compliments

now i am sitting at rendezvous watching the downpour with an old couple.  they are drinking coffee in small cups and smoking imported cigarettes.  i am not sure what language they are speaking.

it has been a long time since i have written on here, or anywhere, i suppose.  i am uncertain as to how i feel about the overall level of resolution in my life.  the rain is quieting, now.

i have a plan, though, a real one.  the other tendrils can curl unimportantly onward.  my attention is focused elsewhere.  the old woman shifted to english to ask the time.  it is a quarter to two.

let me tell you the things i am thinking when i am driving in the car.

flimsy file cabinets house

the dna samples I take

donated drops of blood

for every occasion the

ultimate memory I wanted

to see mutations in action

genetic impatience general

lack of

fitness for parenthood

neuroticism spanned perfect

method twinned from

meticulousness perhaps rather

a calved sect instead a

crumble of glacier punctuating

the warming arctic ocean

receding from itself in

every moment insane productivity

I’ll shut up now my

teeth are wearing down enamel

eaten out every last night

think sporadic organization

preferably divergent hierarchies

converse only in empty

libraries sleep only in

beds belonging to others

the imprints are comforting

everything has been done

and said and is being done

and said alongside crepe

paper cartilage panoramas

we’ll go back to the farm

together – memorandum

to self hello dear

weather you’re keeping me

company just fine

house fires kept it

dark at night I count

your possessions for

lack of sheep mitochondrial

movements

unidentified implies specifications

the rain came out my

muscles atrophied slowly

hold my by my shoulders

teeth glossing over the

webbing of scar tissue held

us close or so we thought
spiraling hum at seventy-five

positive psychology part one

Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly & Seligman, E., P., Martin.  (2000)  Positive psychology:  An introduction.  American Psychologist.  55(1).

Positive Psychology: An Introduction

The goal of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in the focus of psychopathology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities.  Prior to World War II, there were three distinct missions of psychology.  These were curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent.

After WWII, the focus shifted towards curing mental illness (largely due to monetary distribution), and human beings were seen more as passive foci, experiencing external stimuli that elicited various responses.  As such, the disease model of psychology was formed, making it a scientific field focused on solving disorders; here, the second two goals of improving the lives of all people and identifying and nurturing genius were secondary at best.

A prominent researcher of the time, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, was troubled with such an attitude.  In his opinion, the science of human beings needed to understand both what was and what could be; psychology needed to be more than the study of pathology, weakness, and damage, but also the study of strength and virtue.  As it became clear that the disease model of psychology was not progressing towards prevention, there was a shift towards building competency rather than correcting weaknesses.  Certain buffers, including courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work-ethic, hope, honesty, and perseverance, seemed to mediate mental illness, fueling a movement intent on amplifying strengths rather than repairing weaknesses.

The resulting shift saw individuals as decision-makers with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, as well as helpless and hopeless.  This movement served to restore psychology's briefly forgotten goals of making normal people stronger and more productive and actualizing high human potential.  Within this framework, the field of positive psychology began to flourish.

Positive psychology essentially consists of three guiding elements.  On the subjective level, the focus is on valued subjective experiences, which include well-being, contentment, satisfaction, hope and optimism, and the capacity for flow and happiness.  From a personal perspective, it is about positive personal traits such as capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom.  At a group level, the concern is with civic virtues and institutions that move individuals towards better citizenship, including qualities such as responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work-ethic.  In one sentence, positive psychology is about identifying and nurturing the strongest qualities and finding niches in which to best live out those strengths.

There are a number of other important forces guiding the progress of positive psychology.  One of these is the role of the positive experience, or the questions of what qualities make one moment better or worse than the next or what distinguishes happy from unhappy individuals.  A second concern is with the positive personality and how humans function as self-organizing, self-directed adaptive entities.  Lastly, there is the important consideration that people and experiences are embedded in a social context and the ways that individuals change and are changed by their environments.

A number of perspectives have emerged to explain how the above forces affect individuals.  From the evolutionary perspective, the primary barrier to positive states of mind is the difference between the ancestral environment from which we evolved and our current environment, as posited by David Buss and others.  In addition to this belief, he theorizes that evolved distress mechanisms, are often still functional; an example of this would be jealousy alerting individuals to make sure of their spouse's fidelity.

Another realm involves positive personal traits, which include subjective well-being, optimism, happiness, and self-determination.  To a large extent, this area deals with how a person's values and goals mediate between external effects and the quality of experience.  As suggested by Epicetetus, it is not what happens to people that determines how happy they are, but how they interpret what happens.  Optimism, then, is seen as involving cognitive, emotional, and motivational components that intersect to affect an individual's view of the world.  In terms of self-determination, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci suggest that personal well-being and social development are optimized when the human needs for competence, belongingness, and autonomy are met.  Such people are intrinsically motivated, able to fulfill their potentialities, and able to seek out progressively greater challenges.  Barry Schwartz, though, warns that excessive autonomy may lead to depression and dissatisfaction, as the burden for autonomous choices can become too heavy.  He suggests that cultural constraints are necessary for leading a meaningful and satisfying life.

he's around

i know it.

after riding over to my aunt and uncle's lakeside house to film part of a project, they invited me to come out on the boat with them.  i agreed and soon i was in a borrowed bathing suit floating in a water chair tethered to the boat.  before i knew it, i had a five-year old girl named sangria on my lap, and she told me all about jesus.

time killerz

a home is not a house

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." -I John 1:8,9


As I began reading the first chapter of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, I began thinking about other theories that attempt to explain reality. In all those that I chose to explore, a common theme is self-deception and its detriments. Each theory offers a slightly different perspective, and all hold at least something useful. Once you've finished, I'd love to hear what you think.


Plato's Theory of Forms suggests the existence of a level of reality or "world" inhabited by the ideal or archetypal forms of all things and concepts. This is more or less his idea of Heaven, where the absolute form of everything exists. Under this theory, a form is the "common nature" possessed by a group of things or concepts, and is eternal and changeless, but exists with changeable matter to produce the examples we perceive in the temporal world. Additionally, the Analogy of the Divided Line distinguishes between lower forms, the real items of which ordinary particular items we see around us are reflections, and higher forms, characterized by priori, that knowledge of them does not depend upon experience of particulars or even on ideas of perpetually well-known particulars.


Here, the temporal world is opinion, as illustrated in the Allegory of the Cave; just as the prisoners observing shadows cast on the wall believe such likenesses are the actual objects or reality, we are seeing shadows of forms rather than the absolute forms themselves. When we have false beliefs about the nature of absolute reality in each thing or concept we encounter, Plato places us as unable to reason. The prisoners suffer this gap in reality because they are bound and unable to move, and although we may be physically unhindered, Plato explains our metaphoric chains with the Metaphor of the Sun.


He states, "when the soul is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts into opinions hither and thither and again seems as if it lacked reason."


