I just created an infinite loop linking this pic >=D original I made is here
I copied this draft to SyfyDesigns earlier today. I'll just leave it here as backup.
If you follow me on twitter, you may have picked up that I'm lately soaking my brain in a 12 Monkeys brine. This is a continuation of a thought I've been working on for years, but what the heck, let's splat it out there and see what happens.
I've been thinking about the problem of causality and infinite loops. The 12 Monkeys viewer's perspective can only happen if we keep Cole's continuity intact. Real time travel wouldn't happen like that, but we have to be able to tell stories about it, so we usually pick a few 'prime' characters so we can distinguish them from themselves changed or in alt timelines. The injections given to Cole that let time flow around him are never explained, but I'm betting it would have to involve nanite technology, and right now, those shots are the only way that allows his story to be told, so that's a convenient plot device that can go into more depth later if they wish.
This is a writing perspective that has been used for a very long time. For instance, the Sliders gang called their own earth 'Earth Prime' and desperately looked to get back to it from numerous uncatalogued and sometimes wildly variant 'copies'. When Star Trek fans discuss new Trek, the original canon timeline is 'prime', so prime Khan and Spock and can be distinguished from alt Khan and Spock after Nero changed the timeline and created alt Trek, which I just simply call new Trek because it also means new generation reboot. (I handle the alt Trek stuff at Things To Do On Your Phone When You Can't Sleep.)
So Cole and Cassie in episode 1 "Splinter" are prime. After that, everything starts changing. By the time we get to season 2's version of Jose and Sam, which simply looks like a single alt change, there have been numerous other changes way too lengthy to even list, if you get onto every little bitty detail like some fans have been doing. Compared to Continuum, which basically involved one metro area, 12 Monkeys is worldwide, and even though Continuum's time travel changes affect the entire world because of policy and political changes, 12 Monkeys directly affects billions of lives every single time they loop de loop, as it were.
By the time Cole holds dying Cassie, I noticed her watch was unscratched again. What's up with that? I wasn't live watching, don't know if the fans noticed on twitter, haven't checked the wikis and forums very deeply yet (but here's one questioning what happened), and it's never been mentioned in the show as far as I know, BUT, that must mean something. Cole apparently didn't notice. That watch had just about come full circle, and it's the same watch he'll be taking off her skeleton arm in the future, but because of the paradox he created, unless there's a specific time it unscratched, shouldn't it now be scratched when he first finds it in the future? If the writers are indicating that at Cassie's death there is a reset, Cole never looped back the same way the reset happened over Jones. We might possibly be looking at more than just a paradox and a time loop.
Cube 2: Hypercube also focused on a watch, but there the time was always frozen. Lots of things happened in many alternate dimensions, but time didn't actually pass. I have a fascination for watches in scifi shows.
I want to propose a different way of looking at time travel. I've been thinking about this for a long time, have probably mentioned it in passing elsewhere because I blurb sometimes about time thoughts (this section -Waking Up- is a first draft for a book I'm writing- I was doing the untimed house visual in 2007, so it was cool seeing that kind of visual filmed out in 12 Monkeys), so here goes, and I think it will help a bit with how we view the 12 Monkeys thing.
Time travel is currently still more a philosophical subject than a scientific one, and thinking through and mapping all the 'loops' in all the shows (Doctor Who sites really go wild with it) is difficult for some of us to keep track of. I visualize time very differently than one line sprouting into many, and I personally think Douglas Adams is right, time kinda smooths itself out no matter how much you mess with it. Everything Cole and the rest do is set in motion by what they themselves have already done, so everything they're doing is just role playing into all the preset loops. It's like exponential self fulfilling prophecy creating more and more loops (preset changes) until there is such a tangle of possible outcomes that the loops start dangerously tipping off the outer edges of the light cone of events, sort of like the High Roller in Las Vegas.
So here's the deal. Most of us have seen macrame. It's a particular kind of weaving that depends on 'interlocking', which you could metaphorically call 'fixed points' or 'primaries'. The Fates of old were more powerful than the gods, and they wove single threads into the destinies of men. Instead of seeing Time itself as one thread to map loops with, we should be seeing all the threads of all the characters weaving in and out of each other, but still part of a bigger whole, like a rope. All the loops and mini ropes that split off from the main whole can still come back together and remain intact on their own, like a macrame plant holder. I think threads of time going off in rogue directions is only a micro view, and if we pan out, we can see that every move Cole makes is necessary to the entire woven structure of his time traveling. Things may look like they've changed, but he's simply looping through parts of the weaving.
It looks like all that can be lost to the Red Forest. Logically, if the Red Forest is an immutable thing, all the rest should already have collapsed and there is no story to tell, so the Red Forest is a rogue fixed point that all the threads might appear to have to pass through or go around, if we look too closely at it. I'm not sure time can be unmade like that. It is only the human perspective that becomes corrupted. However, their situation is admittedly dire, and yes, they must do something about it.
If this were Minecraft, the Red Forest would already have a big section to play around in, like the Nether...
I've changed. A LOT. Someone who knows me personally from years ago to now would definitely notice. I used to be way more super aspie than I am now, less self aware, confused and 'uncaring', nearly everything black and white with me. I've chillaxed.
So last night went on forever. An old friend I know irl that I lost contact with years ago had decided to push the past and all my stuff now aside and moved in with me. I was hers. She redecorated my entire house, fixed me up (surprise!) with a whole new wardrobe, planned and scheduled all my days out, and even showed me that she'd been keeping written diaries on me for years.
O_O
Ok...
Scott kind of thought it was funny (in the dream) but agreed it was a little bit of a problem since she kept getting in between us. He was wanting me to pick up a particular collector's video for him, and she kept pulling me aside to make me change my clothes (right there in public) and fuss at me to get ready for some meeting or soiree. I was handling it all really well in my dream, just kind of going along with it to a point (I'm sorry, I can't just change my taste buds like that, but yeah, those wall hangings are ok {because I really don't care about my walls anyway}), but when it came to wearing toe prosthetics (???? !!!! yes, you heard right), I called moratorium and said that's it, if my toe isn't delicate enough for your fine sensitivities (I don't even have an ugly toe), go find someone's whose is. And then I just took it off and walked away, which was difficult because she kept holding me back and trying to shove it back on.
That was cute, just got a logged out of different location notification ~on blogger~. All these years, first notification. I think Edge is toying with me. I'm on Chrome and it's pouting. Find Who Has Access to Your Gmail Account All the activity listed seems to be me.
Oh, that reminds me. I got one of those 'test your site with Google' emails where they can ping across devices. This is my report card.
I have no idea if part of this test includes pinging through Jawn or not, but I live in an area where internet speed is precious and rare and takes lots of money to procure (yes, even with a Nighthawk), so I know my page loads laboriously and not instantly. If I were in Springfield using shared wifi, I'm sure it would be faster, so no telling what's behind this kind of report card and what they might want to sell me. Google analytics has been wanting me to go pro for awhile... I have Lexxperience with these things. Lexx on Droid All I know is that I can fix all I want on my end, doesn't make it better for you guys if you have slow wifi or older tech, knowhutImean. BUT, yeah, I did go out of my way to make this blog very mobile friendly. Many professional sites out there still aren't. This is what you guys look like on my end.
Is anyone else noticing that deleted mail from legit companies (Best Buy, Penney's, etc) can now kick back in as read mail on mobile? Cute, guys, real cute. That doesn't happen with other stuff I delete.
Still free associating through stuff. This, this, this... Take what you want from it. Might be overkill, might be brain training, might be people who have way too much time on their hands. I'm not the one to say. Disclaimer- I have no religious interest in this. Only political.
