dragons are not shy

One of those bring a sandwich kind of posts.

There is a very big difference between shyness and reticence. I'm not at all shy. I am so obnoxiously forward that I embarrass people. I myself don't embarrass easily because I'm acutely unaware in the first place. (Everyone who knows me in real life is vigorously nodding.)

Reticence is "a lack of willingness or desire to do or accept something" according to Merriam-Webster. If I am reticent about something like joining in a convo or going somewhere with a group, it has a lot more to do with being able to see a long list of disastrous consequences from blown off misunderstandings and me becoming agitated, if not severely pissed (making whatever problems arise much worse since I'm not good at real time feels), and has absolutely nothing to do with anything shyness is automatically connected to. Shyness is about being too aware of peers and an inward difficulty with handling one's own feels about other people's possible feels, maybe even a sort of dread. The only thing I dread is coming to my senses with bloody skin in my mouth. I'll believe I'm simply explaining something and the recipient will feel shredded and never be friends with me again.

Over the last 5 years since I've come back out public, I've been invited to several introvert groups and lumped into the 'shy' thing multiple times, based solely on minimal observations, leaps to conclusions, and shortcut explanations. I know it's difficult for some to understand that jumping to a word like 'shy' as a shortcut for 'extremely reticent about commitment to interaction that I know could turn sour with me as the bad guy' makes me kinda crabby because it automatically denotes a whole slew of behaviorisms not like me at all, but there we go, for lack of better verbiage in a quick way, what the hell, I'm shy. 😠

The truth is that I am a stupid person. Really stupid. And I'm not shy at all about owning this. In fact, I think it's crucial to understanding why I'm NOT shy. My social intelligence quotient (the capability to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments), called an SQ, is so bad that I constantly misinterpret not just social signals, but everything being said in the actual words because typical humans don't use words logically but emotionally. Most people have an inbuilt translator that interprets all the incoming into how one should behave in response. Basically, a bunch of happy bubbly people on a road trip will have gone silent long before they've dropped me off, and I usually won't have a clue why.

As far as I can tell, it begins with me not behaving properly, and they receive the wrong signals from me. If I'm not bubbling along with a bubbly group, they automatically think something is wrong. If I'm being quiet, someone might think I don't like them or I'm not having a good time. If a brave soul tries to interpret FOR ME to the group without having any kind of real clue, I'll become hostile without even realizing it, and I've been told I even scare people, which confused me for years because I've heard this even when I didn't feel angry or raise my voice in any way. I think it's because I can twist blunt truth through emotional guts like a hot knife through butter and completely miss the empathy part while I'm doing it. It usually hits me a few days later and I quietly die in a corner all alone facepalming, because by then it's usually long beyond repair.

This is my point of view on how humans see things. Apologies to the friend I'm using as an example, but it's spot on. A dog can be really cute tilting its head and looking at you funny. Personally, I don't see 'cute' when I look at animals. I grew up with animals and can read them very well. So a person sent me a pic one day of a dog and was all awww, and I was like are you sure the dog is feeling ok? And sure enough, within the hour the dog puked big time. Why I was able to get that from a picture, and a person living with the dog couldn't see it?

If humans can misinterpret a pet, they can certainly misinterpret me. A glance at a person doesn't mean anything unless you really know that person. You cannot tell by looking at someone or by how they're behaving whether they are suffering something inside that you can't see. I worked retail for years, and many people go shopping to relieve stress. You never know when a person is hiding fear of a dental appointment, or sadness and dread about an upcoming funeral, maybe even just lost a baby, and when they snap at you in a check out or return line, you can't assume they are always hateful and mean like that. Well, you can, you can assume all the shallow you want.

Deep down we are all hiding something. When I am surrounded by bubbly people, I don't for one second believe they are happy just because they are bubbly. I don't believe they aren't shy just because they're behaving like they're not. I believe the quickness to judge the outer cover is an automatic defense mechanism that most people don't even realize they are utilizing to justify their own points of view on how they think something in the world around them should be. Many people behave in response to perceived peer pressure, real or imagined, and go along with the bubbly bit because they're supposed to. I don't think most people are even cognizant of this process, stepping into rhythm with others like that. I'm very aware of it because I don't seem to have the wherewithal to get into step in the first place.