Rene Descartes is perhaps most famous for reasoning, "I think, therefore I am." As far as he was concerned, Plato's concept of our experienced world as shadows of absolute forms is skewed. Descartes saw thinking as the only thing that cannot be doubted, and that through perception and deduction, the judgement of the mind is the only means of explanation and understanding of our environment. Even further, he saw Plato's argument for an external world as absurdly placing sensory perceptions as involuntary and external to the senses.


He uses the example of speaking, postulating that although, "most philosophers assure us that sound is nothing other than a certain vibration of air that strikes against our ears...if our sense of hearing were to report to our mind the true image of its object, then, instead of causing us to conceive of sound, it would have to cause us to conceive of the motion of the parts of air that then vibrate against our ears." With this premise guiding his work, through the use of mathematics and calculations regarding the properties of light, Descartes even attests "that the face of the heaven...must appear to its inhabitants completely like that of our world." We will get to heaven in a little bit.


In the segment of the first chapter entitled "Spirituality and Religion", Tolle's discussion of ego offers an alternative to both Descartes' and Plato's theories of existence and reality. Ego, he attests, is an identification with form, primarily those of thoughts. When we remain in the realm of our own thoughts, we are trapped from recognizing oneness, much less attaining it. The relative reality of evil is, then, "complete identification with form...physical, thought, and emotional."


Such an unawareness of oneness with all others characterizes the dysfunction afflicting the "normal" consciousness of most humans. This original sin, of missing the mark of human existence, this maya, the veil of delusion, and this dukkha, mind-generated suffering and dissatisfaction, all result from such egocentric ignorance. This is living in Plato's cave and treating shadows as reality.


Basic tenants of Christianity provide yet another set of insights. The Book of Common Prayer, contains "An Outline of the Faith: the Catechism". It begins by reminding us that we are part of God's creation and made in His image. As such, we have been given the freedom to love, create, and reason, but we are separate from each other and from Him because we have misused this gift. This disconnectedness is similar to Tolle's ego; in using our God-given reasoning, skill, memory, and logic to unintended, self-serving ends, we distance ourselves from the essential oneness we began with and perpetuate our own ignorance.


In this text, sin is defined as a "distortion of the will of God that compromises our relationship with all creation." When our relationship with God, the unifier of the world, suffers, we lose our liberty by becoming entrapped by our egotistical, individualistic pursuits. This tenant is reflected not only in Tolle's description of ego, but also in Plato's Allegory of the Sun; when we ensnare ourselves in false beliefs of reality, we lose our connection with the unifying absolute. In Christianity, because we have been made in the image of God, we are all a part of the communion of saints, the whole family of God, and as such, we must honor and love each other as we love ourselves.


Hebrews 9:24 explains that, "Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are figures of the true; but into heaven itself." In this pointed distinction between the trueness of heaven and its contents and the world we experience, the parallel to Plato's World of Forms is uncanny. When we transcend our bodies, we are subject to the everlasting life that comes with ascension into heaven, "a new existence in which we are united...in the joy of fully loving and knowing God and each other."


I'll leave you with some words from Descartes.


"I..aspired as much as any one to reach heaven; the way is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead to heaven are above..the impotency of my reason. In order competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special help from heaven, and of being more than man."


Regardless of route, the pursuit of heaven seems to require being more than man and his ego. On spiritual pilgrimage, the search for home is anything but physical or esoteric; to play with an old adage, a home is not a house. Coming home is a return to the inherent oneness unfettered by the ignorance of ego.

we need innernet now

..so i don't kill time in the fishbowl doing things like this

transport of matter

Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness (2010) – Dong Shen

This article discusses the experiment in which a small piece of paper was transported out of a plastic vial by the means of human consciousness. The phenomenon of solid matter penetrating solid matter is attributed to a second consciousness state (SCS) that differs from the first, normal consciousness state of everyday thinking. Chinese research has suggested the involvement of a third-eye screen, which is essentially an image of an object created on a virtual “screen” in the middle of the forehead when a practitioner spends about an hour thinking deeply about the object. Psychokinetic (PK) transportation of the paper from the vial requires an image of the paper to be held stably on the screen by the SCS so that the first consciousness state can visualize moving the paper out of the vial; findings suggest that the paper image on the screen is able to receive information from the practitioner.
The methods used in this experiment were derived from Chinese research that began in the 1970s. These early studies were fueled by findings regarding Exceptional Function of the Human Body (EFHB), first seen in a boy who could “read” Chinese characters written on a piece of paper placed next to his ear. Shouliang Chen at Beijing University sought to determine whether or not EFHB was a physiological function of the body, and his studies found numerous other children and adults who were considered to have EHFB. The resulting source of practitioners served to advance research on this topic in a number of other programs.
For this particular experiment, practitioners were recruited from the Fudan University workforce. Individuals were selected to voluntarily undergo ESP and PK training without compensation and were generally 16-22 years old with little education. Results showed that success was often predicted by individuals’ level of mental flexibility and lack of preconception; approximately 60% of participants were successfully trained in ESP, with lower rates for PK success.
In this study, the canister was a standard-sized, opaque black plastic, 35-mm film cartridge container with its cap. A slip of paper 65mm by 90mm had a number written on it before being placed inside the canister. Although the practitioner, a 17-year old male, had no ability to achieve SCS initially, after six months of psychokinetic training, the experiment began. After the practitioner spent two days preparing, the experimenter wrote the number 830 on the paper, folded it four times, then passed it to a second experimenter who placed it inside the canister. The practitioner was seated one meter away from the table and told the paper was inside but not what was written on it.
Approximately forty minutes passed in silence as the practitioner stared intently at the canister. Moments later, the practitioner stated not only that the paper had moved to the floor near the wall, but also that it had the number 830 written on it in blue ink. None of the experimenters described seeing the paper leaving the container or flying across the room, but upon further inspection, there was in fact the very same paper on the ground near the wall, still folded.
The researcher provided the manner in which the practitioner described his experiment as follows, “during the experiment he concentrated on the black catridge container and got it deep in his consciousness while entering into the SCS. Then an image of the container appeared on the third-eye screen located in front of his forehead. He saw the image of the paper in the same way. At the very beginning, the paper image was not stable and not clear. After he focused on the image for a while, it became stable and clear on the screen. The number on the paper could then be easily read, that is, 830 written in blue, even though the paper was folded inside the capped container. When the image of the paper was clear on the screen, he started to use his mind to move the paper out of the container. At a certain point, he “saw” in his mind that the container was empty and saw in the room that the paper was on the floor near the wall.”
This research found that second consciousness state images on the third-eye screen have a number of remarkable qualities. When the practitioner is in the SCS, he can see the folded paper on his third-eye screen, and even has the capability to mentally examine it to determine its parts and characteristics, which was the number 830 in blue ink. Studies have also shown that an individual can focus on a given page of a closed book and read it while the book remains closed. This is possible because the image of the object on the third-eye screen is actively connected with the actual object; merely reading the third-eye screen is simply ESP. Psychokinesis results from the SCS focusing on the image and working with the normal, first consciousness state, which can then instruct the object to move.
According to the author, there are three requirements for psychokinetic activities. The first is that the image of the object actually appears on the third-eye screen. Second, the image on the screen must be stable to ensure it is intimately connected with the real object such as that between an object and its reflection in a mirror. This is achieved by maintaining concentration on the object. Finally, the image receives its “instruction” from the normal, first state of consciousness. When the position of the image on the screen changes, the real object will follow the position change simultaneously, similar to a tunneling process associated with a quantum mechanical wave function. These traits can be trained, with children 8-12 years old and young adults 15-22 years old with limited education showing best results.

