Monthly Archives: May 2011

Oh boy, it’s SCIENCE!

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Got some fun and cool science stuff for you today, after yesterday’s emotional expectoration.

First off we have a completely awesome bit of technology that might just tempt you into thinking you are a superhero : an armored glove with a built in high powered taser.

It’s a elbow-length glove, and has a built in video camera and laser pointer. It was originally inspired by tales of a fatal mountain lion attack, but now it’s intended for use by law enforcement, corrections, security, and other such situations.

Here’s the description of a possible scenario :

A robber is cornered in a dead-end alley. He turns to face the police officer pursuing him, ready to fight. He pauses. The officer’s left forearm is encased in ballistic nylon, and half a million volts arc menacingly between electrodes on his wrist. A green laser target lands on the robber’s chest. He puts his hands up; it’s a fight he can’t win.

Note the complete and total awesomeness of having lighting arcing across your fingers. That fact alone makes me want one of these. You have to admit, that would be pretty damn intimidating!

Next up : turning a foreskin into a spine!

Perhaps I should explain.

Scientists have succeeded in transforming skin skills into living, working neurons for the first time ever. This isn’t stem cell research, technically, although it draws from the same science of cell plasticity. The skin cells are being turned directly into neurons, without becoming stem cells in between.

Oh, and the foreskins come in because discarded foreskins from the millions of circumcisions per year are a great source for skin cells.

The idea is that with this technique, plentiful skin cells could be turned into highly valuable neurons, which could in turn be used for a wide variety of cutting edge regenerative therapies that could repair the previously irreparable tragedies like spinal cord damage.

Imagine a future where people who have been paraplegic or quadriplegic for decades due to a spinal cord injury are given the full use of their bodies back.

It’s not that far away!

Who lets the blind see and the lame walk again? SCIENCE, BITCHES!

And speaking of the miracles of science, get this : at the University of Montreal, they have developed a drug that suppresses the recall of bad memories… and ONLY bad memories.

Go Canadian brain science!

Specifically, the drug, called metyrapone, blocks cortisol production in the body, and is normally used to treat abnormalities of the adrenal glands.

But it also affects your cortisol levels, and recent research has suggested that the stress hormone cortisol plays a vital role in the process that creates post traumatic stress disorders.

Basically, PTSD is created by an over-strong memory process. Very stressful events, for sound evolutionary reasons, create extremely strong and vivid memories that burn deeply into our brains. Evolution figures that if it’s that stressful, it’s probably very important that you remember everything about the event and that is remains prominent in your mind, so you can avoid it in the future.

And that’s fine in a state of nature, with familiar environments and relatively simple events like an encounter with a mountain lion. From that point on, you can just avoid that part of the woods, or remember extra hard to keep an eye out for mountain lion shit, or whatever.

But modern human life interaction with a modern human’s complex and rich emotional life can create situations which are many magnitudes more traumatic than a run-in with a predator, situations so incredibly emotionally damaging that the psyche simply cannot process them, and so the PTSD victim becomes locked in a cycle where the mind is continually trying to process the memories and failing, and so the memories keep coming back with terrible vividness.

And because the point of this mechanism is to create a powerful association that steers you to avoid that same situation, the victim often finds their post-traumatic flashbacks being triggered by nearly anything which connects with the traumatic event. Depending on the severity of the emotional trauma, this can range from small highly specific triggers, easily avoided, to broad and crippling triggers that leave a person unable to cope with life at all.

This can cause severe disruption to a personal’s life, and lead to depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts. The idea is that a drug like this one would suppress the cortisol and hence prevent these too-vivid memories from being formed in the first place.

That could go a long way to reducing the emotional havoc wrought by terrible events.

Finally, we have some somewhat NSFW technology to show you.

This is a video clip of “the skweel”, a sex toy designed to simulate licking.

Warning, this video is probably NSFW, even though technically, we see people’s tongues all the time.

It also might make you explode in giggles, as it did me.

