"...So... apparently... I've been getting a lot of compliments lately."
My hair is one of the main focuses of this. Everywhere I go. People look at it and tell me how beautiful it is, or touch it. Long hair, it's like a pregnant woman's belly. Apparently personal space rules no longer apply. Everyone has to touch. Haha.
I don't actually mind that much, though... at this point.
Yesterday, my mother was told by a cashier that I was "so beautiful". This stuns me. I can't really comprehend it. It's hard to let go of the various self-defence mechanisms in me, and allow myself to feel good about it. In this case, it really is about letting go of them... usually, things in my life... it's more about being stuck through with the mental/emotional equivalent of some kind of harpoon. If you've ever had a porcupine quill in you or your dog... You'll know what I mean. Those things really get stuck in there good. You can destroy the tissue pretty badly by trying to just pull them out, and 'just letting go of them' is pretty much a patently insane idea. They're not going to fall out. What they will do, and what they're designed to do, is to work their way out to the opposite side of the body - - Ugh, what am I even going on about??
Anyway, my hair is one of the few joys in my life. I hesitate to use the word 'joy', but... Yeah, I love my hair very much. It brings me a lot of satisfaction, relatively speaking... Life has trained me hard to keep anything that precious to me hidden away inside. Never refer to it as 'joy', never refer to it at all. Especially since for me, 'joy' was flat-out an alien concept until maybe three years ago. Around 2011-2013, I learned about 'joy' and what it was. Interestingly, during the absolute worst time of my entire life, when I had never felt so much despair. And this is coming from a person who has been used to constant despair and the reality of being a small child who wants to commit suicide.
I still don't really get it, 'joy'. I get it on an innate level, but as a life, I have a long way to go and a lot more saturation in 'not bad things' to go before I really 'get it'.
My goal, set in those bad times with those strange, twisted tastes of the 'truly good', what I'm living for, is to expose myself to and absorb as much of that as I possibly can.
I'm not able to think of myself as beautiful. I never have been. Really, all I see is ugly. For years, I thought... this is an ugly person who is just being prettied up by hair. I can use that. At least I have that. As far as I'm concerned, anything 'beautiful' about me is linked to some kind of optical illusion. I'm serious. I have what looks like this cute, coy smile on my face all the time - it's really because my mouth is deformed. I can't really close it properly. (I very nearly had a cleft palate, but it didn't go that far.) I have a massive, massive overbite.
What am I even saying? What's the use of putting this out there?
I have so many personal journals where I've written more or less the same... but better... and with more context included. I can't really handle going back and gathering stuff from those, and making it suitable for this. Right now, the only way for me to manage to get anything posted here is if I completely remove all expectations and standards. "Just post stuff." I hate the chaos of it, the lack of context, but - -
What I'm saying... I guess this: Basically, I'm adjusting.
I'm not used to positive reinforcement or good things and it's going to take a hell of a lot more of it, very gently and quietly, to get me used to it. I'm trying my best with this.
Even as I'm writing this I'm imagining all of the raving-asshole-type answers that it would most likely attract. (And that I'm so used to living with.) I really do not understand kindness at all... At least, kindness aimed at me, that isn't really a sneaky way of getting something from me.
It's shocking to me every time I experience it, I can't really adjust. Coming back from some things... really deep, difficult, old things... it takes a long time. It takes a long time to adjust.
Tuesday, 16 June 2015
Friday, 12 June 2015
Gintama episode 275 - My Evil Dream For the World
I don't usually watch Gintama much.
I've probably only ever watched a small handful of episodes.
But when I was meandering mindlessly around the internet today, I came across a review and some articles for the latest episode that... kind of caught my eye a little. Ah ha ha ha...
What the heck? How could I not watch this?
This was like my evil dream for the world when I was young.
...and apparently this isn't just a single episode, this is a whole story arc. What.
I can't even think of anything else to say. Stuff came to mind, but I am too damn tired. I didn't sleep at all last night (again). Come to think of it, really, I can't even laugh. Just... what.
Well, I guess I'll be trying to catch this every week for a while.
Crap, this looks like a riot.
