Lately my dreams have been both vivid and interesting, but until this last sleep-time there hasn't really been one where I could remember all three acts in sufficient detail to want to log it.
Dream logging started out as part of my determined quest not to be sideswiped by those parts of myself I don't trust very much. But even as I've become more comfortable in my own skull, I still find it fun and challenging to try and glean useful psychological info from the welter of images. My current theory includes, as things no longer really in dispute, the ideas that a) each "act" is the product of one REM cycle within a given sleeptime, and that b) when a dream is remembered fully, easily and in detail, this means the working problem it represents has come to some sort of useful conclusion. In addition, various in-dream actions and structural elements (light levels, indoor/outdoor environments, eating food or conversing in words) are ones which I've identified as important for study, but for which I haven't settled on a single preferred interpretation as yet. And perhaps most interesting to me are the images which recur across more than one dream over a long period of time, with alterations from one dream to the next. These I am certain represent ideas, beliefs, or aspects of the relationships between myself and the universe which are both important to me and changing as I live my life.
In any case, whatever is going on down there in the depths of the Fiatbrain right now, I rather approve of it.
Act one took place in a large building. The place was well-lit, the decor was sort of gray and white and efficient-functional, and it was crowded with large numbers of people milling about in a desultory fashion or standing in line. I had the impression this activity was a continuous, 24/7 sort of thing, so that whenever one visited the place it would be found in roughly the same state.
The purpose of the building was to enable people to get into one of many, many pocket universes. All these universes were similar, more or less patterned on the same plan. Green fields, a map that stretched far and wide across a kind of fantasy landscape, and a conflict of some kind. I don't remember the nature of the action; there was some sort of fairie kingdom, but one which was unusually densely populated and efficiently regulated by a tiny but singleminded queen. Come to think of it the fairie kingdom had a lot of the social elements of a beehive. At any rate, different versions of this universe had slightly different parameters. There were "soft" versions where everyone was always nice and no one was allowed to put anyone in danger, and there were "difficult" versions where everyone you met would attack you on sight. There were ones where you studied the situation from afar, the whole kingdom spread out like a map, and there were places where your perspective was always first-person. Within each universe there were a kind of portals or gates that you could use, once you'd gotten that kingdom's difficulties more or less under control, to move into other mini-universes.
What took me a bit to figure out, and almost got me lost in the process, was that each pocket universe had its own version of the original building by which one entered in the first place. There were kingdoms within kingdoms, fractal, all the way down, and if one wasn't careful it would be very easy to just hop from one universe to another, similar one, without ever getting anywhere or accomplishing anything different. When I realized this I started poking around the nearest entry building, and found something curious. There were portals or doorways all through the building, of course, but people generally only used those to which they'd been directed by the staff. (Not pictured. The building staff was skipped, meaning not manifest, assumed in the frame of the story--even later in the act, when I interacted with them more or less directly.) I was trying out different doorways to see if I could get directly from one building back to its counterpart in the previous universe. And when I used one of the doorways which allowed me to do this, some of the "troops" I'd assembled in that universe came back out with me into the previous one.
They got clobbered at once--there were guards on the exit, y'see--but this was the first time I'd had anything except myself carry over from one place to another. I was mightily interested. Perhaps, it occured to me, with a sufficiently large force, one could bring something all the way out into the original building and make use of it in the real world! So I waltzed myself back out into the original building to see if I could find a staff member who could explain to me what was going on.
My inquiries (skipped, as I mentioned earlier) resulted in me sitting down across the table from a guy who was clearly an experienced player, who was bemused and somewhat pleased that anyone had figured this out. The room itself didn't have any lights on and so was somewhat dim, but clear daylight came in through a smallish window in one wall, so we could see perfectly well. Even so, beyond a general impression of sharp, laughing eyes, of lean and somewhat grizzled competence, the guy's features were pretty much skipped. He explained that there were a lot more places in the pocket universes than anyone from outside normally visited. Those like himself, who'd been there for a great while and were no longer part outside life, tended to stay in the areas that only they knew about. The crowds who muddled in and out of the building tended to travel only to the pre-programmed destinations, never suspecting there was anywhere else to go. And said crowd, since they didn't put much thought into it and were only there to occupy themselves, made awful gamers. He showed me some kind of roster: people like himself from the "old days" were all off in one category, while the more recent roster of those who'd withdrawn from outside life were mostly at levels where they didn't get much done and eventually faded into the background. Which was bad indeed, because there was something that needed doing, something kind of urgent. Something on which people both inside and out needed to collaborate, and this crop of newbies didn't have their head in the game at all, and weren't likely to be very much help.
Act two began as I pondered this, and I went out by the main building entrance. There was a revolving door through which the crowd of people pushed their way in and out. And as I looked at them more closely through the glass of the door I saw what the guy had been talking about. Old, young, male, female, all races, all styles of dress--they all had a bored, defeated look to them. Most were obese, slumped into themselves, distracted by various electronic devices whose cords led back into their purses and satchels, or some combination of all these. Small wonder, I thought, that when they get inside they don't do much of anything, if that's what they're like out here.
Then I was on a bus, talking to someone about--of all things!--Scientology. The bus didn't have any other occupants; the day visible through the windows was clear, blue-skied, with diffuse early afternoon light. My conversation partner was one of those dream-people with an entirely skipped apprearance, so I'll use the plural instead of a gendered singular noun. They were standing up and holding on to the straps, as I was, but beyond that I've no idea what they looked like. The bus drove past a large, shiny building. Not quite a skyscraper, as it wasn't that tall and stood pretty much on its own, but with that windows-everywhere look I associate with skyscrapers. We were saying how pointless it was for them to have such a pretty building, when what they actually did in it was so unbelievably dumb. My conversation partner said something sarcastic about some similarity between Scientology and Christianity. I laughed, shook my head, and said something about how it had been a fun challenge at first to get myself into the Scientology organization and move up through the levels, all while resisting their attempts to brainwash me. "But I've been all through it, like, three times in two months," I continued, thinking to myself that this was a slight exaggeration--it was more like three times in three or four months, "and I'm so bored!"
Act three started with a clean scene shift; how I got off the bus etc. was entirely skipped. I was Ice Cube--the young Ice Cube, the way he looks in the movie Friday. There was a woman walking next to me who resembled both of the ladies in that movie who were not attractive as current or prospective girlfriends. She had the body and demeanor of the shallow, jealous one at the beginning, the face and bad fake hair of the one at the end, and a voice that didn't belong to either one of them. She was leading a young boy-child by the hand. I got the impression she was a caseworker of some kind who'd been sent to interview me, and I needed to make a good impression, or at least not antagonize her.
We were walking down an alleyway--an outdoor scene, but with indoor-quality light. The alley was paved in red brick cobblestones. One side was a wall, along which there was some kind of couch. The other side was bordered by a very tall chain-link fence. The section of the alley down which we walked was sort of the middle of the alley; off at either end of the chain-link fence I got the suggestion of other buildings. On the other side of the fence was something like a vacant lot, overgrown with scrubby weeds and volunteer trees which had pushed their way up through the rubble. And in the vacant lot there were baby elephants and fledgling or juvenile crows. Some of the crows were small and looked new-hatched. One was molting, playfully pulling sloughed down out of its chest feathers, which floated away like dandelion fluff. Another looked more mature than the rest, its feathers sleek and shiny; it stood shoulder-high to the baby elephants, and seemed somehow very solid.
The woman turned to me and started asking me pointed questions. As we spoke, she let go of the boy-child's hand, and he drifted over towards the far end of the fence, not to be seen again in the dream. Her questions concerned Pearl's upcoming missions trip to Africa, a dream event which we both knew about, and which was going to happen very soon. We said Africa, in conversation, but the mental picture I got was of one of those pocket universes from act one--one of the interesting, out-of-the-way ones. I said, "At first I was opposed to the idea, but as I've thought it through I've become reconciled to the trip." I began to list some reasons. "One, when she's in Africa, she can get her mind settled, because people she knows here won't be around to mess with it. Two, it's a great opportunity to travel and study in a foreign country, an opportunity that she's getting for free but that otherwise a person would have to pay a lot of money for. And three--"
As I'd been speaking, the woman had moved closer and closer to me. She'd put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the couch. And just as I was about to get to point three, she got on top of me, straddling me, and started to grind her crotch against mine. We were both wearing jeans, but I was baffled and highly offended, and even through the clothing the heat of her body was very disturbing. I took hold of her upper arms, shifted my body weight under her, and with as little force as possible--since I didn't want to hurt or seriously offend her--shoved her off of me onto the cobblestones and sat up. "What are you doing?" I demanded. "I don't want to do this!" She stood up with a look of irritation, and asked why I stopped answering her questions. I took a deep breath, found my train of thought, and prepared to start speaking. All of a sudden she was on top of me again, smiling and perfectly pleased about it, as though she'd convinced me after all. I shoved her off again, a little more vehemently, and shouted, "I told you already, I don't want this!"
Then without changing location or any sense of movement, the structure of the landscape shifted radically. The cobbles of the alley and the weed-strewn rubble of the parking lot combined into one surface, like a screen or a piece of paper. Myself, the woman and the couch were gone. The crows and elephants were still themselves, but they were also items on a list, with little radio buttons next to them like on a computerized multiple-choice test. Many of the elephants were sick, and had slumped forward, their foreheads resting on the ground. I rushed around briefly pushing them back up onto their feet, because if they were too sick to stand, their buttons on the list wouldn't work. I looked over the list again; it was a puzzle or test, and there was a definite time limit. I figured out how to solve the puzzle pretty quickly, and selected the right buttons and entered the right answers next to the list items. But in order to submit my answer and send it, somewhere in the list there was hidden a big red button, which would calculate and send what I had entered. If I wanted my answer to count I had to find it before the time limit expired.
I ran through all the puzzle parameters again and again, trying with increasing frustration to figure out where the big red button was.
Then I woke up.
*****
Some preliminary notes, now that I've had the day to think on it.
Notes on act one.
Act ones tend to talk about the general theme or the background for the material presented in the dream as a whole.
The pocket-universes and their many fractal interconnections seem to represent how I view the world of ideas, and if you will, the invisible or spiritual side of reality. That images and social memes from computer games I love played a large part in the construction of this image tells a lot about my attitude. In other words, the way I approach invisible stuff, or towards imagination and creativity in general, is very similar to my attitude towards games. I like things that are long-drawn out, have lots of detail and plot, and can be played in many different ways. I like things that have lots of interconnectivity. And when I enter into a game map or a symbol set or a system of beliefs, I do so primarily with the attitude of an explorer rather than a conqueror, even when (like some of the universes in the dream) the scenario seems specifically designed for conquest. If, as often happens when I play Heroes, I have to start a thing all over from the beginning because I missed some small but crucial step, I will do so happily. (After a few token grumbles, of course, which are mostly for show and for the fun of hearing myself make noise.) If, as happened in the dream, I discover an apparent loophole or shortcut, I will investigate it thoroughly before attempting to take advantage of it.
More and more I've been coming to the belief that magic / spiritual stuff / the invisible stuff side of personality construction is all about relationships. As I become better at having real relationships with real people, I will become better at having (possibly) imaginary relationships with (mostly) invisible people. If I am a good friend, I will be a good invisible friend. So, for example, I'm now even more confident that joining my local in-person Dungeons & Dragons group is probably an excellent thing for my continued spiritual development. Be a better gamer, get a better handle on getting my internal mental house in order.
Notes on act two.
Act twos tend to be statements of a specific problem or conflict.
A vehicle, moving, tends to be a symbol of people acting towards a particular goal or purpose in life.
A building tends to represent a long-term personality structure.
One of my rules of thumb about dreams is "there is only one character in a dream." Namely, the dreamer.
Thus me on a bus conversing with an undifferentiated dream-person is me taking a good hard look at a purposeful, goal driven activity in my life. My guess is, the undifferentiated dream-person is coming from the perspective of things that I haven't thought through yet, while my own perspective obviously represents the things that I have thought through and of which I am aware.
Conscious-me talks about Scientology--a so-called "religion" which exploits people and which I find loathsome and laughable. Unconscious-me mentions some connection between this and Christianity. The thing prompting the discussion is a pretty building we see out the bus window. The building looks perfectly nice, but the things happening in it are perfectly stupid. Conscious me says building equals Scientology. Unconscious me says Scientology has something to do with Christianity.
I think what Lassie--er, I mean, unconscious me is trying to tell me here is that those things I dislike about Christianity have to do with the "building." That is, the psychological structures of belief and perception, the mental frameworks for action built by its practitioners. Some of the structures themselves are even quite nice, but the ways in which those structures are used are objectionable and don't do justice to the potential of the structure. The point here is that those aspects of the culture and psychological attitudes of Christianity I don't like are the ones which remind me of Scientology. And it is those things--according to dream-me's comment and silent aside--that I've been through backwards and forwards, if not perhaps as thoroughly as I'd like to think. And with which I'm profoundly bored.
Notes on act three.
Act threes tend to be either the conclusion of a process described in an earlier act, or a pointed suggestion for a further action that should be taken on a previously introduced subject.
Crows are a significant repeating symbol for me. Although this is only the second time they've appeared, making them a relatively new symbol, and unfortunately I didn't log the first one here.