That is just hilariously wrong. I am sure it functions decently for its intended purposes and I am never one to knock anything that brings people pleasure and joy.

It’s just really funny to watch the thing in action. It’s so obscene and bizarre that you would almost think it was just some lesbian artist’s art piece rejecting the phallocentric world of women’s sexy toys, or something.

But no, it’s a real product you can actually buy!

I wonder how it lubricates itself?

I wish I had never read it

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And that’s not something I say easily, because normally, intellectually, I am usually pretty fearless and open to things which might be sad or harsh or strange or terrible or terrifying.

So it takes a lot to make me wish I had never, ever read something. Even something as brutal as The Cold Equations is something that, while it has a serious emotional toll attached to it every time I read it, I am still glad I read it. It’s a profoundly important work.

But I really, really wish I had never read this story that starts right here.

I link to it for reference, but please be warned, it’s incredibly sad and depressing. Make sure your heart is warm enough to survive the chill.

As for me…. I fucking hate the webcomic creator for telling the story and I fucking hate the world of dropping it out of the blue into my brain when my defenses were down and making me feel like I feel right now. It’s not fair. I have been feeling pretty good lately, and have been watching things which were new to me and enjoying them and feeling a little warmly towards the world, and now… this.

God, why did it have to be a fox?

I would retell the story in brief here, but I just can’t handle it emotionally, so I am sorry, but you are going to have to go read it. I am sorry that it’s so sad and if it makes you feel bad too, I am really, really sorry.

But it’s like it was written expressly to destroy me emotionally. I feel a deep connection with foxes, and often, things which involve foxes have an especially strong effect on me. To this day, I can never watch Disney’s The Fox And The Hound again because all that stuff about childhood and friendship and conflict and being different would be hard enough to take, but put a fox in there… and it is just too damned intense, and hits far too close to home.

So to have such a sad story revolve around a fox of a (hopefully fictional, but I can’t bring myself to check because if it’s not fictional, it will kill me to know this really happens in this horrible cold cruel world) breed called the Japanese Glacier Fox… jesus fucking Christ, why would the world do this to me?

Because god damn it…. I am that poor little fox. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me. My life went fine while I was still in the den, before school. But then I went to school, and something I could not even slightly begin to understand (bullying, and all it implied) burned out a very important part of me and left me helpless and dependent and abandoned and alone and confused and lost, lost, lost, so god damned lost.

And so help me god, I want to go down to the sea and sit very still and let it takes me away, because I can’t cope and I never will and maybe next time I will have eyes.

I’m just so broken inside, and everything is so damned hard, and there is always too many possibilities and so much pain and I am always so god damned scared deep down inside and there is no place anywhere that I can run to get away from it and I am trapped and I am dying and I am alone.. really, deeply, alone.

And the ocean….. it had to be a fox AND the ocean. I grew up a few blocks from the Atlantic. I feel a deep connection to the ocean. Usually it calms me just to be near it.

But to just surrender to it, have it wash me and my filth and my horribleness and my taint away for good, take me away from this world where I don’t work and I don’t fit and I don’t know how to do anything and I can’t even do the the things it would take to get better and I am probably not even going to make it to fifty because I am so fat and unhealthy and disgusting…. to end that, to rid the world of me and leave it clean so I am no longer a burden or an embarrassment or a drain on people’s time and attention and good willl…

To take myself out of the equation so that at last, the world can heave a sigh of relief and say “thank goodness, I thought he’d never leave… ” and drown in the ocean, the only thing big enough to wash away all that I am and remain clean, because even a profound shitbag pathetic joke of a person like me is just a tiny drop in a sea of pure calm water…

To spare my loved ones from the burden of having to care for and clean up after my helpless self…

I am terrified by how good that sounds to me right now.

This is way worse than the spider, and he was a real creature. Here I am, crying my eyes out and feeling suicidal over a cartoon fox.

God, I hope the Japanese Glacier Fox isn’t real.