Not a good sign that I'm too tired to laugh, though.
I've probably only ever watched a small handful of episodes.
But when I was meandering mindlessly around the internet today, I came across a review and some articles for the latest episode that... kind of caught my eye a little. Ah ha ha ha...
 | ||
| Gintama - Episode 275 |
This was like my evil dream for the world when I was young.
...and apparently this isn't just a single episode, this is a whole story arc. What.
I can't even think of anything else to say. Stuff came to mind, but I am too damn tired. I didn't sleep at all last night (again). Come to think of it, really, I can't even laugh. Just... what.
Well, I guess I'll be trying to catch this every week for a while.
Crap, this looks like a riot.
Not a good sign that I'm too tired to laugh, though.
Monday, 8 June 2015
Sunday, 7 June 2015
Tired
So... damn... tired.
What's up with this 'movement' stuff? Ugh.
I know!
Let's lie down on the floor and turn into a puddle of sessile goo!!
What's up with this 'movement' stuff? Ugh.
I know!
Let's lie down on the floor and turn into a puddle of sessile goo!!
Saturday, 6 June 2015
A Ghost Attached To Some Meat
I feel like I'm a ghost attached to some meat.
I'm not really 'alive'. People take so much for granted... like being able to feel. Even if it's just to get irrationally angry about stupid posts people make online, or... something.
I joke about being 'undead', but it isn't really a joke. As far as I'm concerned, I'm about as close to what it actually means to be 'undead' as it's possible to be.
And I've lived this way for almost all of my life. When I was a toddler, there were times when I didn't feel so bad. Sometimes, rarely, I still remember them. It's extremely depressing, like getting crushed by a building, emotionally speaking...
I keep saying to myself that what I'm doing in life and have been doing all of this time is "clawing my way out of my own grave". Wow, it feels so bad to just put that here, in quasi-public, in something like this, for the first time. I wish it had been something with more context and depth.
...and really, I haven't clawed my way out of it yet, in the roughly three decades I've been alive, and it doesn't look to me as if I have any real chance of accomplishing it for real in this lifetime.
I've lived for so long using every possible tactic to make the best of everything. Constantly. Everything. No matter how bad it got or how 'dark' my 'sense of humour' got, underneath of it I was engaged, ceaselessly, in a massive battle to attempt to get the best I possibly could out of my situation, no matter what. To still be able to think, somehow, to read, to have something to enjoy, something, to be able to enjoy anything, in any way. To have even the tiniest wisps of some kind of excuse for a life. It wasn't a life that I had, but I tried to make the best of what I did in fact actually have... underneath and throughout however incredibly fucked up it all was.
It's frustrating... I've written things before in my personal journals and files that express how I feel pretty well. But here, what have I really written to describe it? Pretty much nothing. It's just "I feel bad", with nothing that really shows how.
I'm not really 'alive'. People take so much for granted... like being able to feel. Even if it's just to get irrationally angry about stupid posts people make online, or... something.
I joke about being 'undead', but it isn't really a joke. As far as I'm concerned, I'm about as close to what it actually means to be 'undead' as it's possible to be.
And I've lived this way for almost all of my life. When I was a toddler, there were times when I didn't feel so bad. Sometimes, rarely, I still remember them. It's extremely depressing, like getting crushed by a building, emotionally speaking...
I keep saying to myself that what I'm doing in life and have been doing all of this time is "clawing my way out of my own grave". Wow, it feels so bad to just put that here, in quasi-public, in something like this, for the first time. I wish it had been something with more context and depth.
...and really, I haven't clawed my way out of it yet, in the roughly three decades I've been alive, and it doesn't look to me as if I have any real chance of accomplishing it for real in this lifetime.
I've lived for so long using every possible tactic to make the best of everything. Constantly. Everything. No matter how bad it got or how 'dark' my 'sense of humour' got, underneath of it I was engaged, ceaselessly, in a massive battle to attempt to get the best I possibly could out of my situation, no matter what. To still be able to think, somehow, to read, to have something to enjoy, something, to be able to enjoy anything, in any way. To have even the tiniest wisps of some kind of excuse for a life. It wasn't a life that I had, but I tried to make the best of what I did in fact actually have... underneath and throughout however incredibly fucked up it all was.
