11:36am
I just had an insight -- my brain injury makes me, or at least has the potential to make me, smarter.
Remember this? A way to universally describe my symptoms might be that nothing comes naturally anymore. 'producing speech, initiating and planning daily activity, reasoning' etc have lost their natural flow. I can see these symptoms as being sort of a 'cognitive asperger syndrome.' asperger syndrome might be oversimplified as a condition in which the little social graces, gestures and considerations that make interaction between humans a generally effortless and pleasant thing, no longer come naturally to the sufferer, just as simple functions of human cognition no longer come naturally to me.
So, since various cognitive functions don't come 'naturally' to me anymore, I have to literally reason and analyze my way around them -- essentially using my brain to overcome the deficiencies in my brain. What might also be relevant to this discussion is the fact that my right brain was damaged -- the 'stuff comes naturally to you' half. So, all of these intuitive, pseudoinstincitve adaptations to the flux of perceptual stimuli are replaced with left-brained, analytical adaptations.
Everything is suddenly 'binary' -- presented in discrete, analytical packages instead of a big syrupy tide of intuitive glop.
So, schoolboyishly closing off my thesis, my brain injury makes me smarter in a sense because I have to use my brain more to compensate for things that are normally in the realm of something very much like instinct. It's an issue of consciousness -- in order to survive and stay sane, I have to stay super-conscious. At least I've trained myself that way, so that even during situations where I'm supposed to lose some of that grip, my brain is chattering away. I think I'd be a good candidate for the benefits of meditation. I tried it -- it was ok. Here's an interesting article on the impact of transendental meditation on recovery from a traumatic brain injury.
9:13am
Grocery adventures! I went over my allowance by $3, since my mom gave me $5 less than usual and also requested that I pick her up some diet coke. So, I had to use my debit card, and then deposit the cash in my account after wandering around the strip mall at 7:00am trying to find a pen with which to fill out my deposit ticket. I finally got one from a grumpy dry cleaner (i caught a strong vibe that he would have been a lot happier if I'd been there to pick up some dry cleaning). When I got home, I discovered that I'd left my mom's diet coke in the parking lot, in my shopping cart. So, I drove back. The whole endeavor involved more rage, financial hardship, and frustration with the mechanics of reality than one usually associates with food shopping.
I think I may have gotten way too much food for the week. Management is not my strong point, whether it involves food, cash, time, etc. However, I'm making my infamous chinese chicken, so that'll add some cheer to the week-in-food. It'll be a challenge to restrain myself from eating it within hours of its emergence from the oven, but it's these little challenges that make life worth living.
The question is always: what's going on behind the scenes?
11:07pm
Just for kicks, I decided to try installing greymatter; it's unbearably dorky, and...well...unbearably greymatter-y. I'm sticking with my bare-bones blog; there's really something to be said for re-inventing the wheel. Of course, I'm cgi-less, but who wants comments on a blog anyway? Haha. If I ever get it up and running again, I might install a simple bulletin-board interface where people can insult me via cgi. But for now, I'm content to sit here typing static html in my little terminal emulator window.
2:55pm
Hurray. I got my cgi/perl script running. That's all I want for now -- later, as I see fit, I'll modify it and apply shamelessly trendy css to it, and maybe even use it with this blog. But I got it working, and I'm very pleased. I'm not sure it's the most secure thing on earth, but it works. Hurray. It puts me in a good tweaking position to have this thing up and running, no matter how ugly it might be.
Haha, I rendered it inoperable by tweaking it. But at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that it once worked.
11:50am
Sometimes I wish I wasn't so fucking stupid. Soon the human race will know my revenge.
Anyway. The weather is still icky, and won't improve until this weekend, so bike riding might not be pleasant today. What I'd really like to do is get a simple cgi/perl script up and running on my sdf site (this one), but my brain injury keeps kicking in.
"Cognitive changes involve disorders of attention, concentration and memory, problems with understanding or producing speech, difficulties with initiating and planning daily activities, and poor reasoning and judgment. The behavioural effects include agitation and irritability, verbal and physical aggressiveness, impulsivity, depression and suicidal thoughts, and an egocentric or self-centred orientation in interpersonal relationships."
