I didn't get enough sleep last night. If I go to bed around 10pm, then I'll wake up at 3,4 or 5am, and not be able to get back to sleep. If I got to bed some time after midnight, up till about 3am, then I'll wake up almost invariably at precisely 8:30am. So the optimum window for bedtime is somewhere in the area of 11pm-12am.
Normal people, if they go to bed late, will sleep late. This isn't true of me. Every once and a while I am able to sleep until about 9:30am, but these mornings don't come often.
When I wake up at 8:30am after 5 hours of sleep, I'm irritable. My whole body is irritable -- my flesh harbors tingly, crawly spots that fade in and out, and I feel like I have to pee and shit constantly. I shiver randomly, and I have a constant feeling that I have to sneeze. I can feel every dry booger in my nose, and every bit of sleep in the corner of my eye. But I'm not tired; I just feel horrible.
There are mental effects too. I can't concentrate, and I get annoyed more easily. It feels like the set of symptoms I attribute to the residua of my brain injury is exacerbated.
I'm not in the mood for any shit today.
Here are some guitar tips and ideas:
1. Don't be a button-pusher. Ie, don't slam down a chord shape without individual awareness of the voices. Instead, try to concentrate on two voices sounding at once and moving against each other; counterpoint for the guitar. A good way to practice this is to start with a pedal open string, and playing melodic phrases on top of the drone. Then, you can move the bassline around a little bit as you play the top part. It really works. this is admittedly much easier when you have 2 or 3 fingers to individually pluck strings. But, it can still be done on an electric in a couple of ways: 1. Play harmonic intervals and move both lines around independently, being aware of motion in each voice as opposed to just putting your fingers down in an interval shape, or 2. Play the lower line on a beat (in your head or on a metronome), and then play the upper line on the off-beat.
2. Don't stare at your left hand or right, but rather at about the 12th fret so you can see both in your peripheral vision, and don't develop that fret-to-pluck discontinuity that's so ugly.
3. Keep your right hand away from the body instead of holding it anchored there with your palm near the bridge. This will both free up the resonance of strings as well as get your hand to move more freely (in wider intervals, not constrained into a scale shape, etc). Just let your hand float there in the air. You might find yourself playing more slowly, but this is a good thing.
4. Eliminate the vibrato, unless it's conscious. Not only is the way that most electric players tend to execute it rather hokey, but the sound of a resonating string is just pretty unto itself without any wiggling back and forth. Avoid 'nervous vibrato.'
5. Slow down. Really concentrate on each note you're playing, and don't think about a phrase as a scale or mode, trying to finish it as quickly as possible. Keep your mind open, and carefully consider each note, each two notes, each three notes, etc. Thoughtful guitar playing.
6. Avoid playing scales when improvising. It's tempting to select a shape and root it on a note you know will fit with your background music; try to avoid this. Specifically, play wider intervals, and dont constrain your playing to scale tones ascending and descending by whole and half steps. throw in some other intervals: thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. Especially concentrate on developing a melodic sense and awareness of sixths and sevenths. Those are the hardest. Of course, bach moved his contrapuntal voices in small steps, but he thought about each step he was taking, and didn't approach this movement as a memorized scale pattern. It's fine to move in small increments, but keep the playing thoughtful, as always.
Serena yelled at me last night for applying for administrative assistant jobs, which she feels I will likely be unable to do. She told me that I am creative, and can do lots of things, and that I should be able to find some unusual avenue of job pursuit on the internet. She mentioned that she was able to get a job doing graphic design with no software skills or design experience just by approaching an architecture firm and saying 'here I am, I want to work for you.' I think this is the 'what color is your parachute' approach, where you decide what you want to do and then go after some target companies, rather than look through the want ads. Maybe I should get a copy of this book.
Then there's peter, who thinks I should work for a gas station, and says it's interesting how people can be so blind to the best avenue for them.
