I woke up today at 3 AM in a terrific mood. It's a nice day, I'm motivated, and I will now attack my multivariable textbook to review!!!!
^^;; Life is good today.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Not tired enough apparently. Random thoughts.
I want a livescribe pen!
I miss my dad so much.
I love my family more than they can ever imagine.
I wish I could be in Starfleet. That would be awesome.
Discover Ocean Engineering.
East Campus? Random Hall?
I am a shitty writer ahahaha
I love bunnies
This is pointless
I want a livescribe pen!
I miss my dad so much.
I love my family more than they can ever imagine.
I wish I could be in Starfleet. That would be awesome.
Discover Ocean Engineering.
East Campus? Random Hall?
I am a shitty writer ahahaha
I love bunnies
This is pointless
It's 3:37, and I can't sleep. I have to wake up at 9 to volunteer at the museum tomorrow (actually, today). Needless to say, this is an inconvenience. Insomnia sneaks up on me at the best of times, usually the result of reading or thinking too hard close to when I want to sleep. Yes, apparently sudoku is also something I can't do past 10, including watching TV or eating anything. My mistake- so now I'm in for a lovely couple of hours before I have to get out of bed. I'll be productive.
What, exactly, is the value of a happy life? The point of life is to find a sense of joy in everything you do. When you hear a story about a happy old couple living together in a pretty little house by the ocean, being visited occasionally by their grandchildren and going on walks and trying to cook new foods, there's an immediate "awww" reaction, and the undeniable sense that this would be the perfect ending for any life, one where you were at peace. Nothing too exciting anymore, just a return to basics. Gardening, the natural world, and the presence of a loving family should bring people joy, and I confess that a part of me wants this desperately: the simple ending, a vague understanding that you are happy in some sense, you are grateful for what you have because it's all you really need. I feel as though the people who are lucky enough to find this are admired at a level far below the everyday concept of success, and I'm slowly driving myself absolutely insane by asking why.
Happiness is an emotion, and triggered by different things in different people. In some, its excitement and thrills, while in others, its just a normal day spent at simple, dull tasks filled with familiarity. The physiological basis is exactly the same: a rush of dopamine and serotonin, the lighting up of pleasure centers in the brain. So if everyone were rational and concluded that happiness was the end goal of a life, they wo
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I am now tired. It is 3:38, and I am feeling more tired. Maybe writing boring essays voluntarily should be my new sleep trick.
What, exactly, is the value of a happy life? The point of life is to find a sense of joy in everything you do. When you hear a story about a happy old couple living together in a pretty little house by the ocean, being visited occasionally by their grandchildren and going on walks and trying to cook new foods, there's an immediate "awww" reaction, and the undeniable sense that this would be the perfect ending for any life, one where you were at peace. Nothing too exciting anymore, just a return to basics. Gardening, the natural world, and the presence of a loving family should bring people joy, and I confess that a part of me wants this desperately: the simple ending, a vague understanding that you are happy in some sense, you are grateful for what you have because it's all you really need. I feel as though the people who are lucky enough to find this are admired at a level far below the everyday concept of success, and I'm slowly driving myself absolutely insane by asking why.
Happiness is an emotion, and triggered by different things in different people. In some, its excitement and thrills, while in others, its just a normal day spent at simple, dull tasks filled with familiarity. The physiological basis is exactly the same: a rush of dopamine and serotonin, the lighting up of pleasure centers in the brain. So if everyone were rational and concluded that happiness was the end goal of a life, they wo
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I am now tired. It is 3:38, and I am feeling more tired. Maybe writing boring essays voluntarily should be my new sleep trick.
Monday, June 1, 2009
I write in fragmented sentences, in loose ends. Never have I written a paper from beginning to end. Any thought starts out with just bits of argument that I fill in as my mind jumps around from idea to idea. Nothing can be sustained in my head, it seems, for longer than the span of around 5 seconds. It's extraordinarily inconvenient.
Mrs. Dalloway Imitation
Here's an imitation short story done in the style of Mrs. Dalloway. I kind of like the beginning, but I think the quality drops off in the second half.
