I slept for approximately 15 hours last night, a strange but satisfying waste of time. At the tail end of it, I had a most bizarre dream. There were many components to it, but the climax came when I swam through the hallways of a submerged school, making it into the gym, where the water level was very low and I realized that some organization (according to my memory, it was CVS, but that detail is probably extraneous) had hung up many different animals that they had fished out as specimens. There was a dolphin, etc. One that somehow caught my attention was a large whale that was slowly drying out. It was suspended by two steel chains and looked extremely unhappy. I instinctively grabbed the nearest object, which was Meowy, and chucked him at one chain. I think I somehow broke one, but then Meowy kept falling short on the other, so I used a medium-sized rock instead. The whale plunked down and rehydrated (it looked like a raisin turning into a grape) before swimming away into the distance. After the dream, my father called me to let me know that my grandfather had passed away overnight, and then I prayed.
Archive for August, 2007
My appetite has a certain instinct for what it wants to eat, and its focus tends to be one particular ingredient or property (of any sort). However, it expresses itself in a most bizarre suggestion: by recommending particular food items that I can eat that would contain the ingredient, without telling me explicitly what that ingredient or property of the food is. Sometimes, it’s really trivial – chocolate ice cream bar, Twix bar, and Godiva — I obviously want chocolate (this happens periodically, maybe once every month or so). It can sometimes be more subtle: corn flakes, beef jerky, and a wrap from the Olive Tree Cafe food truck. The common denominator of those three is the requirement of higher-than-average chewing. Oftentimes, the cravings actually address needs of my body – cravings for bell peppers may indicate a vitamin deficiency, and one for pineapple may indicate the need of the enzymes to settle something in my stomach.
Today, my stomach told me: “buffalo chicken fingers and pickles.” I was like, hmm, maybe what I want is vinegar (by the way, I ate both). I double-checked by thinking about hot & sour soup and guo tie in soy sauce-vinegar sauce, and indeed, I got approval from my appetite with those as well. It also so happens that I have been rather dizzy and light-headed all day, and after eating the buffalo chicken fingers and pickles, I gradually but surely began to feel less spinny-headed.
Suspecting that perhaps dizziness and vinegar are linked, somehow (I’ve never thought of that before – I usually eat ginger or drink ice water for dizziness), I searched the web. I came across many remedies citing apple cider vinegar (which isn’t really what’s in buffalo wings or pickle, which, as far as I know, use plain white vinegar). There may really be some wisdom behind these cravings … I take great care to always listen to my stomach – I tend to have far more satisfying meals when I do.
Skeptics can choose to believe, instead, that I became less dizzy because the dizziness was caused by hunger in the first place, and eating anything would have reduced the dizziness. Some evidence to the contrary, however, is that I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, and in the absence of having buffalo chicken fingers, I would have preferred to just eat nothing at all.
By the way, have you ever heard of “Mother of Vinegar”?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_vinegar. What a bizarre thing o_O
I want my life back.
So I step into the shower, naked like nobody’s business, and I see this spider. That brown, stripe-legged raggedy-looking spider was huddled up in the corner, front legs covering its eyes. Man, he was pissed!
“Yo, yo, yo, man. What you think you doin’, comin’ up into my crib like this, ass-nekkid? I don’ remember asking for no male strippers.”
“Wait, you high or sumthin’? Yo’ crib?!” I exclaimed. “This ain’t your space – it’s my shower.”
And then the spider did that creepy shit where it looks like it’s walking on air and all that. You know what I mean?
“Lookie here, son, I busted my silk-spinnin’ ass (literally, get it, man? aw, you’re lame) last night, building this little shanty and you have to go all boar-joiz “evict the spider” on me huh? Huh? You think this buildin’s yours? I come in here, I build my house. I live here. Shit, man! My great-great-great-gramps, he’s living here all nice an’ all, on some bushes and trees, and then you things run over the place and put up this big ol’ thing. Where’s we supposed to live, huh? Huh?”
“Yo man, chill. I’m not here to wash you down the drain. You jus’ mind yo own business and I’ll mind mine.”
“Feh, nekkid big pink thing.” And he started pacing around irritably til I left.
