Sometimes when I don't want to do stuff, I say to myself, what's the point in doing stuff? I have never gotten over this by finding the point. I just start wanting to do stuff again.
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09:39:43 PM,
Monday 30 August 2010
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"70-80% of petulance belongs to cats."
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05:07:56 PM,
Sunday 29 August 2010
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There are tiny peppers on the pepper plant in the backyard. It's like magic.
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(2)
08:57:13 AM,
Friday 27 August 2010
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Battle hamsters are on sale at CVS, or so I hear. Sometimes the invisible hand gets something right.
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06:26:07 PM,
Friday 20 August 2010
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"Your mind is like the ocean: troubled, deep and full of seals."
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05:54:07 PM,
Friday 20 August 2010
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04:36:04 PM, Thursday 12 August 2010
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Enrolled in a basic drawing class today. Starts next week. Yay!
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(3)
05:44:39 PM,
Friday 6 August 2010
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Hina dolls: like a creche except for the Japanese Imperial court. This message brought to you courtesy of Erika playing Japanese puzzle games.
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07:30:42 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2010
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In other news, Tim and I have invented a new game at our local basketball court. It is called pathetic-ball. The target audience is people who are so bad at basketball that even Horse is too elaborate. How to play: take turns trying to make a basket from anywhere on the court, with no interference. 1 point per basket. Ping-pong scoring rules: game is to 20, winner has to win by 2.
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(3)
08:04:04 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Seriously, I don't know what to do with mania.
Mania is a real altered state of perception. No question about that. I put on sweaters when it was hot out. I could see things in slow motion, for instance watching dragonflies, I could see their paths and intricate dance, when normally they would just be buzzing this way and that.
My culture gives a variety of explanations for altered states and methods of dealing with them. The current accepted priesthood of the altered state is psychiatry, with its mantra, "it's all in your head". That's a quite helpful explanation, much of the time. And it means that one doesn't need to look for an explanation, which is also good. However, when it is actually happening, that dry bone doesn't cut it. The mind wants a meatier explanation, and it will prepare one, or a dozen. One can think, at the beginning of an episode, "ok, just an altered state, it's just me that's having problems", but that just isn't going to last. Sure, if I could have my rational mind on task I might be able to manage it, but the everyday mind quickly gives way to pure dream-logic.
It's very much like I'm dreaming while I'm awake, in fact I had the only-partly-wrong delusion that I was dreaming for part of this episode. Just about anything that covers "something seriously out of the ordinary is happening here" can come up as a delusion. Time travel, spiritual awakening, alternate worlds, death, etc.
I spend all this time reading about philosophy and spirituality thinking that maybe these people will be able to help me. They know something about reality, right? They know something about how to tell the difference between what's true and what's not, right? But realistically, I know that philosophers are like my seminar-mates: they can yammer on for hours about the being or not-being of the table right in front of them, but when it comes down to it, they can go home and tables are just tables. Philosophy is not some mental kung-fu that lets you keep a grip on reality.
The spiritual leaders, sometimes it seems like they could help. Surely, after all, this is their domain of expertise. After all, they are often seeking out experiences that are just as wild (if in some subtle way non-insane), and finding knowledge and solace in them. But they disappoint as well. Spiritual experience is huffily distinguished from mere madness (or, worse, madness is ascribed to demons or bad karma), but then spiritual leaders often act mad (at a Buddhist group I attended they spoke of an enlightened one who was homeless and walked the streets, they were very excited about him). I end up thinking that probably a lot of what goes for spiritual experience is the same thing as madness, in some milder or more socially acceptable form. I would really like help figuring out the spiritual content of my madness, but as Tim tells me, I'd have to walk in the prophet door, and religions don't actually want prophets. They don't want the Holy Spirit buzzing around making trouble, they don't want to stamp quasi-spiritual madness trips as divine, and you can see why. I don't have any interest in being a prophet, either, but I've been wild places that made religion make more sense to me, and that's a large part of my interest in religion. I would really like for someone else to understand all this and explain it to me. This seems less and less likely. I start to think that a Zen master or monk confronted with what I am confronted with would do just as badly.