I don't pretend well. I don't play 'happy' to an audience very well. I can't keep up the tone, the rhythm, and the banter and still keep up with the convo. That doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the convo. That doesn't mean I'm shy about talking. That only means I have a cognitive disability to juggle all the eggs in a social situation without dropping any. I could care less what someone thinks of this, and it doesn't hurt my feelings at all to be the autie on the fringe, but I cringe when I hear "she's shy". I especially hate when it backfires and full attention turns on me to oh don't be shy we won't hurt you. That has really happened. The irony is how close they come to a tiger claw in the ol' jugular when that happens.

If I quietly sit on the side of a convo, believe me, I am enjoying the people doing the talking. If I weren't, like if I were bored or not interested, I'd be gone really fast. I don't hang in there for chatter I'm not interested in. I actually miss a lot of chatter I *am* interested in because I can't keep up with all that. My incoming pile for 'talking' lasts about an hour, tops. After that, nothing makes sense any more because my real time starts lagging and skipping. When that starts happening, I tend to drop off because it doesn't make sense trying to be polite going drrrdrrr in my brain. That's not a reflection on the people doing the talking at all. That's my brain.

Yes, I do feel like I miss a lot. Yes, sometimes I do wish I could jump in and keep up. Yes, once in awhile I feel a little sorry for myself. But you know what? I have a sweet advantage over a lot of chatty people. I remember what I've audio processed for a very long time. It's like how I can remember something I've seen on twitter years ago and find the timestamp. I said something to someone just this week about such and such, and they'd already forgotten that only 2 days before they'd said such and such, and suddenly it was almost a weird insult coming out of my mouth because they had no context and thought I was being snotty instead of adding to something funny after the fact.

I wouldn't trade that kind of memory for any amount of bubbly happy. I like that I remember the people I listen to, and I like that I can see discomfort behind staying in step with social pressure. The empathy I've learned has come from the outside like this, and sometimes I can tell when someone might need to puke and keeps smiling anyway and no one else ever picks up on it. I may not be able to pretend, and I may not be able to keep up, but I'm human too, and I know there's a lot more underneath words flying over my head and behind cute faces looking at me.

Wild subject change, but one I deal with daily and so I think about this a LOT. Time passes, people forget, I don't feel time passing right, I don't forget...

I'm blocking out a little background chaos at the moment, getting through this in snatches as I can. 2+M views can't be wrong.

the 12 Monkeys viewer perspective

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...

obsessed

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.

12 Pinkys

So I had one of those long, rambly dreams that wound up with me in the back seat with a blanket and ice cream while I drove myself home, only we seemed to be taking the long way because we kept thinking of places we wanted to go and either do things or see someone, and it got dark on us so driving me decided to cut through behind 'town' and we wound up going down a very long steep bumpy dirt road through some dark woods. I wasn't worried at first, but after a few bumps and it being so steep, I grew a little alarmed as I realized that I couldn't see where we were going, even though technically I was driving, because I was in the back seat with a blanket eating ice cream. I decided everything would be ok since I would be seeing what driving me was seeing at some point since it was me, but after a little more thought realized that no, that wouldn't be happening at all, because I had chosen to be in the back seat, and driving me and back seat me were experiencing now at the same time, and I can't and never will see both nows because I won't actually loop around, because driving me isn't from the future and came back or anything, no, driving me is NOW and I chose to be in the back seat instead of driving. There really were two mes.

I got so absorbed in thinking all this out that I didn't realize we'd arrived at the end of the dirt road, which came out behind a convenience store and around into a parking lot by a park, where other people were hanging out, including a fox hunting club on horses (not the foxtrotters, which is in my neck of the States), and one of the young ladies on a horse, all dressed like a rich English rider, had a pet squirrel, which I thought would be awesome to get a pic of for my squirrel gang on twitter while driver me had already gotten out and left the door open and the car kept rolling, and then I was all busy trying to get my phone and unbuckle my seat belt and find the door handle and cranky that I had left the car to roll away like that and now I was going to have to get out because I couldn't just get the pic through the window.