--
Katherine said she would buy the flowers herself. She had promised, the day before, surprising Ben for the first time in years. Ben, her brother— she repeated the word in her mind, rattled it about it all its different forms, until even the sounds stripped of its meanings sounded oddly bent and alien. Brother- how strange that other, which rolled off her tongue as easily as the taste of flat water, could be crippled by an insignificant addition of sound so easily produced by a stern tightening of her lips at the beginning of the word. How had she never noticed it before, the way the taste and sense of the word lay curled up within the kernel of its meaning? Brother was stern, yet almost comically clumsy—not without cause, she thought wryly. But a second voice whispered in her head that Ben was not stern or cruel, and chided her, for she had no right to think that because he had taken them in. No, Ben was simply reliable Benjamin, as he’d always been (providing and aloof), occasionally dull Benjamin, brilliant absorbed Benjamin with the well-paid scientists’ job, who had never once just introduced himself as Ben, not once in his life despite her good-natured pleas and teasing.
But the flowers! It had been the dark little apartment that had driven her to make the promise the previous evening, she was sure of it. For it was the sheer lack of dimension in the tiny rooms had been weighing on her and dragging her down- the swept corners that stood out more starkly from the empty white walls were tormenting her especially, though she could not explain it, not by any stretch of reason. (Reason! she scoffed, for neither logic nor Ben’s facts and figures could explain the strange phenomenon beginning to haunt her. Reason could not explain the awful emptiness or the silence of their home, even as it was pushed far past the intended extents of occupancy.) She had been feeling restless from her inability to explain the small discomforts that plagued her, like the increasing whiteness of the white walls that had invaded her being as a light prickle on her spine, and was nearly tortuous in its consistency.
But perhaps the misplaced prickling on her spine that had made her so wary was merely boredom. There was nothing of interest in the apartment- not half-written lists to wonder at nor misplaced keys that she could test on creaking closet doors, because despite her best efforts Ben was the most devoted of housekeepers. As a visitor with freer habits, she felt like a savage, or at the very least willfully ungrateful. Ben had a way (though likely unintentional) of making other people feel as though they were merely flighty children to be tolerated. One could not leave anything to chance, put anything off until later without feeling judged irresponsible, or even worse, incomprehensible altogether. How awful he could be at times, she’d thought (though with a flash of guilt), and even worse that he truly meant none of it. If she picked up a bowl and dashed it against the floor, she thought, Ben would arrive with his measured walk, and sweep up the bits without demanding the slightest explanation. But no, that would be cruel of her, even frightening, and so during the hours before she had made her fated promise, her hands had remained tightly at her sides, though her mind replayed the scene in a half-sketched fantasy. The images would not leave her mind, and though the imagined sound of shattering china brought her a strange measure of relief, her guilt grew.
When Ben had entered the room at last, she’d thrown her arms around him quite suddenly, surprising even herself. He had hesitated and taken a step back. Had she startled him? The thought that he should be afraid of her! The sheer ridiculousness of the string of events, both real and imagined, drew a quick laugh from her. She felt the black edge of her mood dissipate, and she apologized to him again and again for nothing at all, laughing helplessly at his surprise. She was just restless, she’d assured him; it was the lack of color in the city, the sudden move that was shaking her. She would make it better for all three of them; perhaps she would brighten up the apartment somehow. She could line the windowsill with colored bottles, like the stained-glass church they had visited as children (the one that had sparkled so brilliantly their eyes had ached), or they could even start a flower garden! She fooled herself quite thoroughly with her antics, and though she had always hated rummaging out of doors she sank to sleep that night dreaming of starbursts of color peeping out of thick, unkempt grass.
But flowers would be an impossibility, after all. What a day, she thought, beginning to awake from her drowsy reverie that had blended the present and the evening before. The morning was gray and damp (rendering the long walk to the miserable florist’s shop draining and pointless), she was certain, even as she lay in bed without opening her eyes. Lethargy filled her, and she felt strangely wise—for she knew that even if she had blinked or willed her eyes to a squint, she would have seen nothing, and so her refusal to commit an act that would be inevitably useless made her very wise indeed. The curtains she had hung were impenetrable barriers against whatever lay outside the windows, so whenever she awoke she had the sensation of waking into a half-dream, or perhaps a cocoon. A moth’s cocoon, she thought, for the slight taste of dust that was always on her tongue reminded her of the nights when she’d watch the fluttering creatures come up to her faintly lit window. But even the taste of dust and her dark cocoon could not mask the headache beginning to take form. She’d always had the worst of them on rainy days, even as a girl. It was as though a band was being wrapped tighter and tighter about her temples- torture, at times, to the point that she barely capable of making herself sit upright. How she’d carried on about them when she was young, raging and whining, tormenting the rest of her family endlessly. All children are selfish, she mused offhandedly, except perhaps Julian, whom she suspected never truly understood anything (and thus meant nothing) that he did.
