[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in
Paradoxes!'s InsaneJournal:
- 08:54 It's NEWS when a rich guy cheats on his wife now? I mean, if it doesn't surprise ANYONE, is it news? "Today on Fox...the sun rose! Discuss!" #
- 08:58 More than an hour this a.m. to catch up on polyphasic comments/emails. Yowza! #
- 10:54 BEHOLD! I have made a lentil soup, and it is AWESOME. Somehow I stumbled on a recipe that's very close to Indian-restaurant-spicy. Woot! #
- 10:30 @bricestacey If it were you, where would you ask? I trust people more than companies anyway, as a rule. I like my donations direct! ;) #
- 12:02 It's cold and grey out and life is deeply uncertain...obviously the only answer is to MAKE SOUP. *yay soup* #
- 12:05 RT @postsecret: 1 (800) SUICIDE Fundraiser :: For every new follower today, I will donate $1 to HopeLine. Please Retweet. #
- 11:30 "Sometimes you just have to put on a record and sit on your floor and cry," the 'Net tells me today. Having had my appt, I understand why. #
- 16:55 Give $10 to this family today and save their home: focused donations FTW! bit.ly/6geDny #
- 08:55 I told my boy I wanted to be less nervous singing/reading with microphones. Now he's got me carrying one around all the time. Brilliant, y? #
- 10:48 I feel certain that no matter how wild the future, there will be a place in it for storytellers. #
- 15:17 @SageFrancisSFR So...did it win the fashion battle AND the wardrobe? ;) #
- 15:18 @jemaverick Is "As a favor to women everywhere" on the list? B/c if the article's aimed at the public, that's true over half the time....;) #
- 15:20 Ooo...I just had to critique a really BAD story. Ick...pulling punches is no help to the author, but I hate being That Harbinger too. #
- 15:22 "Writing, like sculpting, means first making the idea present, then removing all the stuff that'll keep people from seeing it clearly." #
- 15:24 (Okay, so sometimes I get off on my own advice. Sue me. In, um, masturbation court. Is there one yet? Get on the ball, Catholic Bishops!) #
- 11:27 Awesome bumper-sticker I saw: Politicians and diapers need to be changed often...frequently for the same reason. #
- 14:10 Awesome start...Obama shoves lobbyists off of federal advisory boards: bit.ly/56rQhB #
- 11:46 Wow, been a long time since a concert. The Jesus Lizard and Easy Action were both AWESOME. Gods I love hardcore. I need me a hardcore band! #
- 16:14 Whups, sorry @undegaussable & @noraknickers - that's in reference to the antepenultimate post over at TL: bit.ly/5hMxEe #
- 11:58 Holy crapgasm, am I getting a lot done! It's only day three, but I think I have to say that uber-time-management thing works REALLY WELL. #
- 08:52 @SergiosFirefly Those beliefs themselves won't make being monogamous for decades easy. They may help you deal w/ how hard it can be, though! #
- 08:54 @bricestacey @Sydney_Everyman Wow, thanks for the interest! Am invigorated and terrified about finishing it now. ;) #
- 10:28 Part One of Thirteen of the novella is edited. Progress! What do people think of "Fangboner Street" as a title? #
- 10:30 @SergiosFirefly Well, I hope expecting it to be easy doesn't stymie you when it gets hard...how about we both agree to keep open minds? #
- 21:00 Finished some #shorinryu practice & @riotmod tells me, "Every time you say 'pinan', I want to laugh." #
| Monday, December 7th, 2009 | |
| 1:50 am | Reality…you suck sometimes. Oh crap. So, I’ve caught something, some dastardly virus or bacteria. It’s sort of descended like a calvary of doom out of nowhere over about four hours; this morning I felt great and tonight I’m barely on my feet. Even the neti pot barely touched it. ::cowers:: CRAP! I was doing so well! I was having a productive and weird Manic Sunday and it was pretty fun, for a December day. I was doing the good kind of brainwashing! I had leapt out of bed for alarm training 18 times already! And I got stricken by stupid germs, brainwash interruptus. You are really not fair sometimes, life. Oh well. Crap happens. It’s important to stay focused on what to be thankful for: the talented musician practicing in the dining-room; the opportunity to strengthen one’s discipline by trying these projects again later; ginger tea, and it’s amazing ability to unplug the stubbornest sinuses. Ugh. G’night and sneezes. Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there. |
| Saturday, December 5th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Friday, December 4th, 2009 | |
| 10:00 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | |
| 10:00 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | |
| 11:58 pm | Ahead of the Curve (By Definition)
Kids are the future, you know. That makes three teenagers who’ve asked me questions about doing experiments on Polyphasic Sleep for their school science projects. \o/ Whether or not those projects get done (I’m not really hot on the idea of the UnFullyGrown messing around with restrictive sleep-schedules, personally), it’s awesome that high-schoolers combined with the Internet are arguably more innovative than anything that can put "Fortune 500" anywhere near its name. *woot!*
