Talked to my therapist about my dissociative moments today.

I’ve tried to talk about them in this space before, but it’s a very difficult thing to put across. It’s like at any moment, I can lose contact with reality, and my brain sort of reboots. Often I have to deduce what is going on in order to re-connect with my short term memory of my situation.

Because my working memory is as empty as a politician’s promise.

My therapist said that often people with this very common problem can trace it back to abuse and that made so much sense to me. When I was being sexually assaulted as a three or four year old, I did what every abuse victim does and “took my mind away”. I told myself “this is not real, this is not happening, I’m not really here, I’m far far away”. I remember that clearly.

And that installed a very dangerous capacity in my mind, the ability to completely dissociate from what is going on, and apparently, sometimes my mind just does that spontaneously sometime, presumably as some kind of defense mechanism or internal regulatory measure.

It’s like my mind know how to short-circuit itself, and uses that as the ultimate form of escape.

That must be the source of the “gravity” that I have mentioned in this space before. The force that drags me downwards and inwards no matter what I have to say about it, and makes staying connected with reality a chore in the first place. I only have so much fuel for fighting this gravity, and when I run out, I fall back into myself.

And it wouldn’t be that big a deal to have these moments if they didn’t freak me out so bad. It’s really scary to lose contact when I am in a social situation (they are inherently realtime) and have to scramble to figure out what the hell is going on and finding it really hard to concentrate, and in that irrational state determined to hide this from everyone and try to “seem normal” as a way to keep a grip on something real.

I am pretty sure that if every time this happened, I externalized it (with words, a facial expression, some form of body language even), I would end up in an institution not long after.

Maybe that would do be a lot of good. I don’t know. But it’s definitely a problem.

Now I don’t relish the thought of trying to sort through the spaghetti wiring of my crazed cranium, so I am unlikely to be able to unhook that system directly. All I really want is to be in control of it.

Because that’s the real problem. It happens spontaneously. One moment I am fine, the next I am scrambling over thin ice and trying not to drown. It makes for a very stressful existence and explains why I have such a tendency to isolate myself.

When I am alone, the stakes are much lower.

I told my therapist that if consciousness is a house of cards, then I have a force that knocks it flat and makes me have to start all over again and it can strike at any moment.

It’s a wonder that I can keep it together at all, much less go to school and get good marks and have a social life with my friends. A lot of people with this problem would be either batshit crazy or drooling vegetables or both.

But I learned to deal with it. I had no choice. In a sense, it was lucky that it happened when I was so young, because my mind was plastic enough to learn to route around it most of the time.

On the other hand, because it happened when I was young, it’s set in stone in my mind, like hand-prints in wet cement. You would have to break the foundation of my mind to get at it.

So this is definitely a question of coping, not curing. Maybe if I was the sort of person to go on profound spiritual journeys involving walking through the desert and eating hallucinogens, I might be able to access the deep table of values within me and set things right.

But no, I am all cerebral and rational up in the head, so I have to do it the hard way : through the conscious mind. And it is terribly labour intensive and slow.

It’s a hard thing for us rational types to truly accept that under the brightly lit realm of our rationality, there is a vast dark ocean of subconscious thought. The rational realm is so much more appealing to a rationalist because in it, things make sense and are knowable, and that allows the rational type to feel like they are in control.

It even, on a good day, makes us feel powerful. Very powerful. After all, a sufficiently creative rationalist is capable of astounding things. Even the more straight-ahead kind of rationalist can often do impressive things with their minds, like remembering large numbers of facts by putting them in an intelligent framework, or make very intelligent planning decisions because of their grasp of the facts.

So a powerful rational mind can make someone feel like a wizard in the right milieu. This sense of power can be so overwhelming that it tempts the rationalist to believe that they are in command of the universe and (this is the really bad part) that there is nothing beyond their domain.

But there is. In fact, your rationalism is but one lonely island in a vast sea of emotions, instincts, and memories that stubbornly refuse to go away no matter how many times you remind them they don’t make sense.