All the location indicators tell me that this action scene is taking place in a part of my mind on which I haven't done a lot of work lately, but which is very important for my personal development. Alleyway = off the beaten path in terms of the channels of conscious thought. (But the cobbles and the "neighborhood feel" make a place where I'm at home and very comfortable.) Vacant lot means an area of my mind where I haven't developed a settled structure--actually quite a positive thing. I have very fond associations with vacant lots with weeds growing up through the rubble. And even though it was an out-of-the-way place it wasn't dirty or grimy at all, just poorly lit and not built up.
I have no idea why my brain chose Ice Cube for my avatar and his unpleasant suitors (suitoresses?) for the antagonist in this scene. Maybe it was just a good match for the emotional dynamics in this scene. Even though I haven't seen that movie in ages! I don't know what the child means. Maybe the lady represents the bad, antagonistic side of the Christian perspective, and the child represents the good, valuable side? That would make sense, especially since he went off in the direction of the vacant lot filled with lovely, lovely animals.
But that little action scene where the other character starts a conversation about one thing, then physically holds me down and tries to jump my bones, is exactly what it feels like to be proselytized. It's a mental image worth holding on to, for those times in life when it comes up. If I ever find myself trying to push my viewpoint onto someone who isn't receptive to it, I will endeavor to think of this dream scene and and control myself. And if I'm on the flip side, I will think of the odious lady with her fake hair and tight jeans and start giggling, instead of feeling dirty and cornered. And I will try to remember that there may be some other, valuable thing which is being momentarily eclipsed by the awkwardness of the situation.
As for the very last bit, where the scene changes into a puzzle--well, I'm puzzled. The puzzle itself bears some resemblance to a pre-employment Excel skills test I'd taken online earlier in the day at the behest of an employment agency. The thing about the "big red button" is probably drawn from my frustration with a fiddly bit of new Kingdom of Loathing game content in the Itznotyezitz Mine. (The mastery of said new content is fortunately not necessary to beat the game. Just part of one of those exasperting sidequests.) Something to do with an extremely complicated machine, calculating numbers in base 7, and decoding bizarre dwarven runes.
Is this how I feel about the personality area in which the scene took place? About the issues represented by the scene itself? Or maybe it was just my conscious worries about money and joblessness reasserting themselves as I swam back upwards into consciousness. Who knows.
Things on which everyone can agree
Thanks to Amber I have gotten some good sidebar links of conservatives who (unlike Bill Cooper, who Geds is deconstructing in a more systematic way) are not weird and extreme, I have noticed some things. Namely, that conservatives and liberals tend to pay attention to different news items. This is not surprising, since I imagine our respective providers of news--Fox News for the reds and, somewhat ironically, The Daily Show for the blues--tend to focus primarily on those items which support their chosen ethos.
However, there are some things on which we all seem to agree.
I wish here to make mention of one of those things. Other things will follow in later posts. (Stay on the lookout for post #2: Brainwashing children is bad.)
Thing#1: Rape is bad.
Here is a conservative blogger decrying a recent Playboy article which lists a top 10 conservative female pundits one might wish to "hate f***." Granted, under the right controlled circumstances, given a partner with whom one already has established limits, angry sex can in theory be fun. It offers a way to let aggressive emotions percolate out of the psyche in a constructive and enjoyable fashion. And for those of us who maintain an extremely rigid boundary between fantasy and reality (said rigidity being necessary because the line between fantasy and reality is frequently tested) the concept of "hate f***" is not entirely repulsive. Because it is understood to exist only on the fantasy side of that line. In which realm, as in the world of cartoons, all participants are willing, and elements of illusory non-consensuality are said imaginary participants' way of working through their emotional issues.
In short, while such a list might well adorn the personal blog of an individual who presumes a certain level of fantasy-making sophistication in his or her audience, it should MOST CERTAINLY NOT be an article in Playboy magazine. Which is read by impressionable young men, middle-aged men who may not be accustomed to using their critical thinking skills, and curious teenage girls who pilfer pornographic magazines from their neighbors in hopes of seeing someone else's awesome boobies. (Guess which category I have had occasion to fall into.) None of whom should be given the idea that rape is cool. Rape is reprehensible. We can all agree on that.
Here on the other hand is a story about a lesbian who was gang raped shortly after the passage of California's Prop 8. Granted, this act of violence is atypical, the act of extremists who take an ideological position to a weird place way beyond its logical conclusion. However, despite the fact that rape as a "punishment" for homosexuality is both extreme and not sanctioned by any defense-of-hetero-marriage type group, anti-gay hate crime is still pretty friggin common. Your average person who thinks homosexuality is a sin would probably say, "look, if you can't be attracted to the opposite sex, the best thing to do is join a church, pray to God for healing, and be celibate and we will give you lots of love and support!" Yet it is very easy for a person to drift from the idea that homosexual acts are sinful to the idea that people with homosexual desires are inherently wicked and somehow less than human. If a person has in themselves large amounts of bitterness and unchecked aggression, even if they don't otherwise have an animus against gays, gays can become a target of convenience because they represent something "everyone" "knows" is "evil."
So how does a religious group police itself so as to weed out those who take indictment of a sexual orientation as a license to commit violent acts against those who are so oriented? How does an ideological group weed out those of its members who are perfectly willing to dehumanize their conservative opponents to the point where encouragement of rape seems hilarious rather than appalling? Is it as easy (and difficult) as holding ourselves and our siblings-in-metaphorical-arms to a higher standard of discourse?
However, there are some things on which we all seem to agree.
I wish here to make mention of one of those things. Other things will follow in later posts. (Stay on the lookout for post #2: Brainwashing children is bad.)
Thing#1: Rape is bad.
Here is a conservative blogger decrying a recent Playboy article which lists a top 10 conservative female pundits one might wish to "hate f***." Granted, under the right controlled circumstances, given a partner with whom one already has established limits, angry sex can in theory be fun. It offers a way to let aggressive emotions percolate out of the psyche in a constructive and enjoyable fashion. And for those of us who maintain an extremely rigid boundary between fantasy and reality (said rigidity being necessary because the line between fantasy and reality is frequently tested) the concept of "hate f***" is not entirely repulsive. Because it is understood to exist only on the fantasy side of that line. In which realm, as in the world of cartoons, all participants are willing, and elements of illusory non-consensuality are said imaginary participants' way of working through their emotional issues.
In short, while such a list might well adorn the personal blog of an individual who presumes a certain level of fantasy-making sophistication in his or her audience, it should MOST CERTAINLY NOT be an article in Playboy magazine. Which is read by impressionable young men, middle-aged men who may not be accustomed to using their critical thinking skills, and curious teenage girls who pilfer pornographic magazines from their neighbors in hopes of seeing someone else's awesome boobies. (Guess which category I have had occasion to fall into.) None of whom should be given the idea that rape is cool. Rape is reprehensible. We can all agree on that.
Here on the other hand is a story about a lesbian who was gang raped shortly after the passage of California's Prop 8. Granted, this act of violence is atypical, the act of extremists who take an ideological position to a weird place way beyond its logical conclusion. However, despite the fact that rape as a "punishment" for homosexuality is both extreme and not sanctioned by any defense-of-hetero-marriage type group, anti-gay hate crime is still pretty friggin common. Your average person who thinks homosexuality is a sin would probably say, "look, if you can't be attracted to the opposite sex, the best thing to do is join a church, pray to God for healing, and be celibate and we will give you lots of love and support!" Yet it is very easy for a person to drift from the idea that homosexual acts are sinful to the idea that people with homosexual desires are inherently wicked and somehow less than human. If a person has in themselves large amounts of bitterness and unchecked aggression, even if they don't otherwise have an animus against gays, gays can become a target of convenience because they represent something "everyone" "knows" is "evil."
So how does a religious group police itself so as to weed out those who take indictment of a sexual orientation as a license to commit violent acts against those who are so oriented? How does an ideological group weed out those of its members who are perfectly willing to dehumanize their conservative opponents to the point where encouragement of rape seems hilarious rather than appalling? Is it as easy (and difficult) as holding ourselves and our siblings-in-metaphorical-arms to a higher standard of discourse?
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 17: Balance
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
~ Tom Stoppard
I just had a lovely and interesting conversation with Amber which touched, among other things, on the subject of balance.
When I changed my blog skin, the lists and links on the right-hand side of the page did not carry over to the new version. So I had to start reconstituting my links from scratch. Naturally, I started with the blogs and sites on my own "follow" list--the things I read regularly. Since this time I was able to figure out how to make it a blog list rather than a mere link list, it now shows the titles of the most recent post on each site. (Though, perhaps due to my poor skills in technomancy, I still haven't figured out how to put up a cool "donate through PayPal" link like the one PersonalFailure has. Ah well. Maybe I'll just create a PayPal store which offers poetry by commission, and circumvent the whole problem.) This caused Amber to notice, and be disturbed by, a thing I had only thought about as a vague worry in the back of my mind: Almost all of my links are liberal, anti-conservative, ex-Christian, or otherwise blue sort of places. Yet in conversation and in real life I strive for a more balanced, "I don't trust anybody" approach, and this seemed to her like a worrisome contradiction. Possibly disingenuous, even.
My own views are more like the t-shirt which reads "fiscally republican, socially democrat, sexually liberal." I like the idea of a flat tax, a percentage of income for all persons, and of laws which permit relatively law-abiding citizens such as myself to own firearms. (Did you know it is illegal to own a handgun in the city of Chicago, but not illegal to own a rifle--for which there are no practice ranges within like 100 miles?) I like the idea of gay marriage being legal, of evolution being standard curriculum in schools, and of marijuana being legal, at least for medical purposes such as the treatment of chemotherapy-related nausea. (Seriously. Nothing else worked for my sweetums at the time. Even the doctors agreed that as long as they didn't officially know about it, it was a great idea.) In fact when it comes to relationships between consenting adults, I like Dad's idea of the relationship contract. Regular hetero marriages, in addition to being legal contracts, could have the sanction of the appropriate religious bodies. However, any other relationship which does not violate other laws could be delineated in a contract and signed by the appropriate parties. Which would include of course gay marriages, but also temporary partnerships, poly groups, Gorean "slave" contracts, open marriages--pretty much every kind and flavor of human relationship. Provided the persons involved are all adults and sign in the presence of an attorney and/or judge, who would hopefully be able to vouch that said adults did not do so under any overt coercion.
But of course there isn't a political platform which perfectly matches my views: we live in a democracy. Not a synchromocracy, in which the whims and opinions of the populace are charted in real time and fluctuate like the weather. Unfortunately one is expected to choose either the red team or the blue team, harp on the flaws of one's opponents, and sheepishly apologize for the foolishness of one's allies. This seems ridiculous to me. I view myself as rising out of a conservative background, even though for the last decade I've been either a nonparticipant or a silent, not entirely comfortable participant. So I take some comfort in reading many blogs with a liberal bias, because they make me feel that maybe I'm not crazy. At least by comparison.
Yet having primarily liberal-leaning blogs in my sidebar does create an inaccurate impression, and is definitely counter to the spirit of what I'm trying to do here. I want my blog to be a place where everyone genuinely feels welcomed and validated, regardless of their views. I want the distinction between thoughtful and asinine to be far, far more important than the distinction between conservative and liberal. With the caveat that everyone should get a chance to be asinine from time to time, so long as they don't become dependent on the habit.
I'm thinking that my sidebar categories will be something like "Good Guys", "Overzealous Partisans", "The Unabashedly Rude", and "Relations and Personal Friends". Y'all know what categories you yourselves will fall into if you are regular readers.
I would like to invite everyone who reads me, though, to give me some links to get me started. Reasonable conservatives and crazy whackjob liberals especially, since given my linklist I will have a slightly easier time finding the converse. (Although You Are Dumb, for example, clearly falls into the Unabashedly Rude category on the liberal side. So perhaps it won't be so hard for me to find crazy whackjob liberals...) My point is, if there's any viewpoint which you think should be represented yet I have failed to adequately acknowledge, please, find an eloquent proponent of same and I will linklist them.
Because here on the internet we are a collective of disembodied voices, bereft of the social cues and visual signals which would normally ameliorate the acid touches of our opinions on one another's brains. My own blog postings of late have been deliberately void of politics and the doings of religious organizations, for the very good reasons that those things are relatively small parts of the average life, and any discussion of them tends to get people's dander up. I am not avoiding the subject because I have no opinions. I am avoiding the subject because, in general, I don't consider my own opinions authoritative enough to be worth starting a fight about, and besides, I have so many other things to talk about which I find interesting and fun.
So please, post me some links, or send them to me if you have my email! Expand my horizons, and thereby help me to expand the horizons of my other alleged readers!
~ Tom Stoppard
I just had a lovely and interesting conversation with Amber which touched, among other things, on the subject of balance.
When I changed my blog skin, the lists and links on the right-hand side of the page did not carry over to the new version. So I had to start reconstituting my links from scratch. Naturally, I started with the blogs and sites on my own "follow" list--the things I read regularly. Since this time I was able to figure out how to make it a blog list rather than a mere link list, it now shows the titles of the most recent post on each site. (Though, perhaps due to my poor skills in technomancy, I still haven't figured out how to put up a cool "donate through PayPal" link like the one PersonalFailure has. Ah well. Maybe I'll just create a PayPal store which offers poetry by commission, and circumvent the whole problem.) This caused Amber to notice, and be disturbed by, a thing I had only thought about as a vague worry in the back of my mind: Almost all of my links are liberal, anti-conservative, ex-Christian, or otherwise blue sort of places. Yet in conversation and in real life I strive for a more balanced, "I don't trust anybody" approach, and this seemed to her like a worrisome contradiction. Possibly disingenuous, even.