I can only hope that, despite how I feel right now, I will make it through all this and come out stronger and cleaner and that this was just the trigger I needed to release a profound catharsis deep from my soul, and when the flood ends and the waters recede, this will have turned out to be just what I needed.

Sometimes, the best thing life can do for you is to slip through your defenses and make you deal with things.

But right now, I feel like the best that I can hope for is that the ocean doesn’t want me today.

I am going to go lie down and try to get my shit together. I have a friend coming over soon. I think I will be OK. I did not want this, but maybe I needed it.

But fuck… a fox… childhood…. the ocean…. what are the fucking odds?

Another Sunday…. something

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Eeek. Napped all afternoon, in that annoying reality way where I relax while reading, not really going to sleep per se, more like intense daydreaming, and then get back up and it’s four hours later.

It’s especially annoying because I lose the time without seeming to gain anything. I don’t feel well rested or relaxed or anything. In fact, honestly, I could use a real nap. I feel more tired physically now than I did when I lay down. But I’m doing dinner with my friends soon, so that’s not on. Plus, you know, gotta write this very thing here.

Oh well. such is the harsh and cruel life of whatever the fuck it is you call my sort of life shaped thing.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice weekend. Nothing too exciting, just the usual. Went to Denny’s with my friends on Friday night. Of our usual haunts, it remains my favorite. The servers there are very nice, and they seem to genuinely enjoy us being there and appreciate our business, which has not been true in other places we have tried in the past.

So we’re loyal to them, and them to us. Plus, Denny’s has a great menu with a lot of variety and a uniform good quality. None of it is fancy or Cordon Bleu, but that’s fine by me. In fact, honestly, it’s nice to go to a place here on the Wet Coast that isn’t trying to be yet another casual chic trendy Left Coast brew pub slash restaurant slash sports bar with weird stuff on the wall.

It’s just Denny’s.

Plus, while they sometimes have “the game on”, it’s only in the front part of the restaurant, and we always go right to the back, where the seating is less cramped and it’s almost always quiet. We eat out to enjoy one another’s company while having a relaxed meal served to us by others. We do not want to have to yell at each other over loud music or a sports event with hollering fans.

Basically, we’re all quiet verbal types, and loudness, therefore, repels us.

I have said it before but it bears repeating as it’s been on my mind again lately : I think the main reason the modern world supports so much eating out at restaurants is that doing so activates some highly relaxing instincts in our minds by providing us modern busy types with someplace you can go and just have a meal with people. We never eat together at the table like family at home any more. At home, there are far too many of our modern distractions. It’s too easy to just grab something in the kitchen and then wander off to do our separate things like we do in the modern world. Plus, and this is vital, if you eat at home, someone has to cook it, and someone has to clean up afterwards too. It’s all too real, too mundane, too dull.

But go to a restaurant, and there is a sense of occasion, and vitally, nothing to do but talk to each other. not only that, the mere acting of sitting around the same table and eating together is powerful human social bonding mechanism. Family, on a primal level, is the people you eat with. Many of us had childhoods where the only time we were all together in the room talking to each other was at meal times. This trained us to a certain deep expectation of a certain amount of coordinated social connection each day.

Plus, I am convinced that, on a deep level, being fed by people who are nice to us makes us feel like we are being “cared for”, and thus gives us that nice warm feeling of safety and comfort that comes with things which activate and sooth our social bonding urges.

Hence, you drive down any random primary street in our modern worlds, and there’s a strip mall every three blocks or so, and half the places in there are fast food, and there’s a simply staggering number of traditional restaurants everywhere you go.

We have a lot of options in this modern world when it comes to what to do with all that money that we don’t spend on basic necessities.

I think it say something about what it means to be human that we spend so much of it on the simply pleasure of sitting down to eat with one another.

With, of course, someone else to cook and do the dishes!

Not that friendly?

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Or perhaps, just not as friendly as I thought I was.

I have realized recently that part of my psychological herniation complex is that I think of myself as a very open and friendly person, but in many ways, I am not.