* * *
Aquamarine Stardust blog … bringing you more BS than cattle on laxatives since 2006!
I had intended for this to be the 600th entry, but the sudden allergic crisis has obviously usurped that position. In any case, I just wanted to write a short, informal essay on my relationship with blogging, which has stabilized after a long period of turbulence.
As a child, I had no opinions. That is, at least, how I came off to people. If you asked me the simple question, “Do you prefer X or Y?” I would always reply with, “I don’t know” or “They’re both fine.” I let decisions be made for me; like some accursed cloud, I pushed it away. Neither did I have opinions on politics, and I took pride in being apathetic to what I considered trivialities and empty rhetoric.
The greatest secret of all was that I was not devoid of opinions at all. Quite the opposite, I was completely filled with them. Only, I never let them show. Partially, I did not want to offend anyone or say the wrong thing – fear of guilt or being mistaken was and always is a big deal for me. But the primary reason was an implicit fear of offending one choice or another. This came to take on a very abstract meaning, but one that was an overarching theme of my childhood.
I was born an animist, which is to say that I, in the absence of moral or religious teachings of any sort, naturally was born with the admittedly primordial idea that all things had souls. As my conception of the spiritual world awakened, I added to that list of soul-bearing things a host of abstract concepts, including ideas themselves. If I said I did not have an opinion on which toy I liked, it was because I did not wish to offend the other. The greatest insult to a toy would be not being bought. Selecting the best-looking product was tantamount to discrimination, and using a distinctly Kant-ian line of thought, I simulated a hundred customers arriving at the same conclusion of an individual item’s inferiority, and wondered idly what would happen to it then. Having no hint of rosy pink in my glasses, I concluded that the ugly ones were thrown away, like vegetables with splotches on them … and children who were too fat or unpopular.
The inability to distinguish object from human, or even idea from human (I could not be committed to one belief or another, for fear of offending the other belief) ran for a long time, and I was strongly non-opinionated all the way through high school, when I began to blog. Writing about things, trying to defend views, and trying to disconnect myself from the reader (the audience no longer being close people who would judge me, but far-off people who thought about me objectively), I came to formulate the views that I have today.
I am still horrendously poor at making decisions, but certainly I have few inhibitions now about sharing the opinions that I do have. Like the child in The Sixth Sense who learns to cope with seeing the dead, I have coped with the cycles of instinctual logic that to this day assign souls to the objects I perceive. You can still tell — I say “ouch” when an object is bumped, and I have severe problems with throwing things away (which has overtaken the initial imbalance, when I refused to buy anything at all). But I can deal with it, and I try to reason my way out of these sticky situations. Thinking about the world holistically rather than in the artificial subunits that my mind instinctively carves out can definitely help.
While I was initially in a love-hate relationship with the medium of blogging, since it let me overexpress things that could then come back to bite me, without any hope of keeping things a secret, I came to appreciate it as a special voice, and a special space, even. As if it were a physical realm.
In this space, I can create individual cup-fulls of ideas, fill them out like a peach around its pit, carving and shaping. I still make my share of mistakes and entries I wish I could retract, but it happens on the whole a lot less frequently than before. I have become comfortable with “my voice,” whatever that means. I have opinions and these opinions may offend some people, and so be it. I have to write for myself.
Writing is for me what dreaming is for others. Writing is dreaming. A dream is meant to solidify memories and experiment with synthetic connections between memories and ideas and the inner spirit. Because my dreams are so ridiculous, I use writing as a replacement for this function. It is when I write that I realize what my heart’s intent and celestial guidance truly is. I also discover, of course, the abyss of sinful wrath or luxurious melancholy that occasionally lodge themselves within me.
Always, always, you (the reader) are entitled to let me know how I am doing, and what you might like to see more or less of. While I cannot just write about anything out of thin air, a nucleus is often enough for me to cobble together a bit of papier-mache’ prose. And with that, I move on to yet more topics.
My favorite activity in the haircutting salon as a kid was looking into the mirror, which reflected the opposite mirror, which reflected my mirror, which reflected the opposite mirror …
Hmm … okay, apparently what I just described is typical of a food allergy (courtesy of MIT Medical). Now, to figure out what I’m allergic to …
It actually hurts to type right now, so I’ll try to keep this short.