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there. |
| 10:00 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Monday, November 30th, 2009 | |
| 4:20 pm | Uberchronology: Working with what you’ve got I’ve tried to be a "good blogger" about having normal-ish post titles that at least don’t actively obscure the post’s content…but when it comes to the simple "update" posts that I don’t expect people to be searching for, the gloves are still off as far as I’m concerned. ;) First, if you’re interested in Uber Time Management, you should know that my opinions ought to barely even count as such, considering what’s going on with me right now. (This is a much better source, if you want more details on the concept.) I can’t really elaborate because it’s ALL still way up in the air, and that’s precisely why any attempts at "scheduling" I make during this time should be–I think–viewed as successful or not relative to the complete and total holy crap chaos that everything is TRYING really hard to be. Details below that there cut. ;)
So. Monday and Tuesday, I had to work, but had a lot of free-time due to the PD-pocalypse taking away significant chunks of my usual duties. So I tried the "Uber Time-Management" schedule I found a few posts ago, and lo, during both of those days I got several pages written or edited on two different stories, plus stayed ahead of my mountain of "administrative" obligations. I’m dividing my days into four: A morning admin period, morning writing block, break for nap & lunch; then afternoon admin period and afternoon writing block. On Monday and Tuesday all of these "blocks" were adhered to, but often broken up by work demanding that I Do Things. Cal over at Study Hacks talks about how important it is to keep those blocks of time sacrosanct and uninterrupted, and I think he’s right; but even with the interruptions, having distinct blocks of time for specific things was really helpful. On Wednesday I had no such interruptions. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted from Monday and Tuesday (yes, I had a two-day work-week that wiped me out worse than most five-day ones), so I spent the time before my day started at 8:30, in the 12 – 1:30 break, and after 5:30 playing video games and being basically inert. In spite of that, though, I still got a lot done on my big story "Fangboner Street", my short-story "Good Morning, Bert & Ernie", and my Secret Project, all of which advanced several pages that day — a day when, to be honest, without that schedule I doubt I’d have accomplished anything at all. Thursday was Thanksgiving, and though my family got it out of the way last week and I had no plans, I decided to take a "break" from my schedule. Actually nothing got done on Thursday, in spite of my firm intention to write anyway. This is an important lesson, I think: Intentions are nice, but even the firmest needs support from some kind of schedule or dedicated block of time. Friday I decided I’d learned my lesson, but also that I was still on vacation, so I’d continue to be lenient. Then an interesting effect kicked in: Because I’d been writing on the current fiction projects for several days straight, the bug bit me. Ignoring the various alarms that told me to switch tasks, on Friday I wrote for about ten hours straight. It was fabulous; I won’t lie. Saturday I got back on the schedule and again, got a lot done. (I started actually tracking pages written & edited on Friday, as part of the morning admin time before I got sucked into Fangboner; but those notes are at home. I’ll post the numbers later.) Not only did I write on my projects, but I cleaned my desk and paid the bills and wrote several critiques for other writers, and it wasn’t really hard at all. By 5:30 I was playing video games again, feeling like an Uberman again. (This in spite of my sleep-schedule being all kinds of screwed up…I’m still "on" Everyman if I’m on anything, but I’ve been getting poor sleep due to all the stress, so I don’t think I’ve had a perfect day in two weeks. Ugh!) Sunday I kept my momentum up with Fangboner, but without the schedule again, I didn’t get much else accomplished. Today I’m back at work with the attendant interruptions. I actually have no idea how many days this week I’m working, or how much there’ll be to do while I’m here (oh yes, it’s that crazy), but I’m planning on nailing my life together with this schedule: I’ll follow the blocks of time if I’m at work, and just deal with the interruptions. If I’m at home, I’ll be as firm as I can about not being interrupted. I have a mostly-finished novel (I’ve been calling it a novella, but I suspect it’ll turn out to be a smallish novel), a finished short-story to submit, two short-stories that need editing, and a Secret Project or two. I’d like to see them all get done before next summer, when things get REALLY crazy again and I suspect I won’t have time to write any more for a while. *sigh* So, maybe I can turn this ridiculous time of my life into something useful, eh? It’d be nice if all time-management was about what to do with stable situations and good work environments, but you know me…I’m a big believer in working with what you’ve got! Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there. |