I'm currently accepting volunteers to fill out my application for full disability. Of course, this entails my three-step process for filling out forms: 1) discovering which form to fill out. 2) filling out the form. 3) depositing the form in the correct slot at the correct time.
mike mentioned something interesting to me on aim yesterday -- the idea of perfect competition. As I understood his explanation, perfect competition is what should happen under capitalism: the complete absence of profits. Under perfect competition, competitors will always force your profits to 0, since you will need to keep prices down in order to compete. All the competitors sell at exactly the cost, which comprises materials and labor. No 'profits' are made, but companies stay in business, paying their employees and such.
My question was 'what about growth?' growth, though, is unrelated in this model to profits; as your customer base grows, your costs increase as your revenues increase.
I've heard the argument that the reason our capitalist system doesn't function that way (or even remotely that way) is because our government fosters and encourages monopolistic, profit-driven practices. But under a nerdy, libertarian, ayn rand-ish system, everything would work out.
9:45pm
Hello ana :)
4:09pm
I got back from appalachian bluegrass just in time for a tornado warning. I've always wanted to see a tornado, but I didn't see anything but rain and overcast skies. I really need to stop blogging so damned much.
12:26pm
I'm going with james's stepmother to a little music store in catonsville called appalachian bluegrass. It was actually recommended to me by my old guitar teacher at montgomery college because of the resident repairman, one john thurston. I have to admit, I enjoy the fact that I care enough about my guitars to ship them off to baltimore to get repaired. I've had some horrible experiences in the chop-shops in the dc metro area; the repair department at chuck levin's comes to mind.
The people who work there look like you'd expect the members of the scorpions or possibly even manowar to look if they maintained their, shall we say, youthful style into their autumn years and beyond. The results include things like really tight stonewashed jeans, sparse tendrils of extremely long hair dangling from severely balding scalps, and gaunt, haunted, nicotine-poisoned faces. I remember referring to one particularly horrific specimen as 'the undead.' anyway, it's not pretty there, at chuck levin's, and they're not friendly either. Don't shop there -- it looks like a burnt-out industrial plant.
I still remember my encounter with the teenaged 'repairman' at chuck levin's; I basically had to walk him through adjusting my intonation, which is sort of the guitar equivalent to an oil change. I think it was at that point that I realized that 90% of the time, I'm going to do a better job maintaining my guitar than a stranger, just because I actually care about it, and my livelihood doesn't depend on fixing it as quickly as possible. But it's nice to have found a qualified repairman, just in case things go really wrong. I'm not sure how they could -- an electric guitar is basically a solid chunk of wood with some electronics in it. The only delicate part is the neck. This is sort of fixable, but if the neck is really badly damaged, the best thing is just to buy a new one; it's bolted on and is thus easy to replace. I wish fixing cars was this easy -- maybe it is.
10:10pm
Ana just demanded that I update my blog this very second, so here I am. I went grocery shopping, and by this I mean that I bought $6.32 worth of groceries, effectively sapping the last of my cash reserves, including my pocket-change. It bordered on embarrassing.
12:24pm
Here's some poetry for ya:
Flatulent can of drink
it takes two to play that game, my duchess
i don't like sex all I like is food
ha ha just kidding
you fucker
quinine in the freshly evacuated cavities
sizzling like alkaseltzer
my bowels are empty
my bowls are empty
sinus headache from crying
11:37am
When people argue, they often fiddle around with language tricks to 'prove' their points. Here are three tried-and-true examples:
1) expanding-and-contracting at will: one varies the scope and depth of one's argument, depending on whatever is easier to prove. For example, I might argue that my piece of cheese is smaller than your piece of cheese by so many millimeters, or on the other end of the continuum, I might say something about the definition of 'size' and what that really means, in an ontological sense.
2) exercising the conceptual knife: you start arguing that ideas that define one thing from another, this from that, are purely invented, and hone in on the conceptual boundaries of whatever is in question. For example, where does your cheese end and my cheese start? Is it where we can no longer perceive the edge of the cheese to be? But what if we look more closely at the edge...we see the atoms of cheese intermingling with atoms of air...so where should the boundary be drawn? This can also be called accusing your opponent of a reductionist argument -- it's always a legitimate claim, and is therefore meaningless. For instance, the argument that 'race' is a function of culture rather than biology relies on accusing the proponents of biologically defined race of making a reductionist argument, specifically that you can't draw a distinct line between the races because you'll always find some ambiguity in the border-states, so to speak. This is true, but if you apply this argument to everything (as is readily possible), distinguishing between this and that becomes meaningless; interpreting the world, sanity and reality start falling apart.