My own views are more like the t-shirt which reads "fiscally republican, socially democrat, sexually liberal." I like the idea of a flat tax, a percentage of income for all persons, and of laws which permit relatively law-abiding citizens such as myself to own firearms. (Did you know it is illegal to own a handgun in the city of Chicago, but not illegal to own a rifle--for which there are no practice ranges within like 100 miles?) I like the idea of gay marriage being legal, of evolution being standard curriculum in schools, and of marijuana being legal, at least for medical purposes such as the treatment of chemotherapy-related nausea. (Seriously. Nothing else worked for my sweetums at the time. Even the doctors agreed that as long as they didn't officially know about it, it was a great idea.) In fact when it comes to relationships between consenting adults, I like Dad's idea of the relationship contract. Regular hetero marriages, in addition to being legal contracts, could have the sanction of the appropriate religious bodies. However, any other relationship which does not violate other laws could be delineated in a contract and signed by the appropriate parties. Which would include of course gay marriages, but also temporary partnerships, poly groups, Gorean "slave" contracts, open marriages--pretty much every kind and flavor of human relationship. Provided the persons involved are all adults and sign in the presence of an attorney and/or judge, who would hopefully be able to vouch that said adults did not do so under any overt coercion.
But of course there isn't a political platform which perfectly matches my views: we live in a democracy. Not a synchromocracy, in which the whims and opinions of the populace are charted in real time and fluctuate like the weather. Unfortunately one is expected to choose either the red team or the blue team, harp on the flaws of one's opponents, and sheepishly apologize for the foolishness of one's allies. This seems ridiculous to me. I view myself as rising out of a conservative background, even though for the last decade I've been either a nonparticipant or a silent, not entirely comfortable participant. So I take some comfort in reading many blogs with a liberal bias, because they make me feel that maybe I'm not crazy. At least by comparison.
Yet having primarily liberal-leaning blogs in my sidebar does create an inaccurate impression, and is definitely counter to the spirit of what I'm trying to do here. I want my blog to be a place where everyone genuinely feels welcomed and validated, regardless of their views. I want the distinction between thoughtful and asinine to be far, far more important than the distinction between conservative and liberal. With the caveat that everyone should get a chance to be asinine from time to time, so long as they don't become dependent on the habit.
I'm thinking that my sidebar categories will be something like "Good Guys", "Overzealous Partisans", "The Unabashedly Rude", and "Relations and Personal Friends". Y'all know what categories you yourselves will fall into if you are regular readers.
I would like to invite everyone who reads me, though, to give me some links to get me started. Reasonable conservatives and crazy whackjob liberals especially, since given my linklist I will have a slightly easier time finding the converse. (Although You Are Dumb, for example, clearly falls into the Unabashedly Rude category on the liberal side. So perhaps it won't be so hard for me to find crazy whackjob liberals...) My point is, if there's any viewpoint which you think should be represented yet I have failed to adequately acknowledge, please, find an eloquent proponent of same and I will linklist them.
Because here on the internet we are a collective of disembodied voices, bereft of the social cues and visual signals which would normally ameliorate the acid touches of our opinions on one another's brains. My own blog postings of late have been deliberately void of politics and the doings of religious organizations, for the very good reasons that those things are relatively small parts of the average life, and any discussion of them tends to get people's dander up. I am not avoiding the subject because I have no opinions. I am avoiding the subject because, in general, I don't consider my own opinions authoritative enough to be worth starting a fight about, and besides, I have so many other things to talk about which I find interesting and fun.
So please, post me some links, or send them to me if you have my email! Expand my horizons, and thereby help me to expand the horizons of my other alleged readers!
Musical Monday vol. 11: ALA conference = good times
My internet just came back online today, after having been briefly cut off due to some foolish business about "payment" and a "seriously overdue balance" or some such thing. Pah. Yesterday I took care of that little issue, although it will mean delaying some other, equally important things, but right now I am in far too good a mood to be upset about that.
You see, over the weekend and through tomorrow, I have had a temp job that takes me to the American Library Association's yearly conference at McCormick place. When I first arrived on Saturday, I had no idea what the nature of the assignment would be; I'd assumed it would involve sitting in a booth and attempting to convince librarians to "use this product or service rather than some other, equally useful product or service".
Instead, I get to hand out the free ALA Conference newspaper, which is called "Cognotes." This paper has been the vehicle of ALA news at these conferences for years, so between the fact that the papers are familiar to attendees and the fact that they are free, I have the distinct good fortune to be handing out pieces of literature to people who actually want them and are happy to receive them.
In part because of this, it's a pretty fun job, and has provided me with great amusement. On Saturday, for instance, there was a large robot roaming my designated hallway advertising something or other. I assume, by the quality of its banter, that it was being directed and voiced by remote control, because when I walked up to it and made as if to hand it a newspaper, it got the joke, and rolled around for awhile calling "Paper, paper! Get your paper here!", with me following close on its treads waving a copy of said paper in the air. On Sunday I saw a couple of guys dressed as the Blues Brothers; they were apparently performing that afternoon. Today's newspaper even featured of photo of the winners of the ALA Book Cart Drill Team championship, the Oak Park Library Vikings. If I remember to bring home a copy of yesterday's paper later, I will scan it in and post it, so you can share my joy in having a clear mental picture of Viking librarians riding book carts.
However, the principal cause of my joy in this temp gig has been because I realized Saturday afternoon that there was no reason for me not to sing. So long as I sing as a means of letting people know that I would give them free Cognotes if they wish to have one, I have carte blanche to be a complete ham, and walk around in public showing off my meloodious pipes and my ability to improvise new lyrics to familiar melodies. I can stand at the top of the escalator and serenade people in a mellow fashion. I can walk up and down the hall singing at the top of my lungs. I can stroll past the crowd standing in line waiting for the exhibition hall in the morning and sing to them. As I remarked to one of the security guards, with whom I've had some very pleasant chats, "There are many things I love in this world. Coffee, chocolate, kittens, surprises...but one thing every member of my family dearly loves, is a captive audience."
Here are some of my favorite selections:
To the tune of "Midnight Special":
Come and get your Cognotes
Issue Three today
Get your new free Cognotes
The newspaper of the ALA
To the tune of "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog":
If you haven't got a Cognotes
You got to let me know
If you'd like to have a Cognotes
Come on and let it show
Cognotes will tell you all you need to know
If you don't have a Cognotes
I can help you out
If you would like a Cognotes
Just give me a shout
I'm here to give you free Cognotes
Of that there is no doubt
To the tune of the "Ode to Joy":
Cognotes is a free newspaper
Published by the ALA
If you don't yet have a Cognotes
I'm here to give them away
To the tune of the chorus of "Greensleeves":
Cognotes lets you know what's happening at the ALA conference
Cognotes will keep you informed about all events of consequence
Other tunes included Bridge Over Troubled Waters, the "I hate Flanders" song from the Simpsons, the Simpsons theme, Freebird, D'yer Mak'er, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, The Piña Colada Song, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, What a Wonderful World, the theme from Flipper, and Friends In Low Places. Oh, and Cabaret, but that was mostly for people standing in line at the entrance to the exhibition hall or at Starucks:
What good is standing
Alone in a line
With nothing at all to read?
Come get a free Cognotes, my friends
It might be what you need
At Dave's suggestion, I also did "Bring it on down to Cognotes-ville", a la Justin Timberlake's dancing advertisement sketches on Saturday Night Live.
Late this morning, I found a couple of ladies holding up signs announcing the ALA Members' Meeting. Of course I couldn't let them just stand there and hold up their signs all by themselves--especially since they were right next to my favorite escalator. So I stood next to them and mixed it up a bit by making up combination Cognotes/meeting jingles.
Afterwards, shortly before it was time to leave for the day, one of the sign-holding ladies came up to me, thanked me for helping them out, and told me I was a Twitter celebrity at the conference. Apparently a singing newspaper girl was enough of a novelty that people felt they needed to Tweet about it. Given that this is the first time my life has connected with the existence of Twitter in any way, I am delighted.
All in all, it's been a pretty good few days. I have an interview at another temp agency tomorrow afternoon, and after an interview last Thursday and a drug test Sunday, I anticipate being employed as a cashier at Dominick's by the end of the month. My financial situation is still pretty desperate, but nonetheless, things are looking up in Fiatville.
You see, over the weekend and through tomorrow, I have had a temp job that takes me to the American Library Association's yearly conference at McCormick place. When I first arrived on Saturday, I had no idea what the nature of the assignment would be; I'd assumed it would involve sitting in a booth and attempting to convince librarians to "use this product or service rather than some other, equally useful product or service".
Instead, I get to hand out the free ALA Conference newspaper, which is called "Cognotes." This paper has been the vehicle of ALA news at these conferences for years, so between the fact that the papers are familiar to attendees and the fact that they are free, I have the distinct good fortune to be handing out pieces of literature to people who actually want them and are happy to receive them.
In part because of this, it's a pretty fun job, and has provided me with great amusement. On Saturday, for instance, there was a large robot roaming my designated hallway advertising something or other. I assume, by the quality of its banter, that it was being directed and voiced by remote control, because when I walked up to it and made as if to hand it a newspaper, it got the joke, and rolled around for awhile calling "Paper, paper! Get your paper here!", with me following close on its treads waving a copy of said paper in the air. On Sunday I saw a couple of guys dressed as the Blues Brothers; they were apparently performing that afternoon. Today's newspaper even featured of photo of the winners of the ALA Book Cart Drill Team championship, the Oak Park Library Vikings. If I remember to bring home a copy of yesterday's paper later, I will scan it in and post it, so you can share my joy in having a clear mental picture of Viking librarians riding book carts.
However, the principal cause of my joy in this temp gig has been because I realized Saturday afternoon that there was no reason for me not to sing. So long as I sing as a means of letting people know that I would give them free Cognotes if they wish to have one, I have carte blanche to be a complete ham, and walk around in public showing off my meloodious pipes and my ability to improvise new lyrics to familiar melodies. I can stand at the top of the escalator and serenade people in a mellow fashion. I can walk up and down the hall singing at the top of my lungs. I can stroll past the crowd standing in line waiting for the exhibition hall in the morning and sing to them. As I remarked to one of the security guards, with whom I've had some very pleasant chats, "There are many things I love in this world. Coffee, chocolate, kittens, surprises...but one thing every member of my family dearly loves, is a captive audience."
Here are some of my favorite selections:
To the tune of "Midnight Special":
Come and get your Cognotes
Issue Three today
Get your new free Cognotes
The newspaper of the ALA
To the tune of "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog":
If you haven't got a Cognotes
You got to let me know
If you'd like to have a Cognotes
Come on and let it show
Cognotes will tell you all you need to know
If you don't have a Cognotes
I can help you out
If you would like a Cognotes
Just give me a shout
I'm here to give you free Cognotes
Of that there is no doubt
To the tune of the "Ode to Joy":
Cognotes is a free newspaper
Published by the ALA
If you don't yet have a Cognotes
I'm here to give them away
To the tune of the chorus of "Greensleeves":
Cognotes lets you know what's happening at the ALA conference
Cognotes will keep you informed about all events of consequence
Other tunes included Bridge Over Troubled Waters, the "I hate Flanders" song from the Simpsons, the Simpsons theme, Freebird, D'yer Mak'er, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, The Piña Colada Song, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, What a Wonderful World, the theme from Flipper, and Friends In Low Places. Oh, and Cabaret, but that was mostly for people standing in line at the entrance to the exhibition hall or at Starucks:
What good is standing
Alone in a line
With nothing at all to read?
Come get a free Cognotes, my friends
It might be what you need
At Dave's suggestion, I also did "Bring it on down to Cognotes-ville", a la Justin Timberlake's dancing advertisement sketches on Saturday Night Live.
Late this morning, I found a couple of ladies holding up signs announcing the ALA Members' Meeting. Of course I couldn't let them just stand there and hold up their signs all by themselves--especially since they were right next to my favorite escalator. So I stood next to them and mixed it up a bit by making up combination Cognotes/meeting jingles.
Afterwards, shortly before it was time to leave for the day, one of the sign-holding ladies came up to me, thanked me for helping them out, and told me I was a Twitter celebrity at the conference. Apparently a singing newspaper girl was enough of a novelty that people felt they needed to Tweet about it. Given that this is the first time my life has connected with the existence of Twitter in any way, I am delighted.
All in all, it's been a pretty good few days. I have an interview at another temp agency tomorrow afternoon, and after an interview last Thursday and a drug test Sunday, I anticipate being employed as a cashier at Dominick's by the end of the month. My financial situation is still pretty desperate, but nonetheless, things are looking up in Fiatville.
good bones (the chicken song)
Yay!
First new content in awhile, awhile, oh yes. I don't think the tune to which I originally wrote it will be the permanent one, since that tune is sort of sad and repetitive. And this song, when I look at it, really ought to be a bright and slightly comic song. It is a meditation on the circle of life, specifically the eating and being eaten parts of it. Inspired by my love of using the bones from a cut of meat to make broth for a soup in which the same cut of meat is pincipally featured. Tonight I made stir-fy out of some chicken thighs, but after microwaving the bones & gristle so that they would not rot in the garbage can, I threw the bones away. Thinking it a shame, since as I am fond of saying, I hate to waste good bones.
