Right now, our apartment is a “sick house”.
That means a home where everyone in it is sick with the same thing. In the olden days of huge families and no central heating, this meant that the local women had to organize to pick a group of them to go to the “sick house” to look after the housework and the doctoring until enough of the women of the house in question were well enough to do it themselves.
Serious business, if you think about it. Without someone to look after the sick family, one nasty bug going around could wipe the family out completely as there would be nobody to even keep the stove going, let alone cook and clean.
Luckily, we live in the modern era of premade food, central heating, and penicillin, so we should be fine in a day or two.
Myself, I don’t quite have the bug yet but I can feel it trying to gain a foothold. My nose is getting a tiny bit runny, my throat is just a little scratchy, and I can feel my lungs just itching to start filling with goo.,
So I am doing my best to get lots of fluids and vitamin C, and hope this particular plague passes me by.
On the oither hand, I would kind of like to go cash my cheque and then do some shopping today. I am out of my usual supplies and I really don’t want to have to improvise every meal until after therapy tomorrow.
That’s four meals. And true, I can order in for one or two of those.
The other ones, though… I might have to actually cook.
I mean, in theory I still know how.
What I am really craving right now is pasta. And we gots da noodles and we gots da sauce. That’s not a problem.
But making pasta involves a certain amount of standing over a hot stove, especially with the sauce. And I am not sure I feel up to that.
I will probably end up ordering pasta from Pizza Hut, and figuring out something else for those other two meals.
Either that, or I will somehow summon the gumption to either walk two blocks to 7-11 in order to spend my last $14 on supplies, or to take a cab to the bank, then walk to Pricesmart, get groceries, and cab it back home.
Before I do any of that, though, I will take a good solid nap and see how the world feels to me when I get back up.
Maybe I will have the wherewithal to GTFO of the apartment and take care of things, and maybe I will not.
Either way, I will deal with it. Persist, endure, overcome. There is no problem that can’t be dealt with as long as I resist the urge to flee and keep pressing onward until I win via sheer grit and determination.
Now Imma go lay down, cuddle my teddy bear, and sleep like a baby.
More after the break.
Well I didn’t make it out to the bank. No real surprise there. I have been feeling pretty depressed lately. And it seems to be building to a peak.
Had an “I hate my life” moment earlier, and that’s never good. It was even followed by a “I hate my stupid fucking life”, which is new.
And bad. Very bad.
There is no one thing wrecking my mood. Some of the usual suspects are there, like a very small bit of financial insecurity due to the usual too much month at the end of the money type thing.
No big deal. All will be solved tomorrow when I cash my disability and GST cheques.
And I try not to sweat the little stuff, but that’s hard to do when it’s all you got.
Plus I think I have a fundamentally high strung, nervous nature. I need things to stress and fret about, if only just to give my nerves an outlet for deeper, less specific stress and worry bubbling up from down below.
Who knows, though. If I had financial security and sufficient material comfort, I might actually be able to relax for a while.
Or at least I would be fretting over something productive.
Still digging my way through Carlos Casteneda’s Tales of Power.
I have arrived at what I assume is his central thesis, this idea that there is the tonal, which is all the things we can name and define and mentally apprehend, and then there is the nagual, which is everything else.
These are useful and interesting concepts because they let us peer over the edge of our own consciousness and see that, despite what our arrogant powers of reason would like us to believe, even the brighests of minds (ahem) contain but a tiny fraction of all potential knowledge and understanding, and there is a vast universe out there, with countless things beyond our understanding even as concepts, let alone realities.
One might say, then, that when out minds expand, the naugual is what it expands into. It is the medium in which our limited, finite minds float.
Casteneda then goes on to talk about how one way to look at these two concepts is to see the tonal as representing the world of reason and the nagual as representing the world of will.
And that’s where he loses me.
I have no problem imagining the world of reason – after all, I have lived there for my entire life so far – but I can’t imagine the world of the will.
Is he talking about imagination? Or creativity? Is the naugual merely another name for the subconscious mind?
Or is it more like Nietzsche rule-making will, that which in us which says “This makes you feel pain. That makes you feel pleasure. “?
I honestly don’t know. Reading this work is at times frustrating because at times it seems like genuine wisdom and at other times it seems like cheesy New Age confabulism meant to dazzle people who like the warm thrill of confusion and mistake that feeling for being deep.
I will read on, doing my best not to judge but to simply enjoy.
Perhaps I will venture into my naugual myself one of these days.
Who knows what I may find out there in the dark?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.