3) arguing something else entirely: basically, going off on a tangent. A related device is retorting with 'but my point is' and then proceeding to make your own assertion, completely independent of anything your opponent has said. Also related: repeating yourself over and over without addressing any challenges to individual points. Basically, debate is a cooperative process that requires mutual understanding. However, this almost never happens, and people just talk at one another because they have such a huge, collective hard-on for presenting their theses.
Loudly trumpeting assertions is as aggressively offensive to some people as standing on their toes and staring at them mannishly while simulating digital insertion into their sisters. And yet, at the same time, people are drawn to it. I think that's why maddox is so popular -- he basically comes out and challenges you to a knife fight via html. And people like knife fights, being aggressive creatures (but cooperative creatures too -- I don't want to further the hobbesian/american justification of laissez-faire).
There's something about the web that fosters this kind of thing: the whole feeling of MAN MAKE ASSERTION MAKE PENIS GROW is powerfully present here in cyberspace. Or maybe it's just me; come over any time for a knife fight.
7:05am
I went to bed at 11pm last night, and therefore woke up really early this morning. Today is the day when, according to my day planner, I am supposed to 'follow up on' the job's I've recently been begging for. I hate all humans.
7:39pm
I just got back from a marathon bike ride with nick. We left at 1 this afternoon, and didn't get back until 6:30 in the evening. I would conservatively estimate that we biked about 30 miles all told, from gaithersburg to great falls park, finally turning around about 10 miles from georgetown. It was pretty exhausting, but the nice thing about biking is that you can go almost indefinitely, since you can coast or go as slowly as you want in some ridiculously low gear. On the way back, we had to ride on the road in the dark during rush hour, which was sort of unpleasant; we were honked and yelled at a few times. But it was a good way to spend the afternoon -- certainly better than paying homage to the computer all day.
As nick and I were biking down the path, we saw someone I thought looked a lot like ted koppel. So, after some discussion on the best course of action to take, I biked back and re-investigated. Sure enough, asking 'excuse me sir...are you ted koppel?' and then reaching out grinning with a shakable hand confirmed his identity. He seemed a little put off at having his evening walk interrupted, but that's what you get for being ted koppel and walking along the towpath by yourself, wearing headphones. For some reason I couldn't get the thought of throwing ted koppel into the canal out of my head; he's pretty small.
Speaking of filling my days with activity, greenpeace sent me a postcard informing me that they'd received my resume. I suppose I'll still send them a follow up email, but I get the feeling that they are pretty terrifically swamped with resumes, especially considering that they're trying to fill a web position. I haven't heard from the bank or the mystery veterinarian who neglected to mention their company name or address in their classified ad. But, that $60 in change I found around the house is padding my account nicely.
My back hurts, and I sort of have post-exercise fever-chills. I had a bowl of cereal for dinner, being too lazy to make an egg as planned. James wrote me an email suggesting that I stretch my reserves out by mooching dinner at his mother's and then his father's house, but I feel guilty. Plus, his mother wasn't home.
The reason I'm winding up with such meager pickings as the week draws on is because I opted to spend some of my grocery money on a phone card to call my girlfriend, and on some corona that john and I could drink. I hope he still has some left.
1:19pm
I think I'm going to run into grocery problems here...i have a box and quarter of cereal, three quarters of a half gallon of milk, one apple, three eggs, a smallish block of cheese, a loaf of bread, and half a box of pasta/sauce/parmesan. I'm not sure I can get lesee...9 meals out of that.
Monday dinner: one egg, quarter box of cereal with milkActually, it might be interesting to see if I can do it.
2:00am
I'm writing this in notepad because the sdf servers appear to be down; I'll post it later. I slept from about 7pm to 1am...i should really go upstairs to bed before too long, and not further disturb my sleep schedule.
I was looking at profiles on match.com, and that made me think about people's burning obsession with location. I think living in an outlying suburb has given me perspective on the phenomenon of location, location-coveting and location-reporting.
If you live in a suburb of dc and someone asks where you live, you might reply with 'dc,' and cite the reasons for doing so as purely communicative; your conversation partner might not know where gaithersburg or germantown is, whereas everyone is familiar with dc. However, I'm convinced there are more insidious factors at work -- namely, a sense of location pride or lack thereof; a phenomenon I call 'looking wistfully down the i-270 corridor.' essentially, a sense that in gaithersburg or any other suburb, you are never 'home.'