happy mother's day

on this sixth sunday of easter, the lessons remind us of the power of love; god's love for his people has brought beauty and light into the world, and all we are asked for in return is an unwavering love and faith in him. although she may be a mere mortal, the gifts of god shine so brightly in my mother. in this week's gospel, john 14:23-29, jesus tells judas, " my peace i give to you. i do not give to you as the world gives. do not let your hearts be.. afraid." as i read these words, i couldn't help but think of my mother, whose capacity for love and compassion constantly amazes me.

in our relationship, my mother has never given to me as the world gives. a year after i was born, she wrote, "you have filled a place within us that we didn’t know was empty...I want you to always know how much I love you and that I’ll always support you and do whatever I can to ensure your happiness." she has never, ever broken that promise. i cry every time i read it (i'm crying a little now) because her love for me has been so dynamic and enveloping, even when i have been perfectly awful. her heart has so much room, it seems, and i know how blessed i am to experience such enveloping love - it feels as if we are physically connected.

my mother is filled with such beauty, and she transmits a sense of inner peace and love in every interaction with the world. when i watch her, i see it clearly and tangibly. i marvel at its constancy and its untiring, unyielding, and unrelenting presence and think of god. last week, we were told to love one another, and that this love would be the true marker of our faith in god and his son. in my opinion, this loving relationship is trust in the innate perfection of god's creations, or more simply, faith in the essential goodness in people or things. even in the most trying moments, i have seen my mother draw from some beautiful inner strength that i can only hope to find.

so yes, i have faith in god, but i also have faith in my mother. the vibrance of her radiating love is a living reminder that we were all created in the likeness of god, and that the peace offered through love for god, jesus, and each other most certainly exists. my mother embodies what we, as christians, strive to become, and is simply the best person i have ever known. the strength of her intrinsic love has carried me through times when i could not find any love in and for myself. saying thank you is not an adequate show of gratitude for such powerful gifts. to truly honor my mother, i must open my own heart to the love i have been offered, but even more, to the love i can offer. my mother has taught me that love is endlessly renewing, perhaps like nothing else in this world, and thus, to have love is to have the world.

i love you, mom.

haus of bird

inbox

soup
whiskey orange juice
grapefruits death no.
I’m saying
that’s all I had planned for later I think
I’m forgetting

to do what I said I would and
I need to try to keep with it
so I don’t think I will see you
no kate dawson’s creek I told you

think carrie
just left were like half an hour away ookey
I can’t pretend
that youre only my friend

when youre holding
my body tight we still on for tomorrow
HURRYUH we need to set a start time yes ma’am
in the meantime blind

pig afraid not love
s’okay went with megan
s’all good ran home to pee how
does one order drinks

at an American bar tomorrow
would you like to go
get fnc or should I
have them waiting for you

at my place okie doke what was it eh fuck
fuck I’m high
close before meeting
and I don’t think
it was straight
weed na ddrive me to allway
eq q 4:00 Friday dr beye
yes please yes double

please I’m in getting-up
process now yesm whr
u today nearly there yeah
fine where in aa
ooops
where in aa WELL


YOU DON’T KNOW DO YOU BECAUSE I WAS TALKIN WITH SOMEONE ELSE the first time okay sarry nuuh
sdiff
oh u didn’t lock the front door
and bass’s chair got rained on
of course ehhhh what is it
what is it what is it

what is it um yes it will be
is that comment yr way
of telling me that you will be going
to the party
sux 4 u
come over come over hah no
I got good shit now buuuuut
so you’ll be fun you mean
smoking this joint with clara now to take a break from smoking so
I shouldn’t SMOke even MORe after that oh yeah I see
gtg kate
yo can we
return bottles otherwise I only have 3$
we r staying inside til u call whr we meeting u
dinner’s all over
but I think
I’m staying in tonight

where is my mind

no, i haven't been listening to too much of the pixies.

it's been at least six months, but more likely over a year. it isn't necessarily just my mind that is missing, rather, it might be my self. at least my sense of self, i suppose. i've described a schism that has wrenched apart who i want to be and who i have become through my actions. the cohesive element is my constant desire to be good, nice, respectable, honest in my movements. unfortunately, this underlying hypothetical essence of self is constantly disrupted by the poor choices i make (in situational haste and shortsightedness), leaving me feeling destructive and dangerous and generally unfit for human interaction. perhaps i would be better off if i didn't expect or want to be a good person in that the regret and grief i load upon myself - i can't even pretend anymore that my bad behavior is accidental - destroys me constantly, and yet, i still hold out the tiniest wet match hope that i will step up and away. i seemingly always choose situations that enable me to act stupidly but moreso manipulatively and i know when i'm doing it and i know how i will feel afterwards but i yield to some yet to distinguished force and feel momentarily good but constantly false. there is nothing that feels worse than not knowing why i lack the discipline to stop, except the fact that i have lost all concept of who i am anymore. blaming mental illness feels trite at this point. even being on meds for every emotion and sensation didn't enforce any sort of identity, and so i am left wondering if i either have some growing up to do or have some fatal character flaw. i have been in therapy for five years now. i have been on meds for four. what the hell do i have to show for it? am i not trying hard enough? have i not met the right person? what is wrong with me? most likely i am making poor choices.

sometimes when you disobey your body, your body disobeys you

the best thing i have written in college:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaxAzGo3CISTZGZnZDJtbjhfOGcyY3Q3cWdz&hl=en

other things:

↔↔↔
sublimation

asleep and alone,
the quandary between
both snow and ice
as solids is resolved
by a mutual eagerness
to fill lungs as water.
schematic alterations
become coastline interjections
as the silhouette smell
of pennies clenched
in pocket fistfuls
attest that this
house could use
some utensils.
incisors gleam in
shields of useful moments,
and build solidarity
through emptying
the lost and found
-
underwater blind spots are
pinky toe pinching sneakers,
dental floss suicide,
the day’s news,
a remainder in
side-hand smudges
transferred onto
more personal business.
-
I never dreamed,
and instead laid
unconscious in bed -
should versus could versus want:
could becomes want,
but want is seldom should,
and could and should
rarely align
-
do-it-for-yourself and
sever the corpus collosum
with pruning shears you
find in the garage, but
wd-40 the blades first so
it is a single snip, not
a series of teething perforations –
it is impossible to nest
when everything
is so shiny.
↔↔↔