It's frustrating... I've written things before in my personal journals and files that express how I feel pretty well. But here, what have I really written to describe it? Pretty much nothing. It's just "I feel bad", with nothing that really shows how.
Friday, 5 June 2015
Some Thoughts on Skepticism
At this point, I don't think that true skepticism exists in the world anymore.
For me, what being a 'true skeptic' entails is being open-minded to every possibility, without blind belief in any of them. This doesn't exclude passion or conviction for a subject; ideally, it should just mean a calm lack of single-minded obsession with proving only the preferred thing to be true or false.
For me, Arthur C. Clarke was a hero for this:
Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction is some of my all-time favourite. To me, it really stands out for its open-mindedness... without falling into tepidity or mindlessly exploring topics the author had no passion about (usually accompanied by a great deal of academic self-importance and pomp). Each thing was sculpted almost preciously and was a personal interest of the author. The stories also never sought to 'prove absolutely that God didn't exist', nor to prove that the 'God' that did or didn't exist was the 'God' from the Old Testament that so many people are blindly and automatically fighting for or against. (I can't say they're fighting 'thoughtlessly', because part of the problem is that there is way too much 'thought' going on.)
The guy seemed to me to basically explore this stuff with a kind of almost-childlike joy, beautifully mixed together with and supported by his adult intelligence. Rather than artificially limiting things in an attempt to make them "realistic" as people would accept it at the time, he explored as far as he could in each direction. He also didn't fall into the trap of trying to not offend people by making his explorations artificially 'open' enough to be 'interpreted how people want'. Instead, we're presented with something that we can interpret how we feel like interpreting it, with all of our natural or unnatural personal bias, but it's also depicted as just what it is. There is almost no needless, cowardly ambiguity here. The author's personal beliefs are present as a part of the exploration and theorizing, in whatever forms. To me, this is beautiful; this is what makes his works feel so whole and appealing.
What I see now, mouthing off loudly all over the world, are not 'skeptics', but "rabid or fundamentalist non-believers" or "anti-believers", who are only 're-acting' to or against people who are "rabid fundamentalist believers". People calling themselves "skeptics", but think of everything as rigid, already-decided, dead and inert, in a loud social war against people who obsessively refuse to think for themselves. And this 'loud social war' is almost totally monopolizing the ability for any human being to think independently and scientifically, with any degree of freedom.
What makes you a 'skeptic' if your whole life is rabidly devoted to the highly emotional quest of proving that the universe is a dead, empty pile of randomness? Proving that any deviation from your preferred social norm is rooted exclusively some kind of mental illness? In reality, the people doing this are as mindlessly, emotionally, blindly devoted to the topics they condemn as the people trying to get us to believe that "God" is a hirsute male human giant on a throne in the sky, and that the Earth was made a few thousand years ago.
I suppose I could just blurt "I mourn for Science"... because I see it being extinguished in the world, and replaced by nothing more than the flipside of the coin of fundamentalist religion, or even simply an expert part of a marketing scheme.
The original dreams of the founders of "scientific thought" basically seem to stand dead now.
When a person goes into an experiment, one has to be truly open-minded. What I see, almost universally, are people going into an experiment not to 'learn', but to prove something. E.g., "transsexuals suffer from a mental illness", "spiritual experiences are real/false", even things as ridiculous as "ferrets aren't weasels, they're cats" and "birds did not evolve from dinosaurs". We may be totally over the "bird-dinosaur argument" now because of China's archaeological discoveries, but when I was growing up in the nineties it was a huge deal, and people were getting their livelihoods ruined for trying to prove that turkeys and tyrannosaurs were not so different from each other. The viciousness and closed-mindedness of the arguments against the bird-dinosaur connection wouldn't be out of place in an argument in the church or among fanboys. And really, that's what it's all about, isn't it... Those things aren't actually different from each other at all.
They go into it completely without joy. Without that 'childish joy' of discovery, there can be no scientific thought.