| Sunday, November 29th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Saturday, November 28th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Friday, November 27th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Thursday, November 26th, 2009 | |
| 10:04 am | PD IN PIECES |
| Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES ...This concludes our WTFcast for today. |
| 10:04 am | Abandoning Philosophy for the Hard Work of Being a Continuing Machine
To which he answers something like, "Are you high? You agonized for months about that decision." To which I could answer, "Well, maybe that’s flippant for me," –but in reality it makes more sense to admit that it wasn’t the speed of the decision, but the fact of it, which consternates me still. It’s hard to let go of things with which you identify. But isn’t to identify with anything just another way of failing to know who you really are? In the world of equations, 1=1, and the only thing you = is you. Know thyself or perish in mathematical hell, heh. In any case, we all have to let go of things we identify with, good and bad, because one of the fundamentals of the Universe is "shit changes". Failing to get okay with that is one of humanity’s more potent recipes for agony and dissatisfaction, right? Still. I was "the little philosopher" since I was very young, and most of my life I’ve been defined in some way by my tendency to ask, chew over, and spit out some attempt at answers to, all kinds of questions that normal humans assure me they’d rather leave lie. I laid awake at age eight for weeks because I couldn’t figure out why I’d ended up in the body I was in, and nobody at the Church (who, I was convinced, knew the answer on some level) would tell me. Further, I was a damn good philosophy student. My aptitude with written English combined with my natural fearlessness about scary questions and the consequences of their answers made me a darn good group-discussioner and paper-writer, and I spent my whole (lengthy) undergraduate career kicking ass and having my name taken by some very impressive people. I was the pet of every professor I wanted to impress, and I would have had a lot of help if I’d wanted to go further. In the end, I let it go for practical reasons: My education was interrupted by ten years of "other stuff", and by the time it was time to get serious professionally, I was in a position that I could neither afford to move around chasing jobs, nor work stupid-long hours for chickenfeed pay. (No amount of connections was going to get me out of that, sadly.) I decided that, much as I love (LOVE!) a good philosophical romp, as far as careers go, I was actually better off chasing my dream (the only earlier dream than philosophy) of being a science-fiction writer. Which was probably a good decision. (How good will be determined by the success of my stories, I suppose.) There was also the fact that my chosen philosophical forays are all geared towards a specific set of answers I desire to understand (not find or discover; understand and hopefully elucidate to others) during my lifetime. Professional philosophy would have provided some tools towards that end (but few that I don’t have access to anyway, given some books and some time), but it would have also required that I do a lot of philosophy that didn’t aim in that direction. Professional philosophy is about filling in gaps in human knowledge, ironing out kinks, publishing papers on how you think you got that wrinkle out. There’s a lot of talk about Big Answers, but not as much work available to do with them. I would have, I think, been like a lover of fine German auto-engineering who took a job on the line at Ford, at least for a while. And components that I feel are necessary towards grasping the things I really want to understand, like kungfu and meditation, would have had little or no place in my "official" philosophical toolbox. So I opted to do, and read, a little philosophy that was specifically targeted to my personal goals; rather than make philosophy my living and possibly subordinate those goals in the process. At least on the face of it, that still doesn’t look like a terrible decision. And yet. I no longer get called a "philosopher"; now that I’m an adult I don’t qualify (according to standard terminology) if I’m not a professional, or at least on the road to try and be one. I’ve officially diverged from the path of "philosophy", a path I’ve been pretty well matched-up with for most of my life. Ever since it happened, I feel a bit…unmoored. Not in a bad enough way that I take it to mean I definitely made the wrong decision, but it is distinctly uncomfortable. Part of me wonders if I’m a failure because