Yesterday just floated away from me, literally. Yes, got more of my 'unsticky' list done, bathrooms got cleaned, laundry all caught up, but by the afternoon I was a fruit loop, so I hung around in Kai's private realm experimenting in creative. I ran into an ocean monument and decided to own it and redecorate. It's out so far beyond anywhere we've yet explored that unless I post coordinates, no one in the realm will ever see it, so it's all pix and vids for that one. It'll take time, but whenever the mood strikes me, I can go annoy those pesky Guardians. All of this is underwater, if you're unfamiliar with minecraft. I don't have to worry about dying because I'm in creative mode. It's so funny how cranky they look at me, cracks me up.
Don't worry, I'm still over at the jungle on multiplayer a lot. I've got a cute little jungle garden growing right over my jungle bunker.
Natural fire damage is turned off on MoCreatures (so our structures and farms won't burn down, I presume), so it was interesting running into lava flow through the jungle.
On the private realm I play in, whole forest areas blaze up just being near a lava pit and getting sparked on. My diamond house is an experiment in building next to a lava pool. I built on an area where a bunch of trees burned down. I'm always surprised to go back and find my fence still up.
I'm one of those lucky people who actually gunk up a little more over this kind of stuff. I live in botany heaven. #lifeinthewoods Just mentioning in passing. Whining.
Stalling now, actually. I need to make a few executive decisions about what to do next, preferably in the category of 'useful'. By the way, yes, I'm pasting #pinkyblog links over to facebook more often now, so some of you just discovering Pinky blog are surprised to find out I'm weirder than you thought. Or maybe more sane than you thought. Whatever. It's all good.
Time to skid outa here. Another disclaimer- my thing is survival. Cautions galore on this vid. NSFW.
Now I get alerts for every single web beacon that doesn't get blocked. Thanx, Kaspersky. All this means is every time a browser rotates a news window through a slideshow, I get a notification that a web beacon was allowed to interact with my hard drive. Life was so much easier when we just didn't know.
Here, have some cute blown out vein pix. I don't bruise easily and this very rarely happens, so it's been a little fascinating to me. I'll keep them small so they aren't too gross, but that might not stop mobile from pulling them up full screen. Close your eyes.
Yes, I know, I've seen worse, too. Hugs to everyone who gets poked a lot. I've been a pincushion for years, they can feel the scar tissue all over my arms when they're looking for good veins.
I'm pulling this here in case there are other Matrix super freaks like me. A twitter link rolled through claiming their write up was still 'trending', I followed to an old blog post with nearly no comments, so I jumped in and this was my response (ignore the 'awaiting', it got approved). I tend to be super yappy online on my quieter real life days and used to get tangled up in lengthy discussions over nothing just to be ornery, but I'm getting way better at keeping things brief or not commenting at all. If anyone reading this enjoys philosophical debate and would like to argue with me, there you go. But do it over there, not here.
Personally, I'm not fond of writers using other people's entertainment creations to push their own ideologies, but The Matrix makes it all fun.
Still dealing with flutters. It's been 3 weeks since I started tapering atenolol. All the weird stuff, purportedly (from patients in forums), lasts 2-3 weeks. They're not bad and don't last long, usually settle real quick into mild SVT and in a few minutes everything is fine again. I really should have stopped coffee this month, can tell it's not helping...
I'm still working on my 'unsticky' list from yesterday.
Youtube is recommending vids from an account named definitely -evil. I'll leave you guys to it. I've gotta go walk around some more with this headache, maybe work on my list some more.
Sack of outgrown Bunny clothes collected for hand off-check
All by 4 a.m.
I'm not the least energetic, just tranced. Aspienado is in full shutdown, floating around the house.
My head.
Oh yeah, body check.
fasting glucose-90
blood pressure-114/82
weight-lost 4 pounds in the last week
I could stop there but I need to make a Plan.
Time to money sync, calendar sync.
Final decision on the rest of the transfer.
Unsticky my house. (this will require multiple steps)
bathrooms
minecraft
dishes
nap
linens in the wash
space out on youtube
Stir gently and float through random 20 minute activity rotations.
Trancing is an excellent way to start recovery week. No pressure, no leaving the house for 3 days. Several years ago I just stayed in trance mode dealing, it was the only way to stay out of meltdowns and pain clinics. Doesn't always work, but for a year solid, electronica was the only stuff I could tolerate listening to.
Yes, of course there is Sherlock trance.
And if that's not your thing, have some symphony Sherlock.
And there is always acoustic.
Bit of role play with your classical acoustic?
Many years ago I had a guitar. I haven't been able to play because arms/hands, you guys know the drill. I accepted long ago I'll never be able to play again. My brother still does though. I can't get a player to embed, blogger is throwing fits with purevolume code. My fave is Nuthin I Can Do (But Blame it on You). Yes, that's all him, mix, etc. Southern fried rock blues, guys. If THAT doesn't fix your Monday, something is srsly wrong.
I had to log off and shut Jawn down in the middle of writing this post. When I turned back on, I couldn't pull anything Google related up, not Chrome or Torch, not my G+ page or Youtube, nothing. I'm currently working through the Windows 10 Edge browser, which is fine, but since Microsoft and Google are playing Game of Webs, neither is mutually supportive of the other. I'm finding forums on this problem going back well over a year. At any rate, I couldn't even pull blogger up until I signed into Google through Edge, which technically means I'm signed in on 4 'devices' now- Chrome, Torch, my phone, and Edge. Just signing in again on my own laptop meant security checks galore, a frenzy of email alerts, and having to 2-step verify, so I feel like the time when James Cole accidentally changed the future and wound up having to get back into the lab through Deacon and Cassie-gone-WestVII, like geeeeeez louise, it's me. Same laptop, same house, same little dot on the map, and all guns pointed right at me. As Deacon would say- Respect.
I clearly exhibited today why I'll never to be able to achieve morphine addict status. Hats off to all you guys who think it's the bomb, but all it took was what the ER doctor called a 'baby dose' to set off wave after wave of acute deep musculoskeletal pain and the shakes. Basically, I'm so adapted to screaming high pain levels that it took nearly 20 minutes to even feel relief, and not because it was a 'baby dose', which was probably 5 mg, and I say that because the nurse said it was half a dose when she brought it in. (Morphine Injection)
I so very rarely go in for pain any more. I'm so tired of all the hoops that have to be jumped before I ever get any relief that it's usually just not worth it, but today was one of those days.
Ok, now I had to all-stop because Edge decided that NOW is the time to walk me through an intro like I've never used a browser before. It is now stuck in a loop trying to import my favorites from a broken Chrome. Serves it right.
Ok, where was I? Papa and Bunny are up at the pool, I'm in a nice quiet house with the last of the morphine sliding its way out of my system, and putting the day back together. -Oh, yeah.-
I've been through this before, but apparently my pain management needs adjusting. Just sitting here at the table, streak of lightning bolted through my chest that set off the adrenaline response from heck (not to be mistaken for hell, I've had much worse), that kicked off a sweet SVT that wouldn't slow down at all, so 10 minutes of that and I decided being 16 years past the radio ablation might not mean much any more and better safe than sorry. EMT could feel the pain waves in my pulse changes, no one could get a needle in until I arrived (5 blown veins, and pretty sure my bad after not hydrating well this week after all that deep muscle work in therapy- I know better), and all else being magnificent because I've been working so hard to get all ripped like Madonna, I only had to hang around for 4 hours before I got a small dose of morphine and then cried like a baby.
They used to give me 10 mg and then I'd get all hysterical and bossy when it was wearing off. The best is when I get cocktails, but I'm so loopy after that I'm just not safe even when I love everybody, because you never know when I'll walk right off a curb into oncoming traffic like an idiot. It's just easier on everyone if I tough it out most of the time, and I've gotten so used to stuffing it down that I fall apart when drugs pull the walls down and I have no resistance.