This song uses a lovely poetic form called the pantoum, in which lines repeat in an alternating pattern. I enjoy pantoums, and find myself writing them over and over, because the form presents a challenge which never seems to fade. I think of it as the creative sublimation of my internal sadomasochistic tendencies. ;) More restriction, within a carefully defined context, makes for greater stimulation.
Here is the song. Slash poem. Whatever.
cook my chicken quickly
wasted some good bones
still feelin' weak and sickly
in no shape to throw stones
wasted some good bones
ground to make me bread
in no shape to throw stones
but I've got to be fed
ground to make me bread
life reaches for the sun
but I've got to be fed
so I take life from someone
life reaches for the sun
I peck, peck, peck the ground
so I take life from someone
too small to make a sound
I peck, peck, peck the ground
still feelin' weak and sickly
too small to make a sound
cook my chicken quickly
First new content in awhile, awhile, oh yes. I don't think the tune to which I originally wrote it will be the permanent one, since that tune is sort of sad and repetitive. And this song, when I look at it, really ought to be a bright and slightly comic song. It is a meditation on the circle of life, specifically the eating and being eaten parts of it. Inspired by my love of using the bones from a cut of meat to make broth for a soup in which the same cut of meat is pincipally featured. Tonight I made stir-fy out of some chicken thighs, but after microwaving the bones & gristle so that they would not rot in the garbage can, I threw the bones away. Thinking it a shame, since as I am fond of saying, I hate to waste good bones.
This song uses a lovely poetic form called the pantoum, in which lines repeat in an alternating pattern. I enjoy pantoums, and find myself writing them over and over, because the form presents a challenge which never seems to fade. I think of it as the creative sublimation of my internal sadomasochistic tendencies. ;) More restriction, within a carefully defined context, makes for greater stimulation.
Here is the song. Slash poem. Whatever.
cook my chicken quickly
wasted some good bones
still feelin' weak and sickly
in no shape to throw stones
wasted some good bones
ground to make me bread
in no shape to throw stones
but I've got to be fed
ground to make me bread
life reaches for the sun
but I've got to be fed
so I take life from someone
life reaches for the sun
I peck, peck, peck the ground
so I take life from someone
too small to make a sound
I peck, peck, peck the ground
still feelin' weak and sickly
too small to make a sound
cook my chicken quickly
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 51: acting lessons
Greetings y'all.
Despite beautiful local fireworks and a trip to Wisconsin to see my newest cousin, Independence Day passed without a post from me. (Although I was able to enjoy KoL's Dependence Day.) But that is okay, because Geds has posted a wonderful and captivating series about the American Civil war called Four Days in July. If you don't feel like scrolling to the bottom, you can start at the first post in the series, here.
I am working on American Idol posts, but have been lethargic and playing tons of Heroes of Might and Magic IV instead of writing stuff. I will post those eventually, in case they will be interesting.
Our local mental health place has experienced massive budget cutbacks--cutbacks with consequences. To wit, they are no longer able to give psychiatric care for free to people without insurance. Namely us. So after meeting some nice intake counselors, generating pages and pages of notes for our files, meeting psychiatrists, and getting on some meds that actually help us, we are now right back where we started.
My last appointment with the psychiatrist happened to fall on the same day the staff got the news of their budget cuts. I had wondered why she handed me enough meds to last me the next six weeks when my next appointment was only in three weeks, but it makes sense now. Nice of her. And since me and Dave are on the same meds, when we start to run low we can pool our resources for maximum duration.
I took the news pretty calmly; meds and counseling are very helpful but not life-threatening if I have to go without. Some of the clinic's other patients are not in the same boat, though. The counselor who brought me up to speed on the budget cutbacks said there'd been one very angry man who stood around in the lobby shouting after he got the news. I imagined a situation he might have been in; homeless, jobless, with a serious set of crossed brain wires. Suddenly told there would be no more help for him. Hell, I'd've been shouting too.
The previous week Dave and I had gone to the nearest Department of Human Services office to apply for welfare. Right off the bat, hearing that I am getting money from unemployment and am not disabled, the lady there told me I would only qualify for food stamps, not cash assistance or medical assistance. Dave might qualify for all three, since he has no income.
But to even apply for food stamps I need written proof of all my expenses, including rent. Which is kind of a problem, since the lease was between Dad and the landlord, and I just kind of kept on paying the rent after Dad died. So I have no written proof of anything from him; I had to call and ask him. Difficult, because even medicated, talking to hearing from, or otherwise dealing with our landlord throws me into a fearful state of mind. He seems like a nice and reasonable guy and has only once mentioned the possibility of us having to move out, despite the fact that I'm now a month and half behind on the rent and have been for some time. However, he'd be within his rights to kick us to the curb whenever he gets fed up, and I know it. I am acutely and fearfully conscious of this fact whenever I see his name on our caller ID. So far, though, I've either been lucky, have subconsciously guessed his schedule, or have developed some minor super power which allows me to only call him at times when I can get his voicemail. Hopefully he will send us a document we can use without getting too irritated.
There are some more hoops we can jump through to try to get state aid, though. The counselor who explained it to me gave me a letter which basically states "This person is in need of psychiatric care", and helped me find a local DHS office nearby which might be more sympathetic. She kind of walked me through some strategies for how to present myself and my case which might help.
First of all, me and Dave shouldn't come as a couple next time--that gives an impression of stability, which while it may be true in an emotional sense, does not translate for us into financial stability. Second, I need to talk about my problems and why I need mental health care in a way that makes me sound like a patient. I tried out some phrasings on her, and she said my natural way of speaking sounds way too much like therapist lingo and would sound coached. So she tried re-stating my issues in more normal-sounding words: "you know, I've been really depressed ever since my father committed suicide, and it's been so hard to find a job." And despite the seriousness of the subject I burst out laughing. She started laughing too. How funny it is, she said, that I'm coaching you on how not to sound coached. I said it was all about image, just like with homeless guys begging for change. I could be a genuine vet with two legs missing, but unless I have a loud voice and a jingling cup with change in it, people aren't gonna give me their money.
So much of everything is about image, is about acting the part so that people will put you into the role you wish to play. Write a resume, write a cover letter, so that you appear to be a consummate professional, eager to work your tail off and capable enough to tackle any task. Apply for public aid, and present yourself as a poor helpless person whose only hope for survival lies in a government program.
Every person has many facets, and though I am a capable (and after months of inactivity, most eager!) employee, I also hover on the brink of eviction, wondering which utility will be cut off first. So yes, all of these things are true. But what matters in any given endeavor is how true they appear to be.
Despite beautiful local fireworks and a trip to Wisconsin to see my newest cousin, Independence Day passed without a post from me. (Although I was able to enjoy KoL's Dependence Day.) But that is okay, because Geds has posted a wonderful and captivating series about the American Civil war called Four Days in July. If you don't feel like scrolling to the bottom, you can start at the first post in the series, here.
I am working on American Idol posts, but have been lethargic and playing tons of Heroes of Might and Magic IV instead of writing stuff. I will post those eventually, in case they will be interesting.
Our local mental health place has experienced massive budget cutbacks--cutbacks with consequences. To wit, they are no longer able to give psychiatric care for free to people without insurance. Namely us. So after meeting some nice intake counselors, generating pages and pages of notes for our files, meeting psychiatrists, and getting on some meds that actually help us, we are now right back where we started.
My last appointment with the psychiatrist happened to fall on the same day the staff got the news of their budget cuts. I had wondered why she handed me enough meds to last me the next six weeks when my next appointment was only in three weeks, but it makes sense now. Nice of her. And since me and Dave are on the same meds, when we start to run low we can pool our resources for maximum duration.
I took the news pretty calmly; meds and counseling are very helpful but not life-threatening if I have to go without. Some of the clinic's other patients are not in the same boat, though. The counselor who brought me up to speed on the budget cutbacks said there'd been one very angry man who stood around in the lobby shouting after he got the news. I imagined a situation he might have been in; homeless, jobless, with a serious set of crossed brain wires. Suddenly told there would be no more help for him. Hell, I'd've been shouting too.
The previous week Dave and I had gone to the nearest Department of Human Services office to apply for welfare. Right off the bat, hearing that I am getting money from unemployment and am not disabled, the lady there told me I would only qualify for food stamps, not cash assistance or medical assistance. Dave might qualify for all three, since he has no income.
But to even apply for food stamps I need written proof of all my expenses, including rent. Which is kind of a problem, since the lease was between Dad and the landlord, and I just kind of kept on paying the rent after Dad died. So I have no written proof of anything from him; I had to call and ask him. Difficult, because even medicated, talking to hearing from, or otherwise dealing with our landlord throws me into a fearful state of mind. He seems like a nice and reasonable guy and has only once mentioned the possibility of us having to move out, despite the fact that I'm now a month and half behind on the rent and have been for some time. However, he'd be within his rights to kick us to the curb whenever he gets fed up, and I know it. I am acutely and fearfully conscious of this fact whenever I see his name on our caller ID. So far, though, I've either been lucky, have subconsciously guessed his schedule, or have developed some minor super power which allows me to only call him at times when I can get his voicemail. Hopefully he will send us a document we can use without getting too irritated.
There are some more hoops we can jump through to try to get state aid, though. The counselor who explained it to me gave me a letter which basically states "This person is in need of psychiatric care", and helped me find a local DHS office nearby which might be more sympathetic. She kind of walked me through some strategies for how to present myself and my case which might help.
First of all, me and Dave shouldn't come as a couple next time--that gives an impression of stability, which while it may be true in an emotional sense, does not translate for us into financial stability. Second, I need to talk about my problems and why I need mental health care in a way that makes me sound like a patient. I tried out some phrasings on her, and she said my natural way of speaking sounds way too much like therapist lingo and would sound coached. So she tried re-stating my issues in more normal-sounding words: "you know, I've been really depressed ever since my father committed suicide, and it's been so hard to find a job." And despite the seriousness of the subject I burst out laughing. She started laughing too. How funny it is, she said, that I'm coaching you on how not to sound coached. I said it was all about image, just like with homeless guys begging for change. I could be a genuine vet with two legs missing, but unless I have a loud voice and a jingling cup with change in it, people aren't gonna give me their money.
So much of everything is about image, is about acting the part so that people will put you into the role you wish to play. Write a resume, write a cover letter, so that you appear to be a consummate professional, eager to work your tail off and capable enough to tackle any task. Apply for public aid, and present yourself as a poor helpless person whose only hope for survival lies in a government program.
Every person has many facets, and though I am a capable (and after months of inactivity, most eager!) employee, I also hover on the brink of eviction, wondering which utility will be cut off first. So yes, all of these things are true. But what matters in any given endeavor is how true they appear to be.
Kingdom of Loathing slime tube sea chanty
I'm backdating this post to the chanty's date of composition, because I realized that I didn't write a single "real" song in the entire month of June. In my defense, June was a month in which many events took place, and indeed, Ravel at the war was a very tough act to follow, songwise. But still, a song a month is about where I'd settled to, production-wise, and it offends my songwriting sensibilities to have less.
This is a pirate chanty with a rollicking little tune. I wrote it from sheer happiness, because the clan of which I am a member, The Rollicking Band of Pirates, has opened its third Slime Tube. This is a special adventuring zone which exists only in clan basements, and I had been saddened by my small amounts of participation in the first two Tubes.
The chanty is intensely spoileriffic and makes absolutely no sense out of context. Nonetheless, it may amuse.
I'm going in to the tube of slime
it's hard to find many words that rhyme
with tube of slime, or the slimy tube
I got beaten up there like a n00b
I'm going to get me some slimy cysts
find all the marbles that I have missed
they rolled right out of my pirate brain
into the depths of a slimy drain
I'm going into the tube of slime
surely I'll have me a lovely time
tickling a uvula hung down low
so that our slime-covered loot will grow
I'm going to get me a slimy hat
so that slime cannot knock me flat
with it perched on my head like a Jughead proud
I'll guzzle bile till I'm good and plowed
I'll venture into the slime tube now
wipe the gunk from my face with a chamois--wow!
basementy deeds, when they're done dirt cheap
with your best mates--arr! tell me, who needs sleep?
This is a pirate chanty with a rollicking little tune. I wrote it from sheer happiness, because the clan of which I am a member, The Rollicking Band of Pirates, has opened its third Slime Tube. This is a special adventuring zone which exists only in clan basements, and I had been saddened by my small amounts of participation in the first two Tubes.
The chanty is intensely spoileriffic and makes absolutely no sense out of context. Nonetheless, it may amuse.
I'm going in to the tube of slime
it's hard to find many words that rhyme
with tube of slime, or the slimy tube
I got beaten up there like a n00b
I'm going to get me some slimy cysts
find all the marbles that I have missed
they rolled right out of my pirate brain
into the depths of a slimy drain
I'm going into the tube of slime
surely I'll have me a lovely time
tickling a uvula hung down low
so that our slime-covered loot will grow
I'm going to get me a slimy hat
so that slime cannot knock me flat
with it perched on my head like a Jughead proud
I'll guzzle bile till I'm good and plowed
I'll venture into the slime tube now
wipe the gunk from my face with a chamois--wow!
basementy deeds, when they're done dirt cheap
with your best mates--arr! tell me, who needs sleep?
some little talk awhile of me and thee
Happy Father's Day, everybody.
Maybe later I'll make a post about Idol registration. It was an interesting and highly surreal experience.
