Totally incompatible because of memory shortage in my age class.
I really shouldn’t generalize, some people my age and decades older have phenomenal memory capacity. My husband does (drat!) and my father did into his nineties. My memory just has never been that great. This does not bode well for me on tests that require dependence upon the retention of formulas.
Ah, well. It’s just a test.
(Shopping list: Plastic seat cover for computer chair to avoid the issue of a wet seat from running out of the shower with ideas that just have to be typed up immediately.)
The thought struck me, not for the first time, that I live an incredibly dull life.
Sometimes I’ve answered this reflection with a philosophical approach: Just get through it, promise to be more exciting the next go-round. Clichéd version: “Live for today!” (Response: There’s always tomorrow), “You only go around once!” (Response: Maybe in my next life.)
Whatever I happen to be involved in seems to drive every other facet of my life. Right now, getting turned onto what’s being discussed in the New Media course, I’m finding that I’ve been able to both apply and dissect the other hours of the week by what I’m learning in the hours I spend in the clutches of its influence. These guys, the professors, are heavily into the concept of forking paths in life (Thank you, Jorge Borges). Now with the writerly/readerly discussion of Barthes yesterday, I’m wondering if there’s a tie-in with the writer/author (I’m just going to use the term “writer” as someone who dedicates a decent part of their life to writing, okay?) personality and the type of literary efforts they make.
For example, do fiction writers lead basically less exciting lives, but have vivid imaginations that not only give them the creative ideas of story, but keep them satisfied by fantasizing their own lives, i.e., living a more adventurous life in their head while conducting Walter Mitty lives to all observation? Do the people who travel or write journalism live the exciting life and write about it, but have no imagination or secret fantasy world for themselves? Are the paths not taken in reality, actually followed through in the mind? Are we still following them daily in our heads?
But then, there’s Hemingway. And there goes another theory.
Okay, I’m gonna tell you guys something that I can’t discuss with my husband, because it’s about him and I, locked in a 15-year war that luckily does not involve bloodshed.
It’s about toothpaste. No, not the old cover on, cover off thing, or even the one about squeezing the tube in the middle–that Waterloo’s been met by one of those tube-flattener, get-out-every-last-enth of toothpaste devices. But that squeezer thingie is what’s evolved into this ongoing battle of wills. Who will be the first one to use the new tube of toothpaste I put out there, which goodness knows, is off limits until the old one is most absolutely, positively done-fer. This involves unrolling the thingie off the tube before it can be tossed.
We never mention it. We just each, individually, go in and use it, all but twisting and compressing the toothpaste to get that very last brush-full out, then with an audible, “Aaah,” we replace the cap and leave it on the counter back in place.
Although this morning, I noticed a suspicious dent in the new tube. Hmmm. That’s not fair.
Good God, I love labels.
In a New York Times article this morning there is a very interesting piece on a scientific study being conducted on that familiar “I’ve been here/done this” feeling we call déjà vu. We can all relate to this, and I’m most anxious to follow this particular research as it evolves.
But this, within the text of the article elicits even a greater interest in my mind:
“For one thing, déjà vu appears to be more common when people are exhausted or stressed, conditions that are known to cloud short- and long-term memory (and that may also accompany jamais vu, the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them).”
Ain’t that neat? I had multiple or… experiences of jamais vu last night just studying Statistics formulas and working out the problems. Maybe I can relax now that I know what it’s called, and if the study proves this part of its theory about stress, memory will return before tomorrow’s exam.
I intended this post as a warning that there would probably be no blogging on my part tomorrow, but I’m a blogaholic, as well as an obsessive/compulsive type so I rather doubt it.
Tommorow is planned as an intense learn formulas for standard deviation, covariance, correlation and general all-around statistics study marathon, and normally I find that I can dedicate myself to a single focus, but statistics? Statistics will kill the best creativity. Unless you learn to combine them, and evidently that’s a profitable career in corporate these days. But I personally find it difficult to continue a flow of both together. So if I blog (and I probably will need to take breaks from numbers), it most likely won’t be inspirational stuff.