Julian would want breakfast, she realized, and the thought comforted her. Of course it must be so, just as it was every other morning. Julian with his perfect clockwork mind, so unlike hers that she marveled at it endlessly. She was drawn out of her bed by what seemed to be invisible strands of expectation, drawn down to the kitchen by an equally invisible puppeteer, and the pain that had shone white and steady began to pool around her like a soft wind, just cold enough to make her shudder and bristle at its touch. She floated; how light she felt, as though she was a dandelion seed being pulled by along something huge and unknowable.
It was later than she had guessed- Julian was there sitting at the table patiently, arms pressed tightly to his side. She felt a brief spurt of fondness grow in her chest. Julian, her son, was always on schedule, no matter the weather or whatever catastrophe might befall him, could always be counted on to be in the same place and the same time as the day before. (Ben had asked Julian, not long ago, what she had thought at first to be a terrible joke, and hearing him ask had thrown her into a terrible fury. She remembered the question perfectly even now: the words were part of her, and painfully permanent—nearly unbearable. “If your mother died too,” Ben had asked, unaware that she was just outside the room, listening, becoming too paralyzed with rage to move or make the tiniest sound. How dare he ask that question? she’d raged silently, when it had been so soon after the shock and the necessary move to the strange city. But he’d continued, and her anger had subsided. “And if I had to go away somewhere very far too, what would you do?” Anger lost a brief but ferocious war to fascination, and she felt that the answer that would come from Julian’s mouth hung on the thinnest of threads. The moment when it would snap was coming, and whole worlds seem to lie in the balance. He would speak his answer, and she would hear something wonderful that would thrill her to the core, or destroy her utterly. The answer must come—she was silent in the hallway, awaiting an execution, standing on the line between sand and sea as a wave swelled, perhaps to crush her and carry her away indefinitely. “Would you still sit in your chair every day and sort things? Would it be different?”)
But Ben was just sitting across the table from her son, cutting oranges into perfect wedges and lining them up around the edge of the plate for them to share. I could never cut an orange with that precision, she thought offhandedly, and said good-morning in a voice that faded before the last syllable had escaped her lips (that phrase’s necessity at that moment eluded her). What a beautiful find this scene was, she wanted to say instead. What a beautiful coincidence that her brother could speak so easily with her strange son, that their worlds had meshed so seamlessly that it left no room for strangers and truly needed none. She could watch them for hours-- she wished she could, but Julian would have to finish his breakfast precisely fifteen minutes past ten as he insisted he must do each day. Then, she remembered with a hint of sadness, that secretive smile would spread across Julian’s face. He would reach for his box of beads to sort and set into dizzyingly complex patterns according to a design that had formed in his head, somewhere behind the eyes that never betrayed the hint of thought. His routine was a force of nature within itself, utterly unstoppable by any action a person could carry out. (How different she was from her son, how easily she was swayed by the slightest of things!) Ben would retreat to read in silence, bringing the universe to a strangely tense and natural peace once again.
And where will I retreat to? she wondered. The flowers occurred to her once again, but though the thought of gardening and cool dirt had refreshed her the night before, Katherine realized that they not been missed. No, she thought quite calmly, Ben had forgotten her promise altogether, and Julian had never noticed at all; the soon-pouring rain that would make excursions impossible and her subsequent crippling headache would not be raged against by anyone. How useless she was in their tiny square apartment!
At the thought, tears sprang into her eyes unexpectedly, but not out of grief. Uselessness was a simple word without subtlety or uncertainty. There was finality in its sound, and as Katherine said it once more in her mind, she realized there was nothing for her to do: no responsibilities, no necessities besides her own to tend to, nothing to fetch or promise. What a relief it was to be useless, Katherine thought, and though her head began to throb again, its significance seemed to escape her. She was suddenly exhausted, she thought, but decided there still was nothing she would rather do than to watch Julian finish his oranges. It was fascinating, utterly fascinating, to watch his eyes flick between each sticky slice in his hand and the plate (as if to check that the rest hadn’t scrambled into chaos while he’d looked away for those brief moments), to watch the thin stream of juice that trickled down the side of his mouth before dripping onto the floor with an odd sense of finality.