So when I say it was a long, rough week, what I really mean is I'm exploding inside with so much pain that all it takes to break me is 5 mg of morphine. After the first 20 minutes of super ultra hypersensitivity and awareness of every cell in my entire body, I'm finally spazzing on a beach on the other side of the galaxy and it's all cool.
omg, just getting this pic locked up #allthethings again
had to reboot
NOW I HAVE CHROME BACK
I owe it all to this man ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX 2016
If everyone went through what I go through with injected pain meds, no one would ever use. It absolutely sucks being able to feel every millimeter of my entire skeleton, all the fibers attached to it all over, and all the veins and nerves and muscle fibers around them. SUCKS. Yes, you heard me right. I CAN FEEL MY SKELETON.
I can describe in detail everything attached to my skull, my sternum and ribs, every backbone, all the bony protrusions, and I especially love my shoulder blades, clavicle, and jaw. omg it sucks being able to feel all that so intimately. I don't even feel my skin when I'm in that mode. I don't feel my other senses, nothing else gets through, all I can feel are all those nerves screaming out the map of my body.
You'd think I'd want to be doped up all the time. You have no idea how terrifying it is to live with solid pain and suddenly it turns off. Completely. Like the year I suddenly couldn't feel my lips, tongue, throat, sinus, cheekbones... It wasn't just numb, it was *gone*. The nerves blanked out. I could still move just fine, and talk, but that one got me an MRI making sure I didn't have blood vessel inflammation in my brain during an autoimmune flare up, because yes, I was in autoimmune flare up.
Ok, way too yappy. I need to stop. Today was just about poor pain management and dehydration. I've exhausted lists of pills, I have to plan for 20 more years of liver maintenance, I can't just go back on a bunch of junk and expect to reach anywhere near 65 with grace and aplomb if it's not about making my health top priority. Pills burn you up. I'm living with a liver condition because a decade of meds will do that to you. I'm saving pills and cortisone shots for when I'm older, and I've gotta arrive there in as good a shape as possible if I want to make it longer on medical crutches. My people don't live to ripe old ages like @bonenado's people.
Wait, pain management. I was going to write this down so I'll remember it. When I follow up with my doctor I'm going to ask what he thinks about opiate bursts. Kinda like pred bursts, you don't stay on it, just do short term to get something under control. This week needed heftier pain management, and if I'd had a fall back (boldly says the noncompliant patient), I might not have wound up spiking into the ER right in the middle of a blood pressure med withdrawal. I'm wondering if a low dose ibuprofen/codeine burst for a couple of days might have changed this entire weekend. Maybe I could ask him if he'd let me have enough for, say, one week out of every month. Not a month's supply, not every day, because it's too easy to get addicted again, but a controlled count for one hard week a month. I already knew this week was pretty rough, and I've lived with this long enough to hoard back for days like that.
You know how many doctors over how many years tossed prescriptions out into the hallways hoping I'd chase them out the door? Not this doctor. And now I've got this whole team counting my pills, so I feel like I'm in a safer place now to actually ask for opiates. We'll see what the summer brings. I really don't want to go onto a daily regimen of something that he'll be pulling me back off of in 2 weeks and I'm back at square one. I've been a guinea pig way too many times.
This is what pain management problems look like for what a rheumatologist has labeled 'severe' in a med addict cleaned off meds. I just got my once a year baby morphine shot. Because I'm gonna be MADONNA.
Much of this post was finished up around watermelon, butter and jelly sandwiches, playing 'cherries' (HiHo CherryO), yogurt, playing ball with 3 different balls, and other massive stickiness, because coming home all sparkly clean from a long swim is just too good to be true.
Back under control, yay! Did a few neck thangs, nerve glosses and stretches and stuff.
So I dink around in singleplayer sometimes experimenting with how something will work or look, and I'm wondering if taking this idea to multiplayer will be a disaster. I'm having to let a /home go so I can teleport way further out now to a new /home (you only get 3 homes in MoCreatures), so literally going hardcore parkour between development bunker areas is super risky. Using my flying horse would be convenient, but keeping my pet amulet on me is a great way to lose that horse forever if I die horribly in lava, and I've lost where I stashed it several times already as I move around. I finally learned to /warp to a specific chest to keep it in, and that worked for awhile, but eventually I wind up dying again. Really wish I had vid from a couple days ago. I was building a glass floor deep inside a dark ravine over a spider spawner at the very end of a mineshaft, super dangerous area but it was so cool looking down and watching the spiders through the glass, crawling all over themselves trying to get to me and falling into a river of lava far below (that's about as close to Mirkwood, Morder, and Gollem as I can get on minecraft), and I didn't notice one making it up a far wall and coming up behind, and totally knocked me off the glass floor, and we fell together all that way down into the lava, and I lost *everything* I was carrying. THAT is why I have to be careful about carrying that amulet around.
Anyway, I have to cross a couple of oceans getting to different bunkers, and I'm thinking about plotting out my direction from some of my coordinates (I keep a notebook of coordinates, very serious about multiplayer) and bridging over one of the oceans. This is from singleplayer in creative mode, but I don't have to worry about creepers in multiplayer and the only other thing that would destroy the bridge is actual players griefing on purpose, and that is super strictly monitored, so I feel fairly safe building it, but it will take a LOT of work and time and be fairly dangerous in multiplayer because we're in survival mode there.
I think it's a pretty design. I've experimented with several bridge designs, this is the most simultaneously efficient and elegant.
As long as you stick to the torches, no problems falling into the ocean. There is no wind on moc (some mods have wind damage now), and nothing gets rainslick. There would still be danger from lightning, but I think the torches will keep mobs from spawning, although that won't stop mobs from being able to use the bridge themselves. I was once pushed off a water crossing by a spider and then shot to death by a skeleton floating in the water while the spider was all over me, so yeah, there's always risk. And that's not counting a stray bear or shark or even just a witch and jellyfish, but I still think it would be worth it.
SPOILERS
I may have finally found a logic flaw in 12 Monkeys. In episode 2.8 "Lullaby" they could have stopped at any point before they even killed Jones and drastically changed the future. They took out the leader of Spearhead, for one, and corrupting Spearhead's future might have meant Jose never found out he had a son there, so that whole conundrum could have simply vanished. Time kept resetting, though, even when they didn't kill Jones, until they finally figured out they had to save Jones' daughter without her knowing she'd been saved, because Time needed her to be exactly like she was to keep the direction she'd gone intact. And then she meets Hannah all grown up, actually got a little tear in my eye.
BUT. If they never, ever use Hannah again as a key player in the 12 Monkeys story, that was an extreme logic error, because otherwise, all they had to do in principle to escape the loop was not kill Jones. Well, they kept looping anyway, even when Jones didn't die, so obviously they weren't spit out of the loop over AAAALLLL that other stuff. So saying it all boiled down to Hannah can't be entirely correct. It meant that not just Jones, but everyone else in Jones' history HAD to be kept in place, including the leader of Spearhead. So I feel the snippet of explanatory dialogue at the end of the episode was begging the question a bit. Either Jones is slipping or the writers are, and I tend to lean on writers. Also, they jumped right over springing Jennifer out and how that was done without destroying Spearhead, as well, so all this focus on Hannah is really bothering me. This episode would have been done more justice if it had been a two-parter or even a cliffhanger into a 3rd season.
Ok, I'm way off course today, need to get back on track. The Bunny sleepover is up in the air, thunderstorms may or may not actually roll over, one of those really iffy days, so best be ready for action.
Here comes free association random day because I have a headache and actually can't face the thought of minecraft right now while I wait for my coffee. +_+
Pinky Cave exists in this parallel dimension. "WFFD on Pinky's Cave Incident" WICHITA FALLS, TX - Four juveniles took a wild ride through a drainage system in Wichita Falls Tuesday."We were called for a water rescue. It was in the area of Avenue L and Monroe and they actually gave the location of Pinky's Cave which we know very well where it's at," Wichita Falls Fire Department Chief Jon Reese said.Those kids took a nearly three mile ride from Pinky's Cave off Kell Blvd. and Monroe to the Martin Plaza Park, but they were all okay.