I am, in fact, a shy and quiet person (sorta?), definitely an introvert, not keen on chaotic social situations, the sort of person who doesn’t like noise or crowding[1] or large raucous groups of people or any kind of situation where I can’t think straight or hear properly or move freely.

I have definite and particular tastes in the company I keep, and the objective truth is, most people don’t fit the bill. I don’t know if this is a result of simply being an involuntary loner for so long that you become a voluntary one, making a virtue of necessity, but I am extremely independent by nature and am not much of a team player. I never learned to work well with others in a team sense because I never had to growing up. I was always off all alone, doing my own thing. I had no friends for much of the time, and my siblings were much older and therefore did not have much in common with me, and had their own friends and social circles and lives, and so I grew up a lone and lonely kid.

And my parents had lives and careers that did not really include me either. My parents were always either tired or busy. I was subtly but deeply encouraged to just fade into the woodwork.

I grew up feeling like I was an unwanted guest who had overstayed his welcome but couldn’t leave.

I was not a planned child.

I am also an intellectual. I spend all day feeding my mind or stimulating it. I have an overdeveloped brain and an underdeveloped everything else.

So really, I am a quiet, bookish, reserved, introverted person. My idea of a fabulous evening is dinner with friends and stimulating conversation. That’s truly all I need. Some of the times in my life that I have felt the happiest and the most alive have been really great conversations with truly interesting people.

And the truth is, I can’t really talk to people who are not at least somewhat the same. I grew up in a household of bookish intellectuals, all very independent and self-reliant, and because I had such a socially stunted childhood in the school system, I never learned to get along with other kinds of people.

To be honest, in many ways, they frighten and/or depress me. I know it’s my problem, not theirs. I have lived a cloistered life, with my books and my thoughts and my video games and my Internet. I have avoided actual contact with life, the way most people live it, and have substituted thoughts for emotions, ideas for interactions, and stimulation for experience.

All of this is ineluctably true. Objective evidence from my own personal history, intuitive introspection, gut feeling of truth…. all point to my being more of a closed off, private person.

So why is it so hard to admit that to myself, let alone accept it? Why do I think I am supposed to be different? Why do I cling to this idea of myself as a kind of person I am clearly not, and look at the person I have described thus far and think “Geez, what a boring and antisocial prick”?

I don’t know why. Perhaps because that is preferable to the truth. Perhaps because I have not, until now, really thought about how I think about others versus how I think about myself. Perhaps because when you have thought of yourself a certain way for long enough, it is really hard to think of yourself any other way.

Perhaps deep down, I just don’t think I have any right to be anything but incredibly eager to please and friendly and open and funny and charming because I am fundamentally disgusting and horrible and unlovable and not worth anyone’s time or attention, so I had better do everything I can to maximize my chances of getting people to like me before they see the real me and go away.

Monsters can’t afford to be fussy, or difficult, or high-maintenance.

Even when they are.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. As opposed to crowds…. I don’t mind being in a crowd, it’s being crowded in tightly that makes my social anxiety team up with my claustrophobia to kick my ass)↵

Friday Science Roundup, May 27, 2011

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May twenty SEVEN, two thousand and ELEVEN. Hey, that rhymes!

Forgive me, bad sleep has addled my brain. I just woke up from a dream in which I turned a corner and there on the wall was this HUGE bug, bigger than a dinner plate, and it made this horrible buzzing sound that made the air shake with how loud it was. It was mostly like a huge fly, but with some beetle features. And it was coming right at me. Scared me so bad it woke me up.

I blame all the Monster Hunter Tri that I have been playing. Lots of imaginative nasties in there.

Anyhow… on with the science!

First, some mad props to some extremely bright researches for invented a truly magic marker.

The problem : millions of mothers and babies dying each year from easily treated prenatal conditions. The majority of these are in third world countries, where the fifty cent dipstick test we use to screen for these conditions here in the modern world is prohibitively expensive.

Enter this new marker. Instead of the dipstick urine test, you just draw a line on a piece of paper, and then drip a drop of the patient’s urine onto the line. If it changes color, you have your result.

