becomes mental draining after awhile.
Is it good or bad? When I meditate not haven taken any meds, my mind runs crazy, jabbing for a few minutes. I finally quiet most of the verbal chatter but I can feel it bursting from under the surface. It is like an ocean that is very wide and deep and dark, very calm, with little ripples now and then that perturb the surface. The funnest part is that if I just keep sitting there, all the energy that must be constantly being burned up by the chatterbox mind and spastic body gets refunneled. After a few minutes my whole body starts to glow, metaphorically of course. I have had the same experience doing katas or in yoga. I am blissful, spastic and still all at once. I also want to giggle-he hehe.
This same glow often comes to me during sex, or when I am in really painful yoga poses (awwww, the back bends) Perhaps it's an endorphin rush.
I feel close to god then, not jesus or god mind you, but siva. I feel closer to understanding what I am about and what the world is about.
Funnily enough, like in Siddhartha, I don't know if I can explain it to anyone else. However I see the same thing in my dumpling. He will run and dance about spastically and I see the glowing bliss-silliness all over him. He couldn't stop if he wanted to. I guess that's why he is ADD. Mental illness or mental advantage? I may never be rich but I can roll in the grass and feel siva around me and inside of me. I guess all those normal people miss out on that.
I am so lax about posting in the blog. I think to myself that I would like to write but I get caught up doing other things and just don't get the chance.
I am writing from work and I just want to note that my UNIX sucks ass. It seriously has given me a window two inches wide to type into. On many web pages I get messages about "your browser does not meet basic internet standards". I tried to get a new netscape however it seems that nobody likes UNIX anymore and no new versions have been made in years.
The dandelions have been mowed and returned as tall as ever. On a wierd side note many of them seem to have undergone a very odd mutation developmentally. The flowers will grow on a stalk an inch wide and four flower heads will be morphed together into a single wide flower. I was going to make dandelion jam, however I am a bit scared that I live on a nuclear waste site. Wonder what the tomatoes will look like?
Interesteing non plant, semi plant observations. I can't keep my mind quiet. On ritalin (for ADHD), it will sit there quiet when I try and meditate. It observes my surroundings but there is little internal "talking"-you know the voice in your head sort of talking. Off the meds, the voice never stops. Idea after idea pops up and they merge and split. It is like a vast web of chaotic colors all blending together. Like a toddler given two pieces of a puzzle. It bangs them together over and over again in different ways, till something fits. My brain does this with ideas. They get blended and churned and brought to the surface over and over again.
At night when I dream this is most obvious. On meds I sleep like a rock. It is so funny that I take a stimulant and I sleep so deeply. I still dream but can't remember it. My guess is that it enhances, not REM sleep, (perhaps supresses REM?), rather the periods of deep sleep that surround REM sleep. If I drink a big cup of coffee or take sudafed before bed I also sleep much more deeply. When I don't take meds, I dream all night long and almost always remember my dreams. It is very easy to interact in my dream stste as I usually know that I am dreaming. If something scares me in my dream , I can choose to calm down and move away from it or morph it into something else. I can also see the same blending of ideas occuring in dreams even more than when I am awake. My brain will take unrelated ideas encountered during the day and force them to be mixed. It will sometimes get stuck in a rut and hash the same idea over and over again till I get up because I can't stand lying there dreaming about it anymore. It actually becomes mental draining after awhile.
Is it good or bad? When I meditate not haven taken any meds, my mind runs crazy, jabbing for a few minutes. I finally quiet most of the verbal chatter but I can feel it bursting from under the surface. It is like an ocean that is very wide and deep and dark, very calm, with little ripples now and then that perturb the surface. The funnest part is that if I just keep sitting there, all the energy that must be constantly being burned up by the chatterbox mind and spastic body gets refunneled. After a few minutes my whole body starts to glow, metaphorically of course. I have had the same experience doing katas or in yoga. I am blissful, spastic and still all at once. I also want to giggle-he hehe.
This same glow often comes to me during sex, or when I am in really painful yoga poses (awwww, the back bends) Perhaps it's an endorphin rush.
I feel close to god then, not jesus or god mind you, but siva. I feel closer to understanding what I am about and what the world is about.
Funnily enough, like in Siddhartha, I don't know if I can explain it to anyone else. However I see the same thing in my dumpling. He will run and dance about spastically and I see the glowing bliss-silliness all over him. He couldn't stop if he wanted to. I guess that's why he is ADD. Mental illness or mental advantage? I may never be rich but I can roll in the grass and feel siva around me and inside of me. I guess all those normal people miss out on that.
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