They don’t have to make sense. And trying to make sense of them can lead one down a very twisty and treacherous path of justifications, rationalizations, and internalizations.

Your mind becomes a maze and the only way out is to stop trying to make sense of everything, accept that you are human and irrational and complicated, and open the door to finding out who you really are.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to lay down and…. I want to say think, but…. that’s not right.

Time for me to lay down, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…namely, I forgot to blog before class today. So now I got like 70 minutes to do 1000 words.

That’s not even fifteen words a minute, No freaking problem.

Today was my long day, the day I have two classes back to back. Creative Writing, then Linguistics.

Creative Writing was fun and slightly socially scary, as it should be. So far, there’s been no repeats of the massive panic attack I had on the first day of class. Then again, I haven’t been asked to catch someone’s eye again either.

Must stay focused. Mind wandering. Difficulty staying on track. Caveman sentence structure. Not good.

Sadly, during Creative Writing, the fire alarm went off and we all had to go outside to our class’ gathering point. Then we all had to wait there until the firefighters told us we could go back in.

At first, we all assumed it was a drill. Apparently, according to my prof, there had been a drill during her class at the Surrey campus lately. But as the emergency vehicles arrived and began to accumulate, we started to wonder if maybe we were wrong.

By the time the third hose truck arrived, we figured, this had to be real.

Luckily, I had brought my coat and my tablet, but there was nowhere to sit. And that is a very big problem when you are a 42 year old fat man with a bad knee that gets a lot worse in the cold.

So while we waited, I could feel my leg muscles starting to quiver. And I seriously considered breaking from the group and sitting down on the steps to the school. That’s certainly what a more Asperger’s version of me would have done. But I decided to stick it out because I am trying to become a better socialized monkey and part of that is sticking with your group instead of pointlessly disconnecting from them and demonstrating that you do not feel any connection to others and are therefore not to be trusted.

That’s how normal people see you when you pull shit like that. They might not be able to explain it, but that is the message you are sending. There’s being independent and then there’s being a dick.

Anyhow, I ended up having to stand outside in the cold (my legs, alas, only had a little denim to protect them) for half an hour as my poor fat guy legs started trembling and hurting like a son of a bitch.

Then the firefighters said we go in, and I thought I was home free…. until I realized I now had to walk up three flights of stairs. And these were not the nice friendly shallow and plentiful stairs from the entrances. No, these were much steeper and I was climbing them with legs that were already tired out and wobbly from all the standing.

So that hurt like a cocksucker. By the time I got to class and sat down, I was having heart palpitations and my legs felt like they had been tied into knots then left in a freezer.

When class resumed, I was surprised to see that not everyone had come back, and that once the professor gave permission, a bunch more went home. And class ended twenty minutes early.

The prof said people could go home if they were shaken up by the experience. And I suppose that is the standard human response. But I have lived in a bunch of places that had “someone burned something on the stove” type fire alarms go off on a fairly regular basis, so when I hear that bell, I just groan and pick up my stuff and shuffle out.

To me, it’s not exciting, it’s irritating.

Obviously, I came back and stayed. I am paying for my education and Creative Writing is my major. And I like the prof and the subject. I guess that makes me a dedicated student. But I see it as just being mature enough to fully choose to go to school without feeling like it’s a cage you have to escape at the slightest opportunity. I went to school today fully intending to learn, so that’s what I did,

Besides, I had another class after Creative Writing, so it’s not like I could go home anyway.

Class ending early did allow me to improvise a meal with the seven bucks I had left. So my dinner was a toasted garlic and cheese bagel and a whole wheat carrot muffin from Tim’s and a can of Sprite Zero from the HFC-free vending machines on the third floor.

And I was really proud of my resourcefulness in being able to put together a fairly decent meal and still be on budget. But then I remembered I still needed cab fare. Dammit.

