Well I did it. I ordered a tablet.
It’s an Amazon Fire 10, a ten inch tablet to accommodate my giant gorilla hands.
I was going to do the obvious thing and buy it on Amazon Canada, but there were only two shops selling it, and one was only selling it used and fuck that noise.
If I am spending this much moolah, I am not spending it on something that has already absorbed other people’s finger sweat. No siree Bob.
And the other was happy to send me a new one…. by August 8 or 9.
Apparently they were gonna swim it over to me from China.
So first I went to Best Buy Canada. Ironic name – they had the highest prices of any of the places I checked.
Well, technically, it “best” buy, not “cheapest” buy. And in their unbiased opinion, the buy where you pay them way too much for things is the best buy of all.
So anyhow, I ordered the damned thing. All told, after shipping and import fees and other mysterious factors, my tablet cost me $180 in Canadian bucks.
I am getting really fucking sick of things suddenly becoming way more expensive when it comes time to pay. It’s bad enough with my Skip the Dishes orders, but to have it on a big ticket item like this makes me feel distinctly clipped.
I have never been fond of sticker shock.
Checkout counter shock is much worse.
But whatever. The thing is ordered, the money is spent, and within three business days I should have my new toy.
And if it doesn’t work, I’ll call Jeff Bezos to complain.
Today was Therapy Wednesday.
Totally blanked on the fact that we’d moved it at the end of my last session. So when the phone rang at around 1 pm and it was Doctor Costin asking me if I was ready to do therapy, I was completely caught off guard,.
But I am very proud of the fact that I still jus said “Sure!” and went on to do therapy with the Doc like I had totally remembered it was today.
For me, that’s turning on a dime. I handled something unexpected with grace and aplomb and that makes me so damned happy I could split in two.
So yay me! I am becoming more ruggedly capable.
I talked about how I feel like I don’t have whatever motive force it takes to get over myself and get my life moving and take better care of myself and all that jazz.
And it’s true. Whatever you want to call that metaphorical substance – let’s call it anima for the moment – I do not have it on hand. My soul is quite barren and nothing grows there. All that damage and the killing frost that sprung up to handle it have combined to make my inner world nothing but unbroken midnight tundra.
I contain much beauty, wonder, and delight. But none of it is for me.
But the fact that I don’t have this anima does not mean I cannot generate it.
I am packed to the rafters with high powered emotions just waiting to be used as the potent but unstable power supply for a revolutionary war engine.
All it takes is the courage to stop hiding from my primal emotions and instead give them a big sloppy kiss then slap a harness on them and make them WORK.
I’m working on it.
More after the break.
A theory of glitches
I have consumed WAAAY too many of these Glitch in the Matrix stories.
That’s what Reddit (and hence, the internet) calls people’s personal stories of the bizarre, extreme, radically out of context experiences they have had.
Alien abduction stories would technically count, but these stories are far more likely to be “reality flaw” stories.
Like living the same day twice. Or missing time – sometimes in large amounts. Or getting caught in a loop with no way out on a familiar road. Or time suddenly jumping forward and you with no memory of what happened to you in the skipped time. Or a total stranger approaches you and starts to reminisce with you like you are old friends and they even have pictures of you and them when you were young on their phones but you do not remember a single thing about them.
I’m becoming a believer in alternate timelines.
My theory of why this happens stems from a book I have called Hallucinations, by my hero of brain nerdity, Oliver Sacks.
In it, he lists a lot of types of hallucinations that various people have experienced and that he has recorded in his years as a doctor.
And I am repeatedly struck by how many of these Glitch stories match some of the hallucinatory events in Sacks’ book.
So my current theory is that it is entirely possible for otherwise perfectly sane people to have a one-time hallucination due to some sort of potential in their brains building up without release to the point where it discharge into the brain and voila, hallucination.
And to make things even scarier, one theory of UFO abduction stories says that it is possible for people to hallucinate memories into existence.
The idea is that in order to resolve some deep psychological conflict, their minds had to create a new, false memory out of whole cloth and it did such a good job of it that the new memory is indistinguishable from the person’s genuine recollections.
So when the abductee or other victim of these extreme out of context events swears that it happened. they are not lying. As far as they can tell, it did.
It’s a terrifying thought that memory could be fooled like that.
This relates, I think, to the Mandela Effect. I think sometimes, in order to fill in gaps in your memory, your mind creates a memory of what it thinks should have happened.
So I never saw a cover that said “The Berenstein Bears”. And I never saw a flesh colored Crayola crayon.
And yet, I remember both of those things.
Pretty freaky, right?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.