Gaithersburg is the second-to-outermost northwestern suburb, lying about 27 miles from the center of washington, dc. To its credit, gaithersburg has a metro stop, but most people are 10-30 minutes from the parking garage by car. For me, biking to the metro is by no means impossible or even difficult, but is somewhat time-consuming.
I'd like to do a survey of gaithersburg residents and see how many of them respond with 'dc' when they're asked where they live. Even the fact that suburbanites talk about 'going into town' or 'going downtown' (there is, arguably, a 'downtown gaithersburg') reflects on their perception of an intimacy with the nuclear city center that bona fide urbanites are uncomfortable with. For one thing, urbanites have paid a great deal of money and made sacrifices of cleanliness, comfort, safety and convenience to live in the city so they can legitimately make the claim: 'i live in dc (or nyc, sanfran, chicago, etc).' people in the suburbs (like gaithersburg) who claim that they live in the city are essentially free loaders, in city-residents' minds; they've not sacrificed anything for the right to proclaim 'i live in the city,' but they do it anyway.
And yes, it is arguably less convenient to live in the city. Maybe you can order falafel at 3am, but finding, for instance, a philips-head screwdriver during normal business hours can be difficult. Things are spread out in the suburbs, and it's vital to have some kind of transportation (bikes work well, since the sidewalks are 99.9% unused), but you can find anything you can conceive of within a span of five miles.
The suburbs are the butt of many media jokes, and understandably so: there is a sense that there is nothing here but acre after acre of a disconnected, impersonal network of housing developments and strip malls, joined by roads and sidewalks that are never, ever used by pedestrians, thereby transforming them into excellent bike paths. But the central problem is really the disconnectedness; gaithersburg has no life to it -- not the way washington dc does. You can't step outside your house and be swept along by a tide of human energy. But paradoxically, you're surrounded at all times by cars and humans whose only interest in you is to avoid running you over or to avoid being run over by you.
The source of this lack of life and sense of disconnectedness is the notion in the minds of gaithesrburgians (gaithersburgers?) that they don't really live here -- they live in dc. They are essentially ghosts; a diaspora of displaced persons part of whose souls are about 25 miles southeast of their bodies, suv's, and manicured lawns.
The people who live in gaithersburg are generally less 'cultured' than the people who live in washington dc. A sense of 'culture' is somewhat intangible -- it's often said that gaithersburg, for instance, doesn't have as much culture as dc. I sense it myself, but I'm not sure how to quantify it. The closest I can come is to raise the point that gaithersburg doesn't have any museums or concert halls. But how often does the average dc resident really attend the opera? I think the perception of 'culture' comes from one's own self-concept; dc residents are 'home.' gaithersburg residents are always looking down i-270 towards 'home.' if people stopped staring wistfully down i-270 long enough to focus on the here and now, to notice their neighbors, to take in the sights, we might have a community here in gaithersburg -- a community rooted in our own culture. But that's not to be, in the suburbs. None of us are really here.
The suburbs are a compromise between city and country, and two arguments come up: one is that you get the best of both worlds here, and the other is that you get the worst. Reality lies somewhere in the middle. But there's something more natural about living in a city, I think. It's the way humans have been organizing themselves for millennia -- think of the city-states of mesopotamia or ancient greece. People are community-oriented, gregarious creatures. I'd like to try living in a city, once in my life, just to see if I like it. I can't believe I've been in gaithersburg for 18 years. Well, not exactly, but it sounds more drastic if I put it that way, and it's sort of true.
When someone asks me 'where are you from?' it's my policy to eagerly reply 'gaithersburg!' if they ask for clarification, I'll clarify with 'central Maryland.' actually, I'm not 100% sure that my house even lies within the gaithersburg city limits -- if not, then I'd be burdened by accuracy to reply with 'montgomery county!' I'd like to do as my arch-enemy and secret idol esr does, and simply give an exact figure like '34 23 19 n, 46 23 46 w,' but I don't know how to get that information.
So the problem is that gaithersburgers feel disconnected, and have no sense of place or home to compliment their identity. In order to resolve this, they must stop staring wistfully down i-270, and focus on their own community.