There are all these theories that the mind is a special domain where we have total control, or could have control if we only had the discipline. I'd like to believe that. But you know maybe it's just bullshit. I don't know, I'm not all that disciplined, but from recent experience it's pretty clear that my mind is part of forces that are utterly beyond my control. "It's all in your head" is not the slightest bit comforting. My "head" is something that can swallow me up in a terror-world and spit me out at its leisure. Just because something is defined externally as "me" or "my brain" does not mean that I have any control over it whatsoever. I was doing my honest best to see what was happening as illusion and delusion, but damn, that did not get me very far. All it seems to have done is erode further my assurance and security about the world in general. I wonder about that sometimes, how much that typical living-on-an-edge-off-a-cliff sense of things changes my views in general. I tend to have an unreasonable demand that others just accept that the world is like that.
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(20)
05:59:20 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Mania: like a bad fantasy series where every book ends "and she woke up in a mental hospital."
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04:55:46 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Nothing like experimental ice cream, videogames and friends to make one feel human.
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(2)
08:23:43 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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A few days ago when logging into twitter I saw one of their "top tweets" which was something like "After seeing [whatever movie] I don't know whether I'm awake or dreaming!". And I thought, yes, yes you do, actually. If you didn't, you'd have had a last few weeks like mine and then you wouldn't be tweeting breathlessly about it.
This time around mania beat me. Hands down. Fair and square. My defenses were up, it blew them away like a straw house. I don't even know what hit me, anymore. I used to think I understood, at least partly, what was going on in mania and depression. Now I just don't. I used to find it annoying that doctors nattered on about it without seeming to actually understand. Now I find it scary. Because it's this big thing that can knock me over any time, and I'd really like for someone else to be an expert on it.
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02:02:38 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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I had a period of being super-organized externally to make up for my lack of internal organization. That phase seems to have passed, for better or for worse.
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01:52:26 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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Turns out I had blackouts, this time around. Whole conversations I didn't remember. So if I don't remember something I said to you from a week to a few weeks ago, it's 'cause I don't remember much, even when I was seemingly coherent.
Glad to be back in order, but tired. Been lying on the couch listening to new music downloaded from the Free Music Archive, including a cello concert I actually went to a couple of years ago, with a cool breeze coming in the window, room a little cavelike cause the blinds are down, but trees and sky still visible through the slats. I don't know where I've been but sometimes for a few minutes things are ok.
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01:49:23 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility not for passivity, not for obedience. (pg. 93)The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori (1909) _
True rest for muscles, intended by nature for action, is in orderly action; just as true rest for the lungs is the normal rhythm of respiration in pure air. To take action away from the muscles is to force them away from their natural motor impulse, and hence, besides tiring them, means forcing them into a state of degeneration; just as the lungs force into immobility would die instantly and the whole organism with them. (pg. 354)
We often hear it said that a child's will should be 'broken', that the best education for the will of the child is to learn to give it up to the will of adults. Leaving out the question of injustice which is at the root of every tyranny, this idea is irrational because the child cannot give up what he does not possess. We prevent him in this way from forming his own will-power, and we commit the greatest and most blameworthy mistake. (pg. 366)
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03:12:39 PM, Saturday 24 July 2010
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12:51:50 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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12:50:18 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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12:49:54 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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Growly thunder.
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09:23:27 PM,
Monday 19 July 2010
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Scared, even though I'm back, even though I can interact with reality again. This time this thing grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me absolutely to my foundations.
Her world collapsed early Sunday morning. She got up from the kitchen table, folded the newspaper, and silenced the radio. (R.E.M.)
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09:27:27 PM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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Somewhere around the blogmass recently there was talk of some sort of planning/goals group somewhere. What was that? I need help with goals tracking right now. Let me know if you have any recommendations for software etc.
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(2)
12:26:30 PM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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...
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09:29:50 AM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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