Sunday, July 31, 2005
On my way back today, I saw a large bird flying by the side of the road. It was big so I thought: maybe it is a duck. As it flew, it dropped a large brown object and I thought: birds don't shit like that. When the object hit the road, its ears popped up and it started hopping around. So, I swerved and the baby rabbit made it safely back to the grass as the bird flew away.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Since the baby gerbils (I don't think I've mentioned them here before. Meriones and Jird birthed 4 babies while I was in Michigan) are getting bigger and their cage was getting crowded, I realized I needed to do something about how much playroom they had. While I was at the pet store getting them some food and trying to find a cheap cage to put the babies in when they are weaned, I found a $50 bird cage on sale for $28. I also bought a log for them to play on and when I got home I moved the whole family into it. The plastic bottom is situated such that it may be easier for them to eventually chew out of than the old cage (this one is made for birds, the original for rodents), but I think it makes a quite cute setup and gives them more room to play. I'll try to post a picture sometime later today.
I watched the movie Waking Life last night. I was amazed. I'm not sure I can explain the phenomenon of it. Just watch this incredible mindtrip movie.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
I've just learned two interesting health related facts that relate to me that I thought I'd share:
- The effect that I have in my eyes sometimes that I've been calling "sparklies" is most likely the effect that everyone else calls "seeing stars". Although I think it is kind of neat, I do worry about it with all that's written about retinal detachment and "seeing stars" and floaters (which I also have sometimes).
- Masturbation increases testosterone levels in the body. I have noticed that after masturbation is the time I feel most comfortable with a completely male gender. After an increased frequency of masturbation following none for a few days when I was home for a weekend and then hosted my family here for a day, I've noticed more male feelings. Is it possible that my gender feelings and even those of many other people, even those completely comfortable with theirs, are simply a function of hormonal levels?
Truly the best thing to do at this point would be to eliminate phytoestrogenic and antiandrogenic compounds from my diet for a few months to return to whatever my unaltered hormonal state would be and give enough time for me to mentally re-adjust to it and see if I am comfortable in that state. The problem with that, however, is that even as a male, I don't want most of the effects that increased testosterone causes. I guess in some sense it really comes down to a choice of preferable physical-troubled psychological vs. troubled physical vs. comfortable psychological.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
I had a most wonderful dream last night. It's quickly fading from my memory but I'll toss in what I remember.
The main character was a scrawny little white nerd kind of guy. The setting was a hospital where someone close to him was being treated. The disease was very rare and was represented visually in the dream as a thick brown liquid that was secreted from the sick person's body and depending on his or her condition the levels would rise or fall. As the levels of liquid rose to the point that only the victim's mouth and nose were sticking out of the substance, we, as viewers, knew that the victim was close to death. It was only like this that we saw the victim so we don't know the age or sex but only that s/he was important to the main character.
Somehow also involved in the scenario is a tall, very dark black man with a shaved head. For some reason he walked around the hospital with no shirt on and one could see how good of shape he was in. In effect, he was very beautiful in a masculine way. We don't know why he is walking around the hospital but the main character begins to draw conclusions. As blood levels of some toxic substance raise in his person's body (correlated to the rising substance), he becomes more and more convinced that this black man is not ordinary but is evil. His hatred, probably born out of a twisted envy, leads him to believe that this man is an agent of death or the antichrist.
One day, after he has had enough of it, he grabs a butter knife and goes to the room where the black man is at. He swings the knife at him which the man manages to dodge. At this point the man starts to cry and asks why the main character is attacking him. This reaction pops the preconception bubble that the main character had created about the black man and a sudden burst of humanity flows into the setting completely changing the atmosphere. The main character feels stupid for his paranoid delusions and sees that this black olympian is broken in spirit and has lost his major muscular definition. The black man explains, pointing to the bed in front of him, that his wife is very sick and that he has been attending to her night and day and pacing in anxiety around the hospital.
The white man asks him about his previous persona and the poor man simply replies through tears that all he did was order a workout tape and a self-help tape that he saw on a midnight advertisement on television.