For me, what being a 'true skeptic' entails is being open-minded to every possibility, without blind belief in any of them. This doesn't exclude passion or conviction for a subject; ideally, it should just mean a calm lack of single-minded obsession with proving only the preferred thing to be true or false.
For me, Arthur C. Clarke was a hero for this:
Clark's Three Laws:1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction is some of my all-time favourite. To me, it really stands out for its open-mindedness... without falling into tepidity or mindlessly exploring topics the author had no passion about (usually accompanied by a great deal of academic self-importance and pomp). Each thing was sculpted almost preciously and was a personal interest of the author. The stories also never sought to 'prove absolutely that God didn't exist', nor to prove that the 'God' that did or didn't exist was the 'God' from the Old Testament that so many people are blindly and automatically fighting for or against. (I can't say they're fighting 'thoughtlessly', because part of the problem is that there is way too much 'thought' going on.)
The guy seemed to me to basically explore this stuff with a kind of almost-childlike joy, beautifully mixed together with and supported by his adult intelligence. Rather than artificially limiting things in an attempt to make them "realistic" as people would accept it at the time, he explored as far as he could in each direction. He also didn't fall into the trap of trying to not offend people by making his explorations artificially 'open' enough to be 'interpreted how people want'. Instead, we're presented with something that we can interpret how we feel like interpreting it, with all of our natural or unnatural personal bias, but it's also depicted as just what it is. There is almost no needless, cowardly ambiguity here. The author's personal beliefs are present as a part of the exploration and theorizing, in whatever forms. To me, this is beautiful; this is what makes his works feel so whole and appealing.
What I see now, mouthing off loudly all over the world, are not 'skeptics', but "rabid or fundamentalist non-believers" or "anti-believers", who are only 're-acting' to or against people who are "rabid fundamentalist believers". People calling themselves "skeptics", but think of everything as rigid, already-decided, dead and inert, in a loud social war against people who obsessively refuse to think for themselves. And this 'loud social war' is almost totally monopolizing the ability for any human being to think independently and scientifically, with any degree of freedom.
What makes you a 'skeptic' if your whole life is rabidly devoted to the highly emotional quest of proving that the universe is a dead, empty pile of randomness? Proving that any deviation from your preferred social norm is rooted exclusively some kind of mental illness? In reality, the people doing this are as mindlessly, emotionally, blindly devoted to the topics they condemn as the people trying to get us to believe that "God" is a hirsute male human giant on a throne in the sky, and that the Earth was made a few thousand years ago.
I suppose I could just blurt "I mourn for Science"... because I see it being extinguished in the world, and replaced by nothing more than the flipside of the coin of fundamentalist religion, or even simply an expert part of a marketing scheme.
The original dreams of the founders of "scientific thought" basically seem to stand dead now.
When a person goes into an experiment, one has to be truly open-minded. What I see, almost universally, are people going into an experiment not to 'learn', but to prove something. E.g., "transsexuals suffer from a mental illness", "spiritual experiences are real/false", even things as ridiculous as "ferrets aren't weasels, they're cats" and "birds did not evolve from dinosaurs". We may be totally over the "bird-dinosaur argument" now because of China's archaeological discoveries, but when I was growing up in the nineties it was a huge deal, and people were getting their livelihoods ruined for trying to prove that turkeys and tyrannosaurs were not so different from each other. The viciousness and closed-mindedness of the arguments against the bird-dinosaur connection wouldn't be out of place in an argument in the church or among fanboys. And really, that's what it's all about, isn't it... Those things aren't actually different from each other at all.
They go into it completely without joy. Without that 'childish joy' of discovery, there can be no scientific thought.
Thursday, 4 June 2015
Just Write Stuff
So... I'm setting myself a challenge.
Just write stuff.
Just write stuff, and post it.
Don't try to work on all of the essays and opinion pieces sitting around gathering figurative dust on my hard drive, don't even try to do anything 'organized'. Don't try to make any one thing.
Just write stuff.
Write stuff, and post it. Whatever comes to mind.
It doesn't have to really 'be' anything. (Yeah, sure...)
