searching for the ineffable
I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.
Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?
(rhetorical question.)
You know, this article makes me a bit sad. If what it describes is true, I’d be miserable in Seattle.
The only time I visited it, I fell in love with the city. I even decided, right away, that it would be great to live there for a while. This was unusual enough to be surprising; the feeling of “this could be home” is generally reserved for non-North-American cities. Seattle’s been calling me back ever since that first visit.
And I still want to go back… to visit. But it would be frightening to move to a city where people actively rebuff attempts at meaningful communication often enough to warrant a Seattle Times article.
Too damn funny not to pass along. Entirely work-safe. No sound needed, it’s just pictures and text.
Dear body:
Thanks for the reminder, although you could’ve been gentler about it. Lessons learned (I hope):
– stopping exercising for three days makes me more randomly hungry, not less, and also unhappy;
– when feeling like the world is crashing down for no particular reason, eat protein; preferably in the form of red meat, fish or soybeans;
– in the past stress stemming from procrastination followed by being overwhelmed with work was a good motivator to do said work. That is no longer a viable option, as it is Not Worth It;
– maybe new moon does affect me negatively after all… or maybe this is a coincidence;
– I’ve got to find coping mechanisms to deal with guilt. It is the single most unproductive feeling I experience on a regular basis: it gets nothing accomplished and absolutely drains me of energy.
Now can I have my serotonin back please?
Sincerely,
-V.
(This isn’t intentionally cryptic, Reader. The suck of yesterday and today may have been caused by a combination of individually insignificant factors, but the problems I talk about above are quite generally applicable to my life. At least, to the unhappy moments in it. Which, now that I think on it, don’t occur often at all. But man, when they do, it’s bad…)
It just hit me: a large part of the reason I love [living with] Ethan is that, most any time I get into one of those nostalgic-open-expressive-personal-revealing-vulnerable moods and need to talk, he’s there and even interested.
Most any time. Now it’s quiet for several more hours, and I am alone and afire, reading. Sentences come with difficulty, more fragmented outbursts. Maybe they’ll coalesce into another blog entry, or maybe not.
There’s nothing, nothing like conversation.
Am reading the newly-published A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth and published by Blackwell. Whipping through more than reading, really: I’d recalled it from the library and it got recalled right back, so I only have until Monday and it’s almost 700 pages long. There’s tons of interesting stuff in there. Most of it is nothing new for me – the book reads like a primer – but the writing is excellent and there are some new ideas, and when I teach an intro to humanities computing class, this will likely be the main textbook. Um, if they come out with a version that doesn’t cost $165.
Speaking of excellent writing, here’s a bit from Carole L. Palmer’s “Thematic Research Collections”:
[T]he creators of scholarly collections will need to be a new kind of scholar, or team, with a distinct mix of expertise in at least three areas – the specific subject matter and associated critical and analytical techniques, technical computing processes, and principles of content selection and organization.
Both my job with the VHL and [especially] my dissertation for a PhD in humanities computing (!!) challenge me to develop along all of these lines. There are low points, to be sure, but the occasional bird’s-eye-view inspires and recharges me. This field is so… fun. How many people can boast an adventurous academic life? Unbelievable luck, right here.
George W. Bush has told reporters he’s unfamiliar with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
*head meets desk* four… more… gah.
Okay, so the latest on the New York police randomly harrassing and arresting people, not to mention confiscating their bicycles despite a federal judge ruling that illegal, got me annoyed enough that I actually called the NYPD switchboard and asked where I can lodge a complaint against them. The lady referred me to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I called them, spoke to an investigator doing intake today, gave him a bunch of information.
We’ll see if this goes anywhere. I do appreciate the difficulty of a policeman’s job, but in New York of all places there has got to be actual work to do.
Don’t know whether it’s real or another fake one, but this Golf commercial is pretty impressive!
I’ve been pointed to a pretty good article about Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin in the New York Times. It’s surprisingly sympathetic, given that Shulgin is directly responsible for most of the psychedelics that have fascinated so many curious souls lately.
Gratifying to me personally is the way that the D.E.A. is painted in the article: as people tasked with an impossible, misdirected war-on-drugs effort who have gradually bought it wholesale. People who raid homes and labs and clinics, at times doing good work but mostly employing scare tactics, propagating misinformation and hindering research. People who will destroy your property and arrest you if you give plant parts to terminally ill patients. People who help the federal government in its attempt to bully states that disagree with its stance on what’s dangerous and what isn’t.
But back to Shulgin. His contribution to the modern exploration of our own minds has been astounding. He is almost 80 years old now, and it’s unlikely that I will ever meet him; a pity, because like hundreds of thousands of people he’s affected I am deeply grateful for his insatiable curiosity and his celebration of humanity.
A few years back I borrowed PIHKAL from a friend, and it changed my life. Having never formally studied chemistry of any kind (stupid of me, but physics was more interesting and the school only required one), I began to gather an appreciation for the delicate chemical balance within which our perception of reality floats. To think that a few micrograms of a substance can make everything seem different!
Because of how little it evidently takes to alter one’s perception of reality, I became convinced (and still am) that reality has many faces, and that they’re worth exploring. Researchers claim that many of the chemicals people play with are modified versions of what’s already present in our brain; so it’s no surprise that meditation, breathing in patterns and persistent curious searching have revealed more to me about me and my world than my government’s educational curriculum can hope to.
It’s not all roses. Some substances are addictive; hell, I’ve had sleep and mental-acuity problems related to caffeine addiction, and that’s a forgiving drug. Others aren’t so forgiving. Research is needed, help is needed for people whose lives have been ruined… I always ask myself: what could possibly go wrong if we dedicated half of D.E.A.’s budget to humane rehab and to research? Instead of paying men and women with guns to go rid San Francisco of the “menace” of pot [which has been used for millennia, and look, we’re still here!], why can’t we pay researchers to find out what’s really going on?
Well, it’ll happen. We’ve already won a struggle with nicotine-distributing companies, so that at least they no longer actively make cigarette smoking look cool to teenagers. We’ve got a ways to go with alcohol, at least in this country, where making it taboo only contributes to the frat-party culture in which young people die from alcohol poisoning on a dare. There’s a longer journey for other drugs; I just hope I live to see a society where exploration of our chemical surroundings is done curiously, knowledgeably and responsibly. In other words, where humans are educated and then given some credit.
Isn’t it sad, how much we can’t blog? Freedom of speech, indeed.