5:12pm
I haven't written much today, mainly because I wanted to give people the opportunity to read my brilliant analysis on the taboo of the human bite. When you don't do much all day, your blog is restricted to 'adventures of the mind.' haha. Anyway, suffice to say I didn't do a whole lot today. However, I did change my bike tire, which I popped on my bike ride with nick a few days ago, after much frustration, rage, and feelings of emasculating incompetence.
On the bright side, my effort to budget my food is going pretty well, although it's still not clear if I will have enough to last all week.
I talked to ana today; I miss her.
12:26am
I've been extremely rageful lately, and I'm not sure why. I think it might move in cycles. I've become obsessed with biting, and I've been doing some research.
The fact that humans do not immediately think of using their teeth and jaws for self-defense represents a deeply ingrained cultural taboo with power and influence that approaches that of religious dogma. One of the first behaviors mothers feel compelled to forbid is biting. I was browsing children's' books not too long ago, and I saw a colorful picture-book aimed at 3-6 year olds, devoted to the topic of biting:
sometimes, another kid may bite you. This probably makes you mad. You probably want to bite them back. But you must never do this.
A child will very naturally use his or her teeth and jaws as a weapon. When seeking evidence of child molestation, one of the signs for which police often look is child-sized bite marks on the suspect. Women and men will often revert to biting when they are victims of rape, or otherwise in a position where they feel extremely threatened. Generally, if a person has his or her civilization stripped away by the perception that s/he is in a desperate situation, then s/he will bite in self-defense, ignoring the instructions in that children's picture book.
Entering a kind of self-defense autopilot (as mike tyson did when he bit evander holifield's ear) was an essential ability as human civilization developed. However, the berserker instinct has been driven, civilized, and threatened out of us by thousands of years of our moral imperative. It can be argued that, from a collectivist standpoint, this has been a good thing; it's generally unhelpful to the development of science and art to have people running around biting each other. But from an individualist perspective, using the most effective weapon at our disposal for self defense makes perfect sense.
According to a variety of web sources, the human bite is exerted at between 100 and 400 psi (pounds per square inch). Compare this to the domestic dog, which, surprisingly to me, seems to fall within a range that is only a little bit higher (with a few exceptions). Web data on this subject is various and shaky, but this is a pretty good search; results seem to return averages of about the aforementioned 100-400 psi for both humans and dogs. Suffice to say, there have been no good, well-documented, comparative studies on dog bite pressure versus human bite pressure.
We humans have the teeth of a carnivore and the digestive system of a herbivore, owing this design to our omnivorous diet. As I run my tongue along my canines and premolars, I find that they are in fact noticeably sharper than my dog's (i have particularly sharp teeth), and are clearly intended to tear flesh from bone.
An interesting feature of the human bite is its toxicity; compared to a dog bite, human bites carry with them a high risk of serious infection. There is a special kind of 'bite,' referred to as a 'fight bite' by the medical community. A fight bite is the result of an attacker's fist coming into contact with the victim's teeth, breaking the attacker's skin. This is a much graver concern to a caregiver than any damage inflicted upon the face of the person hammered at with a dull, fleshy weapon. The real danger in these instances of body contact comes from the pathogens that spread rapidly across the intricate network of veins and arteries in the real victim's (the attacker's) fingers and hand.
Komodo dragons actually rely on a similar feature of their bite when killing prey. The 300 pound lizards bite their prey, wait for it to collapse of infection, and then simply track down the highly incapacitated or dead animal for leisurely consumption.
As animals learn not to eat poison oak, avoid biting into porcupines or run from fire, they learn to avoid the bite of another that will certainly be debilitating or fatal, even if not necessarily immediately so (although the possibility of immediate fatal damage inflicted by a human bite exists; certainly 400 psi and carnivorous teeth are quite capable of opening a jugular vein).
Our teeth and jaws are by and large the most formidable weapons at our disposal. So why, across cultures and across history, is this fact not discussed, if not celebrated by systems of martial arts that date back thousands of years? The answer is that the lethality of the human bite represents a taboo almost greater than we can fathom: that people are animals, that there exists no inherent quality that clearly separates us from other animals. Chimpanzees fashion and use tools, dolphins have an elaborate language, and we all bite (or at least we are all intended to bite).
This is why I refer to the taboo of the human bite as having a religious quality; the fact that our teeth and jaws are many times more lethal than 'civilized' body weapons such as the fist represents a direct challenge to the cross-cultural, moral-religious doctrine of man and beast being inherently, spiritually and biologically distinct.