↔↔↔
begotten, not made

you arrived in
a short circuit
of time that had
occupied the place
beneath the lines
of my face. my
teeth had grown
whiter and thinner
in your disappearing
half-life.
the neatness of
your cuticles
disarmed my pupils
into narrowing.
a gun held
to the temple
ignites circles
of candles.
inhales taste loudly
of hasty justifications in
the form of prayer.
our father,
who artfully wore
a silk necktie
over the hollow of his throat,
knew when to come
and when to be done.
let’s go let’s go let’s
go now into the world
with pieces
of imprinted love
remembered
with fingers to forehead.
punishment is
scar tissue rolled between
thumb and pointer
while begging for
time to pass and
stay the same in
a single pulse
of blood.
let us pray.
↔↔↔

↔↔↔
slow dancing

I’d like to honk, just a single
beep, a bell for service brought
warmly to a halt in the continuation of
the ringing finger’s downward path.
it is almost Christmas. the mall has
looked the same since thanksgiving
and this day ten years ago. you are
unquietly miserable. your parents and
fourteen zen vegetarians will be hungry.
I had to leave when I realized you
were just realizing that gluten
made meat-like texture. roald dahl
appeared. the brick of frozen
soy protein seemed a potential
blunt weapon and if we expected
nutrition from violence we
would eat bleeding steaks. I
would be dead. you
would get off. no one
would be hungry.
in stepping lightly,
we knew how malleable a
fuck could be. the refractions
seemed always
inward. double sided.
being caught watching might
be worse than being caught.
like a flesh eating virus,
I never felt dirtier. rap once
on the window, hard. the yard
will clear. after the funeral we
didn’t stay to talk. I couldn’t feel
the carillon’s grief chattering
in between your ribs but I heard it
in your eyebrows. I will keep my
eyes on your elbow to ensure
firm contact. everyone likes a last
minute triumph. except the referee.
he would prefer to remain intact and
to make it home at a reasonable
hour. teachers feel the same way,
but fewer arrows, bigger target.
good lord somersaults hurt
and I have never done a single
cartwheel unless my friends
have been lying to me. it can be
hard to keep track of the sun.
perhaps I’ve always had something
lodged between my teeth. physical
contact does not ensure toughness
in locations other than the pads of
hands and feet. sometimes discipline is
as simple as a short whistle through
buck teeth. ears perk despite
best efforts to remain flatly ignorant.
in bed you thrash like drowning
but I never try to wake you
for fear of drowning in tandem.
absolute measures lose value in
unconsciousness. the comparison
of pain in nightmares to drug-
induced hibernation is beyond me.
maybe dreams are better than
real life. the clanging in my head
seems to subside with the
parking lot panic. their mania is
seasonal. yours is not. our mattress
doesn’t even have the heart to
creak when we lay down anymore.
my grandmother still says my
name like cashmere and roast
beast but I wonder what is left of
her lungs. I shake my clothes off
before I come back in, as if her cancer
is more infectious than yours.
when we talk about next weekend,
I worry about genetics. it has never
been comforting. for months I
have planned it. tomorrow I will
win the lottery. that will be that.
you will still be you. I will still be
me. we will not be we. when I go to
make my claim, I will not turn off
the alarm before I open
the back door so that
you will look up. as
you watch me carrying
the garbage out to the curb, there
will be no uncertainty that
it will be my wave goodbye
and the last favor
I ever do for you.
↔↔↔

barely bothered

my posts have been sporadic, at best. i apologize. the cause itself is complex, i suppose.

to be honest, i can't write anything.

perhaps it is the post trauma of all the car accidents.

perhaps it is the dosage and combination of my plethora of meds.

regardless, something needs to change.

in pieces - Psalm 18: 5-6; 16; 19

the cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction
overwhelmed me.
the cords of the grave coiled
around me.
in my distress I called to the
Lord;
I cried to my God for help.
from his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came before him, into his
ears…
he reached down from on high and
took hold of me;
he drew me out of my deep waters.
he rescued me…from my foes who
were too strong for me.
he brought me out into a spacious
place;
he rescued me because he delighted
in me.

and my come to jesus continues to be justified. it is almost scary how exactly parallel this psalm is.

the car is going to flip (cords of death)
we are going very fast (torrents of destruction)
we could all die (cords of grave)
dear god, please don't let us flip (cry
dear god, please let us stop flipping(for
dear god, please let us land on our wheels(help)
thank god it has stopped (he heard my voice)
thank god the doors open (took hold of me)
thank god i am alive (drew me out and rescued me)
thank god for giving me another chance (delighted in me)

the motto is in effect

adventuring to montreal - updates and potentially video to follow

In regards to the tressy doll growth mechanism, marysville's marathon bathroom is equipped with a rotating reusuable cloth towel apparatus.

-- Post From My iPhone

i cannot turn this paper in

Being Hungry Sucks Dick

You will not be able to convince me that the Food Stamp Challenge was anything but a publicity stunt for those governors and senators and other public officials. Our class provided a microcosm of the same problem linked to inaccurate political generalizations; of my twenty-odd classmates, I was the only one who considered the role of appealingly priced fast food in the malnutrition of poverty. here’s the thing. mcdonald’s spends millions and millions of dollars creating appealing and persuasive depictions of not only the food itself, but also of the seemingly great lifestyle that comes alongside such a distinguished choice in greasy hamburgers. lentils are boring. us Americans love us some variety, and as such, I wanted to explore the effects of consuming items purchased solely from the value menu.
in my preparation for my week of dollar menus, I decided to track my mood and appetite for a few days to try and begin my with a baseline. one thing I chose to do was spend eight of my twenty-one dollars on a bottle of a vitamin blend that provides essential fruit and vegetable nutrients to ensure th
let me tell you something. the dollar menus are full of great deals and almost always tasty snacks. really, truly, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. it seems great, you drive up to the window, hand them a dollar and six cents, and they pass you a steaming double cheeseburger or a mcchicken or two apple pies. it’s easier not to wonder how the hell they can make money charging a dollar for a lot of hamburger meat, because the implications are likely quite troubling and would like discourage my patronage.
the single largest problem with the self as an ethnographer of one’s own situation is that of validity. from the overarching issue of conducting research and making observations that accurately address the intending topic of eating the poverty diet to the more minute aspects of designing a meaningful way to capture and organize data, it is nearly impossible to meet an acceptable level of validity. unfortunately, it is impossible for me to entirely abandon the fact that I am an upper-middle class college student, and as such, I’m not able to understand the yet esoteric feeling of poverty.
inarguably, the food stamp challenge is about simulation, not recreation, and that’s okay. my foray into the world of government nutrition programs has taught me a number of things. in reflection on my week, I have decided that the single most important piece of knowledge I have gained was a direct result of acknowledging that my background was inseparable from my experience. rather than attempting to deny the inherencies of my person and societal status, I realized that keeping these characteristics at the forefront of my mind led me to understand that, for me, this ethnography was not about describing my regular life and my food stamp challenge life, but to describe the intersectionality of the two. not only would it be pretentious for me to deem myself a reputable source for the woes of poverty, but it would also deny the fact that where I started from is also a crucial part of how I chose to present my data. this is not a paper about living in poverty. this is a paper about a rich, suburban kid playing at poverty.
perhaps my week of fast food exclusive consumption was no favor to my body, and yet, there was always the lingering comfort that everything I was doing was a choice. there are safety and comfort in control.
this exercise in ethnography illustrates the difficulties of being a social scientist. even the best designed, most naturalistic observations are unable to skirt the numerous threats presented simply by the virtue of its origins in research. whether the breakdown happens at the individual level, with the ethnographer failing to accurately or completely record information, or at the community level, where participants feel pressured or react with a response bias to sensitive subjects, one thing is clear. as much as we like to think as (amateur) researchers that our work is more or less objective, there is real danger in attempting to mask natural influences by feigning ignorance of their existence.