As does Pinky's Restaurant. "Pinky's restaurant gets visit from Food Network host, NASCAR driver" CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - A local restaurant could be getting some national exposure after it was spotted getting a visit from two very well known people. Guy Fieri, host of Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, was seen outside of Pinky's in west Charlotte Tuesday afternoon. The host was there with camera crews and a large production truck for the show. Fieri was seen filming the shot of himself pulling into the restaurant and walking inside.
Ah, you can see all my favs on Twistar. I guess this is the way to stalk twitter without having a twitter account or something. I clicked the popular button. Must mean popular among my following populace. I can see why some of them are popular, probably why I have them on mute.
Ok, no pinky in this title, but one was cut off. Yes, this came up in a personal search. I blame the chicken. I'm also wondering why there are so many outcries and outrages in the world while outrageous boofs in foster care assessment and follow up go virtually unnoticed. See, this is how we get Voldemort. "Man accused of chaining boy to porch with dead chicken pleads guilty" UNION COUNTY, NC (WBTV) - A man accused of chaining a child to a porch with a dead chicken around his neck accepted a plea deal on Wednesday. Dorian Harper, 58, is accused of shackling his 11-year-old foster child by his ankle to a porch as punishment in 2013. He was sentenced to serve between 6 and 10 years for child abuse and maiming. Harper's guilty plea was for six felonies and one misdemeanor, but the deal only gave him time in prison for three felonies. Monday, Harper rejected a plea deal from prosecutors, saying he wanted the trial to go on.
Ah, here's my coffee. Just in time.
Yes, I had very briefly mentioned on twitter that my tweets are slipping. I went from 1,430 to 1.030 in the last 6 months, lololol. Along with other wildly skewed misrepresentation and a nearly worthless statcounter since Chrome took over, I'm feeling a slight dissonance in the Force, and I'm struggling to care. Where is my obsessive obsession? Where is my passion? Where is my meme-ingful diatribe?
Things left unsaid really bother me. The real real things that I mentioned yesterday. My past affects my presence like a wild PTSD roller coaster, how does one just move on? I used to feel so stuck, now I'm in a new place, seeing a distant horizon up close for the first time, an imminent future very different from the past. Maybe I was never chained by my ankle to a post with a dead chicken around my neck and a finger cut off like one kid in this world, but metaphorically, that is the very picture of how I've felt inside most of my life. I hope that kid was genuinely rescued. So many of us aren't.
Moving on. I have a weekend to share this headache with. I bet it can't wait.
I started this yesterday because I felt so crap I couldn't watch TV or do anything or even lay down for awhile and I was doing my best to focus and concentrate on doing something through pain, so unless you're desperate for something to read, save yourself and flee this post.
There is a place on earth worse than the DMV, and that's the social security office.
I saw a lot of all kinds of people today. I sat in a hard chair for nearly 90 minutes waiting for a turn I thought would never come, and I listened to a guy behind me talk nearly the entire time about everything in his whole life clear back to the 90s. I know his family ancestry, his work history, where he banks, what the inside of his home looks like including detailed descriptions of his furniture, where he actually lives, a number of people he's met, how various family members died, whole convos he's had with landlords, and through the entire thing he never once mentioned a spouse, children, or pets. Not once. He never shut up for well over an hour and never once brought up a relationship. And that whole time I couldn't tune him out because super aspie's so aspie, and the pain running along the nerve paths in my shoulder and neck ramped up into a delightfully nasty headache, and by the time my name was called, the people near me were actually leaning away, I'm sure probably because I looked like that one person in the entire collection of mentally and physically disabled specimens that might actually pop a cork and have a real meltdown. I did my best to sit still and not look like I hate the whole planet, because I really don't, it's just the pain, but I was this close to tears and the only thing holding them back was allowing myself to be pissed that the guy just wouldn't shut up.
I was the scary one in the room. The quiet type who visibly struggles to hold back whatever is fighting to get out.
The guy who finally called me back was awesomely nice. He assured me that I had the short form, and that simply mailing it back at all with any kind of noted touch base with a real doctor in the last 2 years was all they wanted, because so many people get their disability settlements and disappear. He looked up my stuff and was surprised I got the short form, because at this stretch of time people usually get the long form, so he looked some more at the notes about my disability hearing and was impressed and said no wonder. I said yeah, I'm one of those that got it on the first try, both cognitive and physical, and part of the visit today was making the mistake without supervision before I mailed it off. He assured me again it would be fine, and not to worry about that triggering a more lengthy reevaluation or stopping my payments. At first I was a little confused by the continued reassurances, but I guess he didn't understand- I was there because of typos. I told him I wasn't worried about another evaluation, hadn't even thought of losing the financial support. My medical file isn't growing any thinner. I was there because my cognitive disability compulsed me to freak out about typos. I'm an autism spectrum freakazoid who can't live with something written down wrong on a piece of paper. I have piles of spirals all over my house full of scribbled notes, years and years of spirals, and no matter how many notes I write and how many blogs I have, I still make stupid mistakes on simple forms and never even notice. There is something about filling out forms that shuts my intelligence center down. I'm professionally trained to assess and care plan and tech talk, but hand me a form and all I have to do is write down a number and sign it, I get it wrong every time.
I don't say that much about what really motivated me back out on the webs. I've mentioned just missing being in an accident that would definitely have been fatal, but I barely mention the stuff that happened afterward, or all the stuff that was going on around that time. No one saw my world blowing apart.
You know how I start time skipping in June and think I've missed the 4th of July? It got really super bad in 2012, which I've mentioned, but the irony behind it is all the real life stuff I was juggling with the people around me by the time the 4th really arrived, and all the stuff that blew up over the next couple of weeks among them afterward. I handled so much stress for so many other people, and no one had a clue what it was doing to me, or that I'd already had what most people would call a nervous breakdown. I'm nice enough not to spill too much for public, but all the same, that was a pretty tense tightrope at first.
I am here because I started blogging publicly. Bluejacky blew up with one survey after another that summer, grandfortuna came back out of oblivion, I reopened new twitter and facebook accounts, and I held on for dear life staying as public as I could with a plan I devised, because this is what my real life was feeling like.
I saw that full screen in a theater, and I'll never forget how shocking it felt to suddenly realize what it must feel like being the aliens crashing onto an unfamiliar planet. What only one person at the time in 2012 actually knew (I confided in @bonenado) was that I had reached a place where I wasn't sure I could stop myself from a compulsive leap into the fuzzy unknown, because I had so little grip on what was actually reality for a few weeks that summer, and I didn't want to be labeled a suicide just because my head was melting apart. I might have been vehemently against my own suicide and still not been able to stop it. I had to create another reality to be present in, to show up for. I had to come back and be my avatar. Sometimes it's ok to escape real life like that, as long as I stick to my preset guidelines and focus on my goals. Every bit of this was supervised by my psychologist. What those of you who've watched all this have seen is genuine live blogging through very real crisis.
My ship had already gone down years earlier, and although it was a somewhat controlled crash, it was much more devastating and destructive and very pre-psychologist. That crash lasted for 3 years, and nearly everyone who was in the Lexx fandom back then had no idea this is exactly what it felt like was going on in my real life for that long.
My whole life has been a series of crashes. My car wreck is obvious, an actual crash. I've talked about the monitored double hormone crash in 2012. I've been through some debilitating systems crashes that nearly destroyed me physically and some devastating losses that broke me emotionally, the bulk hitting in 2004 nearly all at once. I've crashed off addictions like alcohol and medications. I've been through a very long string of friendship crashes. If there is anything I know how to do, it's survive a crash, but knowing and experience doesn't make the next crash any easier.
