My mood collapsed today. I was at the Flower and Garden Show helping my friend Susan who had a stand there. I took a stroll around the show, and somehow in the middle, I began to loath myself: no one likes me; I'm impossible to get along with; my skills are bad; that kind of thing. I went back to Susan's booth and shared this event with her and the woman in the next booth.
Susan understood immediately. "I hate when that happens." The woman in the next booth seemed very concerned. I guess this never happens to her.
Someone recently sent me a spam email that had a supposedly "real" phone tree for a mental health clinic. "If you are dyslexic, hit 9696969696969696. If you are paranoid, we know you're calling so just wait on the line." etc. The last one, which I can sometimes relate to, was "If you have low self-esteem, our operators are too busy to talk to you." This afternoon was one of those times!
I don't know why I get "Body + Soul" magazine. This months issue had an article on heartbreak by Susan Piver (pg. 90). She found that friends and faith can heal a broken heart, and I agree with her. She cited "a good Buddhist teaching": "When you throw a stick for a dog, he runs after it. But throw a stick for a lion, and he turns around to see who threw it. Now when a strong emotion comes up, I try to act like a lion...."
So, I tried to explain to Susan and her friend that I was suddenly depressed because I ate too much sugar, but they just seemed alarmed. They suggested that maybe I feel sad because I feel sad. I don't think this is ever the case. There's always a reason. I came home and ate a good meal. I feel better now.
Showing posts with label thought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thought. Show all posts
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Nightmare
I'm listening to the Talk of the Nation as I prepare for tonight's hanging at the gallery. The topic is The Anatomy of the Nightmare. The definition of a nightmare is a dream so bad it wakes you up. Sleep labs found that something like 70% of all dreams are negative.
Question everything. What is a dream? What is sleep and how is it different from being awake? Let's accept for a moment that being awake and being asleep are fundamentally the same. That is, they are both mechanisms through which we process our emotions and concerns.
In college, I was briefly involved with Brendan who had a very bad reputation. I didn't care, but I heard the stories from the gossips and speculated on how they correlated with the stories of his life that he told me. I won't go into the details. This is relevant bc one of his speech -isms was to call all kinds of his life experiences "nightmares". I found it aptly descriptive and began using it too.
A nightmare, then, is something that happens (in life) that is so negative it wakes us up. It throws us out of our patterns. It bring us consciousness to our actions and how they relate to our values. My relationship (lowecase "r") with Brendan was not a nightmare; my Relationship with Jared was. I've had a few jobs that were nightmares. I even had a living experience that was a nightmare once.
If 70% of all dreams are negative, dreams so bad you wake up are nightmares, and waking life isn't nearly so negative, maybe a waking "nightmare" isn't necessarily always negative. On the other hand, maybe we need a new word for that. I've had many positive life experiences that have caused me to "wake up" to my actions and how they relate to my values.
Question everything. What is a dream? What is sleep and how is it different from being awake? Let's accept for a moment that being awake and being asleep are fundamentally the same. That is, they are both mechanisms through which we process our emotions and concerns.
In college, I was briefly involved with Brendan who had a very bad reputation. I didn't care, but I heard the stories from the gossips and speculated on how they correlated with the stories of his life that he told me. I won't go into the details. This is relevant bc one of his speech -isms was to call all kinds of his life experiences "nightmares". I found it aptly descriptive and began using it too.
A nightmare, then, is something that happens (in life) that is so negative it wakes us up. It throws us out of our patterns. It bring us consciousness to our actions and how they relate to our values. My relationship (lowecase "r") with Brendan was not a nightmare; my Relationship with Jared was. I've had a few jobs that were nightmares. I even had a living experience that was a nightmare once.
If 70% of all dreams are negative, dreams so bad you wake up are nightmares, and waking life isn't nearly so negative, maybe a waking "nightmare" isn't necessarily always negative. On the other hand, maybe we need a new word for that. I've had many positive life experiences that have caused me to "wake up" to my actions and how they relate to my values.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Death and Life
A while back, Tyler got me to sign up for okcupid, a free internet dating site with lots of fun tests. One of the tests included a series of questions:
• If you could save someone by killing yourself, would you?
• If you could save 50 people by killing yourself, would you?
• If you could save 10,000 people by killing yourself, would you?
My honest answer (I believe) to each of these questions was “no”. I think it goes back to the idea that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself, but my survival instinct is just too strong. I can’t imagine ever being that noble.
Or am I? You know how on the airplane, you’re always supposed to put your own mask on first before you assist others? It makes sense to me that if anyone needs saving, I would like to be there to actively do it. How do you know that your death will be effective in saving others?