who needs patches when you can color your leg the same color as your pants?

my grandfather finds equality in new configurations.

the renaissance humanistic movement of the early fifteenth century centered around the words of Leon Battista Alberti, who held that "a man can do all things if he will." within this theoretical framework, individuals who strove to excel in disciplines of intellectual, social, artistic, and athletic concern were held as gifted or genius. today, we use the term renaissance man as a means of describing individuals who embody the innate and infinite capacity for learning described by early humanists.

I revisited the term in an attempt to provide a fitting description of Mark’s brief, but accomplished, life, though I still remember the first time I heard it. we were in baldy’s second hour class (at Greengates in Mexico), and he was talking about leonardo davinci, calling him the prime example of a reh-nay-sonce man. when I looked down at the backwards cursive blueprints printed in my textbook, I didn’t think of beards or walking on water, but instead of my grandfather’s broad, square hands.

my grandfather, hulki aldikacti (all-duh-kahtch-tee), has lived a life that would make any renaissance humanist proud. he was born into a wealthy family in 1934 in Istanbul, Turkey; in his early life, not only did he excel in school, but was also an accomplished gymnast and had already constructed his first motor boat by scratch at the age of twelve.

by the time he was eighteen or nineteen, my grandfather had finished university in turkey, and decided to move to the united states to study engineering here at the university of michigan. the picture of him leaning against the car was actually taken somewhere on campus sometime in the early 1950’s. my grandfather’s drive to produce work that represented nothing less than his absolute best effort led to his employment at general motors (no pun intended).

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/08/science/detroit-innovation-in-bold-stroke-produces-car-with-shell-of-plastic.html?sec=health

in 1983, the above new york times article was published. the Pontiac fiero represented my grandfather’s constant search for efficiency and innovation. its design was unlike that of any previous produced automobile; rather than using steel body plates which were expensive to repair and produce, the fiero relied upon dozens of plastic plates that could be replaced easily and cheaply. with its sporty look, energy efficient engine, and low sticker price, the fiero was chosen by car and driver in 1984 as one of the ten best cars in the year, and was also chosen to be the indy 500 pacecar that same year. my grandmother was excited because she got to spend the weekend with that year’s indy 500 celebrity sponsor, paul newman.

alongside his successful career, my grandfather had always pursued his interests in art and design. when he decides he wants to do something, he follows through; his garage is full of tools and machines to do everything from delicate woodwork to carving marble sculptures. sometimes we laugh at him, because he goes through phases, for example, the arctic tundra, and we all get a marble polar bear or a painted wooden penguin. his work is beautiful, though, always beautiful.

I was at their house three summers ago, when all of a sudden a UPS truck pulled into the driveway with the biggest box I had ever seen. as the ups guy, my grandfather, and I struggled the box into the garage, he told me he had decided to build a boat. when he said boat, he wasn’t talking about a little rowboat, but rather a twenty four foot long mahogany bottom old-style chris-craft. a year later when it was finished, he took us for a ride. my grandfather was not a good driver; my father’s imitation of a little girl being towed on a tube in front of us involves shrieking “daddy, don’t stop!! go faster!!”

our house is full of the things he has created. if you were to visit for dinner, you would first encounter him in the intricate, hand-carved mahogany front door, and if you were served hors d’oeuvres, you might notice the coffee table he made for my mother’s sixteenth birthday, and when your plate was set in front of you, if you looked down, you’d see a garden in the wood beneath the glass.

when he turned seventy-five, he told us he wasn’t taking any shit from anyone. it was funny, not because he said shit (one of his favorite words), but because he couldn’t take shit from anyone if he tried. my grandfather does not tolerate anything less than honesty and as such, despite his strange tendencies and fox news habit, moves through life with fairness. everything he does has a purpose, and for that, among other things, I am proud to be his granddaughter.

no, anthony kiedis, i wish i saw

When I went into the waiting room, I thought I’d be comically out of place as a twenty year old at the most heavily advertised hair replacement center in all of Metro Detroit – Doctors Tessler and Aronowitz, Hair Replacement Specialists. Imagine my disappointment when I entered the office in southfield only to find it filled with homely, badly dressed west bloomfield girls and their mothers. Perhaps the dermatology was a discretionary practice in order to disperse the excess of self-consciousness across a broader demographic of embarrassment.

The nurse led me back for my consultation after I had filled out a number of forms designed to determine my desperation’s depth and suggested I take a look at the booklets full of poorly printed before and after pictures. I quietly assumed the lackluster image quality was an intentional but gentle hand hold to lead the words hair and plus apart, to close the door softly after plugs. Dr. Arnowitz arrived a short five minutes later, which was remarkable for any doctor’s office, especially so because I was not paying for my initial examination. As I stood to shake his fleshy paw, I found myself puzzled with his counter-intuitive male pattern baldness, but refrained from commenting on the remarkable sheen of his liver-spotted scalp, although I may have reflexively squinted a little.

In addition to this concern kept company by buck-toothed dentists, overweight physicians, and male lesbians, upon squirming in his floppy handshake, I had a horrible thought. Maybe the softness of his skin was not maintained in the priestly regiment of non-scented, hypoallergenic hand creams so as not to abrade the comfort hungry parish, but instead a result of touching people’s greasy heads all day; this notion of a different type of all-natural moisturizer forced me to fake a cough while I actually gagged a little. While he flicked my hair around in search of the scar, I was a little jealous that he got to meet my bald spot when my acquaintance with that part of myself was essentially a glory hole finger fuck when I got nervous.

Maybe I wouldn’t have picked the scab so much if its single sense (touch) accessibility, or maybe limitation, wasn’t so fascinating, and sometimes it even felt like I was pulling out infant segments of skull. It got so bad and uncontrollable that nubs for fingernails wasn’t prohibitive enough, so my mother knitted me a tiny hat small enough to be mistaken for a misguided yarmulke. Two weeks earlier it had healed enough for my own dermatologist to deem that particular pasture of my head to be infertile and salted in the form of overabundant scar tissue growth, which is how I ended up at Tessler and Aronowitz. Upon his referral to the Hair Specialists of Metro Detroit, I saw the entire Bernstein family, even the cross-eyed one, in my head, and wondered how many people good ole Sam had sent over to T and A.