Unless melancholia happens. I’m good and creative with melancholia.
I did remember to go uptown and vote on the airport referendum today. All that reading of pamphlets did give me a basis on which to make a decision.
And this, below, is just too funny not to share. You can switch the names around if it suits you; this was just how it was sent to me:
“To all Americans:
There are less than three months until the election, an election that will decide the next President of the United States. The man elected will be the President of all Americans, not just the Democrats or the Republicans. To show our solidarity as Americans, let’s all get together and show each other our support for the candidate of our choice. It’s time that we all came together, Democrats and Republicans alike.
If you support the policies and character of President George W. Bush, please drive with your headlights on during the day. If you support John Kerry, please drive with your headlights off at night.”
Oh c’mon, lighten up.
There I was, sitting on the back step formulating a post (I let ideas drift through, and if one catches into a line that makes a complete sentence, I race inside and start typing. It’s my style.) about the New Media class today and how I almost stood up and shouted "Leftist Pigs!"* when a hummingbird comes over to me and destroys my self-righteous mood.
I hate it when I turn into a marshmallow. I must go poke myself with a stick and lay over some flames for a short bit to harden my shell. I shall return.
*Just goes to show you how emotional reaction can overwhelm rational thought.
There have been theories that other life, other times are occurring around us, occupying the same space. Parallel stories, spirits, time warp; past, present and future all happening simultaneously.
This is what’s been bothering me lately.
The woulda’s, coulda’s, shoulda’s of different paths we take in life may be going on as well. I watched the first half of the movie, “Sliding Doors” the other night, and am very anxious to get a hold of it again to see the rest. It’s got a very simple story line—or perhaps I should say, two—of a woman whose life splits off in two directions in an instant, and beautifully follows each as she continues living both lives simultaneously. It’s the great question of “what if?” and it’s something we’ve all considered at some point in our lives, whether on a small scale based on an event (what if I’d left the house one second sooner and ended up a part of that traffic accident on I-84?) to full-future vision (what if I’d said yes and married that guy?)
Somehow, all these odd thoughts are coming together at once. Since I tend towards a belief in an “afterlife,” reincarnation is a feasible possibility in my theory. But…
What if it’s not a case of “after,” but instead is happening right now? Eternity is an immeasurable quantity, meaning time does not exist within its realm. Some people believe in a co-existing “spirit” world—ghosts. I never did, but we can’t discount it totally. After all, someone thought of the idea. Primitive man understood death; so who was the first brave soul that claimed he saw someone who had died? Why would he even conceive of that notion?
So, giving it just a grain of consideration as a possibility that “something” is there, what if it’s just us running into ourselves? What if…?
The past is part of the present and the future. A little rhyme popped in my head just now, and though I know I learned it sometime in grammar school, I’m not sure if it wasn’t my mother who taught it to me:
“Good, better, best
never let it rest,
until your good is better,
and your better is your best.”
I don’t think I’ve thought of that in decades. But it’s been an influence; a source of both triumph and anxiety. A Google search came up with the quotation, but credit is unknown. Most of you have probably heard them at some point in your life as well. Who, somewhere in a past far deeper than my own, first spoke these words? Are they a part of him, now out of place, but holding place forever? How many people were inspired, driven by these simple four lines?
Language then, is a constant; it transcends time. A thought can exist forever. The old philosophers believed that truth and knowledge were the only thing to strive for because they were the only thing that lasted.
I really, really need a cabin in the woods. Within walking distance of a library, of course. Or at the very least, internet access.
Taking a break from numbers. Numbers that I used to love. Statistics will be the death of me. It’s more than counting pizza slices. It was, as Algebra I’m sure, New Media of its day. Combining letters with the numbers to present a different picture, tell a story that would never have been told by mere numbers alone. Enhanced. Numbers are also necessary to the production of new New Media. It seems I can’t escape them.