What's different now is I'm coming out of all those crashes. I've been doing physical therapy for 4 years for old injuries from the car crash. I've been following a whole different lifestyle the last 5 years for the plethora of chronic illnesses that crashed me. I've been seeing a psychologist for 9 years now after the several really big emotional crashes (losses) happening all around the very physical crashes. Maybe I'm almost ready to talk about the real real stuff that goes on in the middle of crashes, like how I keep kicking when I know another crash might just be the last if I don't keep hanging on.
While some of you pinball between trying to figure out the disparaging meaning behind mass shooters and the sadness of suicides, I'm treading what feels like an ocean full of gunships and subs, helos flying over, on alert for missile launches and air strikes in all directions. It's not so bad nowadays, perhaps going public really was the life preserver I needed in all the chaos, because I haven't been so immediately and continually summoned by people around me nearly so much since then. The pressure has definitely lessened, and I've been able to start processing my own stuff instead of constantly swooping in for others blowing drama into crises. One of my rules for public blogging was it has to be about ME. My stuff. Not their stuff. But one of the clauses is that when people intersect in my life, it becomes my stuff, doesn't it? I think that's why several people in real life suddenly backed off. We've got some spectacular laundry that I keep saying would make great TV material.
Something about sitting at the social security office has triggered all this, so I'm trying to work through it here on Pinky blog. This post is getting way longer than I intended, and I'm not sure of the direction, so I'm just letting stuff flow out.
My mom made me learn to hold things in growing up. If you have an autie/aspie child and you are familiar with meltdowns, imagine what it would take to force that child to learn to never display their real feelings. (Some of you just did a quiet omg what happened in your heads.) Imagine someone like that under a great deal of stress holding everything in for many years because they'd been pressured all their lives to do that, maybe by another person who'd been pressured all their life to do that, maybe by someone who was just plain mean or ignorant. Imagine that you have no idea how many people like that exist around you on any given day. Unless they talk nonstop about their lives like that guy sitting behind me at the social security office, you have no idea what kind of person they are. They can be clean and dressed decently and quiet and polite and you'd assume that person couldn't possibly do whatever it is that people say surprises them. You'd never see it coming.
I'm not the only one in this world who lives a normal life in front of a lot of bad memories. I can't speak for other people, only for myself, but as I stand up and speak for myself, others may feel like I also speak for them. Inside of me there are flames and horrors and screams that no one ever sees. There is cruelty and meanness and great swaths of sadness that could swallow a universe.
But inside me there is also an ability to let it all go in an instant of distraction, or a few moments of quiet. All it takes for me to survive is a time out. I time out as often as I can as long as it's safe for me to do so. I did my best to time out over and over at the social security office today. It's so easy to click-lock my eyes onto sunlight filtering past leaves or blinds, or an odd color or pattern on a wall or floor, but it's really difficult to do that with rows and rows of a hundred people lined up to face each other. So many faces in the way, trying not to see each other, feeling out of place, looking anyway and recoiling or pretending to smile. I'm usually pretty good nowadays about being able to look up and smile, but I just couldn't yesterday, and I couldn't just let the pain dictate how my eyes meet other eyes. Humans are so good at killing with their eyes. I was in kill mode. For most people, that's simply just a hateful look. For some of us, it's a warning that meltdown is imminent. The last thing other people need from me on their own bad days is a meltdown. I've had a couple of public meltdowns, but the disclaimer in me needs me to say I was legally stoned out of my mind on pain meds and muscle relaxers and still so terribly miserable, and I couldn't stand looking back at myself behaving like that. One of the big reasons I cleaned off prescription meds is because I don't want to go to my grave with people thinking Thank God that's over. It's an awful thing not to be able to control your behavior and realize it makes people wish you weren't around. I have a mean enough personality without meds as it is. When I lost my best friend over this stupid conundrum, I spent a year grieving and then set out to change my life.
I have to insert a disclaimer that on good days, I can carry on convos with strangers like we're best buds, as long as it doesn't last too long, but if someone I know is with me, they get squirmy because I am a little too friendly, and I think it gets creepy or something. Like, Scott pulls me away and steers me clear of people handing out pamphlets on my talky days. I'm creepy. You'll wish you never handed me a pamphlet.
I would like to describe what a time out feels like. It's a literal time out. There is no time. Even just a moment of time out feels like a different place, and I'm really there. It's not an imaginary place, I don't invent it or visualize going to it. It's just there. It's always there. It's like the flip side of here. Here is always here, there is always there. When I am there, it's just me, no one else. There's no hint of all the here I disengaged from. Sometimes I can keep both open, but usually I space out to the point of completely missing what's happening right in front of me. I imagine that makes me look fairly mental. It's kind of a joke between me and @bonenado. If I'm spacing out while he's driving, it's a very good thing. If I'm spacing out while I'm driving... not so good. I have to stay vigilant and self monitor when I drive. I've tried telling doctors I need to legally become a nondriver, but so far no one has taken me seriously. I'm a great driver, no accidents for decades, no problems or tickets, but 2012 broke and I haven't 'come back' in my car yet. That year, though, I did have a good delayed Tourette's related PTSD in my car convo with my psychologist. What super triggered the old crash memories was flying. I came back and couldn't make myself touch my steering wheel for a solid month while I was driving. I haven't flown since.
Back to time out. There, light is a thing. Colors are things. They don't need to be part of anything else to be defined or to even be. I go into light and colors a lot. Colors are like a different language. I'm not talking about frequencies and vibrations, but maybe I am. Maybe I can see the sciencey things differently in my head. I get other dimensions, too. If I let go and don't think about it, I can watch how other dimensions work. I've never been able to describe what I get in my head, and I realize it's because they need to be described in relation to something tangible, so there's no context for sharing. I recognized fractals when I first ran into them because I'd played in my head like that when I was a kid. I recognized Smale's horseshoe because I think about that kind of stuff all the time in my head. I was thrilled when multi universe theories started coming out because I'd already played with the 'fabrics of spacetime' in my head. Parallel worlds and alt universes are think tank toys I played with growing up. By the time string theory rolled in, I was already past turning music into light into objects into effervescence in my head. Once in awhile I'd try to describe the cool stuff I could see, but people say things like "You think too much" and shut me down. I wasn't exactly thinking, I was free associating through thought. Thinking is focused, time out is just floating through the nirvana of all the things. I've never told anyone light can talk, and I don't mean like we talk, but I bet science would back me up if I said it differently. That kind of stuff.
I would never be able to talk for a solid hour about my family history and work history and my bank and my furniture and the convos I've had with strangers, but it's a fair bet that guy from the social security office is on a spectrum like I am. He's a living recording machine and I'm guessing he can't stop broadcasting long enough to develop relationships, so he fills his voids playing his recording to everyone he meets. Maybe he's incapable of timing out. He mentioned being able to go days without sleep, even on handfuls of sleep presciptions, yes, which he named off, dosages included. Whatever his soul is on this earth for, he has done it all through a brain hard wired to record and play back everything that's ever intersected with his life. What impressed me most was he seemed so nice and sociable in spite of all that, like the absence of time outs didn't phase his demeanor while he could rattle off every bone and cartilage and process in the human body, there was no hint of ill will or even opinion, just the constant regurgitation of experience. That doesn't mean he's not a ticking time bomb, and eidetic memory doesn't always equate to being capable of advanced theoretical discussion, but his brain chemical cocktail was obviously way easier to live with than mine. The more he talked behind me, the more I slid into hardcore shutdown trying to stave off meltdown, and even though everything he said was actually interesting and pleasantly shared, it was all I could do not to turn around several times and ask him if he never shuts up, and knowing that could be part of his disability is the only thing that kept me sane through it. I'm pretty sure I'd have found him delightful as a people watching study if my pain level hadn't been shooting holes through my head.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ok, this is today, Friday.