My inability to decide whether it was funnier to be a twenty year old with hair plugs or a twenty year old with a bald spot on the top of my head began to shift, as if Aronowitz’s description of the hair transplant process – involving slits with scalpels, microscopes, and tweezers – was easing out the clutch. It sounded gross and not at all funny in its pattern of two grand wait three months two grand wait three months two grand wait three months. Even though I’d never met the bottom boundary of my scalp either, I knew a change of location wouldn’t change that.



sever the corpus collosum with
pruning shears you find in the
garage but wd-40 the blades first
so it is one snip and not a series of
nibbling perforations -
it is impossible to nest when
everything is so shiny



i've thought about the hypotheticals involved in the grief and in the end i see new figurines and rawly unapologetic manifestations that seem to reflect an unintended beauty of pain tracing effortless tracks dabbed by the presence of others and i think i don't want to watch but my vision is distorted enough that it becomes an obligation as if it is my duty to observe and take notes on the natural behavior of those who have themselves forgotten themselves and all others besides him and those who resemble him


but i thought mostly of you in the front seat like i was in october and what made brendan lose control - for mary it was a ladybug - and if you knew like i did of the imminent violence and i hoped to god that you hadn't and cried every time i imagined you pulling your legs down to protect yourself and how it didn't matter whether or not you had implored god to stop time or at least the forward momentum that would kill you because before your eyes could even track the halt your body removed your sense of perception there wasn't time to register or name the feeling of your squishy internal organs (you'd always had a soft heart) compressing unnaturally against the inside of your rib cage betraying the strength of the rest of you or maybe instead just a testament to the fact that you always drank your milk and i cried even more when i thought that you were so good that you wouldn't even be mad at god for being a fucking indian giver and i cried even more because that made me more selfish than god.


UPDATE

Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the early 15th century that, "a man can do all things if he will." This phrase, borne from the minds of Renaissance humanists, places humans as limitless in their capacity to learn and succeed across a broad variety of activities. These days, we use the term Renaissance Man to describe individuals who embody this principle. In thinking about Mark, it seems to be the only accurate way to describe him.

Mark's talents as an athlete, artist, and student are inarguable; he's always been good at everything he's tried. His exuberance for almost everything was nothing short of infectious, and he is inseparable from the adventures of my childhood. Although I probably wouldn't have thought about leaping down Sleeping Bear Dunes or building a hovercraft in the garage or trying to make an ice rink on the Rouge River, I was always glad I'd gone along with Mark's enthusiastic ideas.

Above all, though, Mark's greatest attribute was the sense of equality and fairness that guided all of his actions. Even at age seven, he was telling my younger brother and I to stop picking on our younger sister, and for my brother to stop being grumpy towards everyone. I am convinced that his kindness was not only effortless, but rather inherent, as evidenced by the turnout at his visitation and funeral. What I admire most is how blind Mark was to labels or prejudices of any sort, and how genuine his belief in the goodness of others was.

Mark truly was the type of person we all strive to be, and the world has lost a wonderful son, friend, brother, etc. The best way to honor him, I have decided, is to try and live my life with the love, compassion, and kindness Mark lived his with. I feel honored to have spent so much time with Mark Reedy, and give all my love to his family and all those who were as lucky as I was to have known him.


From The Detroit News: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/forums/newstalk/lettersindex.php?relatedURL=http://www.detnews.com/article/20100217/OPINION03/2170332#ixzz0gCyRQKYt

the parents learned why their kids texted so much

i knew ten minutes ago that my parents had lost themselves in grief. nearly forty eight hours have scraped along since the schism separating life with mark reedy and life without mark reedy. we have cried in every space we have occupied since, unapologetically, but maybe just uncontrollably. my sister and i had gone to the mall to purchase somber funeral outfits (crying in the car on the way and in the jcrew dressing room), while my mother and father undertook the task of sorting through thousands of photographs to find just the right ones for a slideshow or a collage (it was still unclear then). as technology began to fail them, my parents grew more and more agitated, though we didn't realize the magnitude of their frustration and distress until we arrived home an hour later. both were shouting fuck and sobbing. it wasn't the fucking computer or the fucking printer or the fucking ink cartridges, and emily and i knew this and softly ushered them out, taking the baton for a brief shift as the semi-clear-headed representatives of the bodden family.

we have managed moments at best. i have felt as though i have toed the bordered of this thing in the past, looked out across it from its boundaries and envisioned traversing its space, and yet, my foresight was always flawed by its shallowness, or rather, by my unfamiliarity with the true nature of its terrain. friday night, around midnight, john and i were at the fleetwood; our food had just been set in front of us. my mother sent me a text message, and when i read it, i stood immediately and turned out into the parking lot. before the phone had begun to ring, i was already keening, unconsciously, maybe, ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod, suffocating dynamically and in real time, stumbling away, unconsciously, pleasecomegetme. it seems primal in its nature, controlled more by the limbic system than the cortex, distinct from us, impervious to such human constructed concepts such as social norms.

there are 1,194 members in the facebook group my brother created for his best friend. i can hear my mother talking to him through the wall, like when we were little and every night our parents would do the rounds and come and lay next to us in bed for however long that day's activities merited discussion. i'm not waiting for her to come in here tonight, though, because michael needs her more. in his devastation, he has questioned the existence of god and rationality and fairness, and in some ways, i think the heaviness clenching my ribs is a sort of protective response. he and matthew have never looked more like their five year old selves, but my older sister compulsion to keep him safe and away from pain isn't enough here, which makes me even more upset.

the machinations of grief are just beginning to unfold, each moment of recognition of a new implication adds a spinning particle to the disarray. i wonder when things gain enough momentum to find form and structure and when we will be able to stop crying all the time and when we will sleep without benadryl. these hours have shown some beauty in their tragedy, a certain pureness of emotion that seems without parallel in its unconditioned, ragged, and boundless glory. we have remembered so many ways of communication without even trying. i'm crying again. more later.



http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=307522046536&ref=nf

it's good to be a freak

even though I was only nine,
I knew it was not an appropriate solution.

we were out behind Adam and Ally’s pseudo-chalet house
swinging spastically at a Garfield piñata
while their mother of matching orange hair and
sleezy (though I was not yet familiar with that term) stepfather
with a cheap polo shirt stretched over his paunch
(it was difficult to determine whether her eighties blow-out or
his more-than-ample gut was more obscene), drank
red and white cans of beer and smoked cigarettes (which
I can now safely assume were probably Marlboro menthols,
the preference of trashy smokers everywhere),
neither of which seemed particularly adult or
even responsible, for that matter, activities for
the sole supervisors of fourteen obnoxious kids
to engage in, especially when a metal baseball bat
and blindfolds were being used in conjunction.

lucky for them, no one got pegged in the head. it
probably would have been as hard for them to
explain as it was after the mishap when someone
let Tommy Lee host and supervise a birthday party
for a gaggle of small children.

what actually happened was infinitely less tragic,
anyways, at least for them. I, on the other hand,
had a terrible realization forced unasked on me.

at this age, I was still at the mercy of my mother when
it came to dressing. Photographs from this stage show
me husky and all-around awkward, partly because I had
decided to cut my bangs and the growing-process was
not in any way cute (although it was worse when Emily
decided to cut hers alone in her bedroom and her little
kid hands using little kid round-blade safety scissors
kept trying to get them straight until her bangs weren’t
much more than a little fringy forehead border, but she
was only four so it was endearing), and partly because
overalls were such a prominent part in my wardrobe.

it was a great day for a birthday party, which was lucky
for the twins’ guardians because I’m not sure how they
would have entertained the lot of us confined in what would
probably have felt like a hamster cage at Petco.
when it was time to smack at a piñata, a debate always ensued,
because there had to be some way to decided who got the
coveted second hit after the birthday kid. sometimes it was
in order of age, which usually wasn’t advantageous for me given
my July birthday, but our squabble ended with height
ascending order. the parents always chose that because it seemed
fair, but it meant I always went last unless someone’s much
older brother was there, so i generally resigned myself to
the fact that I was not going to get a turn, though I always
held my breath hoping all the other kids would mess up
(the same way I do when I play Scrabble ).