Tina said it would depend on who it was. If it was her sister, then she would definitely die for her. If it was someone else, she’s less sure. But suppose Tina is on a boat with her sister and her sister falls off the boat. Tina jumping off the boat isn’t going to help anything, because then neither of them can get back on the boat. Tina’s sister would need to take some active measure to save herself by, say, swimming to the boat and pulling herself onto it.
The examples of the oxygen mask and the boat resonate most with me. They seem most like how the world works. On This American Life this week, the topic was “who can you save?” All the stories were fascinating. One was about a thought experiment like this: if you could save 4 men by flipping a switch that kills another one instead, would you? If you could save 4 men by actively killing another (pushing him off a bridge), would you? Most people say yes to the first and no to the second. This is odd since they are essentially the same thing.
A researcher asked people these questions while performing a brain scan on them. He found that different areas of the people’s brains fired more for each question, indicating that whichever biological reaction is louder is the one we obey (his hypothesis).
I feel profoundly troubled by the idea of actively killing another person by any mechanism. I am troubled by any association between choice and death. In high school, when everything was SO DEEP I read a book where people described their near-death experiences. They described a white light and dead loved ones calling to them from the other side. I think I remember a story where a dead loved on told the narrator to go back; that this isn’t the right time.
My mother says that my grandmother didn’t want to die when she did, but her body, and perhaps her family, gave up on her. Other times, you hear stories about people with relatively minor injuries going to the other side anyway. Decisions about life and death are profoundly personal. I don’t believe that I would be the right one to make a decision for another person, or 50 people, or 10,000 people, and yet, at the same time, I believe it is the responsibility of everyone in a community (in the form of social services) to facilitate life.
• If you could save someone by killing yourself, would you?
• If you could save 50 people by killing yourself, would you?
• If you could save 10,000 people by killing yourself, would you?
My honest answer (I believe) to each of these questions was “no”. I think it goes back to the idea that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself, but my survival instinct is just too strong. I can’t imagine ever being that noble.
Or am I? You know how on the airplane, you’re always supposed to put your own mask on first before you assist others? It makes sense to me that if anyone needs saving, I would like to be there to actively do it. How do you know that your death will be effective in saving others?
Tina said it would depend on who it was. If it was her sister, then she would definitely die for her. If it was someone else, she’s less sure. But suppose Tina is on a boat with her sister and her sister falls off the boat. Tina jumping off the boat isn’t going to help anything, because then neither of them can get back on the boat. Tina’s sister would need to take some active measure to save herself by, say, swimming to the boat and pulling herself onto it.
The examples of the oxygen mask and the boat resonate most with me. They seem most like how the world works. On This American Life this week, the topic was “who can you save?” All the stories were fascinating. One was about a thought experiment like this: if you could save 4 men by flipping a switch that kills another one instead, would you? If you could save 4 men by actively killing another (pushing him off a bridge), would you? Most people say yes to the first and no to the second. This is odd since they are essentially the same thing.
A researcher asked people these questions while performing a brain scan on them. He found that different areas of the people’s brains fired more for each question, indicating that whichever biological reaction is louder is the one we obey (his hypothesis).
I feel profoundly troubled by the idea of actively killing another person by any mechanism. I am troubled by any association between choice and death. In high school, when everything was SO DEEP I read a book where people described their near-death experiences. They described a white light and dead loved ones calling to them from the other side. I think I remember a story where a dead loved on told the narrator to go back; that this isn’t the right time.
My mother says that my grandmother didn’t want to die when she did, but her body, and perhaps her family, gave up on her. Other times, you hear stories about people with relatively minor injuries going to the other side anyway. Decisions about life and death are profoundly personal. I don’t believe that I would be the right one to make a decision for another person, or 50 people, or 10,000 people, and yet, at the same time, I believe it is the responsibility of everyone in a community (in the form of social services) to facilitate life.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Thought Snack, "The End of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas
Before I begin, this book probably requires a synopsis. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas is about a literature PhD student who finds a rare book that describes how to enter the world of consciousness (the Troposphere) where you can surf minds and emotions through time and space.
Quotes from the book:
“Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all except in so far as thinking has made it so.” -Samuel Butler
But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mother’s shaking their duvets or even god shaking out the fabric of space-time…. Pg. 3
There’s something so sad about broken concrete. Pg. 5
“…But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics but using metaphors instead. That’s how I’ve been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there’s a little story that goes with it.” Pg. 23
…he was so depressed he couldn’t bring himself to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him such as making soup and offering to bring him books…. For ages he said yes to soup but no to the books, but recently he’s been asking for poetry…. Pg. 28
(that all sounds frightening familiar.)