That was a lot of stuff!!!!
Now we need way different stuff. I've probably shared this one before, but bless the fans who do this stuff. You save me like nothing else in this whole world.
K, I've got stuff to do, need to get order pulled together before Bunny spends the night tomorrow, get back on my work track, the usual basic stuff. I just wanted to say, I'm still here. Despite how it looks sometimes, I truly am grateful for every single person who has ever interacted with me online, and you guys need to know you've been meaningful enough to help me stay focused on more healing and hanging in through all the pain, both physical and emotional. I made a Pinky promise not to disappear off the webs again, and that's a real thing. Yesterday was really hard again, this whole week, month, and year has been really hard again, but I'm on a calmer ocean nowadays and I just need to remember to touch base and be the avatar I created. We can do this.
I'm getting so lazy about typos. I used to be appalled if I ran into one later and jump up immediately, no matter what the reason I'd have stopped doing everything else (usually pain) for a break, and nowadays I'm so meh, I'll get to it later. And then much later I go oh yeah, I had a typo, but by then I don't remember where and I'm not in the mood to go find it.
Not in the mood... omg, I'm turning into NORMAL people. I said I was bored earlier this week, and now I'm saying I'm not in the mood.
I'm relying on my obsessive-compulsive everything must be this way or bust behavior to get me through all the things till I'm published. What the what? I'm bored and I'm not in the mood.
Hang on a sec, my body is butting in. *handing mic to left shoulder*
Hi, I'm actually a strip in a bigger muscle group called the trapezius, but I'm the bit that comes from the left side of the neck and anchors to the acromioclavicular joint. I'm probably one of the culprits behind that typical victim giving up style of vernacular (i.e. bored, mood), and I deeply apologize. I know it's not entirely my own fault, as there are plenty of other musculature and bony processes that contribute to this melee of nervous system overload, but I'm definitely a key player this morning. Honestly, I think I could take down Chuck Norris, or at least keep him from killing you. It would feel more like a light tap. Funny story, I
*yanks mic away* Ok, back to stuff. @bonenado just brought me the copy of the official govt form I mailed off yesterday without him seeing it first (I usually make a photocopy and do a practice fill out for him to approve) and showed me where I put month and date instead of month and year, so now I've got to go to the social security office in Springfield and show someone I messed up this paper and see if they'll let me fill out another one there or something.
I'm wondrously intelligent and stupid as a rock sometimes. I can't fill out forms by myself. I can blame it on brain glitching or pain all I want, but blame doesn't get it done right. The stupidest thing I did was think I could do something so 'simple' on my own and totally botched it up. Now I'm a bit peeved with myself, but instead of turning the sourness inward I need to distract again, because my body's already got enough to handle, and kicking myself only makes things worse.
I am Aspienado. I haven't been able to follow directions correctly since kindergarten. I own that this is one of the most outstanding fails in my life. The irony? I was filling out a Disability Update Report. Yes, disability squad, plz to note the cognitive fail. And it's not a blip, it's not an oopsie, it's every. single. time. all. my. life.
Why do they bother even asking about the 3 latest appointments if they don't want the doctor's name and actual date of the appointment? How in the world do they base future need for deeper follow up, oh never mind. The reason they have all these giant bolded instructions is because nearly all of us f*k it up.
lol, Scott and I just had a discussion about how you're watching a rumble about to happen in a show, buncha capes and masks and whatevs, and you notice someone wearing spiked heels and go really? Like they never twist their ankle. Scott said they wait till someone's down and then spike 'em through the eyes. He doesn't question these things. I guess only the cognitively impaired question the logic of superheroes never wearing supportive athletic footwear.
The facepalming is slowly subsiding. My long week is longer, yes, I have to drive further than the plan today, yes, I have to go through security check to sit with a room full of other societal dregs, yes, (I need a t-shirt that states I'm a societal dreg, Dregs would be a cool name for all us underdogs, I think) (we'll rumble in whatever crap shoes we got, yo) (well, my kind of rumble will more like stumbling over a chair trying to get away) ok where was I? I'm a Dreg gonna be all up in that security check, yo. I'm gonna show up and do my thang today, show them again how I screwed up a piece of paper, yo. (Too many yos? I need a dawg somewhere.) I do this what, once a year or so? Totally screw up a form. I need staff.
The super irony is that this post started out about typos and got interrupted by govt paper typos... I started it because there's a typo one or two posts back and I'm too lazy to go find it. LAZY. omg, ok, now I'm cycling back around to what is happening to me, and my shoulder nodding, and me going oh, yeah.
Ug, I'll hafta take everything out of my epi purse at the social security office. I'll pre-empty most of it in the car. It's small, but amazingly super efficiently packed so I won't have to carry a bigger purse.
If I don't stop this right now my morning is going to spiral way outa control. Cue the vid! I shall get me to minecraft straight away until my body reminds me it needs breakfast, yea verily. And then I'll run out my door again.
Chrome won't let Jawn get vids, and old lappy just can't pull that kind of workout off any more, so this morning I invited Torch in. Jawn is thrilled. I'm thrilled. Torch is thrilled. And all the app exes are fighting and it's hilarious and I hope nothing is f*kg up my hard drive.
I really am my happiest like this.
I like getting to the tops of these crazy mountains and then drilling all the way to the bottom. This is the same spot later when I was ladder testing so I wouldn't fall to my death. The white things are snow fluttering down from the hole I made at the top. Even after all this time, I still pause to watch sunrises and sunsets.
Going back to once a month with the psychologist for the summer, and nearly done with this round of physical therapy, so I'm hoping July is will be wonderfully back to routine. My daily workout schedule has been blown to bits between stepping down the beta blocker and aggressively hitting that spot in my neck, and a whole week of heat advisory already spiked all that right into super fibro flare, so I'm mostly just micro focusing on immediate top priority. Got a form filled out this morning that HAS to be mailed off by end of the month, paypal is just about ready for transfers that HAVE to be done by the end of the month, things like that.
Psyche guy wants me to do another sleep study, so if he remembered to note that to my doctor, he'll probably get that ordered to be scheduled when I go back in for follow up on the beta blocker thing in a couple of weeks. Last night was ridiculous. I think it's been at the very least over 9 years since my last sleep study. I think it's the usual junk, the ups and downs of med changes and season changes and whatevs, but he wants to rule out REM related apnea because my dreams are pretty off the wall. Well, I've had severe insomnia for so many years that's probably related to the nerve damage in my neck, I'm more of a wait and see if we continue to solve some of my issues over time, because I've started actually sleeping in the last couple of years. It's hard to sleep well when you're spending a month reliving an ancient whiplash in physical therapy because it triggers a fibro flare. Anyway, I'm sure another attempt at a sleep study can't hurt. The first one I had was pretty lame, my insomnia was so severe that I slept 20 minutes, and 4 hours into it they just booted me out. They were at least able to document the alpha delta anomaly.
A little piece of my brain just reminded me I need to focus back on TODAY. Physical therapy this morning, and no idea what kind of shape I'll be in afterward, so maybe I should go do my dishes and start some laundry before I go. This afternoon might be a complete washout. Get it? Washing.. oh nevermind.
I swear I had to have lived on a different kind of planet in a past life because the dreams are back. I just woke up from one where I could thrust off a little and go right up to the ceiling and lightly come back down, and I was having loads of fun with it. When I was really young, I flew in nearly every dream I had, and I could go super fast or float slowly along, and even hover if I stayed focused. I crashed a lot. As I grew up the dreams were more about not being able to stay up and the crashing grew rather horrifying, so I stopped having those dreams for a long time.