The first one developed detects a common but nasty condition called pre-eclampsia. It can cause very serious complication for the mother, but if caught early, it can easily be treated.

And with the marker test, the cost goes from fifty cents per test to one third of a cent per test. That makes the marker test one hundred and fifty times cheaper.

Now that is the kind of efficiency that can save millions of lives.

Next : cleaning up Japan’s radioactivity problem with the help of a truly heroic blue goo.

The stuff is called DeconGoo, and like a lot of miracle products, it was discovered by accident. A researched accidentally dripped a solution he was working on onto the floor. When he went to clean it up afterward, he discovered that it had solidified into a rubbery blue gel that was easy to peel up off of the concrete floor.

But the truly miraculous thing was that where the goo had been, there was a spot so incredibly clean that absolutely no amount of scrubbing could match it. It had stuck to, and then encapsulated, everything on the surface that was not made of the surface.

Pretty awesome, huh? I want some of this stuff just for cleaning around the house. I am also kind of curious as to what would happen if you put this stuff on human skin. Presumably, it would be one hell of an efficient depilatory and exfoliant, if nothing else.

But for now, its noble use is to clean up all the little traces of toxic stuff left over after a hazmat situation. Right now, the usual method involves essentially good old soap, water, and elbow grease, and that has the distinctly unfortunate problem of taking the stuff and putting it into water, which is hard to clean up and has a nasty tendency to seep right back into things, go places you don’t want it to go, and in general be a bitch and a half to deal with.

Not so the new blue goo! Everything it soaks up gets trapped in the goo when it solidifies, and then you just peel it off like it was so much Silly Putty.

That is freaking awesome.

And speaking of awesome, Disney wants you to truly feel your video game experience. In fact, they want it to send chills up your spine.

They have invented a chain which uses a device they call the Sensory Brush to exploit a number of little known minor flaws in how our bodies perceive vibration to create a number of lifelike tactile sensations to enhance your video game (or even movie) experience.

Of particular note is the claim that this system could mimic the feel of the gravity and acceleration associated with race car driving for a driving based video game.

I don’t much care for driving video games myself (unless I get missile launchers), but I have to admit, that sounds pretty freaking sweet.

And get this… the system can also simulate feelings like rain dripping down your back, or someone touching you from behind. Imagine THAT moment while watching a scary horror movie! They had better make those seats water-proof, or rather, urine-proof.

And, you know, porn. ‘Nuff said.

Oh no, it’s…. DRAMA!

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There you are, minding your own business, enjoying the camaraderie and social connections in a scene or a group, with everyone seemingly getting along just fine, when suddenly it strikes…. DRAMA!

You’ve only been on this forum for a few months, but you feel you know the place pretty well, and so it comes as a total shock to you when, out of the darkness of the human soul creeps….. DRAMA!

You can’t believe it! You finally found a place where people care as much about the best show in the Universe (Marsupilami, as if you had to ask) as you do, and then these ASSHOLES have to ruin it by starting up another round of that hated enemy…. DRAMA!

And the one thing you know, beyond even the ghost of the spirit of the shadow of a doubt, is that all these people in your group or scene are definitely the most whiny, emo, backbiting, divisive, factionalizing, self-destructive crybabies in the world!

Just every other group or scene.

Yes, if there’s one thing das Internetzen and all fannish groups agree upon, it’s that their group or scene is the absolute worst for interpersonal conflicts, people breaking into subgroups or subscenes, people taking things too seriously and/or too personally, and everyone doing it all right there in public and dragging everyone else into it with them, making people choose sides, and capsizing your precious little island of stability and commonality into the sea of people who just don’t get you.

It’s adorable, really, how many people can simultaneously hold the exact same mutually exclusive opinion about their particular in group. It’s a fairly harmless form of provincialism, roughly on the same level as every parent thinking their little ones are the cutest, smartest, healthiest children in the world. In both cases, on some level, the people involved know that it’s probably not true. But they just keep on thinking it anyhow. They have no choice.