--
Katherine said she would buy the flowers herself. She had promised, the day before, surprising Ben for the first time in years. Ben, her brother— she repeated the word in her mind, rattled it about it all its different forms, until even the sounds stripped of its meanings sounded oddly bent and alien. Brother- how strange that other, which rolled off her tongue as easily as the taste of flat water, could be crippled by an insignificant addition of sound so easily produced by a stern tightening of her lips at the beginning of the word. How had she never noticed it before, the way the taste and sense of the word lay curled up within the kernel of its meaning? Brother was stern, yet almost comically clumsy—not without cause, she thought wryly. But a second voice whispered in her head that Ben was not stern or cruel, and chided her, for she had no right to think that because he had taken them in. No, Ben was simply reliable Benjamin, as he’d always been (providing and aloof), occasionally dull Benjamin, brilliant absorbed Benjamin with the well-paid scientists’ job, who had never once just introduced himself as Ben, not once in his life despite her good-natured pleas and teasing.
But the flowers! It had been the dark little apartment that had driven her to make the promise the previous evening, she was sure of it. For it was the sheer lack of dimension in the tiny rooms had been weighing on her and dragging her down- the swept corners that stood out more starkly from the empty white walls were tormenting her especially, though she could not explain it, not by any stretch of reason. (Reason! she scoffed, for neither logic nor Ben’s facts and figures could explain the strange phenomenon beginning to haunt her. Reason could not explain the awful emptiness or the silence of their home, even as it was pushed far past the intended extents of occupancy.) She had been feeling restless from her inability to explain the small discomforts that plagued her, like the increasing whiteness of the white walls that had invaded her being as a light prickle on her spine, and was nearly tortuous in its consistency.
But perhaps the misplaced prickling on her spine that had made her so wary was merely boredom. There was nothing of interest in the apartment- not half-written lists to wonder at nor misplaced keys that she could test on creaking closet doors, because despite her best efforts Ben was the most devoted of housekeepers. As a visitor with freer habits, she felt like a savage, or at the very least willfully ungrateful. Ben had a way (though likely unintentional) of making other people feel as though they were merely flighty children to be tolerated. One could not leave anything to chance, put anything off until later without feeling judged irresponsible, or even worse, incomprehensible altogether. How awful he could be at times, she’d thought (though with a flash of guilt), and even worse that he truly meant none of it. If she picked up a bowl and dashed it against the floor, she thought, Ben would arrive with his measured walk, and sweep up the bits without demanding the slightest explanation. But no, that would be cruel of her, even frightening, and so during the hours before she had made her fated promise, her hands had remained tightly at her sides, though her mind replayed the scene in a half-sketched fantasy. The images would not leave her mind, and though the imagined sound of shattering china brought her a strange measure of relief, her guilt grew.
When Ben had entered the room at last, she’d thrown her arms around him quite suddenly, surprising even herself. He had hesitated and taken a step back. Had she startled him? The thought that he should be afraid of her! The sheer ridiculousness of the string of events, both real and imagined, drew a quick laugh from her. She felt the black edge of her mood dissipate, and she apologized to him again and again for nothing at all, laughing helplessly at his surprise. She was just restless, she’d assured him; it was the lack of color in the city, the sudden move that was shaking her. She would make it better for all three of them; perhaps she would brighten up the apartment somehow. She could line the windowsill with colored bottles, like the stained-glass church they had visited as children (the one that had sparkled so brilliantly their eyes had ached), or they could even start a flower garden! She fooled herself quite thoroughly with her antics, and though she had always hated rummaging out of doors she sank to sleep that night dreaming of starbursts of color peeping out of thick, unkempt grass.
But flowers would be an impossibility, after all. What a day, she thought, beginning to awake from her drowsy reverie that had blended the present and the evening before. The morning was gray and damp (rendering the long walk to the miserable florist’s shop draining and pointless), she was certain, even as she lay in bed without opening her eyes. Lethargy filled her, and she felt strangely wise—for she knew that even if she had blinked or willed her eyes to a squint, she would have seen nothing, and so her refusal to commit an act that would be inevitably useless made her very wise indeed. The curtains she had hung were impenetrable barriers against whatever lay outside the windows, so whenever she awoke she had the sensation of waking into a half-dream, or perhaps a cocoon. A moth’s cocoon, she thought, for the slight taste of dust that was always on her tongue reminded her of the nights when she’d watch the fluttering creatures come up to her faintly lit window. But even the taste of dust and her dark cocoon could not mask the headache beginning to take form. She’d always had the worst of them on rainy days, even as a girl. It was as though a band was being wrapped tighter and tighter about her temples- torture, at times, to the point that she barely capable of making herself sit upright. How she’d carried on about them when she was young, raging and whining, tormenting the rest of her family endlessly. All children are selfish, she mused offhandedly, except perhaps Julian, whom she suspected never truly understood anything (and thus meant nothing) that he did.