A lot of different people give me job advice, and none of it makes sense. The truth is that I would rather lie down and wait to die than work. But isn't this work? Isn't what I do work? Writing and drawing and programming? I'm more than willing to be productive, but society isn't willing to recognize this. This is fine, though -- I'll have my revenge.
Some people are simply good at the job hunt game, and I'm not.
Oh, and by the way: FUCK YOU. I'm angry at my readers, and I hope they all die painfully.
Fri Mar 26 Mostly Cloudy 74°/49°
EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW
74 f-ing degrees? I saw a moth in the parking lot at giant. A MOTH. Maryland disgusts me.
Here is a picture I drew:
Most of the classified ads in the gaithersburg gazette are for administrative assistants. This is good, because I've tailored my resume and coverletter for these positions. My ideal job would be to be a programmer in some really sunny office somewhere, but that ain't gonna happen. I would like to work with computers, but I don't know enough to do it and the market for computer jobs is about as bad as it can possibly be.
I don't think I'd like to design things for people, because I'd get mad when they say 'pretty good...but can you change it to blah blah?' maybe I could write for a living, but I don't think so; it's really competetive, and it's hard to earn your living that way. Same with music. All of the things I am good at are not readily financially rewarded, and there are people around who do them better and are better at marketing themselves.
I was happy and productive when I was in school, but school is expensive. Fellowships and scholarships for art grad students are few and far between. And then when you get out, you're back at square one again. There are a lot more people with MFA's than there are positions at universities, teaching art.
I like to solve problems and I like to work hard, but I don't like to be told what to do and I don't like people.
I don't like fluorescent lights, acoustic tiles, sore feet, pretending I'm eager and alert, and not knowing what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing.
Maybe it's time to start considering an antidepressant again. At least it made me functional. I remember when I started on a new one a few days into my temp appointment at GMAC-RFC. They absolutely loved new, improved, happy matt. They also later admited that, based on my composure and countenance on my first few days (before I had started the antidepressant), if I had been a prospective employee for them (as opposed to a hired temp) they would not have hired me. I just had a certain je ne sais quoi that employers love. I think this j.n.s.q. Boiled down to simple enthusiasm and joi de vivre. It's amazing how differently people react to you when you're happy. Everyone loves you, and things just seem to magically work out.
I don't want a job because I can't bear the thought of leaving my house every day with all of those eyes upon me. Human contact is actually painful. Every pair of eyes that rests on me is like a squirt of burning acid.
Maybe I shouldn't listen to 'the cure.'
Now that I think about it, every paper I've written lately has been negative, as has the bulk of my artwork. I just don't produce anything happy or pretty -- everything has an edge to it.
I wrote this all by myself, except for one line, which was contributed by martind on SDF. I had the program working already in my shell, but I wanted to build a web interface around it, and the HTML form made the perl program do screwy things to the inputed name. Instead of, say, 'joe,' it would print 'hello=joe' ('hello' is my variable name for the form input). For some reason, this line ($hello = $1 if $hello =~ /.+?=(.*)/;) fixes it. From what I understand, it just chops off, using perl's regular expressions, 'hello=.' I'm trying to get a better explanation out of martind as we speak.
Enter your name if you know what's good for you:
Public web pages suck. I can't post anything illegal.
I think it's time to take a break from blogging. I will resume when I feel like it.
That was quick. It's almost too cold to go biking today. A combination of too cold and too lazy. I'm not going to make any more blanket statements about myself, because I'm always going to encounter situations that refute them. For example, 'I'm ymir the frost giant, and I love the cold.' today, I don't feel like going biking because it's too cold. But maybe this is just bullshit. I don't know. It's all so confusing. I try to grasp some algorithmic definition of reality, and it ultimately falls apart. I wish I were dead.
I guess it's not that big a deal. I can still make the statement 'i experience temperate climate at a lower temperature than most others.' I'm allowed to get cold from time to time. Unfortunately, I'm a human with a body temperature to maintain.