So I had to find the campus ATM and get $20 off my reloadable credit card. I felt bad taking money from there, which is supposed to my educational fund, but I was in no mood to walk home.

Even with my fancy new headphones. I was too tired and too worn out to walk home when it was too goddamned cold. So, I got my 20 and spent 7 of it on the cab.

I suppose I could deposit the remaining 13 when I got to cash my check on Thursday. You know, if the guilt is driving me mad.

Took the cab forever to arrive, which pissed me off, as I have no choice but to wait for it outside. If I had a cellphone, I could just give the dispatcher the number and the cabbie could call me when he arrives.

I can receive texts, though. So I suppose I could ask that the cabbie text me when he arrives.

If I get that shit going, I will be way more patient about how long it takes for the can to show up. So it’s worth their while to indulge me on that.

Anyhow, it was a semi-eventful day and I discovered many new things, including the fact that Tim Horton’s whole wheat carrot muffin is delicious.

You heard it here first, folks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got home from class and watched Jeopardy! and Ultimate Spider Man. I am one happy nerd.

Also finished off my BBQ Duck Lo Mein from the Wong Kee Restaurant that I ordered last Saturday night. It was very disappointing.

For one thing, the duck wasn’t BBQ, It was just roast duck. Even worse, it was all bones and gristle. There were a few big pieces of meat but mostly it was stuff that should never have been part of any dish in the first place. It’s like they just crudely diced a whole roast duck and threw it in there.

That can’t be how it’s supposed to be. It has to be that someone cut a serious corner in order to do things faster. I can’t believe that any restaurant would serve a dish with bone in it all mixed up with the meat in a jumble. Something has to have gone wrong.

I probably should call up and complain, but I doubt I will. Maybe next time I order, I will mention it. It was really unacceptable food and someone in charge should know shit like that is going down.

Right now, in the Spidey episodes I am watching, they have already gone through the New Warriors plotline (Spidey gathers a new team…. even though he already HAS one… ) and now we are into the Alternate Universe Spider-Men plot. Spidey has to chase Green Goblin through alternate versions of the Marvel Universe with various different Spidey types already there.

The trip to Spider-man 2099 land was meh. It was okay, but it wasn’t any special. And it was CGI, which automatically makes it worse.

But the second universe was gender flipped universe, and that was fun. Female J. Jonah Jameson was downright disturbing. Really brings out the notes of hysteria in his voice as he blathers about Spider-Man.

They did do one irritating thing though : they made Spider-Girl SUPER sexist. Apparently, some writers are still enamored with the whole “What if women treated men like men treat women!” (mind totally blown, right?) only men don’t treat women like that any more.

That kind of “never let a woman do a man’s job” and “don’t worry your pretty little head about it, darlin'” sexism died out in the Seventies. If it really was the same universe gender flipped, Spider-Girl would be no more sexist than Peter Parker.

And we all know Spidey is cool about the ladies. Both because he is a decent, compassionate, evolved kind of guy, and because if he wasn’t, Firestar and Mary Jane would get together and kick his ass.

It can be nice to have your moral choices backed by threats of physical harm. Gives you a warm secure feeling. Keeps you from backsliding.

Speaking of which, today in Ethics we spent the whole class dealing with the idea that morality is dependent upon religion. So, another yawn fest, topic style. It’s so blatantly obvious to me that it is not that it was somewhat tedious to go through it in laborious detail.

Oh well. Next time we delve into Utilitarianism, and I will be all ears for that.

Next time is also when we will be doing that placement test thing I mentioned before. The one where it’s graded out of three and everyone will be grouped according to score.

I still really, really want a three. So once I get my hands on the textbook for the course, I am going to practically memorize the article it will be based on.

The location of my textbook for that course is currently a mystery. I checked and I definitely ordered it and paid for it along with all the other books I received last Friday. But as far as I can tell and as far as I can remember, it wasn’t in there.