The young lady in real life is someone I've never met but whose name I've heard in passing in recent convo, and I'm pretty sure this whole part of the dream was about my real life somehow because before all that happened, I was musing over a list of names I keep in my head of a string of people who've called me friend over a number of years that I repeat to myself once in awhile, kind of like Arya Stark, but I don't want to kill anyone. Why this particular young lady showed up is beyond me, well it's really not, she's part of the bigger puzzle we all live, and I suspect her place in the puzzle is a conundrum somehow, like a distraction that pops up now on the side of the list of names because she affects that list, but not me personally, unless you count a sort of ripple effect.

I'm not crazy about people I know of in real life showing up in my dreams (really rare) because things that happen in certain types of dreams wind up being true later somehow. It gets a bit eerie, and I'm not the only one in my family that does it, and none of us really talk about it, but it creeps us out. I'm not sure how a young lady in English riding clothes on a horse with a squirrel on her shoulder is going to pan out in real life, but the result in my dream was being frustrated that I jumped out of my vehicle and left me to keep rolling away and then felt tangled up enough to fight to get out of the vehicle. If this is all metaphorical, I'm not looking forward to what the real stuff is when it comes. Whatever the blanket and ice cream and trying to get to my phone were all about pales to me not being in control of another part of myself that doesn't properly operate heavy machinery, but the whole thing looks more like me just going along with something until it goes out of control and then I'm upset with myself.

I've been watching a LOT of 12 Monkeys lately. Coolest thing ever on the webs are time maps, which come in handy for stuff like Doctor Who, but lately I'm trying to wrap my brain around 12 Monkeys. I saw the original movie at least 25 times, and I can see all the ways they're tying subtle details over from the movie into the series. I'm finding it very compatible, and the characters all make sense in the series reboot, applause to excellent skillz by writers who obviously care about homage to original content. In the meantime, here is the 12 Monkeys time map site. It lets you follow every jump in the order they did them in the series, but plots out where all the jumps land on a handy timeline so we can see how the bad craziness of jumbling things out of order affects them all. There's a little button on the bottom right that you have to turn on to activate it, and then you click across from the bottom left starting with episode one to see all the jumps display onto the map. Each jump line has its own notation you can click for more info and will load the jump scene if you want to view it again. Unfortunately, this map covers only the first 13 episodes.

And then I dove into wikis. If you want to see the series timeline listed out, here is a good page. I kept digging and wound up at Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies unravels 12 Monkeys, which covers the movie but not the series. I think there are a few more glitchy areas than this last reviewer noticed, but maybe he didn't watch it 25 times like I did. I wouldn't bring it up except some of you guys know I went a tad crazy over the Continuum time jumping in my Jason Sadler crush, and while some of you are either relieved or frustrated that I don't obsess a whole lot more about time problems, none of you know what I'm actually working on in private, and it's a whopper. I've been obsessed with time all my life, as we can imagine since I wrote time as a self correcting system.

We're watching the characters in 12 Monkeys handle time shifting, time smashing, time looping, time whatever stuff, with the hint that being 'crazy' is what happens when you experience too much time all at once or out of order or whatever. All the characters wind up questioning their level of 'craziness' at some point, how far they'd go with the motivations that haunt them, etc. It's fun to think about, and scary, too. If our real lives could get that tangled up, how crazy would we feel? The Unstuck Pinky

I'm still thinking about going over that list of names in my dream. The list changed. The order changed. I didn't foresee Pinky being my own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oh, well. Need to get on the ball. Physical therapy in about 3 hours, and I need a shower and breakfast and all that stuff.

fighting for our places in history

I saw that vid last night and wanted to hang onto it. It doesn't quite fit the mood, but it fits what I need, I think.

One of those I want to admit defeat weeks. These are really rare. Getting up this morning was hard. It's been hard all week. When I say hard, I don't mean the usual daily grind wearing me down, I don't mean depression, I don't mean life sucks. I mean actually hard. This week has drained me, and the rescue inhaler is the only thing helping me barely hold it together.