I think I might not like transitions in temperature. I remember one night recently after a long cold spell. It was in the 60s, and I couldn't sleep because I was too hot. And now, it's suddenly back in the 20s and 30s, when it had been up in the 50s for a few days in a row. My body gets used to temperature ranges, and complains when there's a big change. I need to find some clothes to put on, so that I'll be less cold. Fuck, I'm so lazy.
Why do you insist on reproducing? The odds are that if you're reading this you've had children or you want to have children. There is no logical reason to reproduce. The ecosystem can't support this many people. Admit that it's a base biological instinct, and that you're no different than a goose flying south for the winter or a beaver building a dam. All species have implanted in them the drive to reproduce so that they can successfully compete with other species. The problem is, humans have been too successful. We need to change our behavior or die.
If necessary, the earth will take care of the problem itself. Either we cut our population by several billion and stop raking the earth with our claws, or the earth will become uninhabitable. Once humans die off, the environment will heal itself and return to a self-sustainable biosphere. I'll take either option. I have no preference; whether we amend our behavior and allow the earth to heal itself or we create an unlivable environment that kills us off, the problem will be solved.
If we continue to value mindlessly producing brood after brood of offspring, driving our cars to 'work,' and disconnecting from reality with television, computers and massive overconsumption, then a violent end becomes an inevitability.
If we begin consciously experiencing ourselves as part of a whole, as an organ of the living planet, and try to live in some harmony with nature, then human extinction might not be a necessary condition of the earth's recovery. But as I said, I really don't care -- either way, it's fine, and the same end-result will be achieved: the return of natural balance to the planet.
I have to admit that I don't have high hopes for voluntary population reduction and curtailing of production. We're not geared that way.
Here's a quote from this insane guy on AM radio:
Our Dying Planet and Human Extinction
Sometime within the year 1985, the human carrying capacity of earth had been breached. This coupled with industrialization has destroyed our environment of which the present day human life support ecosystem is failing. The entire human race now faces probable extinction.
Illustrated below is a template of the final moments of all human life on earth.
Flies fill the air in some areas to the extent that sunlight is temporarily blocked. Molds and other forms of fungi cover most of the decaying matter where forests and cities once stood. Insects control most of the landscape worldwide. The oceans are dead apart from plankton and other human related organisms farmed or grown for food and oxygen near the surface.
Small colonies of young humans are seen dying of asphyxiation, infectious diseases, and suicide along ocean shores. No humans are living inland or under the earth in tunnels, etc.
Ice and year long cold temperatures cover most of Europe, Asia, North America, Russia, and other northern parts of the world.
The template of 4668/2113 reveals a dying mother [X] holding the chest of a male child corpse [A]. The surrounding areas [F] and [E] are murky, yellow, and thick with flies and other insects. All plant life appears dead before a dim sea shore. Both subjects [X] and [A] show signs of an enlarged chest cavity and I will assume that the metallic objects [B] are oxygen tanks. It appears that a severe lack of air quality, disease, and malnutrition end the lives of the last two remaining humans on earth.
A stage seven revealed the names "Marta" and "Antony". I could feel this woman plead with me as I remote viewed her at the moment of death.
Now she pleads with you.
I'm going to go out for a bike ride and enjoy being outside while I still can. Humans were a mistake, but they'll be gone soon enough. Live and learn.
Of course, other animals are in essence just as 'bad' as humans. Animals kill each other, mercilessly compete with one another, and have no regard for the long-term future. The problem is, humans have these weirdly over-evolved brains that make this basic kind of survival behavior extremely destructive, simply because we're so good at it. Might it be that the earth is simply a violent planet that gives rise to violent species? That every system she devises is going to be based on a sort of hobbesian command-and-conquer state of nature?
This pattern must be an inevitability on most planets, or maybe even all planets: some amino acids develop over the years into creatures whose comparatively superior intelligence makes competition with other species a moot issue. But this tremendous success ultimately amounts to failure, as the numbers of that creature increase beyond a planet's capacity to sustain them.