I really liked this dream because it showed two normal people in an extraordinary situation just trying to cope with life in their own different ways. It also showed that people aren't really that different at some core level despite their outward appearances so we need to be careful how we judge them since we cannot know their situation and may just be pulling conclusions out of thin air.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Marc again raised his suggestion that I join the UGA chapter of his fraternity. My thoughts on fraternities tend to be overall very negative and stigmatized. I've been steeped in the stereotypes from movies and popular word that fraternities are irresponsible parties and that fratboys are the conformist, preppy assholes. In my drives past the fraternity houses the impressions I've seen over time was that on game days the yards are a mess and the rest of the time the whole place feels like Stepford with all of the sugary, too nice to be real feelings. Given this preconception, Marc was faced with a hard sell. His words did manage to penetrate a little and I got a little interest in it because of the social atmosphere that it would undoubtedly create. I even began to theorize that it could kickstart my dating life which is something I'm convinced I need to do in order to resolve some of my mental dilemmas and find which of my issues are true issues and which are twisted coping mechanisms since relationships are an important part of life which I am severely deficit of.
As I looked into it, however, a couple of points became big holding points for me. First off, despite being advertised as the cheapest fraternity on campus, I can't even close to afford $600 per semester. Second, because the greek system is divided by gender, it seems kind of sexist and like it would reinforce traditional gender roles and expression. The last, and perhaps primary, is that it feels constricting. I'm not sure that I like the idea of having that many people around or having some place I have to be regularly or commitments to them or the idea that I should feel like I should/can open up to them for support.
It would be nice to find something that could have that sort of social engineering to provide the opportunities for activities, social interaction, parties, maybe even dating, etc. but without the commitment. Maybe I'm just scared to get close to people. Sometimes I rationalize to myself that a reason for that could be my deviations and experiments, but then I recall my theory above that perhaps a large many of those deviations are merely coping mechanisms to solve the lack of experiences that they are now perhaps standing in the way of.
I remember at BYU people would suggest to me that I just completely and absolutely live the church teachings and BYU standards for a few months to give it a real try. I felt, and still do, that I gave the church more than its fair chance during my youth to be able to reject it and that lifestyle. Furthermore, I felt like I would be rejecting or suppressing myself in order to live that artificial life. Now, I wonder with some of these newer situations, if perhaps it might be best to just put everything else on hold and try an immersion experience in one of these lifestyles. The only reason I can justify it now is that I can tell that I have constructed an artificial world and worldview for myself now anyway and so it may be possible that the other lifestyles really are more real or a better fit. I wouldn't want to switch to another artificial lifestyle but perhaps if I could find one that wouldn't require quite as much mental exertion/theorizing to support and maintain... but how do I do it without selling out to the man?
My family and I operate in completely different worlds it appears. It is, to me, an amazing milemarking post in my development that I can show such different views while losing much of the stigma/guilt associated with them that was drilled into me for years.
When my family came to visit Athens yesterday, I decided to hide the skirts, shoes, etc. and just avoid raising that whole issue while they were here. I did, however, decide to leave my alcohol in the fridge/freezer. I was worried that leaving it there would make it look like I drink a lot instead of just having a fair stock of things. I'm still not sure which impression they got. My little sisters got mad at me for having it and my mom was "disappointed" to hear that I didn't have it for cooking purposes. Seriously, what can you cook with gin anyway? My mom knows that I have or do drink occasionally but I think she thought I restricted myself to wine (which actually most of the time I do). The alcohol+family equation has come up on exmormon lists and so it was funny to watch it play out in time honored tradition. In the real world, drinking alcohol is a common and accepted practice and many parents even drink with their 21 year old children or host their first time getting drunk. My mom said that it should be expected that my little sisters would be surprised to find alcohol in my fridge (this despite the fact that they heard about all the alcoholic drinks I've tried sometime last week). The tone of voice she said it in kind of implied that I shouldn't have had it where they could have stumbled across it. Well, forgive me for not following your standards in my house!
Then, while we were out to eat downtown, my mother decided it was in my best interest if she tried to create a social life for me, so she started asking one of the workers what he does for fun and dragged me over to have him tell me what sorts of things there are to do in Athens. He mentioned without guilt or hesitation that he is gay and I accepted it as normal. When I mentioned that part to my family, my little sisters kinda freaked about it (though they did manage to mostly keep their mouths shut about his tattoos and piercings). They kept saying things apprehensively as if the fact that he is gay made it where we shouldn't be talking to him or getting advice from him. I mentioned it to my mom only because she was suggesting to him her idea that I should invite people over and I didn't want her to give him the wrong impression. I was afterall carrying a purse with shaved legs and I wouldn't put it past some parents of gay children to try to get their child dates. So, I brought it up just so that she could be a little more careful how she worded things and instead she just got disappointed and said that it is too bad that he is gay. When I asked her to explain her statement, she responded that homosexuality takes away so many good guys from girls. After a few more remarks I just got angry with them all and told them that it is a good thing they are moving out of sheltered and conservative Peachtree City because there are so many things in the real world that are just completely normal and accepted that they keep making a big deal out of.