I was awake for about thirty-six hours, and just woke up around midnight. I'll be up all day; Mom and sisters are coming down to visit. We're going to the grocery store, maybe get lunch somewhere. I want to play them the full "dead man" trilogy--but the ghost, dead man's blues, and don't forget. Then I want us all to watch that Dead Man's Gun episode Dad liked, "The Impostor." So good. If you ever see that show on reruns, watch it. It's like a Twilight Zone set in the old west.
To kick off the festivities, Dave and I opened up a bottle of wine from my birth year. It was one of the few mementos I have from Elmer's. It's a Riesling, and all the better for its age. When we drank the first toast, Dave said he finally understood why people are so crazy about wine.
As I always do when I drink wine, I read poetry. Today is my perennial favorite, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Here's a sample to whet your whistle:
XXX
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
XXXI
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate;
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
XXXII
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was--and then no more of Thee and Me.
Maybe later I'll make a post about Idol registration. It was an interesting and highly surreal experience.
I was awake for about thirty-six hours, and just woke up around midnight. I'll be up all day; Mom and sisters are coming down to visit. We're going to the grocery store, maybe get lunch somewhere. I want to play them the full "dead man" trilogy--but the ghost, dead man's blues, and don't forget. Then I want us all to watch that Dead Man's Gun episode Dad liked, "The Impostor." So good. If you ever see that show on reruns, watch it. It's like a Twilight Zone set in the old west.
To kick off the festivities, Dave and I opened up a bottle of wine from my birth year. It was one of the few mementos I have from Elmer's. It's a Riesling, and all the better for its age. When we drank the first toast, Dave said he finally understood why people are so crazy about wine.
As I always do when I drink wine, I read poetry. Today is my perennial favorite, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Here's a sample to whet your whistle:
XXX
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
XXXI
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate;
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
XXXII
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was--and then no more of Thee and Me.
mister fox, what time is it?
What do those women expect? When you sign a contract with Fox, you know you're gonna be betrayed and humiliated.
~Bart Simpson
Ah, so many of the blogs I follow seem to be taking time to look at complex social and political issues. Things larger than themselves. I salute them for it. But as for me and my blog, I will keep it up with the diary entries. Because that's what I need it for right now.
Today's topics: job search, money stuff, psych stuff, and American Idol.
Still applying for jobs over the internet. Not with the same manic intensity as in the first few days, but I've kept it up and hopefully will stay in the habit this time. There's a snag with my state of Illinois applications, though, which may delay my ability to be hired by the state. Apparently when I was filling out my online form, I checked "Yes" for "did you graduate" but "No" for "do you have a degree." This was because of my apparently not-uncommon situation: I've earned enough credit hours to be awarded a degree, but it can't be released to me because of an unpaid institutional loan. The state worker who emailed me said I need to go back and check "No" on both questions. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this means I'll have to wait thirty days to re-apply with the corrected version of my application. Arrrgh. Such are the Catch-22s of modern poverty. Have to get the job to be able to afford to wait long enough to get the job. Have to get the job to pay for the loan to get the degree which will get me the job. Et cetera.
Next week, Dave and I will be heading over the the DHS for our appointment where they determine if, and how much, we can get in terms of welfare and food stamps. Props to Dave for taking the initiative and filling out the online application for us. We should have done this months ago. Apparently none of the aid they give you can be used to pay rent, which is a bummer. Looks like we'll still be going through the apartment to find things to sell. But if I'm not spending my precious, precious unemployment bucks on, say, utility bills and groceries, that leaves more to pay rent. Not enough to catch up, but enough to remain at the same level of behind-ness.
Due to various reasons, the two of us are now on the same meds. I'm finishing up week two; he's working up to a full dose while transitioning off the first one. With pretty much the full dosage in my bloodstream, I'm feeling more like my normal self. And the early side effects have pretty much cleared up, which is good.
On a possibly related note, we've both been having vivid, complex dreams, and I want to write down a couple of mine. I would log them in detail, but they're kind of...obvious. So I'll summarize. There was one where, at the beginning, a sort of evil shadow dog/seal type thing (like a Kingdom of Loathing seal, only in 3D) was standing in front of me, and every time I moved it would sidle forward and bite me. It really hurt. Later, I was wandering around through various buildings. In each one, at some point I'd turn a corner and there'd be a closed metal gate with a shadowy monster behind it. It would scare me, but it'd be behind the gate, so I could keep going. Basically this one is all about how deep down, I'm convinced Bad Things is definitely about to happen, and that fear is repeatedly hurting me and stopping me from moving forward. But on a conscious level I'm able to stop myself from being constantly aware of it.
Then I had one, last sleeptime, where I tried to buy some iced coffee and a chocolate-covered strawberry, but the strawberry (from which the chocolate had somehow fallen off) was super expensive and more than I had in my account. When my debit card was declined, the card reader shredded it. I had to leave the coffee and the strawberry behind, but I kept casting longing looks at the coffee over my shoulder on my way out. Needless to say I made myself coffee as soon as I got up. Yay coffee.
Today and tomorrow are registration for American Idol, and auditions are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Registration and auditions are all being held at the United Center. Which I can see from my apartment. It is literally walking distance. Which is the only distance that I am currently able to afford to go, at least for any non-job-search-related reason.
But my feelings are profoundly mixed. I don't really like or enjoy the show; I just follow along with it while Dave watches it. Which has given me a lot of time to think out all the Boolean algebra in my mind. But I've never really written it down, so here goes.
If I don't get selected for the first round, I have to live with the letdown of having my voice and persona judged unmarketable by four highly famous professionals, and the frustration of having wasted two days of my life standing in lines. That's actually not so bad; I could even work out the self-esteem thing in therapy.
But if I do get selected for the first round, I'd have to go to Hollywood. Since the initial Hollywood rounds, before America gets to vote, are not done live, I have no idea if this would be an immediate trip or something that happens this fall. Either way is really bad. If I leave now, I'm not here looking for a job, applying for welfare, and selling off my stuff to try and catch up on rent. Meaning we'll lose the apartment, and Dave and our families and friends will have to move our stuff and our cat and put it somewhere while I'm off in California singing covers with a bunch of crazy teens. If I leave in the fall, in order to do it I'll have to likely quit a job that I've had for at most a couple of months and that I desperately need to keep. Because, c'mon, what's Fox going to do, pay my rent for me? Give those of my peeps who can leave Chicago an apartment in Hollywood so they can be in my audiences? Not for the friggin' first round.
So, okay. Best case scenario. I get selected for the first round, we somehow in an orderly fashion move everything and everybody out of this apartment and that all works. I make it through group week somehow, and get to the part where America gets to vote. You know what that means? That means being part of the Idol "family." For starters, that means being contractually obligated to show up to any Idol-related event at which they want X-place contestants to show up. Having all the fame and none of the money, if I'm one of the early eliminations. Finishing anywhere in the top ten means having to be in the Idol tour next summer, at minimum. In any case it means losing my anonymity everywhere except on the internet. And I like anonymity! A lot!
The good part, the only real good part about it, would be getting a recording contract and getting to record my own stuff on somebody else's nickel, with the help of a professional band. Sure, I'd be paying for it by giving away a lot of my privacy, by giving control over the use of my face and voice and big chunks of my time to Fox. But it's not like I'd be taking all that time away from a lucrative career and a house with a mortgage on it and a bunch of babies. Just people I would really, really miss and who would miss me. And I'd be putting my geeky self out on television where, if I make a fool of myself, it'd be a matter of public record. And anyone who knows me knows I have a knack for making a fool of myself.
Those are all my doubts and misgivings. They are rational and valid and all of that stuff.
But as people close to me have pointed out repeatedly, I might as well go and try. If I don't, I'll regret it, and wonder what might have been. So I'm pulling yet another all-nighter--my second of the week!--so I can go stand in line for when registration opens. Probably I'll head over there in a couple of hours. It's been rainy and chilly tonight, so only the die-hards will be out in front of me. Hopefully I'll be awake enough to read all the fine print before I sign anything.
I don't know whether or not I want anybody to wish me luck, even. I just hope that whatever happens, I'll be able to appreciate the irony.
~Bart Simpson
Ah, so many of the blogs I follow seem to be taking time to look at complex social and political issues. Things larger than themselves. I salute them for it. But as for me and my blog, I will keep it up with the diary entries. Because that's what I need it for right now.
Today's topics: job search, money stuff, psych stuff, and American Idol.
Still applying for jobs over the internet. Not with the same manic intensity as in the first few days, but I've kept it up and hopefully will stay in the habit this time. There's a snag with my state of Illinois applications, though, which may delay my ability to be hired by the state. Apparently when I was filling out my online form, I checked "Yes" for "did you graduate" but "No" for "do you have a degree." This was because of my apparently not-uncommon situation: I've earned enough credit hours to be awarded a degree, but it can't be released to me because of an unpaid institutional loan. The state worker who emailed me said I need to go back and check "No" on both questions. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this means I'll have to wait thirty days to re-apply with the corrected version of my application. Arrrgh. Such are the Catch-22s of modern poverty. Have to get the job to be able to afford to wait long enough to get the job. Have to get the job to pay for the loan to get the degree which will get me the job. Et cetera.
Next week, Dave and I will be heading over the the DHS for our appointment where they determine if, and how much, we can get in terms of welfare and food stamps. Props to Dave for taking the initiative and filling out the online application for us. We should have done this months ago. Apparently none of the aid they give you can be used to pay rent, which is a bummer. Looks like we'll still be going through the apartment to find things to sell. But if I'm not spending my precious, precious unemployment bucks on, say, utility bills and groceries, that leaves more to pay rent. Not enough to catch up, but enough to remain at the same level of behind-ness.
Due to various reasons, the two of us are now on the same meds. I'm finishing up week two; he's working up to a full dose while transitioning off the first one. With pretty much the full dosage in my bloodstream, I'm feeling more like my normal self. And the early side effects have pretty much cleared up, which is good.
On a possibly related note, we've both been having vivid, complex dreams, and I want to write down a couple of mine. I would log them in detail, but they're kind of...obvious. So I'll summarize. There was one where, at the beginning, a sort of evil shadow dog/seal type thing (like a Kingdom of Loathing seal, only in 3D) was standing in front of me, and every time I moved it would sidle forward and bite me. It really hurt. Later, I was wandering around through various buildings. In each one, at some point I'd turn a corner and there'd be a closed metal gate with a shadowy monster behind it. It would scare me, but it'd be behind the gate, so I could keep going. Basically this one is all about how deep down, I'm convinced Bad Things is definitely about to happen, and that fear is repeatedly hurting me and stopping me from moving forward. But on a conscious level I'm able to stop myself from being constantly aware of it.
Then I had one, last sleeptime, where I tried to buy some iced coffee and a chocolate-covered strawberry, but the strawberry (from which the chocolate had somehow fallen off) was super expensive and more than I had in my account. When my debit card was declined, the card reader shredded it. I had to leave the coffee and the strawberry behind, but I kept casting longing looks at the coffee over my shoulder on my way out. Needless to say I made myself coffee as soon as I got up. Yay coffee.
Today and tomorrow are registration for American Idol, and auditions are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Registration and auditions are all being held at the United Center. Which I can see from my apartment. It is literally walking distance. Which is the only distance that I am currently able to afford to go, at least for any non-job-search-related reason.
But my feelings are profoundly mixed. I don't really like or enjoy the show; I just follow along with it while Dave watches it. Which has given me a lot of time to think out all the Boolean algebra in my mind. But I've never really written it down, so here goes.
If I don't get selected for the first round, I have to live with the letdown of having my voice and persona judged unmarketable by four highly famous professionals, and the frustration of having wasted two days of my life standing in lines. That's actually not so bad; I could even work out the self-esteem thing in therapy.
But if I do get selected for the first round, I'd have to go to Hollywood. Since the initial Hollywood rounds, before America gets to vote, are not done live, I have no idea if this would be an immediate trip or something that happens this fall. Either way is really bad. If I leave now, I'm not here looking for a job, applying for welfare, and selling off my stuff to try and catch up on rent. Meaning we'll lose the apartment, and Dave and our families and friends will have to move our stuff and our cat and put it somewhere while I'm off in California singing covers with a bunch of crazy teens. If I leave in the fall, in order to do it I'll have to likely quit a job that I've had for at most a couple of months and that I desperately need to keep. Because, c'mon, what's Fox going to do, pay my rent for me? Give those of my peeps who can leave Chicago an apartment in Hollywood so they can be in my audiences? Not for the friggin' first round.
So, okay. Best case scenario. I get selected for the first round, we somehow in an orderly fashion move everything and everybody out of this apartment and that all works. I make it through group week somehow, and get to the part where America gets to vote. You know what that means? That means being part of the Idol "family." For starters, that means being contractually obligated to show up to any Idol-related event at which they want X-place contestants to show up. Having all the fame and none of the money, if I'm one of the early eliminations. Finishing anywhere in the top ten means having to be in the Idol tour next summer, at minimum. In any case it means losing my anonymity everywhere except on the internet. And I like anonymity! A lot!
The good part, the only real good part about it, would be getting a recording contract and getting to record my own stuff on somebody else's nickel, with the help of a professional band. Sure, I'd be paying for it by giving away a lot of my privacy, by giving control over the use of my face and voice and big chunks of my time to Fox. But it's not like I'd be taking all that time away from a lucrative career and a house with a mortgage on it and a bunch of babies. Just people I would really, really miss and who would miss me. And I'd be putting my geeky self out on television where, if I make a fool of myself, it'd be a matter of public record. And anyone who knows me knows I have a knack for making a fool of myself.