I wish I had kept the bill of lading so I could check to see if said textbook was on it or not. That would be useful information in determining whether the textbook never went into the box in the first place, or whether it somehow got lost along the way.

Ah ha… I actually just found the shipping information on my account at the bookstore, and it definitely does not contain the missing textbook. So something definitely happened between ordering and shipping. Someone owes me the damned book.

My not getting lumped in with dullards and listless lumps depends on it!

One clue is that the order says something about the Kwantlen Print Shop. The textbook is not a traditional textbook, it’s what is called a “reading package”, which is pretty much just a bunch of articles the prof selects printed and ring bound.

It’s a truly brilliant creation. Everybody wins. The teacher gets exactly the textbook she wants, the students get a relatively cheap text (around 24 bucks) and rights holders for the articles get paid for doing nothing at all.

They love that kinda shit.

So it could be that my reading package got printed but wasn’t ready when they packed my order and someone said “Eh, forget it, good enough!” and sent it out anyway.

The plot thickens, and begins to bubble wetly…. I just noticed that it says “cancelled”. SaysWHAAAT? I sure as hell never canceled it. I need that damned thing.

So now our mysterious lazy packer may have canceled an item off my order just to be able to get it done?

Or something completely else. Now I am trying to figure out if I got charged for it. If I didn’t, then everything is cool and I will just go buy it at the bookstore.

But if I did, I am going to want that damned book and I am not paying twice for it.

That means I have to figure out how to present a receipt for a virtual transaction to the bookstore so I can proved I paid for the thing.

And from my experiences with the bookstore staff so far, that could get…. tricky. The cashiers are just girls from the college and don’t really know much, and the lady who hands out the textbooks (they don’t have room to display them all) is kinda cranky and doesn’t speak great English.

But I will not pay twice for the same textbook.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another day where I haven’t the faintest of ideas what I am going to write about. I know I had at least three decent ideas for a topic this morning, but I don’t remember any of them.

So prepare for meandering incoherence, I guess.

Making a Murderer is fully depressing again. I am starting to wonder whether pop culture literacy is worth how much this stuff depresses me. I’m halfway through the third episodes, and at the moment, I can’t say I am enjoying it. It’s making me feel depressed about life and the human race.

We can be such petty, ignorant, blinkered, grubby creatures.

One side effect is that it has prompted me to wonder what life would have been like if I had become a lawyer. I am thoroughly convinced I would have been amazing at it and probably could have made a lot of money at it while not necessarily doing anything that would have violated my integrity.

I only wish I could go back in time and convince myself of that when I was a directionless teen. Go to school, become a lawyer, and fight for justice with all your might.

I would have been amazing. It would be the perfect job for someone with my analytic, verbal, and performing skills. I would love to have been one of the lawyers defending Steve Avery from the (spoiler alert) murder charge. I would have dismantled the case against him and shown how corrupt the whole thing was.

Of course, I am only 2.5 episodes into a ten part series. My opinion might change before the end. But right now, it’s clearly to me that Steven Avery is getting railroaded again because the county really didn’t want to pay him the thirty six million dollar settlement.

I’d have been all over that shit.

Otherwise, life is relatively smooth and groovy (smoovy?). Ordered in Chinese food last night. Despite my conscious attempts to slow myself down, still ended up eating it too damned fast. So that’s a problem that is working itself way through the system, so to speak.

Oh, and I have my funky groovy new wireless headphones now. They are quite good. Nothing fancy about them, just good, sturdy, wireless headphone that charge via USB and seem to be waterproof, which is kind of important here on the Wet Coast.

The long term plan for the headphones is for me to use them as the bridge I need to get myself into doing a little bit of walking. My knee feels somewhat okay lately, and so I have no excuse not to do at least a walk around the block now and then.

Well, other than the fact that I don’t wanna.

But I am doing my best to enjoy the new headphones without feeling like they have to be a solution to all of life’s problems or they were a waste of money and I am an idiot for not getting something else.