Still, as someone who has poked his nose into a number of various subcultures and social groups, I have been amazed and amused at the universality of this conclusion. Somehow, completely independently, millions of nerds have all come to the same conclusion about their fan group : they are the absolute worst when it comes to that dread beast, DRAMA.

And obviously, probability alone would suggest this probably is not the case. With thousands of little drawers in the grand portmanteau that is the World of Nerds, the odds of your little cubbyhole being the worst for this “drama” phenomenon are very poor indeed.

So what gives? Why does this phenomenon happen again and again and again?

Part of the answer is found in the term “drama” in the first place. The fact that all the people involved intuitively point to certain forms of human interaction and label them “drama”, and use that word as a perjorative, as something that is so inherently bad that it inherently and instantly brings the character and even the mental health of the people involved into question, is the vital clue in this mystery.

People outside fannish circles do not think this way. It’s a nerd thing. Why?

First, we have to note that nerds tend rather heavily towards the intellectual. No duh, I know.

But as such, they tend, as a group, to have a very high level of abstract reasoning skills, but a relatively low level of social understanding and emotional awareness.

This makes for a group of people who are, on the one hand, very good at being reasonable and tolerant and mature (often helped by strongly internalized desire to seem “grown up”), but who lack the basic social and emotional awareness to understand the social milieu in which they participate. What is more, they lack the kind of broad social experience it takes to understand that “drama” is something which happens absolutely everywhere human being are socially connected. Period. It doesn’t matter if it’s a workplace, a fan club, an army barracks, or a knitting circle. Human beings are simply too complex to remain in perfect peace and harmony forever. Eventually, people get on each other’s nerves, and someone says something that sets another person off, and off we go into what we nerds call “drama” and the rest of humanity calls “life”.

So part of the problem is a certain kind of social naivete. Nerds do not know any better, so they figure other groups get along just swell, and there must be something wrong with their group alone. Thus, this notion is a subset of the much larger social illusion that “everyone is normal and happy but me”.

Another part of the puzzle is that nerds, being intellectuals, tend towards a rational, relaxed, conflict-avoidant, socially harmony seeking temperament. This is very good for short-term and somewhat superficial and impersonal association with one another.

But once human being associate with one another for a long enough time, they stop being cordial strangers to one another, the social barriers between them come down, and they begin thinking and feeling a lot more deeply about one another and the group as a whole.

This lowering of barriers leads both to the increased feeling of inclusion and intimacy that the socially isolated nerd seeks so desperately and to the increased chance for conflict.

In fact, those with a keen interest in a particular subculture should be glad to see conflict arising, because it means that the group has reached the point of success as a social enterprise that it has begone to act like that quintessential unit of human social interaction : a family, with all that implies.

Add into this the nerd/intellectual’s tendency to avoid conflict at all costs, and what you have is a lot of feeling being swept under the rug and suppressed in favor of short term social stability, leading to periodic volcanic eruptions in which all the suppressed conflict comes welling up to the surface in a white hot uncontrollable torrent, and wreaking havoc on the whole damn scene.

Hence, periods of seeming calm punctuated by short but very intense bursts of highly emotionally charged conflict… colloquially known as “drama”.

It would be better for all concerned if we nerds stopped fearing “drama” and started conflict as a natural part of healthy human interaction, instead of clinging to this idea that total calm is the norm and these outbreaks of conflict are some sort of pathological disease of your particular subgroup.

If we simply understand that “drama” is inevitable and not something to be feared, we can open up the door to making our groups a safer and more accepting place to express anger, doubt, fear, and so forth, and hence deprive these attacks of “drama” of much of their destructive intensity.

Merely recognizing and accepting that some social tension is perfectly normal and natural and not something that can be punished or avoided into nonexistence will go a long way towards keeping the social waters of your fannish life calm and volcano free.