Those are all my doubts and misgivings. They are rational and valid and all of that stuff.
But as people close to me have pointed out repeatedly, I might as well go and try. If I don't, I'll regret it, and wonder what might have been. So I'm pulling yet another all-nighter--my second of the week!--so I can go stand in line for when registration opens. Probably I'll head over there in a couple of hours. It's been rainy and chilly tonight, so only the die-hards will be out in front of me. Hopefully I'll be awake enough to read all the fine print before I sign anything.
I don't know whether or not I want anybody to wish me luck, even. I just hope that whatever happens, I'll be able to appreciate the irony.
Futility Friday vol. 5: This post is not about sports
Job search update.
I've now taken 3 civil service exams, and gotten As on them. Next week I shall go back to the Thompson Center and take more. I've also started applying for things online again, partially filled out (but did not hand in) applications for local Starbucks' and greasy spoon, and today completely overhauled my resume. It is now much more detailed and hopefully enticing to recruiters. Intellectually I think I should be fuming, as Local H put it:
"you wanna jerk me around
with my resume around my neck?"
However, I know it's largely my own hole that I dug, by spending all those months in what was, but did not always feel like, a depressive funk. Hedonism in the microcosm can mask big-picture problems. I think the decision to get therapy, on the one hand, and the decision to get medicated on the other, were a my way of giving myself a wake-up call.
When the shrink gave me my meds she said the standard warning: short-term studies have found that all antidepressants may increase the risk of suicide. And I said, ah yes, I've read about these studies. (Looked around on Curator's blog for a bit, but couldn't find the link I was thinking of. If I come across it later I'll update the post!) Essentially, sometimes a person has been so depressed for so long that they are committed to the idea of killing themselves, but are so paralyzed by their depression that they can't summon up the will to act on their intent. So such a person gets meds, feels the temporary relief of their lethargy, and finds themselves finally able to do it. It's a sad thought, wondering how many people in that situation might have experienced even greater relief, changed their minds, and decided to go on living, if they'd waited awhile longer.
I was really glad I'd had occasion to remember the idea, however. Maybe it's placebo effect, maybe my system's just really sensitive to new chemicals--I'm not sure. Maybe it was the phone conversation I had with my landlord on Tuesday. In any event, three things have been happening over the past couple of days:
1. My stomach is all acid-refluxy like it hasn't been since high school. (A side effect of which I was advised.)
2. Falling asleep is noticeably less easy. (Another expected side effect.)
3. I feel completely terrified about my job and money situation. Filled with panic. Like I haven't been since high school.
Then, instead of going into the old panic feedback loop--panicking about panicking about panicking--I remembered the above sad factoid. And I thought, "Aha! This is the feeling the depression was preventing me from feeling!" Knowing what it was did not automatically make it fixed, of course.
But it did give me a starting point from which to figure out what I could do about it. Panic does two things: it revs up and it paralyzes. The useful and the destructive aspects of fear, both at the same time. Way I see it, the important thing is to find some way to deal with the emotional paralysis so that all that spicy fear energy can be put to use.
To the extent I'm able to accomplish this, every time I start to worry, I do something. Something constructive. If I do enough of those things, not only will it get easier to make the response into a habit, it might eventually resolve some of the problems that are making me scared in the first place.
Now here are a couple of fun quotes!
' Roose still tries to pray every day. He says the act of prayer changes him, referring to the writings of Christian author Oswald Chambers."He said that it's not so much that prayer changes things as that prayer changes me — and then I change things[.]" '
--Undercover at an Evangelical University, an interview with author Kevin Roose (thanks to kisekileia for the link!)
' Even a slight ability to change oneself is more valuable than any power over the external universe. '
--Liber MMM, Peter Carroll
(And a postscript. Thanks to a very cool friend of Paula's who's a whiz at tinkering with computers, I has the laptop back. Though he recommended some steps to get the keyboard back to 100%, I haven't yet taken them. All this to say, this entire post was written without functioning "n" or "b" keys. Instead, I copied "nb", and whenever I need one of those two letters, I hit ctrl-v and erase the one I'm not using. I'm not sure why I felt the need to explain this to you; it was kind of a dumb thing to do. Especially since Dave's computer, right over there, has a fully functioning keyboard. And "n" is the second most common letter in the English language. I have my suspicions. Stupid bad habits.)
I've now taken 3 civil service exams, and gotten As on them. Next week I shall go back to the Thompson Center and take more. I've also started applying for things online again, partially filled out (but did not hand in) applications for local Starbucks' and greasy spoon, and today completely overhauled my resume. It is now much more detailed and hopefully enticing to recruiters. Intellectually I think I should be fuming, as Local H put it:
"you wanna jerk me around
with my resume around my neck?"
However, I know it's largely my own hole that I dug, by spending all those months in what was, but did not always feel like, a depressive funk. Hedonism in the microcosm can mask big-picture problems. I think the decision to get therapy, on the one hand, and the decision to get medicated on the other, were a my way of giving myself a wake-up call.
When the shrink gave me my meds she said the standard warning: short-term studies have found that all antidepressants may increase the risk of suicide. And I said, ah yes, I've read about these studies. (Looked around on Curator's blog for a bit, but couldn't find the link I was thinking of. If I come across it later I'll update the post!) Essentially, sometimes a person has been so depressed for so long that they are committed to the idea of killing themselves, but are so paralyzed by their depression that they can't summon up the will to act on their intent. So such a person gets meds, feels the temporary relief of their lethargy, and finds themselves finally able to do it. It's a sad thought, wondering how many people in that situation might have experienced even greater relief, changed their minds, and decided to go on living, if they'd waited awhile longer.
I was really glad I'd had occasion to remember the idea, however. Maybe it's placebo effect, maybe my system's just really sensitive to new chemicals--I'm not sure. Maybe it was the phone conversation I had with my landlord on Tuesday. In any event, three things have been happening over the past couple of days:
1. My stomach is all acid-refluxy like it hasn't been since high school. (A side effect of which I was advised.)
2. Falling asleep is noticeably less easy. (Another expected side effect.)
3. I feel completely terrified about my job and money situation. Filled with panic. Like I haven't been since high school.
Then, instead of going into the old panic feedback loop--panicking about panicking about panicking--I remembered the above sad factoid. And I thought, "Aha! This is the feeling the depression was preventing me from feeling!" Knowing what it was did not automatically make it fixed, of course.
But it did give me a starting point from which to figure out what I could do about it. Panic does two things: it revs up and it paralyzes. The useful and the destructive aspects of fear, both at the same time. Way I see it, the important thing is to find some way to deal with the emotional paralysis so that all that spicy fear energy can be put to use.
To the extent I'm able to accomplish this, every time I start to worry, I do something. Something constructive. If I do enough of those things, not only will it get easier to make the response into a habit, it might eventually resolve some of the problems that are making me scared in the first place.
Now here are a couple of fun quotes!
' Roose still tries to pray every day. He says the act of prayer changes him, referring to the writings of Christian author Oswald Chambers."He said that it's not so much that prayer changes things as that prayer changes me — and then I change things[.]" '
--Undercover at an Evangelical University, an interview with author Kevin Roose (thanks to kisekileia for the link!)
' Even a slight ability to change oneself is more valuable than any power over the external universe. '
--Liber MMM, Peter Carroll
(And a postscript. Thanks to a very cool friend of Paula's who's a whiz at tinkering with computers, I has the laptop back. Though he recommended some steps to get the keyboard back to 100%, I haven't yet taken them. All this to say, this entire post was written without functioning "n" or "b" keys. Instead, I copied "nb", and whenever I need one of those two letters, I hit ctrl-v and erase the one I'm not using. I'm not sure why I felt the need to explain this to you; it was kind of a dumb thing to do. Especially since Dave's computer, right over there, has a fully functioning keyboard. And "n" is the second most common letter in the English language. I have my suspicions. Stupid bad habits.)
heads up on a job search tool
Just want to give all my fellow Illinoisians a link Mom sent to me a few weeks back. The lady I talked to on Friday says it's kind of a slow process to actually get a job using this. But it at least lets you apply for a million and one jobs pretty quickly:
Illinois Central Management Services Jobs by Title Index
I was gonna go downtown to the place and take a bunch of tests today, but I'm going to go tomorrow instead. Woke up naturally at eight this morning, which means I got about five hours but am suddenly diurnal. Hooray for being diurnal! By tomorrow I should have settled into the new waketime and won't be as fuzzy-brained.
Illinois Central Management Services Jobs by Title Index
I was gonna go downtown to the place and take a bunch of tests today, but I'm going to go tomorrow instead. Woke up naturally at eight this morning, which means I got about five hours but am suddenly diurnal. Hooray for being diurnal! By tomorrow I should have settled into the new waketime and won't be as fuzzy-brained.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 50: adventures in medicine, with dream log
"I hide behind curtains 'cause I have a fear of being stabbed."
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
Musical Monday vol. 10: two days early! with content! (Lullabye)
I had a marvelous birthday on Friday! Me and Dave went downtown and got, respectively, a library card and a current state ID. Then, in the evening, Mom and sisters came in from the suburbs, bearing good cheer and birthday cards. Also Dave and sisters and I were treated with a ride to and tickets for--courtesy of Mom--the Babes With Blades production of Macbeth, which kicked all kinds of behind. (And front, too, in some of the excellent fight scenes.)
For all that, the thing I'm most excited about from my birthday is the following song. I may have gotten the energy and verve to compose it from my good birthday excitement, but its direct inspiration comes from a much more quotable source. Namely, The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, a book about 20th century classical music:
I resolved to write a poem about it, copied it down in my notebook, even read the passage aloud to everyone in the car on the way back from the play. They agreed it was a very poetic image. But instead, it came out as a song! This is the first thing I've ever written in 6/8 time and I'm pretty excited about it, for that and a number of other reasons. (Little note: the accent on "double" is on the first syllable, and also on the first syllable in "piano." This is to preserve the triplet, and the lines kinda sound weird if you put them in the normal spot. But trust me, it sounds good when sung. Oh, and "generals" is pronounced "gen'rals" so it's only two syllables. Gack, I know, it's cheating. XD So sue me.)
Enough intro. Here's the lyrics! :)
[Ravel at the war (Lullabye)] 5/29/09
the road is staccato and rubble
it rains flame and trouble
bent double I struggle to steer
even far from the front lines
my feet beat double time
down hot empty streets where there's no one to hear
but I'll play you
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
your streets can't weep
but my instrument, instrument, instrument
knows how to cry
the prophets of frenzy
have bombed this town empty
soon generals will send me to where they've moved on
this abandoned château
with its lone piano
wakes something in my soul I was certain was gone
so I'll play you
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
they betrayed you
but I brought you some music
I don't think it knows how to lie
these notes seem so small and pathetic
when tyrranous rhetoric's
backed up by poison and shells
may the fallen sleep sweet
may we always defeat
those who'd burn down the world when it's too soon to tell
don't call it weak
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
the dead can't speak
but my instrument can
and while it's in my hands, so can I
so can I
so can I
For all that, the thing I'm most excited about from my birthday is the following song. I may have gotten the energy and verve to compose it from my good birthday excitement, but its direct inspiration comes from a much more quotable source. Namely, The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, a book about 20th century classical music:
"Maurice Ravel nearly died around the same time. The tiny-framed composer should have been barred from military service, but, enraged by the bombing of Reims, he enlisted as a truck driver. By the spring of 1916 Ravel was deployed just behind the front lines and witnessed the ghastly aftermath of the Battle of Verdun. He often had to weave back and forth on pockmarked roads as shells fell all around him. Once he found himself in an abandoned town on a sunny day, walking through the empty, silent streets. 'I don't believe I will ever experience a more profound or stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror,' he wrote. Another time he entered an abandoned château, found a fine Erard piano, and sat down to play some Chopin." ~ p. 102
I resolved to write a poem about it, copied it down in my notebook, even read the passage aloud to everyone in the car on the way back from the play. They agreed it was a very poetic image. But instead, it came out as a song! This is the first thing I've ever written in 6/8 time and I'm pretty excited about it, for that and a number of other reasons. (Little note: the accent on "double" is on the first syllable, and also on the first syllable in "piano." This is to preserve the triplet, and the lines kinda sound weird if you put them in the normal spot. But trust me, it sounds good when sung. Oh, and "generals" is pronounced "gen'rals" so it's only two syllables. Gack, I know, it's cheating. XD So sue me.)
Enough intro. Here's the lyrics! :)
[Ravel at the war (Lullabye)] 5/29/09
the road is staccato and rubble
it rains flame and trouble
bent double I struggle to steer
even far from the front lines
my feet beat double time
down hot empty streets where there's no one to hear
but I'll play you
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
your streets can't weep
but my instrument, instrument, instrument
knows how to cry
the prophets of frenzy
have bombed this town empty
soon generals will send me to where they've moved on
this abandoned château
with its lone piano
wakes something in my soul I was certain was gone
so I'll play you
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
they betrayed you
but I brought you some music
I don't think it knows how to lie
these notes seem so small and pathetic
when tyrranous rhetoric's
backed up by poison and shells
may the fallen sleep sweet
may we always defeat
those who'd burn down the world when it's too soon to tell
don't call it weak
a lullabye, lullabye, lullabye
the dead can't speak
but my instrument can
and while it's in my hands, so can I
so can I
so can I
A response to Pleiotropy re: homeschooling
This post started out as a comment on Pleiotropy's recent blogpost, The homeschooling trap. However, Blogger apparently doesn't like comments that run longer than 4,096 characters (I think that was the number), so I'm posting it here. Head over to Pleiotropy and read his post if you want some background!