As per my usual, I dragged awake, grabbed my phone, checked notifications, and this is my inspiration today. This is a real person, 26, grew up with and still living with a terminal illness. Burying Your Friends and How to Get Around Why it Wasn’t You If you don't have some kind of motivator for your hard mornings, you really need to get one. No platitudes, no moralistic principles, just cold hard truth.

I cried exactly like that one year, except it lasted 7 months. I was about 28, I think, somewhere in there. The year before, I had run into a giant speedbump (a long dusty road, a vision I had during alcohol withdrawal and liver toxicity), and this came hot on its heels a year later. It's not even titled. May 5, 2008 The video code broke during the server move, and if you're on mobile you may have to turn your phone sideways to read it. It's a vision I've never forgotten.

I'm still here. We often think about people who've gone ahead, what the world would be like if they were still here. Well, I'm still here. I haven't left yet. And today, depending on whether plans are still in place, I have two appointments, one with my psychologist and the other with my chiropractor, and then I may be picking up a Bunny, a light in my life I never dreamed possible.

I can do just about anything for my Bunny. I can blow off pain and endure hardship in a way I never could with my own kids. I can step outside of myself and step up far beyond what I could before she came to this earth. Because of a Bunny in my life, I have been able to work harder, be tougher, and smile sweeter. She is here partly because I helped talk her mama through a very hard day where a decision could have been made for her not to be here. I couldn't bear to see another person go through the kind of crying I'd gone through over losing someone who never really existed. The loss is still terribly, horribly real, compounded with the burden of being the one who didn't save that history from being erased. Is it any wonder some people become obsessed with time travel ideas. How do we go back and tell ourselves not to make the biggest mistake of our lives?

This is the first time I've ever connected those two visions together in a time order.

Because I am still here, I can still share. I'm still learning, still surviving, still connecting. I know my lurkers include bruised and very broken souls, and I know how it feels barely hanging on through the long, dark nights and the flat, empty days. Keep hanging on with me. I will keep telling stories and we will keep loving someone, whether in secret or out loud, and when we look back we will say, "I'm so glad I stuck around." Sometimes hanging on is the secret to changing someone else's history. Every day is a big day for Bunny. Time machine achieved.

We were all tiny once. In the big scheme of things, we're all still very tiny. Find your fit, stick around, and be the one who makes the day better for someone. Even if all you do is hold back your own bad day, you changed history. Find your raison d'etre and devote yourself, commit yourself to being that force that stands up to the wolves of time that ravage us.

oddz-n-endz and a jolly good time

click me for lolcat linguistic study

I'm a self-styled amateur linguistics enthusiast. The first time I heard the word 'homophobic' I thought That's me! because I'm not keen on leaving my house. I thought people were talking about other people who preferred holing up in their caves on the webs as opposed to chattering in real life to real faces. I tend to obsessively look up new words now since that one got a little awkward when I used it in a sentence. Out loud. To a real face. People think I'm smart now because I'm getting so good at hiding my dumb first.

My fave thing about the word arachnophobia is that it doesn't force me to spell or speak the word spiders. Unfortunately, it inspires other people to talk about spiders, bomb me with pix of spiders, and even throw spiders on me. That last one is a really good way to find out how fast I can violently break furniture and hate, despise, and loathe someone for life. Me dealing with my arachnophobia is more about dealing head on with facing up to my trepidations about stupid humans than it is about actual spiders. Trust no one.

2nd breksbest, like a Hobbit

We had a Bunny sleepover, which went really smooth this time. I learned yesterday that toddler aged cartoons dealing with photobomb probs are a thing, and that is a good way to eat breakfast, camped in front of the TV on the couch. Scoff all you want, when you have super ADHD kiddo in the house, you bless anyone who creates something that helps them sit still long enough to eat a real meal. We didn't eat in front of the TV growing up, and we didn't do it very often raising our own kids, but I'm all for anything that lowers stress levels and makes hanging out more pleasurable. Good vibes and good memories are important. My memories of grandparents are a bit on the fear factor side.

I rarely sit through TV myself. I know I live tweet sometimes and mention watching this show or that, but you guys don't see me pausing my show constantly to hear something again or start a discussion about it. I'm like a pause button bomber (what else would you call that?), and I'm probably lucky that alone hasn't destroyed my marriage.