Above all, you need to be aware of what is happening in your group so you can be an intelligent and proactive member of your community instead of simply reacting when it’s already too late. Look for signs that people are feeling frustrated or unheard. Ask people what is bothering them. Make room for people to express themselves without feeling like they will be vilified for rocking the boat.

If you do this, you can have a community, fan group, subculture, or club that keeps going on being a supportive and happy place for us lonely nerds for many years to come.

If you don’t, sooner or later, you will be standing in the wreckage of a once fine group that seemed to suddenly and inexplicably tear itself to pieces in an orgy of irrationality.

It’s hardly inevitable or inexplicable. It’s normal human interaction, not a terrible shameful aberration unique to your particular grouping of intellectually advanced naked beach apes.

Surely we’re smart enough to see the thunderstorms coming and get in out of the rain?

Dreams and scraps

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More intriguing strangeness from the lotus eater’s den that is my Paxil and apnea addled brain.

In this dream I just had, I rebooted my computer, only to have it boot into some completely different system, something that seemed like it was from twenty years ago, including low-res VGA graphics, a primitive looking GUI operating system, and horror of horrors, a modem. I knew I somehow had a modem in this dream because the computer starting executing a script and that script immediately dialed said modem and made a connection and started downloading a shit ton of files.

Needless to say, I was freaking out, because obviously I had picked up some kind of malware that had just been waiting for a reboot, biding its time, before hijacking my computer and using someone’s home brew OS to run a script and download files and who knows what the hell else it would do to my precious computer!

So I was freaking out and frantically pressing CTRL-C over and over again to cancel the downloads (told you this was some old school computing) and crying and swearing that I was going to find the person responsible for doing this to my computer and shove my arm down their throat and rip out their hearts and then make them eat it.

In my dreams, I am somewhat more emotional. Dream catharsis, I suspect.

So I manage to cancel most of the downloads and am beginning to calm down when I notice something strange has happened.

(Things get a little vague and a lot weird here. Bear with me. )

The strange thing is that I notice that there is now a shopping cart in the room with me, and it’s filled with various items, and the items are the usual sorts of things that one might see in a stranger’s shopping cart at the supermarket. That’s not the weird part.

The weird part is that I somehow know that these items are a direct result of the downloads I couldn’t stop. I know, with dream knowledge, that my computer downloaded these real physical objects.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

So I go from freaked out of my computer to a wee bit intrigued by his phenomenon of downloading matter, and I begin to investigate the objects.

I take one of the objects, a plain square bottomed glass tumbler, and did the usual sorts of things any curious tool-using monkey does with an unknown object : I turned it over, looked at it from all angles, held it up to the light, hefted it in my hand to confirm it had normal weight, flicked it with my finger to see if it rang like glass (for some reason, I was worried that it would just go poof when I did this… nope!), and so on.

Then I got out the microscope I seemed to have in this dream, and grabbed the identical tumbler I also had from the kitchen, and checked them both out under the microscope’s scrutiny.

No difference at all, I concluded. Identical crystalline structure. (I was also apparently a scientist in this dream, or at least, a science fiction version of one. )

Unfortunately, that’s all I remember from the dream, except for thinking that I kind of wished I had no aborted most of the downloads, all things considered, now.

I blame said dream on all the Jame Burke and Doctor Who I have been watching lately.

In other news, you will never guess who this young lady is :

Mutual Savings Bank – “Hi!” – Featuring Tina Fey from The Purple Onion Archives on Vimeo.

No, it’s not a time traveling Ellen Degeneres clone, it is, amazingly a very young Tina Fey, fresh from Second City, landing a gig in a bank commercial.

The blog I got this link from says that it’s an awful commercial, but I don’t agree. It’s not brilliant or anything, but it’s not without a certain amount of charm, and that’s not something you can say about most bank ads.

What gets me is how Ellen like she is. That could easily be Ellen Degeneres in that ad. It matches Ellen’s unassuming, friendly style perfectly, down to the applique vest over the silk shirt and the boyish haircut.