My mom is so paradoxical in that way. She is friends with gay men at work and works with all sorts of different people at the airport. She has traveled plenty and is open to many new experiences. However, despite her "all people are basically good" theory, on top of all of that she makes all sorts of very black and white moral judgments on people. To me, diversity is a good thing and differences are not good/bad or better/worse in some moral or universal sense. Sexual orientation is no exception. Piercings are no exception. My mom tried to counter that I live in a liberal town where things are more permissive than the rest of the world.
My silent response... if this is as liberal as it gets then I'm fucked.
Monday, July 18, 2005
My head was loaded with bad thoughts tonight. As I sat in the car waiting for my brother to finish his goodbye's with his girlfriend, I got the line "hush little baby, don't say a word" stuck in my head, but I couldn't remember any of the other lyrics to it. So, in order to relieve the annoyance of that same line over and over I let my thoughts flow and this is what I spontaneously came up with:
Hush little baby, don't say a wordTwisted, eh?
Daddy's gonna cook you a big old turd
And if that turd don't suit your palate
Daddy's going to smash your head with a mallet.
So then, while we were driving to Athens between midnight and 2am, we began to get tired and I started thinking about things that could happen. I imagined as we passed street signs that I could pull off the road, plow through one of the signs, and slowly creep to a stall and not even realize I wasn't still on the road until a few minutes after I would have stopped. I also imagined that Erik was tired enough that a stoplight would be red and he'd run right through it and his car would get hit by oncoming traffic and I thought how I'd go right through it to so that I could try to save him. I think I need some sleep since we safely made it here. Good night.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
On Friday, I took the pathetically easy Regent's Exam. It was so easy that on the reading comprehension section, I already knew all of the words that I was supposed to have to try to figure out the definition of from context. When I looked at the essay topics to choose from, I really didn't care for any of them buy I ended up picking one that said basically "why do you or don't you vote?" Hoping that they wouldn't choose to give me a bad note on it for not directly answering the question, I chose instead to examine why I think people in general vote. The thesis to my treatise was that people vote to satisfy a psychological need for perceived control over their own lives. I distinguished between small group voting (pragmatic) and large group voting (ideological) as well as the hybrid forms that are generated in close races. I theorized that, even though in most cases a single vote in a large group election has no meaningful value, the voter was able to satisfy the need for control by making the symbolic gesture of placing the vote. There was more to it, but that should be enough explanation for what I really want this post to be about.
I was thinking about the need for accurate objective truth. I was thinking how lack of knowledge or understanding of occurrences or ideas often holds me and probably others back from progression. For the sake of argument, I'll leave a definition of progression as a subjective exercise for the reader since I'm about to propose a denial of objectivity which would render any general definition of progression invalid. I thought about all of my theories and wonderings about the cause and effect relationships that have led me to where I am now and my preoccupation with the historic chain. My initial thought was that since the past is gone and nobody really knows the answers of what I thought or did or had happen to me while younger, I will never really know the answers to the questions. I've had several theories of my own or proposed to me by others that seem to fit the equations well enough but I lack enough memory to substantiate or disprove any of them. So, the clincher: why not just accept one of them as "true" regardless of objective history so that I can move on? I seem to have some psychological need to satisfy that by objective means cannot be satisfied, yet if I could just get myself to accept as "true" one of the various theories then I could move on. Assuming that personal identity is at least in part a sum total of the past, my life would go in different directions based on these "incorrect" historical ideas, but at least it would move.
Now, suppose all questions that cannot and will not be answerable were just answered with lies. Suppose that somehow we as humans were able to achieve a numbness and detachment from objectivity in these cases. Not only a detachment from objectivity, but also a detachment from their answer. Suppose one could assume they had been abused or that a spouse had cheated on them or that their parents were murdered or any host of big or small things but just have peace from it because their question was "answered", yet somehow escape from having the emotional repercussions of that "realization" or desires for revenge. Just fill the need and float on.
In this strange universe, truth would be not necessarily what "objectively" happened in "reality" but based instead on the satisfaction of psychological needs which were seen as impeding on life.
One might worry that the sycophant or religious leaders would propose the "answers" for everything as they do now and spin our strange universe into oblivion, however, in my conception of it, the individual would choose or come up with an explanation which satisfied his or her needs.
