I'm doing a little spring cleaning of my directories, both in mjt.sdf.org and mjt.sdf.org. I found a few things that can just as easily live in a blog.
Some people might think the baking time to be too long -- not so. Not only will you be baking them at an extremely low temperature, but dark poultry meat is virtually unruinable (very much unlike white meat). Overcooking this chicken is made even more of an impossibility by the fact that you keep dumping more soy vay on it while it's baking. Of course, it is possible to overcook dark meat -- it's just very difficult. I've made this chicken several times, and it always comes out incredibly tender, yet cooked to the point where it literally falls off the bone. The goal in chicken preparation should always be to eclipse as much as possible the fact that you're working with a chicken, one with veins and skin and tendons and fat and all sorts of unpleasant reminders of the brutality of the state of nature. Generally speaking, the more civilization you apply (in the form of marinade and cooking time), the more inoffensive the chicken will be. It's a constant struggle, really.
I did a massive, site-wide update to mjt.sdf.org. The index page has become largely a splash page, and all significant navigation now takes place from the sitemap, which now features thumbnails, and gathers links to every project in one place. A couple of crappy projects have been eliminated, and almost every other project has been altered in significant ways.
I haven't edited mjt.sdf.org in a long while, and I just made up for this stagnation within the past two days by totally gutting and restructuring the site. The re-vamp was too wide-ranging for me to go into much detail. Pages have been combined, things have been eliminated, new pages have been created. Pretty much the only thing I didn't do was re-record the mp3s.
The writing section is gone -- I'll decide what to do with those pieces later. However, my "epistolary journal" (how's that for pretentious?) remains on-board, and is now considered an "art" project. In case people weren't familiar, the journal is a collection of sent emails spanning about three years; about 400 pages of text printed on 8/5" x 11" paper. A blog in letter form, before the days of blogging.
I don't think most index page visitors have seen it -- it was buried within two indices, and was listed at the very bottom of the second one. However, the journal gets more hits than any page on mjt.sdf.org except the index page, simply because it's incredibly long, and contains so many different words and phrases; it's a google-magnet.
I'm sure I was losing a lot of traffic because mjt.sdf.org was so sprawling, and had too many indices. The interface is simpler now, and is arranged in a way such that encourages use. It's not set up for pretentious art buggery anymore -- gone are the snotty, terminology-laden pages of text and photos that documented performance pieces built around a shockwave file. Now, there's just the shockwave file, embedded in a page.
I'm pleased with my updated site -- you have to see it to believe it.
I expressed concern in the last entry that I'm not writing as interesting blog-content as I used to. When I look back, I note that many of my old posts were about philosophy, religion, and politics. These days, they're about punching bags.
I don't have as many ideas anymore. I worry that a cause may be my anti-convulsant medication -- I've seen reports on the web of creativity being damaged by these drugs. It makes sense; they dampen excessive neural firing. Essentially, they quiet down your brain, so you can function. But this reduced output means a reduced output in other arenas as well.
Now that I'm taking lamictal, manic creative bursts don't hit anywhere near as hard as they used to. A few months ago, any little thing would trigger a great fractal tree of thought-processes, and I'd write something about the taboo of the human bite, neolithic statuettes and genetic diversity, or deconstructionism and whales.
I'm worried that the virtual cessation of that sort of bizarre, theorizing, creative writing coincides with starting on this new medication. I'll google my blog for "lamictal," but I don't think that's going to yield any telling results. Admittedly I was a bit psychotic and dangerous without these drugs, but my creative output then was staggering.
I've heard the phrase "debilitating genius" -- this is not to say that I'm a genius in any way, but I can see where the model might apply to me. The sort of mental illness, or at least mental cessation, that is responsible for creative output, is often also responsible for failure to function.
Links between creativity and mental illness, especially epilepsy, have been documented anecdotally, and have popped up over and over throughout history. But perhaps more than anything, the debilitation comes with the constant, burning need to output -- an artist who must paint, or a mathematician who must theorize. Creativity isn't any more something that can be controlled than it is something that can be developed.
This is not to say that it's impossible to be creative and otherwise functional -- certainly there are many examples of individuals who are both. But for many, it's hard -- a few google searches on insanity and creativity turn up lots of pages on the subject.
The medication I take keeps me sane, but it also might, and I stress "might," dampen my creativity. I may have a choice: mental health, or writing blogs about capitalism and the interconnectedness of discreet systems. Perhaps the former could be used as a diagnostic criterion.
In the movie "pi," the main character (a mathematician) drills a hole into the side of his head, and to his blessed relief is no longer a creative genius, a condition that had tortured him. In the final scene, he smiled blissfully and said "i don't know" when a little girl asked for some hard-to-calculate answer to a math problem. Apparently, he used to do arithmetic tricks to entertain her. At least I think that's what happened -- I saw it a long time ago. But I certainly got the gist, and the point holds true: creative genius can be an unhappy thing, and some people want to get rid of it.
I don't know if it's possible to make an effort to be creative; that might not be the way creativity works. I'm inclined to believe that it just comes along, rushes on like a flood. One or two people have asked me how I do it, how I come up with things, and I'm not sure how to answer. It's not like I'm making an effort, like I might to lift a box full of books. Creativity might not something that can be developed or worked on, at least in any significant way. I'd liken "creative ability" to something like eye-color or height more than I would liken it to learned information or cognition.
I've heard that creativity comes in cycles, and that the muses can't be trusted to give consistent results. But this one did, for a long time. I can't help but wonder if this is an easily-correctable change implemented by dosing myself anti-convulsant madication. Or, it's possible that I'm just getting old, which I could certainly deal with.
I wouldn't be as freaked out if I were taking an anti-depressant instead of an anti-convulsant -- for instance, SSRI's add something to the mix (soaking the grey matter in neuro-transmitters) rather than taking something away (inhibiting neural firing).
Again, I have to point out the time-frame of roughly a year, at UMBC, during which I took no medication and was fine. Things didn't degenerate for me until just fairly recently, in fact.
It's a matter of trade-offs, as they say. I very well might not feel as good without medication, but I'm very, very leery about having creative powers drained away.
I'm probably jumping to conclusions, as usual. I don't know -- I guess it's not a disaster either way.
God, I suck at "breaks from blogging." I'm something like 0-for-10 at this point.
I'm going to take a break from blogging for a while. I've noticed that the quality of my writing is nowhere near what it was a few dozen entries ago. I think it's time to revitalize. Plus, I'll be starting my new job soon (probably. Almost definitely). Anyway, I need a break.