I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stick with this. I don’t know what to call myself anymore, I guess. I’m not quite a writer, not just a wife and mother, not yet a guru, not really a technonerd. But how important are labels, really? We obsess about getting out from under the labels others impose on us, but aren’t our own impositions a thousand times more restrictive and just as artificial? If I’m smart, I guess, I’ll take the opportunity to get used to just "being me", and get a little less hung up on how to put that in words. My job is to live this life, not record it for posterity. If someone else wants to call me philosopher, writer, nerd, whatever, then I suppose that’s their choice. Narrating the chase while you’re still having it is hardly a good plan: Your attention is needed in the moment. I think it’s the same with being alive. Because really, that’s the answer to the question I had when I was eight: You are the body, and the person, you are, because the Universe is all about things existing, exploring the possibilities of creation in a specific context, and then seeing how long it takes and what it does before it gets destroyed. Essentially I’m a character-study for a writer with infinite time to play with and an imagination that mine is literally only a shadow of. My job is to play this form out, in this setting, and see where it goes. Not to "be" an "X", where "X" is anything besides just me. And in the end–Catholic upbringing aside–I feel pretty confident that my decisions will be viewed (if at all) with curiosity and sympathy, and not judgment or any negative sort of labeling. Other humans may judge me, but that’s just them playing out their existence, and how I choose to answer them is part of how I play out mine. As Mr. Vonnegut so brilliantly put it, you’re a Continuing Machine. You were put here to go, and keep going, and see how far you get and what you do before you’re over-with. From that perspective, any attempt to be other than the fullest expression of precisely what you are seems pretty misguided.* What would I have gotten from "being" a philosopher anyway, other than ego-gratification? I can still read philosophy. I can still go to lectures and talk to philosophers and write down my thoughts, even publish them (thank you Internet). The need to "be something" is nothing more than a type of resistance to what one already is. Innit? . *Of course, this begs the question, "What if what I am is a miserable shithead, or a murderer? Should I still be seeking to be the purest expression of it?" –The answer to which requires an exploration of whether one feels that human beings are innately good, which exploration I just so happen to have been writing recently. It’ll be up soon. ;) . Awesome picture (of Confucius and Machiavelli) by Helico Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there. |
| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
| 2:46 am | Everybody who cares about the effort for Health Care Reform should read this one. Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option | Robert Reich’s Blog
This is a simple, fast read that clearly elucidates what’s happening to the public option and its likely fates. Which are deeply frustrating and troubling. Being that I’m honestly worried that a bad health-care reform effort may be too expensive a blunder for America’s stuttering economy to withstand, I wish I could do more. I can–and do–communicate with Congresspeople, my own and others; but fundamentally I feel that I can’t communicate as, um, loudly as the major corporate lobbying groups in question, who seem to have the ear of the majority of Reps and Senators regardless of which party is technically in power. What puts the pressure back on politicians to answer to the people? Surely not legislation that forces them to, because that would be ludicrous, right? Violence? I can’t stomach the stuff, and don’t see a reason to want to learn how. Boycotting maybe? Boycotting what, though? Withholding tax money hurts citizens, by impacting schools and other programs they need; it doesn’t cut a Senator’s salary any. Okay. Rather than have no ideas, I’ll say that my idea is that We, The People should pool our dough and hire some really super good hackers to make the lives of our Congresspeople hell until they relent and pass a real public option, a "Kennedy bill" as some are calling it. Of course my idea kind of sucks, so I’d love to hear yours. :P
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there. |
| Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | |
| 11:36 pm | Not everything interesting is fun. Oo, go read Sanguinity's post helpfully summarizing an article (by a guy) that gives a lot of fascinating information about rape prevention. Don't miss the comments either, and if you're interested in the topic, the blog she links to is an awesome source. |
| 10:01 am | PD IN PIECES |
Sometimes I say things, at night, to my partner, like, "I wonder if I shouldn’t have written off a career in philosophy so flippantly."