His post is primarily about homeschooling, but one of the main underlying issues is teaching kids creation vs. evolution. I don't feel, myself, that that really ought to be the main issue (information content and quality are two different matters, as I'll get into later in the post) but it's the one where debaters on all sides have the strongest opinions.
I invite comments and discussion! But because this is an issue where people have very strong feelings, and because I (hope I still) have readers who practice what they preach on both of them, there might actually be a discussion. We are all here on the blogosphere because we are intelligent people who a) know how to read and write, and b) like doing both of those things for the fun of them. It is my hope that any discussion that happens here will be fun for everyone involved! If I have unfairly characterized or insulted anybody, please let me know, as this was not my intent.
***
For me the biggest struggle moving from homeschool to school away from home wasn't even the socialization factor. It was the routine. Since my mom was teaching just me, my older sister and my younger sister, that meant that whatever I was learning, I was the only one learning it. And I would study it as long as I needed to do so. Which meant in my case whipping through the reading, vocabulary and history parts and dragging painfully through the math and science parts.
The thing is, my mom did a damn good job of teaching me. Leaving aside for the moment the God-shaped orientation of the curriculum itself, she is a smart lady who taught me how to read and write and spell and do math. And my dad was a smart man who, though he wasn't our primary, everyday educator, encouraged all his daughters to think critically and ask questions and to love the encyclopedia (in the pre-Google era) and the dictionary. My parents read to us. They talked about stuff with us and liked it when we asked questions. Us getting a good education was really important to them.
So for me, for the most part, homeschooling meant I got lots of one-on-one, personal tutoring from my mom. And got used to being able to learn as quickly as I wanted if a subject came easily to me, or stay on a unit or do extra work if I had trouble "getting it". The structured pace of school away from home, having to sit still in a desk instead of doing my homework in my room or on the back porch, not being able to provide 50% of the conversation for every lesson, was even more excruciating than trying to socialize with my peers.
I went to Sunday School. I played with kids on my block. Our homeschooling families group went on field trips together. It isn't like I was totally isolated in a nuclear family bubble with zero outside contact. The transition wasn't from non-socialization to full socialization. It was from one kind of daily routine to another kind of daily routine.
So what if I had to re-learn all that history and science without the pro-Christian bias when I went to high school (or, if you prefer, re-learn it all with the anti-Christian bias)? The material itself was never the problem for me, only the social consequences. I said evolution wasn't true once in freshman biology, because it was what everyone my whole life had always told me. (Except Dad, who secretly believed in evolution, but had stayed pretty vague on the subject when I was younger.) And the result was comparable than the time I said "Who's Kurt Cobain?" Except this time the teacher was exasperated with me, and not just my fellow students.
Cultural indoctrination occurs on many simultaneous levels. Expected common knowledge is only the most superficial of these. Behaviors, values, emotional display levels, taboos, and subtle group-hierarchy signaling methods are much more difficult to learn. All cultures indoctrinate: this is how culture functions. Members of a group learn to share common habits, norms, and social signals so that they may interact with one another with a maximum of understanding and a minimum of stress. This is why transitioning between two different cultures causes "culture shock"--a myrad of things one learned to take for granted must be re-learned and placed in a new context.
Going from a private, Christian school to a public, secular high school is a massive dose of culture shock. Going from being homeschooled to attending a school away from home is a massive disruption of habit and procedure. I do think that having to deal with both of these stressors at once would be terrifying for any young person. If I have a problem with homeschooling, that's it. However, going to high school is inherently terrifying, and I think that many young people probably could deal with the extra changes, given the right emotional support etc. I think it would be very possible for a parent or parents to help cushion the shock for their kids, provided they are in a position to do so.
But I think it is oversimplifying the matter to urge parents not to homeschool because it indoctrinates their children into a culture and belief set in which the parents themselves are heavily invested. THAT IS WHY THEY DO IT. They believe that indoctrination as such is not wrong, so long as it is done in service of what they earnestly believe to be the truth. And as I mentioned earlier, when one is a member of a culture, so a certain extent indoctrination must occur! You believe (and, having deconverted and given the evidence another look, I also believe) that evolution is the way things happened. They don't. They believe evolution is a dangerous lie that makes people more likely to be amoral and unhappy. They don't want their kids to be amoral and unhappy. They are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them from this fate.
And it is not, primarily, access to the information itself that poses a problem, as they see it. It is the attitude towards that information, learned in a cultural context. When a person has an attitude, an opinion, a belief, about an important subject, the attitude they possess is a primary signifier of the group to which they belong.
Saying that homeschoolers are likely to be more ignorant presumes that the parents doing the homeschooling are generally unfit to teach. Some aren't fit to teach--but many are, especially the types of basic information that gradeschoolers need to learn. "Ignorant" in the sense of not having been given access to science texts with evolution in them, I will grant you. In the very narrow sense of not having been provided with otherwise generally available information on a particular subject.
But this ignorance is easy enough to overcome later in life so long as the person is able to read, learn, hear, and speak. Triply so if they have any love of learning. Human beings, however they are raised, have an insatiable curiosity, especially when it comes to forbidden things. And those of us raised inside the evangelical bubble all know perfectly well that vast troves of information were being kept from us "for our own good." To a young person this is fascinating, frustrating and in short, a dare.
(This post is getting the Tuesdays tag because, like other Tuesdays posts, it deals with issues of social structure. The irony of the fact that today is Friday is not lost on me!)
His post is primarily about homeschooling, but one of the main underlying issues is teaching kids creation vs. evolution. I don't feel, myself, that that really ought to be the main issue (information content and quality are two different matters, as I'll get into later in the post) but it's the one where debaters on all sides have the strongest opinions.
I invite comments and discussion! But because this is an issue where people have very strong feelings, and because I (hope I still) have readers who practice what they preach on both of them, there might actually be a discussion. We are all here on the blogosphere because we are intelligent people who a) know how to read and write, and b) like doing both of those things for the fun of them. It is my hope that any discussion that happens here will be fun for everyone involved! If I have unfairly characterized or insulted anybody, please let me know, as this was not my intent.
***
For me the biggest struggle moving from homeschool to school away from home wasn't even the socialization factor. It was the routine. Since my mom was teaching just me, my older sister and my younger sister, that meant that whatever I was learning, I was the only one learning it. And I would study it as long as I needed to do so. Which meant in my case whipping through the reading, vocabulary and history parts and dragging painfully through the math and science parts.
The thing is, my mom did a damn good job of teaching me. Leaving aside for the moment the God-shaped orientation of the curriculum itself, she is a smart lady who taught me how to read and write and spell and do math. And my dad was a smart man who, though he wasn't our primary, everyday educator, encouraged all his daughters to think critically and ask questions and to love the encyclopedia (in the pre-Google era) and the dictionary. My parents read to us. They talked about stuff with us and liked it when we asked questions. Us getting a good education was really important to them.
So for me, for the most part, homeschooling meant I got lots of one-on-one, personal tutoring from my mom. And got used to being able to learn as quickly as I wanted if a subject came easily to me, or stay on a unit or do extra work if I had trouble "getting it". The structured pace of school away from home, having to sit still in a desk instead of doing my homework in my room or on the back porch, not being able to provide 50% of the conversation for every lesson, was even more excruciating than trying to socialize with my peers.
I went to Sunday School. I played with kids on my block. Our homeschooling families group went on field trips together. It isn't like I was totally isolated in a nuclear family bubble with zero outside contact. The transition wasn't from non-socialization to full socialization. It was from one kind of daily routine to another kind of daily routine.
So what if I had to re-learn all that history and science without the pro-Christian bias when I went to high school (or, if you prefer, re-learn it all with the anti-Christian bias)? The material itself was never the problem for me, only the social consequences. I said evolution wasn't true once in freshman biology, because it was what everyone my whole life had always told me. (Except Dad, who secretly believed in evolution, but had stayed pretty vague on the subject when I was younger.) And the result was comparable than the time I said "Who's Kurt Cobain?" Except this time the teacher was exasperated with me, and not just my fellow students.
Cultural indoctrination occurs on many simultaneous levels. Expected common knowledge is only the most superficial of these. Behaviors, values, emotional display levels, taboos, and subtle group-hierarchy signaling methods are much more difficult to learn. All cultures indoctrinate: this is how culture functions. Members of a group learn to share common habits, norms, and social signals so that they may interact with one another with a maximum of understanding and a minimum of stress. This is why transitioning between two different cultures causes "culture shock"--a myrad of things one learned to take for granted must be re-learned and placed in a new context.
Going from a private, Christian school to a public, secular high school is a massive dose of culture shock. Going from being homeschooled to attending a school away from home is a massive disruption of habit and procedure. I do think that having to deal with both of these stressors at once would be terrifying for any young person. If I have a problem with homeschooling, that's it. However, going to high school is inherently terrifying, and I think that many young people probably could deal with the extra changes, given the right emotional support etc. I think it would be very possible for a parent or parents to help cushion the shock for their kids, provided they are in a position to do so.
But I think it is oversimplifying the matter to urge parents not to homeschool because it indoctrinates their children into a culture and belief set in which the parents themselves are heavily invested. THAT IS WHY THEY DO IT. They believe that indoctrination as such is not wrong, so long as it is done in service of what they earnestly believe to be the truth. And as I mentioned earlier, when one is a member of a culture, so a certain extent indoctrination must occur! You believe (and, having deconverted and given the evidence another look, I also believe) that evolution is the way things happened. They don't. They believe evolution is a dangerous lie that makes people more likely to be amoral and unhappy. They don't want their kids to be amoral and unhappy. They are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them from this fate.
And it is not, primarily, access to the information itself that poses a problem, as they see it. It is the attitude towards that information, learned in a cultural context. When a person has an attitude, an opinion, a belief, about an important subject, the attitude they possess is a primary signifier of the group to which they belong.
Saying that homeschoolers are likely to be more ignorant presumes that the parents doing the homeschooling are generally unfit to teach. Some aren't fit to teach--but many are, especially the types of basic information that gradeschoolers need to learn. "Ignorant" in the sense of not having been given access to science texts with evolution in them, I will grant you. In the very narrow sense of not having been provided with otherwise generally available information on a particular subject.
But this ignorance is easy enough to overcome later in life so long as the person is able to read, learn, hear, and speak. Triply so if they have any love of learning. Human beings, however they are raised, have an insatiable curiosity, especially when it comes to forbidden things. And those of us raised inside the evangelical bubble all know perfectly well that vast troves of information were being kept from us "for our own good." To a young person this is fascinating, frustrating and in short, a dare.
(This post is getting the Tuesdays tag because, like other Tuesdays posts, it deals with issues of social structure. The irony of the fact that today is Friday is not lost on me!)
True Story Thursday vol. 7: navigation fail; then, navigation success!
Last Tuesday I attempted to attend an open mic here in the city. The previous week I hadn't gone, due to having a terrible cold. Dave was still extremely sick last week, so I went alone. I thought I remembered the route well enough: take the train thus far, then take the bus to the appropriate street. What I didn't realize was that two completely different buses pull in at that train station, one heading north-south, the other heading east-west. Last Tuesday, I took the wrong one. I rode for several miles, guitar wedged awkwardly between my knees, hopeful but nervous. Increasingly more nervous, as street after street went by and the neighborhoods become less and less recognizable.
When I finally realized I was going the wrong way, I took the same bus back in the opposite direction, thinking that had been the problem. But looking out again at block after block of unfamiliar buildings, I knew somehow I was still going the wrong way. By this time it was about an hour after the event was supposed to have begun, and I gave up. Got off the bus, walked into a local Burger King and got myself some food.
I was so angry with myself I could barely have spoken, if there'd been anyone around to talk to. So I sat at a table in the Burger King and started to write in my Anatomy of Trust notebook, which in a pinch doubles as a "random thoughts" journal if I'm stranded without other sources of blank paper. Part of what I wrote was:
I chose to get fixed on trust and personality because I believe, believe now and believed then, that those were the avenues by which the things I feared arrived at me. [...] I could understand the people well enough to get by. But I knew I'd never be free from the things I feared until I understood the relationships.
And still self-sabotaging after all these years.
What does it mean when I get myself lost?
Only when I'm on the way to do something I really want and which will be really good for me. Only then.
Here I sit in a damn Burger King, miles from the pub, because it seemed my visual memories of having made a bus & train trek there once before were sufficient.
Relationships that scare me?
How about my relationship with me?
Getting around in Chicago is, in fact, a pretty straightforward endeavor. The whole city is laid out on a grid with the occasional diagonal street for ease of navigation. Madison is zero north and south, State is zero east and west, and address numbers increase in every direction as one travels away from those axes. Every major intersection is labeled with the address of each street, and every minor intersection with the names of both streets. The only way you can get lost is by forgetting where you're going, or by not knowing where you are--whether you're north or south, east or west.
The interior of the mind is a little more fluid, though. Any understanding we have of ourselves is framed in the form of a story, a story arc. "First this happened to me; I became like this because of it" or "I did this in that situation, and discovered that this was a part of me." Ursula LeGuin once wrote that the fantasy story reflects the journey into the self; the language of fantasy is the symbolic language understood by the unconscious. There is no grid. There are no streets with numbers, no buses that declare which direction they're going and their ultimate destinations in a soothing recorded voice every time they pull up to a stop. Just a story, with as much exposition and character development as you're able to pack into the limitations of the frame.