When I was young, I thought the flying dreams were just something I did, but I mentioned them to my dad one day after I got grown up and he got so excited, oh yes, he flies in his dreams, too, and over time he never stopped like I did. He loves his flying dreams. And once internet arrived, I found out that dreaming about flying is a very common thing, too common, in my opinion, to be explained away with meanings. This feels too much like memories to me, something I used to take for granted. Think about it- flying doesn't come naturally to these bodies at all, but it's something we dream of doing and even create characters in stories who can fly. Flying is something we feel like we want to get back to, something we feel in our gut should be a thing.
I've considered that this could be genetic memory from long ago, because fish sort of deal with this sensation all their lives, and the most world adaptive family in the animal kingdom is birds. Many bugs fly, bats fly, even some reptiles and other mammals glide, and flying (or the sensation of flying) just seems like a key part of life. When humans finally really got off the ground, most of us were thrilled. Many of us adapted quickly and love looking out of glass elevators or riding crazy roller coasters or watching documentaries with lots of land flyovers. Some people make careers out of flying, from monster jets right down to hot air balloons.
We could say flying allows the feeling of more freedom, especially for those who need to 'get away' or feel confined to disability, but I was dreaming of flying as soon as I was walking, and I'm not sure how all that got into my head, because I've been able to properly visualize perspective in my flying dreams long before I ever saw it on television or any other way. How did I know what the ground would look like from above? How could I conceive moving through air so naturally if I was barely grasping how to use my body in real life? I loved running and jumping, but I was the klutz kid and shredded my knees a bit.
That dream last night felt really good after the one that had woken me up before...
I dreamed I was watching a little girl, possibly in another country, at least a very different family than mine, partly because the language was different and partly because everyone had black hair. I come from redheads and tow heads with black hair rarely sprinkled in here and there. The little girl was about 3 or 4, and the family was very strict.
One day the little girl was taken into a separate room with a few other children and some drunken men, and they learned to sing a funny song and do weird things, but since the men were laughing it was no big deal. The little boy sang the song while he was playing the next day, and while it was a little shocking, no one bothered him about it. Boys get to talk about that kind of stuff. The next day a mom or gramma (couldn't tell, extended family and everyone had children young) asked the little girl a question and she sang the funny song. This female adult was so outraged and mortified that she screamed at the little girl never say that again, and beat her very hard all over, even her head and face, until she was swelled up and ugly, and never stopped now matter how hard the girl screamed. I had to walk away and not watch because there was nothing I could do to make it stop.
I woke up pretty upset, as you can imagine, but I've had dreams like this before, where I'm a fly on the wall watching other people (aboriginals call this soul traveling), and after a little reflection, decided the adult beating the child must have grown up sexually abused and had held all that in, and once she'd become a mom and then a gramma, no one bothered her any more and she had forgotten it. When the little girl sang the song, it triggered all the horrible memories, and she did to that little girl what she wished she could have done to the people abusing her- make it stop.
I think the underground abuse cycle that a lot of people have been starting to open up and deal with in the latest few generations has a lot to do with the sexualization of children as objects, and sometimes the broken adults around them not knowing how to deal with it when they see it so they hush it up. They have no other way to deal except to shut it down so they don't have to see or hear it.
I know people from both sides of the track, as they used to call it. Some families have no clue what it's like beating children, in other families it's a way of life. It's not always about sex abuse, but it's definitely an abuse cycle. Being able to hit other people is becoming more of a mental illness nowadays. We are starting to say it's bad to hit people at all, whether it's a wife or a stranger, whether we are in school or out in the street. Some people seem to enjoy hitting, and oddly, there are a few people that enjoy being hit.
Then there's another type- those that actually enjoy hurting their own offspring. They don't just get angry and lose it, they actually bait their children, lay out psychological traps that lead to physical and emotional suffering. I've seen this with my own eyes in a waking state, and even lived through it to a point. There is something about hurting one's own child that comes with a complete set of matching baggage full of justification and righteous indignation. This happens all over the world, in every religion and even outside of it.
Our dreams of flying come from a simpler life. I don't think we are trying to escape in our flying dreams (unless we are being chased), and I don't think analyzing our frustrations about flying fails has that much to do with the lives we live now. I think we want to go back to the simpler lives we had. This life is much harder, like a higher class level, and we're having to synchronize sensation to all kinds of internal motivation and feedback. We're having to embrace the realization that we cause pain. I think we were innocent of that realization in a life before on a different kind of world.
I sound like a kook to a lot of people I know, but some of you secretly nod. Even if I'm not right, we wish this were the case. We like ideas that make more sense outside of constantly seeing in terms of this one world. There has to be more going on 'out there' than just this world that feels so hard sometimes.
On really hard days when I don't enjoy this world at all (it really doesn't make sense to me that my body is so easily messed up by plants and sunshine and food- if I live here, you'd think my body would be adapted to all this, I'm like a fish allergic to water or something), I ask- What am I learning here? Several things have been very hard for me to learn in this life. Compassion is one of the biggies. Patience. Kindness is my favorite. I'm not a naturally kind person, but I have learned it, and I really like the idea of it. I like that compassion and patience and kindness give me a kind of power that you don't get with anything else. It's a sweet kind of power, the kind that heals souls and makes wizards of us. I'm not just flying around enjoying sensations. I'm using everything I've ever learned, even if I don't consciously remember it, to incorporate new ways of thinking into myself that progress me forward as a more holistic soul. I experience to learn, I learn to grow, I grow to become.
I didn't read books to get that. I've lived it. I've thought it. I've looked hard at who and where I am and recognized it. I believe this is inside all of us, and that we are all here to learn the same thing. I wonder sometimes if the belief that karma sends us back is one interpretation of feeling stuck on this earth because we haven't learned this lesson yet and get held back for another go at it. Escape into nirvana or heaven is the interpretation that we graduate this world and move on to another class.
I see no other reason for being aware of one's own existence. Everything we do is either right or wrong, loving or hateful, healing or hurting. I think there's only one true way 'out' and that's to embrace these lessons and apply them to ourselves. It doesn't matter what ideology you grew up with or believe, all that matters is that you don't get out of this until you learn something. I think this fits with Christianity just fine, as well, and perhaps the reason we're eating up so much heaven and hell 'smashing' in our entertainment is because we feel like we are literally turning our lives into our own hells and we're all trying to figure out how and what to do with that.
All of us. Rich, poor, super wealthy behind the curtains... Yes, I'm speaking to you, too. Even they have bosses, I'll bet. And turning it all into a mythos to tame the proles and using marionettes to pull the social strings is only a distraction for you too, because we. all. die. You're not winning the game.
I'm loving that my flying dreams are coming back. I really enjoyed that dream.
Evening. Bored and not feeling very well. Stayed off medias most of the day, but when I got back on it's other people bored and not feeling very well. That's understandable and I empathize, but I'm barely functioning and not good for anyone right now. Went back to minecraft. Found 2 jungle temples in a row. In a row, guys. Minecraft loves me and wants me to feel better.
That is the nice one, mostly still intact, even got the loot, which wasn't much. I lit it up for the sake of tourism and left it alone. I'm thinking about going back to the 2nd one to dismantle it. It was broken into without regard to preservation and looted beyond repair, plus it's half flooded. By beyond repair, I mean the powered trigger systems. I may as well just respectfully collect the mossy stones and what's left of the powdered redstone and the empty chests, because it's just someone's shameful leftover trashing on a multiplayer server.
I'm normally into July when my ears fill back up and I start feeling like I'm flying in a helicopter, and then Aug-Sept is a histamine bonanza. It's either starting early (like everything else so far this year) or I'm hosting a gala event for incoming raiders, because it hurts to swallow. I've switched to eating watermelon on minecraft so I won't irritate my throat. Ok, I'm kidding. The jungle I'm in has hundreds of watermelons hidden in the underbrush, easy food.