It’s just a new toy. Whether I use them every day or leave them on the shelf to collect dust, they were still worth getting because I now have the capacity to listen to music on the bus or while walking or even when I am just puttering about the apartment, all without any nasty wires tying me down.

Oh, and speaking of wires, when I am wearing my new headphones, I find myself unconsciously tilting my head and neck in the direction of the device playing the music, just as if there was a wire there.

Might take some time to get over that habit. It’s deeply ingrained.

Feeling sleepy today, slept a bunch yesterday too. This seems to be happening every weekend since I went back to school. Maybe I am experiencing some sort of sleep disturbance that is subtle enough that I am not aware of it during the week, but on the weekend, my brain is like “No classes for a while? Time to catch up on all that REM sleep we’ve been missing!”

Speaking of that… I have noticed something about myself. Inside my head, I address myself as “we”, as if everything I do is some kind of group effort.

And this intensifies when I am out and about in the world, as opposed to here at home. I will say to myself “Okay, what do we have next?” or “I hope we remembered to bring a pen” or “Did we do the homework?”.

And as Mark Twain once said, “Only kings, editors, and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial we.” Or something like that.

So why does it happen? I think it stems from having been such a lonely person for so much of my life. Thinking of myself as “we” makes me feel less alone, like I am just part of a group that is always with me and never lets me down or abandons me.

Still, I won’t deny that it seems a little crazy. But only a little. It’s not like I do it anywhere else. I don’t go around referring to myself as “we” as in “We think we’ll have the onion rings”. I certainly don’t refer to myself as “we” here, either. Could you imagine how fucking irritating that would be?

So I figure it’s just a way of handling stress and loneliness and feelings of social exposure. It’s not like I actually believe that there’s more than one person in my skull. I don’t have imaginary friends. I didn’t even have those when it would have been age appropriate.

And that worries me a little. Why was I such an unusual child? Is it just the intelligence? Why was I so literal and sensible from the get-go?

Maybe it was a lack of proper socialization with kids my age. But no. I was like this even when I was friends with Trish and Janet. No imaginary friend, no play-acting with my toys, no fingerpainting or coloring books or anything like that.

Yet I clearly don’t lack imagination.

What can I say, I am an enigma unto itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, this song is stuck in my head.

Sorry for the Cosby content, but that’s the only version of it I could find that wasn’t some schmuck playing guitar in his basement.

That taken care of, let’s talk about Making a Murder. After all, everyone else is!

I hadn’t planned on watching it yet. I was happy watching the latest season of Ultimate Spider-Man. It continues to be an excellent show with good writing and so, so much rich nerdy goodness in terms of including tons of stuff from all over the Marvel Universe.

I mean, they had Cloak and Dagger! And Ka-zar and Zabu in the Savage Land^[1]! Sometimes it seems like they are creating episodes directly out of my old comic collection. I am just waiting for Dazzler to show up.

Ooh, or Moon Knight. If he can stop being such a dick all the time.

But then, the amorphous amoeba that is the modern media mind decided, all at once, that it was time to start talking about Making a Murder, and I figured I had better watch it before the spoilers really start flying.

Plus, it would be nice to have a chance to take part in the conversation while it is current for a change.

So I started watching it, and at first it was rough going because it’s really depressing, so I went back to Spider-Man for a while. But now I am back.

And I am two episodes in, and it is something that happens in that second episode that I want to talk about tonight. Specifically, the second half of the second episode.

That is the part where they various people responsible for putting Steven Avery in jail for 18 years for a crime he did not commit are on the stand themselves. The evidence of their grossly un-Constitutional and blatantly wrong behaviour, as well of their trying to cover their asses the moment Steven got released, is absolutely damning. A teenager with a good head for facts could have prosecuted them. There was absolutely no doubt that Steven would win his civil suit against the county and the individuals responsible, and any fool could see that.