I stood at the back of the line, behind J.D. Gurganus who
had just moved from Georgia so I didn’t trust him or want
to talk to him, scuffling my feet in my ritual nervous
alternating toe-taps. the grass was long, probably longer
than township ordinances allowed (Bloomfield Hills has a lot
of stipulations because its residents are classy and it is a
nice place to live and anyone who visits must recognize that
immediately, so grass must be neatly manicured at all times
or else they’ll send you a letter, and if it goes unanswered,
they’ll send the maintenance crew over to shear your lawn,
after which they will send you an absurdly high bill) and it
had been a hot summer and the Lightbody’s were poor and
couldn’t afford a sprinkler system that would ensure a green
as lush as a country club golf course, so when I felt a tingle
on the bottom of my foot, right in the soft arch part,
I immediately propped my ankle on my knee to try and
dislodge the sharp piece of grass that was surely causing
my aggravation. because I was only in fourth grade, I didn’t
immediately begin to shout WHATTHEFUCK?! as I probably
would now, but instead, silently cursed my mother for making
me wear those stupid, dorky velcro-strapped Tevas even though
I didn’t want to and now had a reason to never put them on again,
while doing a one-legged squat hop over to the “adults”.

when I tapped the stepfather on his hairy, fleshy bicep,
he chugged the rest of his beer and crushed the can before
turning to look at me to ask why I was hopping around like
a retard and could I please do that away from him. the mother’s
hair bounced as she waved her cigarette lazily to point me vaguely
back to the other annoying-but-far-away kids, and when I
whimpered a little and unvelcroed my sandal to show them the bee
that was still attached, she exhaled smoke as if to say ohhh goddd.
the stepfather belched loudly as if to say i’m just the stepfather,
this isn’t my problem, can you please deal with this so I can crack
open another brewski. the mother narrowed her heavily lined
cat eyes at him, so he groaned and leaned over to look at my foot,
affording me an overly personal view of his sweaty comb-over which
was only slightly better to look at than his sweaty, hairy asscrack.

the stepfather breathed hot and emphysemically on my ankle for
a moment and turned to the mother and asked her for a
cigarette, he knew what to do, he’d seen it somewhere that this
was how you deal with bee stings, could she please stop questioning
his authority and give him a goddamn cigarette already.
I was skeptical, she was not, and as he poured the dregs
from one of the ten beer cans littering the table onto the glass
and ripped open the end of the cigarette to shake its innards into
the puddle, I realized this was cause for concern. in my head
I tried to think, well perhaps I’m wrong, they’re adults, they
must know what they’re doing, but I was just lying to myself,
and I knew it as I watched the stepfather’s fat finger stir the beer
and tobacco bits together into some sort of nasty salve that I wanted
nowhere near my skin.

they made me sit there for a few minutes to let it soak in,
although what actually soaked in was that Ally and Adam
Lightbody probably sucked because they were being raised by psychos.
there aren’t any pictures from that party, but I will always remember
it as the day that I came to understand that when I said that my
parents were the worst, what I really meant to say was that they
were annoying because I knew they actually knew more and better
than me (I’ll grudgingly admit now that the despised overalls were
actually a little cute in their dorkiness).

I never went over to the Lightbody’s house again, because even though
I felt sorry for the twins, I didn’t feel sorry enough to subject myself to
the guilt I would inevitably feel about how much better my parents were
than theirs.

my body and i had a disagreement

i wanted to run a marathon; my femurs did not. the green arrows are pointing to half moons of increased bone activity. my legs had been bothering me for a couple of weeks and stretching hadn't been helping, so i decided to go see the sports medicine doctor i saw my junior year of high school (two stress fractures right tibia, one stress fracture left tibia). upon seeing that x-ray on the left, dr. moeller felt awful, not just because the half-moons indicated fractures in both femurs, but because he hadn't thought to x-ray above the knee on my first visit and had instead sent me for a bone scan, which was unnecessary intense radioactive exposure.

(quick aside one: i scoffed while my mother and dr. moeller went on and on about excessive radioactive exposure. i stopped scoffing when my mother told me the reason my cousins' grandmother had such bad arthritis, among other foot problems that resulted in the amputation of a few toes. when she was a child, her father had owned a shoe store, and apparently back in the day someone had decided that the best way to fit shoes was to measure each customer's feet with x-rays. little patsy mccracken (her real name, i promise, though she changed it to lynn when she was older) had come home from school and x-rayed her feet every day.)

(quick aside two: the bone scan did reveal a fracture in my ankle. in the only intermural soccer game i played in, i had accidentally tripped this guy really hard during a corner kick. it never occurred to me that i had tripped him hard enough to break my ankle...woops)

dr. moeller's mistake, if you will, is no reflection on his competence as a doctor. in addition to being the largest and longest bone in the human body, the femur is also, along with the temporal bone of the skull, one of the two strongest bones. the reason he didn't expect mine to be fractured is because it's pretty hard to do, given femurs can support up to thirty times an individual's weight.

the thing is, dr. moeller's reading and interpretation of those two little shadows only served to give a name to the pain i was experiencing. there's nothing much to be done about femoral (not in any way ephemeral) fractures. his advice: take two tylenol in the morning and walk it off. my legs hurt just as badly as they did prior to the sensation's categorization, but at least i had something to tell my friends who had described and mocked my labored limping gait as, "walking like [i] had a stick up my ass." their sympathy was fleeting and they still thought it was hilarious to imitate the way my knees didn't bend.

ha. ha. ha.

there is a larger point to all of this. what's fascinating about the human systems of spoken and written language is their use of abstraction. abstracts differ from referents in that they serve to represent things that may not exist in reality (physically), or, exist only as sensory experience. from an ontological perspective, abstract is about properties and relations to mark the fact that, if they exist, it isn't in space or time, but that instances of them can exist in many different places and times.

think about it this way. if an abstract is visceral (to know what red means you have to have seen something that color), until you've experienced it, the word is irrelevant and useless. imagine my situation. it demonstrates that it is also possible to have a visceral experience without knowing that a word exists to describe it, and that abstracts can be finicky because of their subjective nature. although the pain i described to the doctor was actually that of femur-stress-fractures, my lack of familiarity with the term necessitated an alternate means of communication or mediation (the x-rays) for us to understand each other.