After my experience of navigation fail I was pretty upset. I cried on Dave's shoulder a bit when I got home. He hugged me, made me tea, and told me not to be so hard on myself. It was still tough for me to calm down. The navigation fail itself wasn't so bad; all I lost was a few hours of my time, time which could have been much better spent, and the cost of some bus fare. What scared me was the self-sabotage. I've worked hard to break that habit, to re-train all the parts of myself that depended on it. Clearly that work is not finished. But it was frustrating and infuriating to me, because I do feel like I've made a lot of progress. I even have lots of nifty aphorisms and catchphrases to encourage myself when confronted with an unpleasant personality-construction problem. There's that wise saying by the late Douglas Adams, "The more something is designed never to break, the more difficult it is to get at when you need to repair it." Or my personal favorite of the catchphrases I've come up with: "If you feel stupid, it means you just got smarter." That one's my motto.
But what I'm trying to do, in seeking out local open mics, finding opportunities to play my songs in front of new people, is something new for me. The goal is to get out of my existing comfort zone and into the larger world. One small step in a very positive direction. Whatever fearful, pessimistic parts of me are tied into those old bad habits, perceived that this act is the thin edge of a wedge. There's creative work kept secret, and then there's creative work brought to the attention of others. Once I gain the confidence to step out in front of an audience, to make a small little place for myself in my local musical community, who knows where it might end? It's a categorical shift, from singing in my apartment to singing in a local bar. So once the shift is made, once I'm comfortable in front of a small, casual, local audience, whatever hard work and effort is required to get a bigger audience is only a matter of degree. At least, that's the way I perceive it--so by the same measure, that's the way my unconscious fears perceive it.
I had a dream last week that I think bears on this subject. I was standing around on a sidewalk in a dingy neighborhood, part of a group of local people. Some of us smoked cigarettes, others spoke of inconsequential things in low tones. But we were all weighed down by fear: this neighborhood was ruled by some evil, authoritarian government, and anyone even suspected of opposing them would be dealt with severely. So instead of going anywhere or doing anything, we all just stood around hoping nothing bad would happen.
So, in my dream, I got mad. I started smacking myself in the forehead with the flat of my palm, the way you do when you realize you've done something incredibly stupid. The thought wasn't one I "thought out loud" to the point of putting it into words, but I felt as though I was in the wrong place, that this wasn't somewhere I was supposed to be.
After a goodly number of forehead smacks, the scene shifted. I was standing in an upstairs room in a large and run-down building. The walls and ceiling were black, not as though they'd been painted that way, but as though they were stained by years of accumulated soot and grime. Debris was scattered all over the floor. Now, in this part of the dream, I had telekinesis. I could move stuff around just by pointing at it and willing it to move. When I looked up at the ceiling I noticed an enormous rectangular vent shaft, like the kind that's connected to a furnace or fireplace to take out the hot air. But instead of leading outside the building, as other ventilation ducts I've seen always do, it curved around sharply. Just a few feet from the room's single, grimy window, it ended in a grille which pointed right back into the middle of the room. I poked around the inside of the ventilation duct with a little telekinetic force and realized that it was almost completely choked off. I was glad I didn't have to physically put my hand in there to clear it out. Who knows what spiky nasty bits were wedged in there along with the soot and ash? But still, it puzzled me, because even if I managed to clear out the vent shaft--an arduous task even with telekinesis!--it would still be blowing all that hot air and soot and ash right back inside the room.
Later on that week I had an appointment at my local mental health place, and found myself describing this dream to the doctor. (She's not my permanent therapist; I'm still in the intake and evaluation phase. Still, why pass up a perfectly good human sounding board?) And after I'd talked it out, it occured to me: "That's a pretty good image for what I do with my anger. Because I'm not too comfortable expressing or even feeling anger, except towards myself." It's still a problem whose solution I've yet to find.
But having a clear idea what the problem is can be helpful in finding ways to circumvent it, and get good stuff done anyway. Most psychological issues aren't things you can clear up easily or quickly. And while it's true that the mind, like the body, isn't exactly a machine, if you find out something isn't working the way it should, it's nice to know what it is so that you can avoid using it when possible. If your ankle's sprained, you try not to put your full weight on it. And if some part of your motivations are sprained, you try not to lean too hard on your own initiative in that area.
So this Tuesday I went out by myself again. But this time I was a half hour early, and armed with detailed directions. This time, I made it there.
And I had a wonderful time! There was a nice couple there, who'd also come to perform. They lent me a pair of maracas, so I got to accompany everybody who played as a miniature rhythm section. I got invited to two other open mics, and some guy gave me his phone number, saying "we should totally jam sometime." May have been not entirely musical in nature, but hey, at least I made an impression.
One of the open mics to which I was invited was on Thursday, at a small tavern on the south side. Navigation success again! And again someone came up to me and gave me their phone number. Only this time it was a lady, who talked with me for awhile about music and was very encouraging. One of the people from Tuesday night showed up, late in the evening, and I got to introduce him to a couple of the people I'd met. Even though it was my first time at that place, I was already starting to feel at home.
Best of all the guy running the Thursday night open mic came up to me as everyone was getting ready to leave, and told me he'd actually been recording the entire night. He said once he'd gotten a chance to chop up the sound file, he could email me mp3's of the songs I played. Once I get those, I will totally send them to y'all! And/or post them somewhere!
It reminds me of the kind of thing that always happens in fantasy stories.
Step one. Fall into perilous bog. Get covered in yucky mud and almost eaten by crocodile.
Step two. Find way to circumnavigate perilous bog.
Step three. Find hidden ruins which contain treasure.
Step four. Use treasure to buy things. Things you like!
When I finally realized I was going the wrong way, I took the same bus back in the opposite direction, thinking that had been the problem. But looking out again at block after block of unfamiliar buildings, I knew somehow I was still going the wrong way. By this time it was about an hour after the event was supposed to have begun, and I gave up. Got off the bus, walked into a local Burger King and got myself some food.
I was so angry with myself I could barely have spoken, if there'd been anyone around to talk to. So I sat at a table in the Burger King and started to write in my Anatomy of Trust notebook, which in a pinch doubles as a "random thoughts" journal if I'm stranded without other sources of blank paper. Part of what I wrote was:
I chose to get fixed on trust and personality because I believe, believe now and believed then, that those were the avenues by which the things I feared arrived at me. [...] I could understand the people well enough to get by. But I knew I'd never be free from the things I feared until I understood the relationships.
And still self-sabotaging after all these years.
What does it mean when I get myself lost?
Only when I'm on the way to do something I really want and which will be really good for me. Only then.
Here I sit in a damn Burger King, miles from the pub, because it seemed my visual memories of having made a bus & train trek there once before were sufficient.
Relationships that scare me?
How about my relationship with me?
Getting around in Chicago is, in fact, a pretty straightforward endeavor. The whole city is laid out on a grid with the occasional diagonal street for ease of navigation. Madison is zero north and south, State is zero east and west, and address numbers increase in every direction as one travels away from those axes. Every major intersection is labeled with the address of each street, and every minor intersection with the names of both streets. The only way you can get lost is by forgetting where you're going, or by not knowing where you are--whether you're north or south, east or west.
The interior of the mind is a little more fluid, though. Any understanding we have of ourselves is framed in the form of a story, a story arc. "First this happened to me; I became like this because of it" or "I did this in that situation, and discovered that this was a part of me." Ursula LeGuin once wrote that the fantasy story reflects the journey into the self; the language of fantasy is the symbolic language understood by the unconscious. There is no grid. There are no streets with numbers, no buses that declare which direction they're going and their ultimate destinations in a soothing recorded voice every time they pull up to a stop. Just a story, with as much exposition and character development as you're able to pack into the limitations of the frame.
After my experience of navigation fail I was pretty upset. I cried on Dave's shoulder a bit when I got home. He hugged me, made me tea, and told me not to be so hard on myself. It was still tough for me to calm down. The navigation fail itself wasn't so bad; all I lost was a few hours of my time, time which could have been much better spent, and the cost of some bus fare. What scared me was the self-sabotage. I've worked hard to break that habit, to re-train all the parts of myself that depended on it. Clearly that work is not finished. But it was frustrating and infuriating to me, because I do feel like I've made a lot of progress. I even have lots of nifty aphorisms and catchphrases to encourage myself when confronted with an unpleasant personality-construction problem. There's that wise saying by the late Douglas Adams, "The more something is designed never to break, the more difficult it is to get at when you need to repair it." Or my personal favorite of the catchphrases I've come up with: "If you feel stupid, it means you just got smarter." That one's my motto.
But what I'm trying to do, in seeking out local open mics, finding opportunities to play my songs in front of new people, is something new for me. The goal is to get out of my existing comfort zone and into the larger world. One small step in a very positive direction. Whatever fearful, pessimistic parts of me are tied into those old bad habits, perceived that this act is the thin edge of a wedge. There's creative work kept secret, and then there's creative work brought to the attention of others. Once I gain the confidence to step out in front of an audience, to make a small little place for myself in my local musical community, who knows where it might end? It's a categorical shift, from singing in my apartment to singing in a local bar. So once the shift is made, once I'm comfortable in front of a small, casual, local audience, whatever hard work and effort is required to get a bigger audience is only a matter of degree. At least, that's the way I perceive it--so by the same measure, that's the way my unconscious fears perceive it.
I had a dream last week that I think bears on this subject. I was standing around on a sidewalk in a dingy neighborhood, part of a group of local people. Some of us smoked cigarettes, others spoke of inconsequential things in low tones. But we were all weighed down by fear: this neighborhood was ruled by some evil, authoritarian government, and anyone even suspected of opposing them would be dealt with severely. So instead of going anywhere or doing anything, we all just stood around hoping nothing bad would happen.
So, in my dream, I got mad. I started smacking myself in the forehead with the flat of my palm, the way you do when you realize you've done something incredibly stupid. The thought wasn't one I "thought out loud" to the point of putting it into words, but I felt as though I was in the wrong place, that this wasn't somewhere I was supposed to be.
After a goodly number of forehead smacks, the scene shifted. I was standing in an upstairs room in a large and run-down building. The walls and ceiling were black, not as though they'd been painted that way, but as though they were stained by years of accumulated soot and grime. Debris was scattered all over the floor. Now, in this part of the dream, I had telekinesis. I could move stuff around just by pointing at it and willing it to move. When I looked up at the ceiling I noticed an enormous rectangular vent shaft, like the kind that's connected to a furnace or fireplace to take out the hot air. But instead of leading outside the building, as other ventilation ducts I've seen always do, it curved around sharply. Just a few feet from the room's single, grimy window, it ended in a grille which pointed right back into the middle of the room. I poked around the inside of the ventilation duct with a little telekinetic force and realized that it was almost completely choked off. I was glad I didn't have to physically put my hand in there to clear it out. Who knows what spiky nasty bits were wedged in there along with the soot and ash? But still, it puzzled me, because even if I managed to clear out the vent shaft--an arduous task even with telekinesis!--it would still be blowing all that hot air and soot and ash right back inside the room.
Later on that week I had an appointment at my local mental health place, and found myself describing this dream to the doctor. (She's not my permanent therapist; I'm still in the intake and evaluation phase. Still, why pass up a perfectly good human sounding board?) And after I'd talked it out, it occured to me: "That's a pretty good image for what I do with my anger. Because I'm not too comfortable expressing or even feeling anger, except towards myself." It's still a problem whose solution I've yet to find.
But having a clear idea what the problem is can be helpful in finding ways to circumvent it, and get good stuff done anyway. Most psychological issues aren't things you can clear up easily or quickly. And while it's true that the mind, like the body, isn't exactly a machine, if you find out something isn't working the way it should, it's nice to know what it is so that you can avoid using it when possible. If your ankle's sprained, you try not to put your full weight on it. And if some part of your motivations are sprained, you try not to lean too hard on your own initiative in that area.
So this Tuesday I went out by myself again. But this time I was a half hour early, and armed with detailed directions. This time, I made it there.
And I had a wonderful time! There was a nice couple there, who'd also come to perform. They lent me a pair of maracas, so I got to accompany everybody who played as a miniature rhythm section. I got invited to two other open mics, and some guy gave me his phone number, saying "we should totally jam sometime." May have been not entirely musical in nature, but hey, at least I made an impression.
One of the open mics to which I was invited was on Thursday, at a small tavern on the south side. Navigation success again! And again someone came up to me and gave me their phone number. Only this time it was a lady, who talked with me for awhile about music and was very encouraging. One of the people from Tuesday night showed up, late in the evening, and I got to introduce him to a couple of the people I'd met. Even though it was my first time at that place, I was already starting to feel at home.
Best of all the guy running the Thursday night open mic came up to me as everyone was getting ready to leave, and told me he'd actually been recording the entire night. He said once he'd gotten a chance to chop up the sound file, he could email me mp3's of the songs I played. Once I get those, I will totally send them to y'all! And/or post them somewhere!
It reminds me of the kind of thing that always happens in fantasy stories.
Step one. Fall into perilous bog. Get covered in yucky mud and almost eaten by crocodile.
Step two. Find way to circumnavigate perilous bog.
Step three. Find hidden ruins which contain treasure.
Step four. Use treasure to buy things. Things you like!
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