But still, their squirm. They prevaricate. They try to wriggle out of things. I almost felt bad for this one woman who was asked a question for which there was no “good” answer for her, and you could see she was desperately looking for a way out.

But there was no way out.

And that got me to thinking about how people react when they are caught in a lie. I have seen a number of real crime type shows that show the same sort of behaviour, and the sheer illogicality of it makes it fascinating to me.

It’s clearly not about actually getting away with it. Rationally speaking, there is no chance of that and they know it. The adult thing to do would be to confess to what you know you did, and take your punishment.

But instead, people end up coming across like this kid :

Your guilt is as clear as the chocolate on your face, kiddo.

But people do it anyhow, and we have to ask why. It’s clearly something deeper and more primal that any of our higher brain functions.

It has to be the “fear” adrenal response, in both its “run” and “hide” aspects. After all, it’s not like giving up is an option if you are being chased by a predator. No matter how bad it looks, no matter how low the odds are, survival demands that you keep on running (or hiding, or fighting) for as long as you can.

After all, better slim odds than no chance at all, right?

And so, for the average person, even when caught dead to rights in a serious misdeed, the urge to continue to fight until the very last moment is too strong to ignore. It doesn’t matter how laughably futile your efforts are. Most people, even respectable people in high status occupations, are too freaked out to be able to restrain themselves.

It is the person who is mature and honorable enough to accept what is coming to them and refuse to demean themselves with pointless scrabbling who is rare.

Also, I found myself wondering what those people thought about the whole thing once the heat started seriously coming down. Did they tell themselves (and their families) that there was nothing to worry about, there was no way they could lose? Did they curse the fates that brought them to justice? Did they hate the people prosecuting them, even though they were people who can prosecuted hundred of others? Did they somehow convince themselves that, this time, the bad guy (them) should get away with it? Did they think “after all, I have a spouse and kids!”, even though every person they ever put in jail had a family?

Did they feel, on some level, that the law was for people like Steve Avery, not them?

Here’s all you need to know about Steve Avery : He’s a small man with an IQ of 70 from a dirt poor family that kept mostly to themselves. Life gave Steve nothing.

This made him extraordinarily easy to pick on.

And it’s clear that this brought out a very ugly side of people. The side that motivates both bullies and their audience. The side that wants to punish people for being unfortunate enough for being both weird (and hence irritating) and weak (and hence be nonthreatening enough for even the biggest coward to pick on).

So it’s no wonder that these people did not want to admit what they had done.

Because then they would have to admit it to themselves.

And the saddest part is, they probably barely even thought about it at the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And pretty soon, there will be less of it.

In other words, I have no ideas for tonight’s blog entry, so I am just going to wing it. This is completely different from my usual method of starting off with a firm, clear idea of what I want to write about and then ending up writing something completely different.

Well, maybe it’s not all THAT different.

History of Popular Music was rad today. It’s such a perfect environment for someone like me, who is into music in a very broad, deep, almost holistic sense. I have almost no time period or genre biases, so I love everything, in a sense. I just plain love music. I’m a music nerd.

So I loved all the music we covered today, and knew most of it. That’s not that big an achievement, though, because it was all songs that were really popular at some point. But still, most people don’t have nearly the amount of music I have in my mental musical library.

If I like it, I’ll retain it. Simple.

We’re still not quite at rock n’ roll yet. We covered the ground from the 1920’s to the 1950’s, from the Jazz Age where the most famous people were bandleaders, into the Bing Crosby crooner era where the singer took over, into the beginnings of Sinatra before the Rat Pack era, and into the very early days of rock n’ roll with people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis.

In case you’re curious, this is what scholars consider to be the first rock n’ roll song ever :

He may or may not be talking about a car. It’s hard to tell with music from that era. This is the era where blue singers talking about their “one eyed cat” being outside your “seafood store”, after all.

Anyhow, I can see their point. The simple beat, the boogie woogie piano, the way the saxophones play counterpoint, even the teen-oriented lyrics about (probably) a car that is so cool and awesome that all the girls will want a ride are very rock n’ roll.