Whenever possible. Just some little thing.
It really frustrates me that this little post is so without context. There's so much behind it, and all of that is invisible. Invisible unless I somehow manage to translate it into something communicable. Most of the time, I don't have the energy or clarity of thought for that. My memory is a foggy mess, my ability to concentrate feels like a lost cause, and all of the mental jury-rigging that I have in order to compensate for it is now falling horrifyingly short, no matter what I do.
I really wanted this to somehow be something almost upbeat, but it seems I wasn't able to manage it. Again.
"Just some little thing." It's really not that simple, though.
Even so, I'm trying the best I can... and am deeply resolved (maybe 'immovable') to continue doing so.
This is humiliating. Why am I bothering to do this?
I guess my answer for myself is that even if I stumble around like this, getting caught and tripped up on all of these things, doing something is sometimes, importantly, better than doing nothing.
Just write stuff.
Just write stuff, and post it.
Don't try to work on all of the essays and opinion pieces sitting around gathering figurative dust on my hard drive, don't even try to do anything 'organized'. Don't try to make any one thing.
Just write stuff.
Write stuff, and post it. Whatever comes to mind.
It doesn't have to really 'be' anything. (Yeah, sure...)
Whenever possible. Just some little thing.
It really frustrates me that this little post is so without context. There's so much behind it, and all of that is invisible. Invisible unless I somehow manage to translate it into something communicable. Most of the time, I don't have the energy or clarity of thought for that. My memory is a foggy mess, my ability to concentrate feels like a lost cause, and all of the mental jury-rigging that I have in order to compensate for it is now falling horrifyingly short, no matter what I do.
I really wanted this to somehow be something almost upbeat, but it seems I wasn't able to manage it. Again.
"Just some little thing." It's really not that simple, though.
Even so, I'm trying the best I can... and am deeply resolved (maybe 'immovable') to continue doing so.
This is humiliating. Why am I bothering to do this?
I guess my answer for myself is that even if I stumble around like this, getting caught and tripped up on all of these things, doing something is sometimes, importantly, better than doing nothing.
Monday, 1 June 2015
Sometimes I Learn Something New
Sometimes I actually learn something new. For me, that's pretty unusual. Usually, I would have to work pretty hard to come across something I had no clue at all about before. However, most of the time, when this happens, it's not because of any work of my own.
For instance, today, I was messing around online (looking for pictures of blue footed boobies) and was wandering sort of aimlessly through Wikipedia again, and in those meanderings discovered that gannets, apparently, have no external nostrils.
I didn't even notice that before. Should I be embarrassed??
Anyway... they have no external nostrils because of their extreme adaptation to hurtling into the ocean at incredible speeds. (Also includes protective air sacs in their chest to cushion against impact.)
But it's always weird to do a double take and realize that I did not notice that at all before, ever, and it's not like I haven't spent some time staring at gannets. Or at least videos of gannets. Gannets, boobies (say what you will...), and albatross are some of my favourite animals.
Well, they say you learn something new every day. I don't, so... there you go. It's an occasion for me. "Today, I learned gannets have no external nostrils!"
I can picture the anniversary.
If only I could remember what happened last year.
For instance, today, I was messing around online (looking for pictures of blue footed boobies) and was wandering sort of aimlessly through Wikipedia again, and in those meanderings discovered that gannets, apparently, have no external nostrils.
 |
| Cropped from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gannet4.jpg |
Whoa. It's true.
I didn't even notice that before. Should I be embarrassed??
Anyway... they have no external nostrils because of their extreme adaptation to hurtling into the ocean at incredible speeds. (Also includes protective air sacs in their chest to cushion against impact.)
But it's always weird to do a double take and realize that I did not notice that at all before, ever, and it's not like I haven't spent some time staring at gannets. Or at least videos of gannets. Gannets, boobies (say what you will...), and albatross are some of my favourite animals.
Well, they say you learn something new every day. I don't, so... there you go. It's an occasion for me. "Today, I learned gannets have no external nostrils!"
I can picture the anniversary.
If only I could remember what happened last year.
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