disordered thought processes - Home

sad on a lot of levels

2012-05-05T23:20:00Z

So, all of the sudden, I’m brought to tears because of a dog that died more than seven years ago. And I’ve only had two beers.

metaphor, or omen?

2012-04-13T13:36:00Z

Ugh. Dreamt of a what-if situation, of a missed chance (or maybe it was always just in my head) that left my heart aching when I awoke and realized that it never happened that way, that it was all just wishful thinking.

It also didn’t help that the end of my dream was me getting shot in the face.

a common etiology of anxiety and panic

2012-04-06T23:57:00Z

Sometimes I feel like telling people “the reason why you can’t sleep and can’t eat and feel like your heart is going to explode is because you’ve totally bought in to the American Dream bullshit, and it’s slowly but surely killing you.”

There ain’t no pill I can write for that is going to fix your problems. Prozac and Ativan ain’t gonna cure you. You’re gonna have to quit your job/drop some classes/take a damn break and find a job that isn’t killing or find a major/career that isn’t going to drive you drink and drugs and an early grave long before your time.

But I don’t say any of this, because I don’t have thousands of dollars I can lend them to help them pay their mortgage at the end of the month or pay for the enormous debt they’ve already taken out for their education or tide them over until they can find a new job, a new career, a new life. All I can really do is just punt to the psychiatrist.

it's never enough

2012-03-12T01:23:00Z

The thing I recognize that will be a growing problem because I spend all this time alone is that I am becoming increasingly selfish. I find myself less and less able to tolerate other people’s contradictory opinions, and I find myself increasingly resentful of others when I feel like they’re impinging on my freedom, even though I realize that compromise is necessary if you intend to keep the peace. I know for a fact that I used to be far more tolerant than this, but I’m not sure how to stop this apparent devolution.

the art of not wanting

2012-03-06T01:29:00Z

But everyday I say I’ll try to make my heart be still.

there are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends

2012-03-03T19:40:00Z

There was a time after Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding that I think a lot of people thought the universe was doomed to end. Gone was the idea that the universe was static and eternal. So it was either the Big Freeze, or the Big Crunch. Either the great heat death of the universe, or gravity would eventually halt the expansion and everything would come crashing back down into a singularity again.

But then they found out that the expansion was actually accelerating, which lead to the concept of dark matter and revived Einstein’s idea of the cosmological constant, and I don’t think it’s anywhere as clear as to what the ultimate fate of the universe is.

True, the Big Freeze is still a viable possibility. All the matter and energy will get spread thin across the voluminous void of space, and it will become more and more difficult to exploit matter-energy gradients to perform useful work, and eventually the whole universe will reach a temperature close to absolute zero. Of course, because of quantum mechanical effects, the thermodynamic gradient will never be entirely zero, but nevertheless, the universe will be a cold, lightless place, and as close to static and eternal as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle will allow it. Certainly, life as we know it will be impossible.

But it’s possible that that isn’t the entirety of the story. The horizon problem showed that the Big Bang theory by itself couldn’t explain the state of the observable universe, so Alan Guth came up with the inflation theory to explain why the universe looks essentially homogenous in all directions. The problem with inflation is we have no idea why it stopped. So there’s a possibility that we just live in a metastable pocket universe that could collapse at any moment, transforming either into true vacuum, or yet another metastable false vacuum with entirely different forces and constants. This would obviously end life as we know it, but the universe would continue on.

And there’s the possibility that inflation hasn’t really stopped, except for our tiny patch of observable universe, and that multitudes and multitudes of bubble universe are collapsing out of the an eternal inflaton field, inflation without end, Eternal Inflation.

Of course, then we get to string theory and the concept of branes, and the possibility that the Big Bang is just an illusion caused by the fact that we can only perceive three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, and that what we perceive as the Big Bang (or, more directly observe as cosmic microwave background radiation) is really just two 3-branes crashing into each other, and then bouncing away. And, like the idea of the Big Crunch, the mutual gravitational attraction of the two 3-branes will eventually halt the rebound, and force the two to come crashing back together again, initiating yet another Big Bang, annihilating this entropy-laden universe to create a new one, a process which is summarized by the ekpyrotic universe model.

Some of these concepts are actually testable (although we may not have the current technology to do so, and we probably don’t have the political will to fund the research to create the necessary technology.) While all these theories explain why the observable universe looks the way it does, they also make specific predictions. It’s likely that we’ll have an even better idea of whether or not the universe is a one-time thing, or whether it’s just one out of many (either spatially or temporally.) There’s something to be said about not knowing how it all ends.

time

2012-03-01T05:25:00Z

It’s just another day, right? Same as yesterday. Same as tomorrow.

Famous last words.

not in a good space right now

2012-02-04T06:41:00Z

I am feeling especially futile right now.

random thoughts while walking aimlessly through target

2012-02-01T03:38:00Z

I don’t really know where it comes from. I just know it’s from somewhere external. I did not learn it. I was informed of it. Probably some sort of romantic—or even Romantic—garbage that I came across in high school, about how you can look into someone’s soul just by looking into their eyes. How you can identify intelligence by recognizing a spark.

My knee-jerk skepticism kicks in. You can’t tell shit about what someone is like just from the outside. Certainly not intelligence. We’re just blindly applying stereotypes. All the signs we see in other people are just as reliable as making decisions based on the positions of the stars, or from how a random deck of cards is shuffled.

Of course, I immediately backtrack. This isn’t exactly true. Evolution has sculpted the face. A smile, a frown, a grimace, a bemused look all signal some internal state that somehow improved reproductive fitness back in the day. A huge chunk of the brain is dedicated only to the task of parsing faces, of translating the accidents of someone’s outer appearance into a symbolic representation of someone’s spirit.

And there’s the fact that one of the skills I learned (increasingly disused in our era of blood tests and high-tech imaging) is all about translating outer appearance into some kind of insight about someone’s health.

Still, nothing is reliable. There’s always some error.

love and duty

2012-01-25T05:10:00Z

A lot of stories pit love against duty, making them completely antithetical to each other, because we live in a culture that says you should never do something you don’t want to. But, just from observation, sometimes love truly arises from duty, and a sense of duty can be kindled by love, and eventually you can’t tell which comes first, and which arises from the other.

trying not to dwell, failing

2012-01-07T05:55:00Z

I am trying not fixate on the fact that I totally pissed away my day off being angry, since that only makes me even more angry.

inchoate rage

2012-01-07T05:40:00Z

You ever been so pissed off that it exhausted you? Yeah. Just woke up from a rage-induced four hour nap. Still feeling kind of ragey. No, I don’t want to talk about it. Yes, I’d like to punch something.

it's not real unless it's shared

2012-01-05T08:18:00Z

This was always an article of faith for me: it might as well have never have happened if there isn’t a story to tell. As I’ve spent several years of my life essentially alone, this has caused me to feel a significant portion of my life is unreal and perhaps even in vain.

But this was when leaving a mark on the world was more important to me. It seems vainglorious now that the likelihood of me accomplishing some extraordinary feat (or perhaps some perfectly mundane but meaningful feat) recedes with every passing day. I still want to try to make a difference, but I’ve come to accept the possibility that I won’t. Well, like Gandhi said, whatever you do is insignificant, but it is important you do it.

Still, on these strange nights when I lie awake staring into the darkness, and my thoughts lead to memories of lost opportunities and chances I thought I had but probably never really did, I worry that there won’t be anyone to tell these little stupid stories about my life to, except the uncaring silence. So I guess trying to blog is at least an attempt–perhaps futile–to stave off my journey into annihilation by at least a little while. My small bulwark against oblivion. When all is said and done–and though I hope the end won’t be for a while yet–the only thing that ever has a chance at staying real are the words, the stories.

better than a time machine

2012-01-04T20:22:00Z

I didn’t want to threadjack, but it’s crazy how a song will just take me back into the recesses of my memory (although the version that I have in my head is the inferior remake by INOJ*.) It reminds me of the summer I went on an East Coast trip with my parents and siblings, from NYC to northern Virginia. It was definitely a time when the world was still rife with possibility, and I still remember hoping for something dear that never came to fruition.

It’s kind of sad that one of the happiest times in my life was also when I was most deluded about my prospects for the future. Ah, well. At least now I’m older and wiser (and sadder, too, but everything has a price.)

*Or maybe it was Dana Harris. My memory ain’t as sharp as it used to be.

don't look back

2012-01-01T02:14:00Z

So when I was a teenager and in my twenties, I used to be really into “Best of” lists and countdowns and reflecting on the last 365 days and all that crap, but lately, I just don’t give a crap.

Now, I’ve always been a big believer in looking back. One of my favorite aphorisms is from Jose Rizal (one of the national heroes of the Philippines) which basically translates into “He who does not know how to look back will never get to where they’re going.” Self-reflection is critical for human development, and it’s difficult to learn new things without this ability.

But I think I’ve come to the realization that (1) one year is not a whole hell of a lot of time and (2) you don’t need to do it just because the calendar says you should.

So lately, I often think of Orpheus trying to lead Eurydice back from the bowels of Hades, or of Lot’s ill-fated wife. Of Daenerys Targaryen from A Song of Ice and Fire and her mantra of “If I look back, I am lost.”

And a thought comes unbidden from my head, something I imagine Coyote or Loki would say. “It’s wise to look back once in a while. But you do not need to do it while your pursuers are on your heels.”

Maybe one day I’ll look back at all this (ALL OF THIS) and laugh. Or at least shrug.