I wonder what people who heard it thought of it at the time, though. It must have, let’s be honest, sounded like crap to them. So simple, so crude, so crass, so cheap…. nobody could like music like that, right? Not when there was still exquisitely crafted big band based crooner music around?

But one of the many cycles in art is the sophistication cycle, where something starts off simple and fun, other people pick it up and play around with it to make it more fun, then eventually you get to a point where it’s extraordinarily well crafted… and insanely expensive to produce.

Then some people come along who just want to mess around and have fun, and the cycle starts over.

It was Bing Crosby who created the switch from bandleaders to singers. He was the first jazz singer to go out on his own with his own band, and as history clearly indicates, it went extremely well for him. He was the first superstar singer, long before Elvis, and he opened the door for people like Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and my personal face (right after Sinatra), Perry Como.

It’s hard for me to decide on my favorite Como song, but this one’s awfully good :

His voice and his music are so smooth and sure and soothing that it’s not just easy listening… it’s effortless listening. And that was totally the vibe they were going for back then. Remember, this is a song style that was born during World War II. The soldiers at war at that time wanting something gentle and soothing from back home to make them feel good.

And besides, if they wanted some excitement, there was always hot jazz :

Speaking of Old Blue Eyes, I don’t have to think hard to find my favorite Sinatra tune :

I know, I know. All those great upbeat songs in the Sinatra catalog , and I went with a really sad one. But it’s still my fave. So beautifully sad, with so much emotion in every word, and such a universally identifiable emotion, how can I not love it?

What can I say, some of us identify more with the sad songs sometimes.

On the other hand, there’s a hell of a lot to be said for rocking the fuck out too. Like this song that people from my generation generally only know about via the movie Back to the Future :

Hot damn, if that song doesn’t set you a-rockin’, your rocker is broken. Chuck Berry wrote all of his own songs, too, which was amazingly rare back then.

But if you really want to pull out all the stops and rock out with your cock out, go here, my son :

Little Richard was so awesome. He was the first “wild man” rocker, with a persona that was flamboyant, androgynous (can you imagine the guts it took for a man to wear makeup in the 50’s?), and out of control.

Ahem. I guess when I get started talking about music, I can get carried away rather easily.

At some point in the course, I am going to have to do an “inquiry project”. This is basically a hippie-tastic version of final project, in that you are supposed to pursue something you are interested in that is related to the course. The rainbow eternally exploding into sunshine part is that it can take any form you want. It could be an essay, sure. But it could also be a painting. Or a song. Or a dance. Or a portfolio of sketches. Or anything else you can think of.

One lady translated the works of Duke Ellington into pastries. Pastries for everyone in class. How awesome is that?

I probably won’t go so esoteric. I am pondering an audio presentation, or maybe a video, about the history of synthesized music. I am very interested in both the rise of electronically generated tones from the theremin onward and the backlash to it from people quite rightfully pissed off that their years of learning how to play music could be replaced by some twit with a box full of wires.

Or, if I want to go (way, way) deeper, I could do a history of poverty and music. Starting from the way the Great Depression led to a need for super-happy optimistic music, on to the various disenfranchised groups who had to invent their own music because they couldn’t afford anything else, all the way up to now, with people making music with nothing but their computer and Garage Band.

And I am sure I will have other ideas.

To sum up, the course is awesome, the prof is awesome, and I feel awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling meh right now. And not happy-meh, where you feel diffident but not perturbed by it. This is negative meh, or neg-meh, as nobody calls it.

It’s the meh where you are having trouble remembering why you do things. Perhaps that only happens to us sad depressives, I don’t know. But I know it will pass.

Today’s my long day, where I will be at school from 4 pm to 10 pm. Somehow, that seems a lot more depressing than being there from 1 pm to 7 pm. Same amount of time, different emotional affect entirely.