You really get the feeling that they wanted Ellen, but didn’t have the budget for her, so they went looking for a “Ellen type” and somehow, that ended up being our beloved Tiny Fey.

Pop culture history is full of surprises, isn’t it?

Strange things happening in my head

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Some weird stuff going on in my head today. Thought I’d share.

You lucky, lucky people.

It started with this song coming up in online conversation, causing me to link to (and watch) the video.

Isn’t Ivan (the lead singer) sexy in that video? So very French.

Anyhow, I watched the video, and other than drooling over sexy sexy Ivan, it got me to thinking about myself and my attitude towards life.

I think I take the whole thing too damned seriously, honestly, which might seem surprising given my tendency towards comedy. But a lot of us comedy types are extremely serious and neurotic inside, and we are drawn to comedy and internalize precisely because we need the relief from our inner demons so badly.

The two classic theater masks are at constant war within us.

We have just learned that people like the comedy half a lot more, and it’s in general a lot easier to be that half in public and only show that face to the world. Heck, sometimes we can even pretend so hard that we forget how hurt we are inside for a while.

But the other mask is always there. The comedy is a great treatment for the symptoms, but it doesn’t last, and sooner or later, the pain from your wounds (which comedy does not heal) comes back.

I am convinced that’s why so many things start out funny (like Woody Allen movies) then slowly turn more towards the serious and the tragic as they evolve and continue. The comedian starts off wanting people to like him and shows only the friendly, funny, comedy mask, but as he gets the validation he needs, he slowly reveals more and more of the other, darker, sadder side, which is the side he normally hides away from the world and which desperately needs expression and validation on its own.

You love me when I’m funny, but will you still love me when I am sad? Because that’s who I really am. A sad little boy who just wants someone to love him. The secret dream is always that if he can get you to love him for his comedy, maybe you won’t run away when you see the other side of the coin.

Who knows, maybe that even works sometimes.

Anyhow, watching the video and grokking its message of relaxation and fun and non-seriousness made me really wish I could be like that, carefree and unconcerned and living for the moment.

But then I had to ask myself : well, why can’t I? What is stopping me?

My first thought was : because I know too much. Because live is hard and dangerous and just waiting to hurt you if you let your guard down for a second.

And then I thought “My god, do I really think that?”. It doesn’t sound like me, like something I would say. It certainly doesn’t fit my image of myself as a relaxed and laid back and cool kind of guy.

But the mroe I thought about it, and peered into myself, the more I realized it was true. Deep down, that’s how I see the world. I have the kind of paranoid, anxious, guarded, and suspicious attitude typical of people who have been hurt badly and therefore never truly completely leave the “scared animal” mode of existence. We are convinced, deep down far below our self-image and our philosophies and our conscious mode, that the only way to be safe is to always been on guard and vigilant.

Fundamentally, we just plain do not trust the Universe. We feel like it’s just waiting to get us and it’s only via obsessive paranoia, trying to see in all directions at once, that we have any control. And if we just relax and be happy and carefree for even a moment, that is when it will get us.

Obviously, this doesn’t hold up logically, but it doesn’t matter, because this is all taking place at the animal level, well below our higher, more logical, more rational selves. These selves, the people we prefer to think we are instead of the wounded animals we truly are deep down, are often part of the problem, because we get so damned good at goign from one mental stimulation to another, keeping the music playing good and loud in our heads in order to drown out the cries of that scared, hurt, confused animal we do not wish to admit to ourselves we have, deep down in the dungeons of our souls.

La la la. I can’t hear you. I am too busy being funny and charming and witty and wise. I don’t have to admit you exist, even to myself, and you can’t make me.

But those who get close to you know there is something wrong.

So where does all this leave me? How do I learn to stop worrying and love the Universe?

I certainly can’t waste any more time waiting for it to love me first. I’m middle aged now (doubt I’ll live past 76, you dig?) and I have spent my entire adult life hiding from the world.

I guess for a start, I have to go find that scared wounded confused little animal, and listen to him, and try to make him feel OK.

After all, he’s me.