To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn’t even wrong. Maybe that’s where human society is now, at the beginning of the 21st century: not even wrong. Pg. 34
They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too. Pg. 35
(like the paradox of the guards at the 2 trailheads….)
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower….I hate the honesty of morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the shadows. Yuck. But my coffee’s OK. Pg. 36
(again, way too familiar… and now I don’t even drink coffee.)
It’s the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles, iron jeans, think about seagulls. Pg. 153
(ditto… in fact the reason I type these up is because they are so familiar…)
“Am I invisible?” I say to the bartender. “Can you see me?” …I…eyeball her enough to make her play three wrong notes in a bar. Well, I think they were wrong. The whole world seems the wrong way up now. Why am I here? Pg. 180
If I cry then it’s all over. All the adrenaline will wash away and I think adrenaline is all I’ve got left. Pg. 209
“connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming ‘at one.’ It’s hell. Who said that hell is other people?”
“Satre.”
“He’s right. I didn’t realize: ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn’t at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It’s like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on.” Pg. 220
(What he described sounds to me like falling in love.)
“I tried being ‘normal’: drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I’m not sure who I am. I use this word ‘I’ and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where it begins and ends. I don’t even know what it’s made of.” Pg. 221
But being pleased with myself won’t do. I should be nothing with myself. I want void. Idiot: I can’t want void. I have to let it come to me. Pg. 271
“What exactly is God going to do with them?” I ask.
“Free them,” Adam says. “Make them properly dead.”
“Can God do that?” I ask.
Adam nods. “He may not have created everything, but he’s good as a manager.” Pg. 368
I like the idea of a fluid consciousness – that you can change all sorts of aspects of the past and present, but it all just comes out the way it comes out. There are no butterflies flapping their wings, there’s just what happens. It’s not a fatalistic book at all, the opposite, in fact. The main character is able to choose a variety of ways for her life to unfold and it just doesn’t matter to anyone but those closest to her. She’s not saving the world; she’s just saving herself a few people she cares about. Well, she’s also saving humanity. She’s saving the ability to know.
In the book, god(s) is (are) the collection of human thought, attention. I think belief systems are whatever people find that they need to get by. Life is incredibly beautiful and painful, disappointing and inspired. We use belief so that it doesn’t drive us mad. Does it create these gods in this other world? It seems a bit literal, but OK.
The Christian emphasis of the book made me a little uncomfortable. There were multiple gods (a.k.a. saints), but the Christian God dominated it all. I don’t want to give away the ending, but the ending left me a little sour with its biblicalness.
What excited me most in the book is empathy. In Hitchhikers’, the woman doesn’t need the empathy gun because she is already a woman so she is already able to conceptualize what another person thinks and feels. This book, written by a woman, takes a slightly more complicated, and real, approach. The main character is already empathetic, but through experiencing others’ consciousnesses (and surfing them), she literally has another’s feelings. That’s bigger than just imagining how someone might feel.
The Troposphere also has the possibility to ride a particular emotion to a different time or place. That blew my mind. I don’t actually believe that every time we experience a certain emotion is linked up anywhere – I don’t think the brain is that smart. But trying to work that out is a fun thought snack.
Language is another thing – the narrator is able to conceptualize the Troposphere as functioning like a computer but also as the manifestation of language. I like language too, but it’s just a tool, a means to an end. I got the idea from the book that the author sees language as being something bigger than that – that it’s a world in itself or at least that it creates one. Maybe my relationship with language is limited, or maybe I’m undervaluing language, but I see it more as the narrow place between two dramatic canyons, my consciousness and yours.
I have been guilty of seeing my present as temporary, and marginal, to some greater situation I’ll discover in the future. As a pre-teen, I wanted to be an actress, but the main theater I ever did was our little production of Alice in Wonderland where I laughed instead of reciting my lines as the Gryphon. (I also played the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter, parts I took much more seriously.) Early in high school, I was still saying I was going to be an actress, and a friend asked if the feeling I claimed to get from being on stage I know about from Alice. I lied and said that I had done more serious productions. That’s how I feel about language. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is a bit bland but I’ll say it anyway: this is it. This is what we get, life, not language or the future. Experience life with everything you’ve got, and that’s what it will give back you.