Julian would want breakfast, she realized, and the thought comforted her. Of course it must be so, just as it was every other morning. Julian with his perfect clockwork mind, so unlike hers that she marveled at it endlessly. She was drawn out of her bed by what seemed to be invisible strands of expectation, drawn down to the kitchen by an equally invisible puppeteer, and the pain that had shone white and steady began to pool around her like a soft wind, just cold enough to make her shudder and bristle at its touch. She floated; how light she felt, as though she was a dandelion seed being pulled by along something huge and unknowable.
It was later than she had guessed- Julian was there sitting at the table patiently, arms pressed tightly to his side. She felt a brief spurt of fondness grow in her chest. Julian, her son, was always on schedule, no matter the weather or whatever catastrophe might befall him, could always be counted on to be in the same place and the same time as the day before. (Ben had asked Julian, not long ago, what she had thought at first to be a terrible joke, and hearing him ask had thrown her into a terrible fury. She remembered the question perfectly even now: the words were part of her, and painfully permanent—nearly unbearable. “If your mother died too,” Ben had asked, unaware that she was just outside the room, listening, becoming too paralyzed with rage to move or make the tiniest sound. How dare he ask that question? she’d raged silently, when it had been so soon after the shock and the necessary move to the strange city. But he’d continued, and her anger had subsided. “And if I had to go away somewhere very far too, what would you do?” Anger lost a brief but ferocious war to fascination, and she felt that the answer that would come from Julian’s mouth hung on the thinnest of threads. The moment when it would snap was coming, and whole worlds seem to lie in the balance. He would speak his answer, and she would hear something wonderful that would thrill her to the core, or destroy her utterly. The answer must come—she was silent in the hallway, awaiting an execution, standing on the line between sand and sea as a wave swelled, perhaps to crush her and carry her away indefinitely. “Would you still sit in your chair every day and sort things? Would it be different?”)
But Ben was just sitting across the table from her son, cutting oranges into perfect wedges and lining them up around the edge of the plate for them to share. I could never cut an orange with that precision, she thought offhandedly, and said good-morning in a voice that faded before the last syllable had escaped her lips (that phrase’s necessity at that moment eluded her). What a beautiful find this scene was, she wanted to say instead. What a beautiful coincidence that her brother could speak so easily with her strange son, that their worlds had meshed so seamlessly that it left no room for strangers and truly needed none. She could watch them for hours-- she wished she could, but Julian would have to finish his breakfast precisely fifteen minutes past ten as he insisted he must do each day. Then, she remembered with a hint of sadness, that secretive smile would spread across Julian’s face. He would reach for his box of beads to sort and set into dizzyingly complex patterns according to a design that had formed in his head, somewhere behind the eyes that never betrayed the hint of thought. His routine was a force of nature within itself, utterly unstoppable by any action a person could carry out. (How different she was from her son, how easily she was swayed by the slightest of things!) Ben would retreat to read in silence, bringing the universe to a strangely tense and natural peace once again.
And where will I retreat to? she wondered. The flowers occurred to her once again, but though the thought of gardening and cool dirt had refreshed her the night before, Katherine realized that they not been missed. No, she thought quite calmly, Ben had forgotten her promise altogether, and Julian had never noticed at all; the soon-pouring rain that would make excursions impossible and her subsequent crippling headache would not be raged against by anyone. How useless she was in their tiny square apartment!
At the thought, tears sprang into her eyes unexpectedly, but not out of grief. Uselessness was a simple word without subtlety or uncertainty. There was finality in its sound, and as Katherine said it once more in her mind, she realized there was nothing for her to do: no responsibilities, no necessities besides her own to tend to, nothing to fetch or promise. What a relief it was to be useless, Katherine thought, and though her head began to throb again, its significance seemed to escape her. She was suddenly exhausted, she thought, but decided there still was nothing she would rather do than to watch Julian finish his oranges. It was fascinating, utterly fascinating, to watch his eyes flick between each sticky slice in his hand and the plate (as if to check that the rest hadn’t scrambled into chaos while he’d looked away for those brief moments), to watch the thin stream of juice that trickled down the side of his mouth before dripping onto the floor with an odd sense of finality.
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