Maybe there's some hope for the future of humanity if they can get their act together within the next 100 years or so, but it's really a non-issue, as I said; whether we can or cannot prevent our own extinction, the earth's ecosystems and biosphere will recover, either with our help or after our extinction. As long as we don't upload our brains into computers and launch them out into space to infect other solar systems, then the earth's mistake of leading in her evolution to the human species will be well-contained and corrected, and the universe will go on as it should.
But maybe things will start to get better. Who knows? There there, everything's going to be ok in the end.
I MIGHT STOP BLOGGING AT ANY TIME. YOU JUST DON'T KNOW. ONE DAY, YOU'LL GO TO my domain AND THERE WILL BE NOTHING THERE. IT COULD HAPPEN.
I went to helen and henry's house this afternoon for a grilled lunch. Helen's parents and little brother also showed up. It was enjoyable. Sometimes I wonder what henry thinks about an ex-boyfriend of his wife's coming over to eat food. I wouldn't mind if I were in his shoes, but a lot of people are just idiotically jealous, and I often expect that reaction rather than a more enlightened one.
The very jealous want to posses their significant other in their entirety, and define the full scope of their interaction. They are jealous of relationships with not only those who express overt romantic interest, but also of friends (of any gender or orientation), family, co-workers, pets, etc. A lot of men are especially sensitive to the family issue -- if their wife continues to be close with her family, they become nervous. I remember a quote from a movie that struck a chord with me: 'a boy, they get a girlfriend, leave home, get a job, get married, and they're gone. But a girl -- they're yours FOREVER.' ana's mother comes to mind whenever I think of this quote. In fact, I believe I saw that movie with ana, when she was still at concord; something about a lesbian angelina jolie and the modeling industry. It wasn't too bad.
Anyway, I suppose feelings of jealousy, unrestricted to those making romantic advances, might stem from basic insecurity or a low self-image. If one thinks of one's self as being at the bottom of the barrel, then everyone is going to be perceived as a threat, as someone who is going to be evaluated by a significant other as more worthy of time and emotional energy.
I don't believe it's healthy or normal to get everything from one person; emotional and spiritual intelligence is best nurtured with many close relationships with other humans. Unfortunately, some people are inclined to see any other contact as a threat to their relationship with a person. This isn't limited to romantic relationships, either -- I've experienced, when I was younger (and when I was older), friends getting angry and defensive at the mention of friends not in their social circle. This might be normal behavior for a child, but as someone grows up it's expected that they acknowledge the impossibility of social and emotional monogamy.
Sexual monogamy makes sense in terms of genetic competition, but that's about it. Essentially, it's an anachronistic instinct, like the desire to reproduce in the face of a dying planet already burdened with the death-grip of billions of human viruses.
I'm going crazy on friendster. They finally sped up their server, or got more servers, or something, because the site actually functions now. So, look me up and add me.
I'm really tired for some reason. Whenever someone contacts me about my blog, I feel all strange and like I don't want to write in it anymore. It usually takes me from a few paragraphs to a few days to get over it. I have to keep reminding myself what I tell readers on my index page: this is my blog. I am alone here, on my little terminal emulator, typing away. For some reason it creeps me out when the gap is bridged between publication and interaction, when someone sees something I've published online and contacts me directly. It's almost like I prefer to be in a house covered with one-way mirrors with the mirror sides facing in. It makes me feel less lonely to know that people are watching me, but I don't want to know that they're watching me, and I certainly don't want to interact with them. I'm being only partly histrionic when I say 'i hate people' -- there's a grain of truth to it. No offense to anyone intended, but please don't contact me about my blog; it makes me uncomfortable. Sorry, I'm weird. I feel comfortable expressing myself over this keyboard an in this putty window, with it's black background, blue text and red cursor, but I'm not able to discuss those same feelings person-to-person. This blog does *not* have comments enabled, so to speak.
Please read, and please enjoy, but that's about it.
I don't think I'd make a very good celebrity.