Sitting is Killing You Good article. Go read it.

I feel so collegiate in my stripey sock.

~~~~~~~~~

Forgot I even started this. I just finished obsessively going back through fixing time tenses. My favorite time tenses are future perfect

and future progressive.

But what about future perfect past progressive?

Will have done, will be doing, will have been doing. Douglas Adams loved playing around with that. From Restaurant at the End of the Universe-

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be."

I bet you people getting this on a reader instead of the blog really hate it when I use light blue. Some of you guys on mobile are missing the cute little autumn leaves.

I need coffee but I don't want it to be 2 hours old when @bonenado gets up. I guess I could turn the pot off when it's done and he can microwave it. That's gotta be better than old overcooked coffee. Hang on.

Waiting for coffee... This is what you do when you wait for coffee. Click it to see Good Mythical Morning's "4 Real Cases of Time Travel". That's right- it's the bacon guys. You're welcome.

Hufda, little strong. Made it in the dark.

Today is one of those doctor follow up appointments where I hope I get my flu shot so it's done and out of the way. I carry my own latex-free bandaids around ever since I got a big ol' hive underneath one after a flu shot at Walgreens, and that came in handy last year when the nurse at my regular doctor's office discovered they had no latex-free bandaids anywhere. I know, some of you are anti-vaxxers. I grew up like that. I'll never forget my dad going DOWN and then being terribly weak for 6 weeks on a big flu year. Since I've done that with something that wasn't even the flu and then spent months recovering, I don't lightly scoff at anything that is estimated to kill percentages of people.

What You Should Know for the 2015-2016 Influenza Season

Coffee installed, brain calming down, maybe I can get a little nap in before I hafta leave. Yes, you heard me, coffee to calm my brain down. It's a thing. I've had a really big week dealing with stuff on Pinky blog, I'm a nervous wreck going to the doctor even on a good day because years of stuff, and this song has been on constant playback in my head for days. I can tell my anxiety is up because time suddenly started jumping around and I can't seem to fixate back into a right now orientation. But that's ok, I haven't messed up any bills yet.

The Edge of Story

Either time travel exists or angels walk among us. Maybe both. But not the bad kind, like in Doctor Who. I question the evolutionary advantage of long sharp teeth in a race made of stone and 'eats' us by absorbing our energy, so first thing, get Weeping Angels out of your mind. Except you can't now. Dang, I just screwed up my whole post with an entirely erroneous and misleading idea. Hang on. May as well just get it out of our systems. I'll wait while you go check this out. Click the snip there.

Cool, huh? Ok, where were we? Oh, yeah, time travel vs angels among us. I could add to that quantum subconscious awareness of the future, but then you'd wonder why I make so many mistakes, to which I'd answer back some gobbledygook about the light cone of all possible future events, and we'd wind up so far off track that we'd forget the rest and go get another coffee. Which I just did in my cute Halloween mug that I got unbelievably cheap on red tag clearance when I worked at Kohl's. Really miss those perks.

I'm really slipping this week. I'm stuck in a weight loss loop because I keep eating Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and Rice Chex (not together), and I know better. I've been shamefully neglecting facebook and its odd combo of Lexx fans, new baby pix, and various and sundry meltdowns interspersed with pet pix. I haven't checked my JanikaBanks email in over a week, maybe even two. I even declined several calls from my publisher. I blame ISIS, ebola, spiders everywhere, and my neighbor coming back after 6 months of neighborly freedom. My world just shut down and suddenly I'm hitting Amazon for fixes again, because isn't that what we are trained to do in a first world society when we feel overwhelmed.

Oh wait, I was going somewhere with a thought. Time travel exists vs angels walk among us. I was tooling around town and once again just missed being broadsided in an intersection by someone paying absolutely no attention to reality around them, and even though the impact was imminent and mere inches away, I sailed right through that intersection as if it had never been a thing, and I noticed this time (because stuff like this happens every single time I leave the house on my own, it's creepy) that I not only didn't even blink, but had no emotional reaction, not even a Ha, bet that woke somebody up as I am wont to think when envisioning someone else's oh crap moment that makes me chuckle.