It began with strange apparent bugbites on the backs of my knees, up my thighs, and on my upper arms. They were itchy and became small irregularly-shaped white bumps. Nothing too irregular.
Then, all of a sudden, the tips of my feet began to hurt and then they itched and swelled and it was so strange – simultaneously on both feet, but only on the “balls” of the feet, on the bottom, and certain spots on the side and the toes.
Oh God, I may be running out of typing time.
So then
I slept for an hour, and I woke up with a massive itch, and to my horror, I realized that both my left and right arms, in a stretch going from my lower arm to upper arm, were covered in a bizarre array of semi-erratic bumps, like the ones on my leg but much larger and frequent – at least twenty or so per arm, and they formed a sort of “patch” because they became so numerous.
And now
my fingers are becoming just like my feet – at first they hurt, then they started to itch and swell. White bumps are developing on the back, along the knuckles and such
the fingertips are swelling and I’m having trouble retaining mobility in the joints, which is, among other things, making it quite hard to type.
when la verde’s opens tomorrow morning, I’m going to buy some benadryl. However, there is a complete absence of any breathing problems that I associate with allergic-type reactions. I also have no complications except in the places I just described, aside from a few bumps on my back and on my side.
I am going to remove everything from my bed, just in case, but the more this progresses, the less I am inclined to think that a bug is involved.
Upon analysis of the sonata form first movement of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, I noticed a great deal of similarity between its construction and ideas and the ones I explored in my Symphony No. 18. Here is a quick rundown of them:
1. A powerful, blasting primary theme that is composed of two nearly-identical statements made in very different keys. In the exposition, these two statements are separated by short wind interludes that bear little relation to the theme, and are more like interjections. However, in the recapitulation, the two segments are placed right next to one another, heightening the jolt of the key change. Also, the brass and winds take care of the theme, while the violins are doing a high, ornamental pattern.
2. There are three (or more) thematic ideas, the last of which melds indistinctly into the development, which is minimal and barely present, mostly serving as a large build-up back to the recap. In both build-ups, we utilize a “rising-by-thirds” key ascension, changing keys every few bars as the line rises in pitch and volume. Eventually, we both land on a blatant dominant chord and sit on it for about two bars before having the theme come back at the climactic point while the accompanying instruments simply continue their original patterns, giving the sense of the theme rushing in all of a sudden while the momentum keeps on going – seamless recap.
I had never heard Bruckner before this summer, yet I feel like we have a lot in common as composers.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/09/news/companies/bc.johnsonandjohnson.redcross.reut/index.htm
Johnson and Johnson is bringing the Red Cross to court over the use of the red cross on first aid items. While I appreciate that J + J had established, over a century ago, a legally binding agreement that gave it exclusive rights to the use of the symbol on commercial products, I am enraged by the terms that it is putting forth – namely, the destruction of the goods, numbering in the millions, and also the monetary profits thus far, which have of course been invested in the Red Cross’s numerous projects. Yes, the Red Cross is legally obligated to halt the manufacturing of the goods, but to knowingly waste products through their destruction and then steal millions of dollars that mean a lot for charity and very little to a multi-billion dollar corporation (which would probably just use it to fund company trips or build new fancy buildings) is absolutely outrageous. If it is that offensive that the Red Cross is using a freaking Red Cross (catch the irony?), then spend a couple thousand dollars on white stickers and cover the damn thing up! I’m deeply disappointed in the so-called “family company” over this. Of course, you’re free to disagree =P — the law is arguing for the other side; participating frequently in the Red Cross’s services, I’m naturally a bit biased. Although I do have an indirect tie to
Johnson and Johnson, too … . It is notable, if you want to play devil’s advocate here, that this article (http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/09/america/NA-GEN-US-Red-Cross-Lawsuit.php) gives a statement about J+J’s ongoing donations to the Red Cross. So you could definitely see the Red Cross as being a crafty player in this, entering the commercial market knowing full well that its public image might make it “immune” to such suits. We shall see how this plays out, I guess.