Quotes from the book:
“Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all except in so far as thinking has made it so.” -Samuel Butler
But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mother’s shaking their duvets or even god shaking out the fabric of space-time…. Pg. 3
There’s something so sad about broken concrete. Pg. 5
“…But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics but using metaphors instead. That’s how I’ve been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there’s a little story that goes with it.” Pg. 23
…he was so depressed he couldn’t bring himself to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him such as making soup and offering to bring him books…. For ages he said yes to soup but no to the books, but recently he’s been asking for poetry…. Pg. 28
(that all sounds frightening familiar.)
To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn’t even wrong. Maybe that’s where human society is now, at the beginning of the 21st century: not even wrong. Pg. 34
They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too. Pg. 35
(like the paradox of the guards at the 2 trailheads….)
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower….I hate the honesty of morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the shadows. Yuck. But my coffee’s OK. Pg. 36
(again, way too familiar… and now I don’t even drink coffee.)
It’s the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles, iron jeans, think about seagulls. Pg. 153
(ditto… in fact the reason I type these up is because they are so familiar…)
“Am I invisible?” I say to the bartender. “Can you see me?” …I…eyeball her enough to make her play three wrong notes in a bar. Well, I think they were wrong. The whole world seems the wrong way up now. Why am I here? Pg. 180
If I cry then it’s all over. All the adrenaline will wash away and I think adrenaline is all I’ve got left. Pg. 209
“connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming ‘at one.’ It’s hell. Who said that hell is other people?”
“Satre.”
“He’s right. I didn’t realize: ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn’t at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It’s like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on.” Pg. 220
(What he described sounds to me like falling in love.)
“I tried being ‘normal’: drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I’m not sure who I am. I use this word ‘I’ and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where it begins and ends. I don’t even know what it’s made of.” Pg. 221
But being pleased with myself won’t do. I should be nothing with myself. I want void. Idiot: I can’t want void. I have to let it come to me. Pg. 271
“What exactly is God going to do with them?” I ask.
“Free them,” Adam says. “Make them properly dead.”
“Can God do that?” I ask.
Adam nods. “He may not have created everything, but he’s good as a manager.” Pg. 368
I like the idea of a fluid consciousness – that you can change all sorts of aspects of the past and present, but it all just comes out the way it comes out. There are no butterflies flapping their wings, there’s just what happens. It’s not a fatalistic book at all, the opposite, in fact. The main character is able to choose a variety of ways for her life to unfold and it just doesn’t matter to anyone but those closest to her. She’s not saving the world; she’s just saving herself a few people she cares about. Well, she’s also saving humanity. She’s saving the ability to know.
In the book, god(s) is (are) the collection of human thought, attention. I think belief systems are whatever people find that they need to get by. Life is incredibly beautiful and painful, disappointing and inspired. We use belief so that it doesn’t drive us mad. Does it create these gods in this other world? It seems a bit literal, but OK.
The Christian emphasis of the book made me a little uncomfortable. There were multiple gods (a.k.a. saints), but the Christian God dominated it all. I don’t want to give away the ending, but the ending left me a little sour with its biblicalness.
What excited me most in the book is empathy. In Hitchhikers’, the woman doesn’t need the empathy gun because she is already a woman so she is already able to conceptualize what another person thinks and feels. This book, written by a woman, takes a slightly more complicated, and real, approach. The main character is already empathetic, but through experiencing others’ consciousnesses (and surfing them), she literally has another’s feelings. That’s bigger than just imagining how someone might feel.
The Troposphere also has the possibility to ride a particular emotion to a different time or place. That blew my mind. I don’t actually believe that every time we experience a certain emotion is linked up anywhere – I don’t think the brain is that smart. But trying to work that out is a fun thought snack.
Language is another thing – the narrator is able to conceptualize the Troposphere as functioning like a computer but also as the manifestation of language. I like language too, but it’s just a tool, a means to an end. I got the idea from the book that the author sees language as being something bigger than that – that it’s a world in itself or at least that it creates one. Maybe my relationship with language is limited, or maybe I’m undervaluing language, but I see it more as the narrow place between two dramatic canyons, my consciousness and yours.
I have been guilty of seeing my present as temporary, and marginal, to some greater situation I’ll discover in the future. As a pre-teen, I wanted to be an actress, but the main theater I ever did was our little production of Alice in Wonderland where I laughed instead of reciting my lines as the Gryphon. (I also played the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter, parts I took much more seriously.) Early in high school, I was still saying I was going to be an actress, and a friend asked if the feeling I claimed to get from being on stage I know about from Alice. I lied and said that I had done more serious productions. That’s how I feel about language. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is a bit bland but I’ll say it anyway: this is it. This is what we get, life, not language or the future. Experience life with everything you’ve got, and that’s what it will give back you.
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