Strange day today. Thinking in directions while trying to stay focused. Still affected by a visit to a church. Wondering why I didn’t walk the other aisles. No doubt, memory got in the way. Not familiarity, thus lack of interest, but more; ingrained respect and learned response to place. Wondering why we look upward, see the sky as heaven–just perhaps, because it once was out of reach? Whether man invented God is quite another matter, but he certainly invented where He lives.
What if the world began with access to the moon–as now–would heaven still be in the skies? Eventually, no doubt, if man has not destroyed himself, he will be living on another celestial body. And pray, and bow his head, and look up…to earth?
In a comment to a post below “What makes up space?” Professor John Timmons kindly offers a poem that relates to a sense of being and the space of universe the poet uses within it. It’s a wonderful piece that you really must read by Mark Strand called, “Keeping Things Whole.” I tend to write poems to voice the darker things in life, and the most recent was in fact a combination of two ideas that competed for my attention today.
Maybe I shouldn’t be encouraged in these mind travels, at least without knowing I have a knapsack on my back, but I appreciate the confirmation that sometimes they lead in well-worthwhile directions.
Of course the trail forks off from here, and goes to consideration of literary form as much as it has me stepping backwards many times today to scrutinize the place where I had been.
But as to literary form, I wondered at the time I posted whether it even fell under New Media. Moving around today, both physically and mentally has produced an image that would well fall into the category.
If we were just suited to this world, wouldn’t we better understand it?
It’s a small world after all? No; as we reach, discovery doesn’t make the world smaller. The conquest of the moon still cannot bring it here; our world gets larger, expanding to within boundaries of the next checkpoint reached. As we push forward, are we getting closer to an outer limit that for now, we cannot even conceive of as existing? Will there be a wall we hit at some point in a future time where time is gone and space no longer is explorable, but all been seen and felt and known?
Or do we move ahead in stages of our lives…and rest between.
Here’s a thought, and you may need to take something fairly potent to visualize it: If we measure movement within a space by distance (here to there) and time (6 seconds to get there) or a combination of both (0 – 60 in 6 seconds), what other means of seeing movement do we have available?
Is the space between objects nothing, or is it a living, moving thing? It’s transparent, but we need it or we’d all be crammed together along with trees and buildings and each other. It’s also used to carry elements we need to survive, like oxygen and water, but what does it do and how does it move to accomodate the objects moving within it?
What if we were able to see the effect of the cause in every nanosecond as it happens? We see objects within space, such as a man standing right there. He takes a few steps in a straight line, perpendicular to our line of sight, and stops 3 feet to the left of where he was standing before. Visually, he has moved from one spot to another, and we witnessed the change in the “picture.” But that’s because he’s moving in transparent space.
What if it were colored blue? Or red? The space must move to replace where he has been—would it show up visually? Think of a cup of water drawn from a bucket. Does space rush to fill in the absence of an object, or is it stationary, and changes in form to take on the elements of the object as it passes?
In a time sequence, would we see the space as slowly filling in as he moves? How about the slow growth pattern of a tree?
So, a cardinal did not just fly across my yard from tree to bush this morning. In thousands of instants, he displaced areas of space in his flight.
I’m sure this is all answered by the discipline of Physics, but it’s kinda neat to come at it from an uneducated, visual and wondering kind of way.
Told you you might need something stronger than coffee to visualize my thoughts today.
Tearing at my veil with fingers
that will never age.
Rending holes in falls of gossamer,
thinner than the finest tulle;
but steadfast, as a wall with oaken door
that swung one way, cutting off goodbye.
Or so I thought.
My mind froze with the cold wind
blowing through; cracking, falling into
little pieces on the floor,
among the dusty remnants of ideas.
I cannot grasp with fingers naked, bloody,
any thoughts in all the disarray.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology