During a conversation among the crew about River’s capabilities.
“Psychic, though?” says the pilot. “That sounds like something out of science fiction.”
His wife, the first mate, replies drily, “We live on a spaceship, dear.”
In which time is not on my side.
When I first decided to go to GBM, I checked kayak.com for flight prices. It was $408 round-trip, including taxes. I didn’t buy because first I had to submit my time off request at work.
At the 6-week pre-travel mark the price for the very same flights went up to $438, and was still there yesterday.
I would have booked my flight yesterday when I got my time-off request approved, but Java had crashed on my machine so I couldn’t navigate the Alaska Airlines site and I was too busy to reboot.
Today I went to book my flight, and in the past 24 hours the very same itinerary has gone up to $602. Crap.
Looks like I’ll be altering my travel dates to March 14-18. Because I ain’t paying no six hundred dollars for airfare.
In which I respond here because I’m no longer in college.
I’m reading one of the late Philip K. Dick‘s final three works: a wild tour of drugs, insanity, and longing called VALIS.
While the characters – so far at least – are so engaging that it’s worth reading, there’s a great deal of vocabulary. Some of it is off-putting, because I already possess a reasonably massive vocabulary, with as solid a relationship with modern English’s predecessors as a product of public schooling can reasonably expect to have, but on some pages there will be three or four – or even more – words I need to look up. Is this communication, or is it masturbation? Who was he writing for? (And will I ever be one of them?)
It doesn’t escape me that the more words one has, the more topics one can think about… I mean to say, can we think about something without having first fashioned words to describe it? I don’t think we can. So: esoteric topics require their own jargon. Fine.
Anyway. Point is, athiests: always pissed off because [1] they can’t force themselves to experience God the same way they can force material things to interact; [2] the existence of suffering in the world upsets them so much that no clear thinking can be done about God or love after the topic of pain is introduced; [3] they require physical, dimensional proof of a force that possesses neither characteristic directly (but only indirectly, as a side-effect); and, [4] if they’re thinky, they tend to go on and on obfuscating and defining and defending and thrashing about and making the entire thing so fucking achingly complicated that no one has the energy to enter into meaningful dialog with them. Which they take to mean they’re right.
Continue reading »
In which now my desk is fully tricked out.
I used to have a Mr Coffee Mug-Activated Warmer. It sat on many a desk next to me as I worked for many an employer. It plugged into an electrical outlet and faithfully kept my beverages – and sometimes even my hands – warm.
When I left LISCO I thought I’d thrown it into a box with all my other crap, but when I unpacked that box recently there was no mug warmer. I can’t imagine myself leaving it; I’d had it for so long and it was such a handy little device…
Oh well. Shit happens. I ordered a new one.
This one plugs into a USB port, is a 4-port USB hub, and has cute little lights on it!
In which I ramble on about getting older.
Work tonight was perfectly paced. Never got behind, never got ahead, just one call or call-back or chat presented itself at a time, all in an orderly fashion. Usually it’s not like that, it’s either banging or totally dead. I guess I liked it; appeals to my Libran sense of… appropriateness, I guess. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that. Orderly.
This morning I walked to catch the bus for work. A man was walking along the sidewalk toward me, on the inside. As we drew abreast, he stopped suddenly with a slap of his feet because there were branches in his path and he didn’t want to swerve into my lane. I smiled vaguely at him, and he shrugged and smiled back, almost coquettishly, and I realized a moment later that I’d seen him as a person, not as an old man. I saw boyishness in his presentation of himself to me, and knew that he’d interacted with me as a peer even though he was probably half again my age, if not more.
Ten years ago, he would have been an old man to me, some inscrutable thing outside of my experience. More an iconic representation of the idea of old-manness than a real human being. But lately I’m looking at the people around me and realizing they all feel like they did when they were twenty, but they’re trapped in bodies that are forty or sixty or eighty. I see the boy the man used to be and the girl the woman used to be now, not just an old person.
I think it started with Gramma. She’s 46 years older than I am, but still giggles like a girl under the right circumstances. She’s told me stories about her life, and I see that her sense of self is much like mine is: she still feels like herself, but then she looks down at her hands and notices they’re the hands of some mysterious old lady. She says things sometimes just like a woman in her prime would, and I have come to realize that one’s sense of self doesn’t seem to change much beyond, say, 30 or so – though our bodies certainly do.
I am now getting permanent wrinkles on my face. My hair is both turning silver and thinning. I even have a varicose vein, of all fucking things. And yet I still feel like… me. Whoever that is.
I suppose I always thought that older people were different than me, that their perceptions of both themselves and the world around them were as different from mine as mine were from my own when I’d been two or three. I think I’m somewhat disappointed, actually, that the evolution of my self seems to have stopped. I expected 40 (well, almost) to feel as different from 20 as 20 did from 10, but it doesn’t. I just feel like me. I have more memories and I’m somewhat quicker on the uptake, but that’s really about it.
Oh, hell, I can’t figure out what I’m trying to relate. I suspect everyone else rather already knew about this – that a person is a person is a person, regardless. I have nothing profound to reveal, other than the fact that I must be realizing my own life’s more or less half over, and that old people no longer seem all that damned old.
Well, that and the shocking realization that 20-year-olds are now, for the most part, total fucking aliens (a feeling I never expected to feel). Honestly, though, I suppose I’m mostly just pissed about the hair thing. And that 20-year-old bodies are TOTALLY wasted on 20-year-olds, holy shit, can I get a witness?
In which I wish I was there.
Bghead just texted me to tell me that the Big M has died. I’m at work, so I googled it immediately (while on the phone with a customer laboriously explaining why she probably doesn’t want to install the lastest version of Outlook Express on her 11-year-old Windows 95 box)…
…and holy cow. Maharishi’s dead.
I spent 15 years, give or take, living in Fairfield directly and indirectly because of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Nearly everyone I know in that town was a meditator or sidha, and even if they weren’t they’d been around people who were for so long that they knew all the vocabulary.
It’s indirectly because of TM that I met Amma – and that was the single most profound event of my entire life, bar none.
Because of TM I’ve met people from all over the world, I’ve traveled, I’ve grown from being a weird little white middle class creature to being… well, whatever the hell it is that I am now.
TM fascinated me, drew me, embraced me, infuriated me, and pushed me out. I despised the Movement for a long time after I got off campus, until I realized that all organized religion is that way: only little folks – pencil pushers and bureaucrats – will stay to run institutions once based on real transformative shit, but their idiocy doesn’t necessarily make the seed knowledge any less profound. No doubt all the biggies would have apoplexy if they had to try to navigate their own institutional legacies today. Pretty much everyone agrees that Christ wouldn’t have anything to do with Christianity if He returned.
Anyway.
So we roos have all been waiting for Maharishi to die for some time now. We’ve none of us been able to answer with any kind of emphasis whether TM – as an organization, not as a technique – was good, bad, or both. (Nearly every meditator – except those who bugged all the way out to TM-ex, that is – will say the technique was good. At the very least, it cured headaches.) And now he has and I’m here in Washington, too far away from what are undoubtedly amazing conversations, tears, knee-jerk reactions, random drunken ramblings, residence courses, policy switchbacks, conference calls in the dome, and confused press releases…
Will the University survive? Will the TM community survive? Will the town – as we know it, at least – survive? How will Movement policy change? Will it get better? Worse? Will people still learn TM? (Most importantly, will the Beach Boys or the remaining Beatles say anything?) (I’m being facetious.) (No, really.) What’ll happen to the Movement’s already wonky monetary structure? Who owns all those TM centers around the world? What will happen to all those multi-million dollar Stapathya-vedic ‘homes’ around Fairfield, once there’s no market for them? Will birds live in them?
Gawd, I really wish I could be in Fairfield this week. I really do. Someone should fly me out so I can get drunk at the Dead Cock and make John Bloch cry. And where the hell is Harold Turner when you need a pink purse?
In which I bitch and moan.
It’s Saturday, and I’m at work.
I’m cold. I’m tired. And I’ve already been on the phone for an hour and I’m usually not even out of bed by ten.
My beloved dog made sad eyes at me when I left the house this morning.
Oh, and I feel crappy on top of it. Wanna be in bed with a warm dog and a good book.
In which I explain why my content sucks so bad lately.
I really like paydays. Twice a month, they put hunnerts and hunnerts of dollars into my account and then I can do neat things like buy lattés and pay off November’s surgery.
I like the job itself, actually. I work in a call center, talking on the phone all day. I actually enjoy most of the humans I speak to, and I enjoy the challenge of figuring out what the fuck they’re talking about and then fixing it. The job’s not the most stimulating I’ve ever had, but it’s certainly not the worst. (I’m understimulated, of course, but then when am I not understimulated at work? At least it’s busy and I’m not bored.)
Money’s good and the work’s fine. So what’s the problem, then?
The problem is working full-time.
It’s too much. Seriously. Five days out of every seven, all I do is work and sleep and feed myself. Who the fuck thought this schedule up? Does ANYBODY actually like it?
Sunday and Monday I try to clean house, do laundry, socialize with Gramma, love on my dog, rest, read, call friends, and maybe go out if I’m lucky enough to be invited somewhere.
If this were a high school writing assignment, I’d be comparing and contrasting Working Full-time to Not Working Full-time, and you know what would win? NOT WORKING FULL-TIME.
I just need to figure out how to earn what I need in far fewer hours of work. I just DO.
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4 random books from my Library!