Lately I'm getting into platform ambiance. I ran across a few fairly spectacular ones high in the sky during some of the longer flying recons, so thought I'd try it. I'm not into the big building thing, but I love the feel of the height. This is sunrise at the edge of the jungle biome looking at the extreme hills, at cloud level.
This is exclusive rooftop dining, and the clouds really do move right through there. When they do, visibility is like thick fog and even disorienting and a little spooky.
Looking across the biomes meeting from the platform rooftop.
Looking out over the tree house. It is really nice in there, one day I'll get more pix or vid on that.
Back at the beach house, our first established building and now where we keep the store, I built straight up from the portal behind the house. First of all, yes, I have fallen and died several times, and yes, it gets your stomach every bit as bad as watching a roller coaster vid, and yes, one of these days I'll be fast enough to F5 while I'm recording to see if I actually splat before I disappear to respawn. In the meantime, here is day and night looking down.
This is my original tree farm right across the river. It's more like a campy vacation hut now, but the mining around there is fabulous.
The rest of the week is pretty busy, out the door 3 days in a row, finishing up the big billing transfer now that paypal is set up, planning out the rest of the summer finances after that, and I need to reassess my work plan. Sherlock filming is kinda wrapping up on the medias and lots of people are on vacations and all I want to do is sleep, but you know how that goes. I got my 6 hours last night so I'm not really complaining, lol.
I swear there must be a million Sherlock fanvids on youtube. I'll never see them all. I really like this one.
Woke up from a dream where I was cranky with a lab tech about some kind of medical testing, but even I could tell my head was a mess (she definitely thought so and was getting very impatient with me) and that I wasn't making sense between partial sedation and trying to logically figure out the odd maze of wassappenin in my head because none of the things I was 'remembering' were correct, so I was busy lining up actual buildings and streets and which doctor might have sent me there with the fake stuff in my dream. I've done this several times lately, like I go into this weird aggressive anti-dream state where I refuse to play along with my own free associating.
Waking up didn't help and I bumped around the house in slo-mo for about 30 minutes before I could get a line of thought straight. I am reeeeeaallyy missing the days where I used to boing out of bed like a Tigger and my brain was super on and 4 a.m. was gogogo time. I hope this isn't becoming my new normal, because the last few weeks have been a bit of a drag getting going in the mornings.
The weird thing is I'm suddenly orienting really well in minecraft, relying less on the grid readout and recognizing landmarks and directions more often. This in turn translates to real time mental mapping skills while I'm driving. For several years I've been dealing with sudden 'drops' in continuity, not remembering which Walmart I was in, even which town (lotta outlying around our metro in this area), sometimes what street I'm driving on, like my internal recognition software blinks out or something. I don't know if you guys ever have problems with an NVidia card suddenly blanking on your monitor and then recovering, it's almost like that in my head, just suddenly 'lose' orientation to time and space around me. Since it's been going on for so many years and no one's ever found anything obviously wrong with my head, no one seems to be worried about it, so I really don't worry either. BUT. Alla sudden, after months of running around and tunneling and flying on my horse, I clicked into spacetime orientation and haven't been needing to check the grid readout so often, and dang if that isn't coinciding with not being so glitchy through my days in general.
Guys, I think I'm rebuilding my brain. And it really could be the beta blocker, like my doctor thought. The experiment continues.
New tech, yay! Funny story. Scott couldn't get internet on his desktop, so I configured the new Netgear X8 on Jawn, and everything was fine until Mr. Bossy was determined to pull the firmware onto his own desktop after he found out from tech support that his wifi card is outdated and killed the internet. SO, he had to hard wire directly into it, and THEN all the internet was back. So we have to hardwire an outdated computer into this awesome new super expensive tech to get wireless tech in our house...
Yeah, let that sink in. I live with Fred Flintstone. We lock horns over control issues. He'll never let me forget the time I crashed a hard drive trying to rip off a song from a wormy scifi site that I could have gotten for 99 cents on itunes, and I'll never let him forget the time he wrecked up all our software with a malware download just because it had a desktop icon that looked like a private detective with a cool hat. Either way, you fly with us, prepare for hard landings, cuz that's how we roll.
I either need to go back to bed or find food, because this coffee isn't doing a thing. Not sure yet if I can handle twitter today, and my psychologist says steering clear of triggers is fine. Baby steps is better than falling off cliffs since I'm on my own. I feel bad, but I just can't go there today.
For those not familiar with Albert Einstein's The World as I See It (scroll down past the intro- there's a lot, the guy was a blogger before his time), this is actually the mindset under which I was raised and why I've struggled with the chess board all my life.
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place. To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.
My dad simplified 'free will' down to 'predestination', and at the time of my car wreck, it ruled his head so strongly that he didn't feel the need to morally support me living through something that should have killed me, because my continued life was obviously God-willed. I've spent the last 30 years swimming through oceans of pain regarding the way God-willed healing took place, at home without any doctors or pain meds.
People who marry into 'old German' families adapt or die. You toughen up. You think your way through your problems, and you blow off whatever gets in your way that isn't 'necessary'.
Jones sifted all that down into one sentence- "Hope is the luxury of those unburdened by fate."
I, simply put, have never been burdened by hope and actually seem to thrive where hopelessness is concerned.
Anyway, if you've never read Einstein's synopsis of life, the universe, and everything, it's worth a read (get a snack, it's kind of long). Personally, I would love to be able to get Einstein's take on the 12 Monkeys (cool recap, big spoiler warning).
We've come a long way since Einstein. Well, my dad hasn't, but I ripped a new timeline and here I am. This links back, but I also wrote about it.
I'm feeling kind of random, so this was a writing prompt. Usually when I'm feeling this random I wind up getting killed by something like that little cube robot down there, because it's so tempting to try to wrest away something as cool as a block of gold. But as soon as I'd go down, at least one of the snakes would poison me during the fight, and the bear and spider would jump in, and who knows what else is lurking behind a tree, and then I'd die and lose my /back to the jungle treehouse because I haven't yet mapped out how to clear out one of my 3 /home options to make a new one. Life is so complicated sometimes...
Hope and fate are just words. There's the whole "no fate but what we make" thing from Terminator (fave), which I agree with because when everything boils down, it's about being obsessed enough with something to make stuff happen differently than it's rolling out.
How badly do you want it? I ask myself this every day, and have since 2012. It's been a living mantra all my life, but I put it into words in my head in 2012. I've talked about how I started making my plan for change in 2008, how I've spent years getting off addictive meds and going through physical therapy and practicing writing for public. All of this has been very hard. How badly do I want it? I wanna eat the world and own it.
I have been seeing myself as a timeline changer, a history changer for many years, ever since I learned to look differently at raising a stepchild and accidentally being right on time to save someone's life. If I'd died in that wreck, I wouldn't have been here to change those things. If my mom had carried her first child to term, I'd never have been born since I was conceived after she lost it and before it would have been born. I have thought of these things for so very long that I can't help believing I'm still here to change more stuff. My purpose is to knock history onto new tracks, to shift timelines, to change the world around me.
We are all doing that, you know. Most people just can't even imagine seeing it like that. This here and now is our opportunity to make things happen, to change what we wish would change, even if it's very hard and takes a long time.
Someone once told me I watch too much TV. That was at a time when I barely saw any TV at all because I was so flat broke that I was walking to work, and I was asking that person for help with a domestic abuse problem. That person, that one sentence, was such powerful motivation for me. I've been pissed ever since. I'm going to change the world.
This is for all the people who've ever gotten in my way, and I have to say, I do love Katarina Jones. It's been nearly a year since I found this Khirk vid. Bless the person who made it, because it really helps my head on the hard days.