I'm sure it is flawed and would need more hashing out to even make sense of it, but it caught my fascination because it suggests an alternate but equally valid "truth" depending on the goal of the individual. My worldview really focuses on the idea of the goal-oriented universe. What is right or wrong for a person seems entirely dependent on his or her individual goal. Although I have trouble accepting the idea that lying to oneself about a critical historical event in his or her life may be right, the idea is strangely appealing as a valid last-resort solution to impeding but unsolvable personal dilemmas.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Is it a virtue or a vice that as humans we are so completely malleable yet so completely inadequate at the direction of the molding? As I was bringing things out of my car up to my apartment, there was another group of people doing the same act, but on a larger scale. A girl was, with the help of her father and some movers, moving her things into what I take is her new apartment down the hall from mine. I didn't even get a long enough glance to decide if she was attractive before the situation engine in my head took off...
While I was in Michigan visiting Curt, I felt like I was in some parallel universe or another world. For all it mattered, I wasn't on the other side of the country but on another planet entirely. It was almost as if the laws of physics and the underlying fabric of the universe was different there. Over our smattering of intoxicants from homemade mead to sherry to the rhythmic beating of the drums to the pulsating green magnetic disturbances dancing across the sky while we stood awed in the clear air surrounded by forest, we engaged our bond offline like we did online without the preliminaries and artificial rituals of social interaction. Although my mind could not loosen the grasp of all of them, I was in a world in which many of the structures and inhibitors guiding my social interactions were meaningless and unnecessary. I was so instantly comfortable and taken in that I simply had no time to try to impose any structure on this place but only to open the gates and let it flood in.
Do to this rapid influx and the immediate comfort, a phenomenon arose that normally takes much more time. While I attended BYU, I developed in my mind a separate operating world for school than for home. While at school, it was as if that is where I had always been and it had certain universal laws and meaning, yet when I would go home, it would again feel as though I had always been there and nowhere else. As it would be time to leave one world to go to the other I would feel sorrow and think how I was going to miss the world I was in, however, upon arrival my mind would be back in the new world and the emotions of missing the old world were left behind and not felt at all. It becomes as if in each transition you are waking up from a dream of the other worlds. Not that the transition is important; what I mean to note is the complete separation in my mind in construction, meaning, behaviour, etc. Although any foreign place feels like another world, it takes time to develop the "always been there" feeling. In Michigan, however, I developed that. As we rode around seeing sights or even when I would sit alone and rock in the chair and look at the room, I would feel, in addition to the sense of wonder, as if I'd been there my whole life and the rest of my life up to that point was a dream. Now being back in Athens, I've gone from the Michigan dream through the Peachtree City dream complete with family and friends that had moved and am now awake in Athens.
But, in addition to relating the Michigan trip in as close to the terms of meaning in which it needed to be related, I was talking about the girl moving in down the hall. In the past, I have liked girls before and in my pursuit of them I'd go on a whirlwind and introduce new elements into my life which felt like they fundamentally altered the fabric of my reality. In all of these cases the pursuits were shortlived and inevitably doomed before any substantial success had been achieved yet they left ripples and permanent artifacts which sculpt my world today. In my solitude, lacking such stimuli which led me into social activities, many of which I enjoyed, the need for the change and development has not ceased but instead of riding the flows that I am tugged into by chasing, I have built and theorized to develop the fragile structure that is my reality.
Although I can't say whether I am attracted to the girl down the hall or not, for some reason seeing her reawoke in my mind the memory of the past waves of change I've had from even one-way or pursued relationships. I imagined the hypothetical in my mind about how entirely and completely every aspect of my life would change, including I believe even the meaning and purpose of it, if I were to date this girl and then move in with her at the end of my lease. A highly improbable situation right now but not something so unusual in the outside world that it could never happen given a longer timeframe. The magnitude of universal disruption would be the same.
I have to keep laughing at myself and everything. I think of how meaningless things really are yet how important and meaningful they are to me. For example, if I think that a person is who they are independent of gender and that gender is just a meaningless filter or mask on a person then why do I put so much thought and weight into which I am? But whatever, what I mean to say is that all of these conceptions are as fleeting and meaningful as a pattern in the clouds. None of it is permanent and one single event in something as big as global politics to something as small as me meeting a girl I mesh with could change my entire world so utterly and completely that this world I inhabit at this moment could pass from what I perceive as reality as quickly as most of my dreams do every morning.
None of it is really permanent afterall and very little of it even lasts very long before it changes. I've only been out of BYU for a little over a year and look how different my world is now. I've often thought that rather than heaven or nonexistence, the best thing for death to be would be an eternal slumber populated by lucid dreaming. I suppose that if life is like I have described it above and the buddhists are right then life is what I wanted death to be.