Still on the nod

Still kind of sleepy. But the day begins.

What ended up happening last night : As you know, I took my sleepy pills around six hours too early. Duh. Turned out, I was able to resist their effects long enough to finish half the blog entry, then finished it later.

In between was a nap of around 2 hours. I wish I had that time back, but whatcha gonna do. I have this blog entry plus an exercise where I find three low budget shorts to do today, plus whatever the homework for Production for Writers : Story is.

Surely I am not expected to have a second draft yet. I only presented my first draft Thursday. I can’t be expected to have a new draft already. Can I?

Besides, holy Hannah does that thing need a lot of work.

Right now, what I want is to go back to bed. I think I have reached the point where I have caught up on sleep enough to get sleepy in a healthy way, and it is very tempting to use the extra hour we all got by the clocks “falling back” last night for naptime.

That rarely works out how I want to to work out, though. Usually I end up not sleeping all THAT well. But sometimes….

Oh, what the fuck. We probably won’t eat till 8 o’clock. I got time.


Napped. It was no big deal. I think it was the warmth from the radiator that made me feel extra warm and cozy and sleepy. I imagine it will happen again, then.

Ain’t that just ducky.

Dunno what to write about now though. I watched the Disney/Pixar flick “The Good Dinosaur” today, and it was very good. Really tugged at the ol’ heartstrings. Dunno what the deal is with the title, though. It in no sense is about a dinosaur whose goodness is a distinguishing feature. The title makes it sound like it’s about a dinosaur that, unlike all the other dinosaurs, is good.

Nope. The main character is a nice dinosaur, but he’s not the only one.  He’s not even especially good, just a nice kid. The title makes no sense.

The movie makes it very clear from the beginning that we are not to take science into account with this movie. The opening scene features an asteroid heading towards Earth intercut with shots of dinosaurs quietly munching on grass.

Then it’s asteroid. Dinosaurs. Asteroid. Dinosaurs. Each time the asteroid getting closer to Earth. Finally the asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere. Cut back to the oblivious dinosaurs… who see a white streak across the sky then go back to grazing.

Perhaps that wasn’t just a gag, but a way to set up what comes next, because the first thing we see in the move after that is a dinosaur… farming.

Which is a tad boggling for the scientifically minded of us because, well, that definitely didn’t happen. So maybe the movie, in a gentle way, was saying this is a universe where the big asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs in our universe never happened, or at the very least, only grazed the atmosphere.

That would potentially allow the dinosaurs to continue to evolve to the point where they could learn agriculture and other Stone Age technologies without, intriguingly enough, developing hands. In fact, one of the most interesting visual elements of the movie, at least for me, is how they show how these long-necked four-legged could do all kind of things we might assume only humans can do by using their mouths to grip and crudely manipulate things. They clearly put a lot of thought into it, and it all seems quite plausible.

Whether the dinosaurs we know could have gotten that far in only, as the movie says, “a few million years”, is quite another thing.

Not much else has happened since I talked to you last. That’s the way of weekends, and thank goodness for that. I still feel kind of weak and disassociated, but that’s just life for me I guess.

Part of me wishes I could sneak away to an alternate dimension where time does not exist and just hang out there for a while. Get caught up on sleep and homework, take a breather from school, get my shit together maybe. Shouldn’t take more than a week.

Who am I kidding? I would never come back. Not until I got bored, anyhow. If I could bring food, a bathroom, and my computer along, I could be gone quite a while, even sans Internet. And when I decided to come back, I would return to time at the exact moment I left it, all rested up and ready to go.

Just think of all the masturbation I could get done.

Of course, then you have the whole slew of issues related to non-time. My scenario assumes time would keep going for me, because if it didn’t, not only would the whole thing be pointless, from the point of view of normal time I would be gone forever.

After all, there can be no changes of state, or changes of any kind at all, without there being time over which these changes could happen. So once you were in the no-time dimension, you would be there forever.

Totally not worth it, then.

Or it could be like Vonneguy’s Tralfalmadore from Slaughterhouse Five, which is inhabited by creatures for whom there is no time and everything happens at once. Even within the main character’s life, everything that happened to him in his life is always happening, and once he realizes this, it allows him to achieve an inner peace so strong that he doesn’t even do anything to prevent his own assassination.

Because the assassination has always happened and always will happen and is, in fact, always happening. Trippy, no? Shows how fundamental time is to human understanding.

That scenario is as unimaginable to us as infinity. In both cases, we can easily imagine the concept, but not what it actually would be like.

Science fiction has such fun toys to play with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.