It certainly creates complications. Once more, I have the problem of when the heck I am going to eat. Last week, my ass got saved by a class ending early. But this week, there will be no such luck.

This is also the day when I will be picking up my textbooks. I tried to do it (or at least do part of it) yesterday, but I messed up. I thought I had a pre-existing order there, but I don’t. I misunderstood what I had been told on the phone. So I just ended up confusing the poor lady at the bookstore by asking for my order. She doesn’t do orders. She just hands you the books you ask for and charges you for them.

Whatever. I will have my book list with me today and it should be smooth sailing. The money for the books is sitting on my credit card, waiting to be used. There might even be a little left over when I am done. That would be nice. But probably not.

Especially if I can’t buy used at the bookstore, only online. My previous bill of $320 was an online bill, and I selected used versions for every text.

I have a sinking feeling that maybe that won’t be an option getting books RL, and that would easily add between $100 and $150 to my books bill.

And that would suuuck.

In that case, I might just go back to online ordering. That would further delay my getting my texts, which would be frustrating, but I would rather pay $36 in shipping than $150 in price difference.

And hell, I made it a whole semester with no books. I can stand to wait a little longer.

So I dunno. I will contemplate further and gather information before making my decision. No sense in rushing into it when I have time.

Not a lot of time. But time.

Right now, all I want is to crawl into bed and sleep. Hide from the world. Not have to deal with things. And who knows, maybe after this, I will take a short nap before it is time to go out and face that big old world. I don’t feel like I need the sleep physically – I got plenty of sleep last night – but I might need it psychologically, in order to be ready and alert for the day.

Had Intro to Ethics yesterday. It was okay. I like the prof. We chatted during the break and she took note of my Vcon t-shirt and said she was into science fiction as well. Wow, sci fi AND ethics? Awesome.

The class itself was frustrating, though. We spent three hours exhaustively (and exhaustingly) disproving cultural relativism (the idea that actions can only be judging good or bad according to the rules of the culture in which they take place).

It’s a notion which is easily proven to be major whacko bullshit and that nobody would really believe or defend in this day and age. She honestly could have gotten the idea across in like ten minutes and then we could move on to something more interesting and relevant. Plus I question the wisdom of starting with meta-ethics when we have yet to cover any actual ethics.

Plus, she kept polling us to see whether we were understanding her by saying things like “Is any of this making at least a little sense to you? ” and “It’s okay if you don’t understand yet… “. And that is very bad form for any kind of teacher. It undermines the necessary authority one needs to teach. The instructor must sounds like they know what they are talking about and that they are explaining it perfectly well and if anyone doesn’t understand something, they will raise their hand and ask.

Without this, we naked beach apes get nervous. Teaching is a leadership position, and therefore when the instructor is weak or lacks confidence, we the students become nervous and stressed out.

Were this a nature documentary, I would be waiting for the scene where a stronger and more confident teacher invades my ethics prof’s territory and challenges her for leadership, at which point the new prof takes over and the herd calms down.

It’s true that human beings need to be led. We are all happiest when we are led by someone strong, decisive, and confident, and can therefore stop worrying about what is going on outside our little world and concentrate instead on doing our jobs.

Thus the allure of fascism. The idea behind all those supposed fascist utopias is that with a single, strong, powerful leader to dominate everyone, everyone can just relax and do what they are told and stop worrying about little things like politics and freedom.

And that might work…. if that was, indeed, something fascism could deliver. If you had a nation where the people had their basic needs very well tended to, where everyone had work and food and electricity and were left enough alone to lead simple, happy lives, you might actually have a stable fascist state.

But power corrupts. The system becomes wildly inefficient in a very short time. Without a voice, the people can’t apply corrective pressure to the system, and soon, what you have is monarchy, only with even less accountability. The people, instead of being calmed, are nervous all the time because they never know what will happen next.

Some day, I will write a story about a highly successful fascist state just to explore the idea. I am sure that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

And that’s fine by me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.