let's go back to the ontological definition for a moment. abstracts don't exist temporally, but instances of them do. my broken legs taught me what femur-stress-fractures feel like, but i can't recreate that sensation. in fact, despite how awful it was to walk for three months, the physicality of the sensation is gone for good, unless i somehow manage to injure myself the same way again.

abstraction can be an excellent means of communicating about the conceptual aspects of human existence, but it's clear that there are limitations. i'm not worried much about the experience-dependent part but the potential loss of specificity troubles me a bit. our interactions with the world are mediated through our own specific umwelts, or self-centered worlds. the way we interpret or perceive stimuli depends on the structure of our semiotic world, which contains signs and symbols for all meaningful aspects of our world; when we interact with other individuals with their unique umwelts, we create semiospheres in which signs are simultaneously and continually creating a new environment. the single largest problem is that our signs and symbols are socially constructed attempts at describing sensation.

maybe i'm getting overly worked up about something that's not so important. maybe every experience does not need to be communicated in explicit detail, or maybe there just isn't language ready to do that YET. in my other project, which i'll go into more later, i'm trying to explore just that dilemma, or rather, how to navigate other forms and combinations of expression in search of some yet to be defined understanding of something yet to be defined. as far as i'm concerned, there are no limitations to human experience, only the ways we choose to describe or depict them.

in the multi-planar sphere, all functions are simultaneously one and zero

last night, i had a dream about quantum physics.

when we lived in mexico, someone told me that you knew you knew a language when you dreamed in it. in mine, at the bottom circular drive at valle escondido, (if you chuckled, even a little, the other part of the neighborhood is hacienda valle escondido) monica was there, but her hair was still long so she didn't have cancer yet. it was easter.

my cousin goes through food in phases. they are always gross things, such as cheez-whiz and that yogurt that comes with a capful of little oreo pieces and is definitely not a healthy snack. well, neither is cheez-whiz, i suppose. you have to be careful with cheeze in strange states of matter, and make sure that when you look at the label it doesn't say "cheese food" or "cheese product". i think innovations in the field of cheese food are the reason we can buy a five dollar hot and ready.

it all started last thursday, when i decided to go listen to a guy called Christopher Payne talk about his book, Asylum. the premise of his lecture, as paraphrased by me, was that he was an architect who got bored and decided (thanks to an idle suggestion by a friend) that his new creative project would be photographing mental institutions/abandoned buildings. how original. before he opened his mouth, it seemed as if it would be at least slightly intriguing, but, unfortunately, not only was he irritating and slightly offensive at times, it was apparent that he was not really interested in what he was doing.

i stepped out for a drink of water and didn't go back in, partly because it was hot in there and we were standing awkwardly in the back of the auditorium and partly because i was busy thinking about what i had heard before leaving. Payne apparently spent a bit of time at the Pilgrim Psychiatric Hospital in West Brentwood, New York. he gave some historical background on the place, noting the thousand acres of farmland purchased by the state of New York in 1930 that would less than one year later open as the largest hospital of any type in the world (a size yet to be surpassed). bizarre sidenote: the largest haunted house in the world is abandoned-mental-institution-themed. it is in japan somewhere.

later that night, i decided to look into Pilgrim a bit more, largely because i'd spent an hour fuming about the guy's inaccurate portrayal of the historic trends of psychiatric care with a friend of mine (as an architect, she was particularly aggravated with his use of the word 'picture' rather than 'photograph', and postulated that he most likely had a trust fund, what an ass). as it turns out, the place was a spectacle in and of itself, without even considering its actual purpose.

essentially, it was a self-contained city, complete with police and fire departments, courts, post office, Long Island Railroad Station, power plant, swinery, potter's field, cemetery, and staff housing. at its peak in post-WWII 1954, Pilgrim had 13,875 patients and over 4,000 employees.

unfortunately, the 1960s brought about a shift in attitude in the field of psychiatry; institutionalization was losing its footing as the predominant form of psychiatric treatment as pharmaceutical interventions gained momentum (it's always about money), and the hospital was forced to downsize, even selling off some of the land to Suffolk County Community College.

what does quantum physics have to do with this hospital? maybe nothing, maybe everything. i got a little curious and decided to look into the concept of being a pilgrim as well as that of engaging in a pilgrimage. that story is worth holding out for.

don't ask don't tell

we had already gotten spooked at a gas station that served as an end point for some kind of a strip mall resort schlumped around the border of a shitty, manmade lake. i had tried to beg dan not to stop there because i didn't like the way that only the end was lit up and i didn't like how much the mouse and cheesewheel statue felt a little too possum pete's. i never liked those jerky dancing robots. it was scary then, when the excuse of extreme overcaffeination fully covered such seemingly irrational paranoia, but when we (three, this time) accidentally ended up there in october, i felt just as bad about it.

it was too late, we had left too late, my exam had run too late, cleaning out my room had started too late, i turned in my room key too late. dan had just opened can number seven and i was shaking through number ten. the gas light had been on for awhile, so he decided to take the next exit off. there were no lights on the off-ramp, so he hit the brights, not expecting them to reflect back off a flash mob of traffic barrels, cones, signs. left, right, left again and neither choice seemed correct and both seemed terrifying. left was not the right choice.

they must have filmed house of wax at this exact gas station, and also that one movie where paul walker and that other guy had a ham radio and pretended to be into some truck driver's solicitations for sex. from a little ways away, it was possible, maybe, that the gas station was open because it looked like a light was on inside; it was one of those little tiny ones with a glorified shack for a mini-mart, the kind that only sold marlboro reds and cans of pop. we were both already speaking in the running donkey clip of auctioneers, the voice where calm has clearly been overshadowed by panic, but the only reason to try to control it is because it might be the only thing to control in that moment.

the lights were on in the gas station shack, but weren't nobody home. imagine the hysteria of teenagers watching a horror film. when we slowed next to the pumps, which were turned off and chained together, we looked across the street at the same time. it was a trucker's restaurant, an a-frame shithole with a five football field lot for the trucks that were bigger than it, just like the one in pontiac, by the silverdome. there was one semi, idling with its lights shining right onto our faces, which were slowly morphing with the frantic terror of tweakers, fully actualized the moment we both realized there was no one in the cab.

when dan screams, his voice gets higher and thinner, except when he does his yawp.
we were both screaming, and i was also flailing around, thrashing around in flight response.

WHAT THE FUCK DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK GET OUT OF HERE GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE I'M TRYING JUST GO.

as we were booking it towards the entrance ramp as quick as a 2005 nissan maxima (dan's sensible mother's sensible car as a sensible means of transportation), i jerked my head right for just a moment. i immediately wished i hadn't.

DAN WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WE'RE IN FUCKING COUNTY ZERO!!!!!!!!

after our screaming had slowed with our pulses, we decided. county zero was the scariest place we had ever been. ever.