Having a vivid memory of being thrown out of a violently flipping vehicle, I am acutely aware of moments in time and how our senses can stretch them out and make them feel weird. I have always been able to do this to a point ever since my childhood, not sure if it has anything to do with Asperger's or synesthesia, but yesterday for some reason seemed inside out. I can't see any way our two vehicles couldn't have passed through each other even on the corners of our headlights or taillights, because it was that close, but we both got through the light unscathed and traffic behind me flowed on like nothing happened.

Things like that make me think about existence as we know it, and what we now call glitches in the Matrix. Great big glitches exist all around us, but even Doctor Who tells us we just ignore them because we don't know what else to do with them. Philosophies have been questioning for centuries what TV shows now take for granted as plot devices. I've been making jokes for years about time inversion and the irony of time traveling, even to the point of questioning the validity of assuming reincarnation moves along in a straight time line on a single planet.

Anyway, that was my trigger for Deeper Thought (remember, we are part of a computer that Deep Thought built to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything), and it hit me yesterday that we generally don't mix time travel with angels. Why? Simplest answer- because angels can't time travel. Why are humans so interested in time travel? As per a much earlier private discussion I prompted on a now deleted facebook, I wonder if 'angels' (in part) might be beings who want something, and humans are the perfect vehicle toward achieving their goal(s) toward that want. And now that a whole TV series is based around that idea, I'm not so crackpot any more to bring it up, am I?

I will pose this, which actually goes back to C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy- the angels that were thrown down to this planet want off, and they will do anything to make this happen. If you like Doctor Who, you'll like this trilogy, very creepy.

Something can fix time, and it's not angels. When we pray for safety (and I've seen this work over and over in astonishing ways), the most you can say, if you don't believe anyone 'out there' is listening, is that we control our realities around us when we are more 'in tune' with our own existences. I'll accept that, but I still don't think individuals have power of themselves, but it comes from somewhere. If you want to believe in the Force, fine, I'll accept that, too. Humans are able to plug into an unseen unknowable Something that sharpens us into more than just bumbling genetic copies. I'll make note here to anyone scoffing about nothing more being 'out there'- you have to work really hard to believe that, especially when death looms. I've been there. I've tried not believing. If you have to remind yourself you don't believe, then deep down you really do believe. Humans can't help this. Whether aliens programmed us to be this way or we evolved it naturally somehow, nearly the entire human race automatically thinks there is something bigger out there out to 'get us' or help us. I'm not going to argue any more about this. It's something we as a race can't seem to switch off. Terry Pratchett would back me up.

Back to my Thought. Something fixes things. Sometimes something unexplainable happens or pops right up in front of us, and we go along forgetting about it. If this weren't a real creepy thing for us, I doubt all the TV shows and movies with this kinda of stuff happening would be so entertaining. I think it's a real thing that cause doesn't necessarily lead to effect, and THAT is what creeps us out. We spend all our lives learning to accept that we really can't be magic and fly, like we assumed when we were small children (where does that assumption come from?), and then weird stuff happens like two cars passing through each other in an intersection and the rest of the day is inside out and upside down because suddenly there is a bit of fuzzy memory in the middle of all that vivid moments stuff.

By the way, Blogger wants me to tell you guys it tried to get me to use 'inexplicable' up there, and I rudely shoved it out of the way. Blogger is a whiny pouty sulky thing today, actually locked up my screen for a couple of minutes. OH, and I just found a word it folded up till I clicked on it. Very clever.

So the question now is- can we trust our memories? Are our memories adjustable to match the game? Because sometimes it feels awfully like we're inside a game system. I said nearly 20 years ago we are like Mario, bouncing off walls that might not even be there, and dang if that idea didn't suddenly burst forth on our big screens.

I think we all know what is going on. We're just afraid to say it.

This whole post is me stalling because I'm in a funk and don't want to GET TO WORK!

This is how I feel reading physics books. For reals. Hawking, Gleick, Kaku- all those boyz get me worked up. I'm so close to turning the corner into the cool stuff now that it's hard to hold back and keep grinding through the mundane scaffolding that got me this far. This song is about taking a cool book home from the library or bookstore, right?