Hey, ever wonder what's in my brain?

You know sometimes, when you google "pain on right side" and that leads you to google "ovarian cancer" and of course, everything points to you having it, I mean, that pain DOES feel like you imagine a tumor would, and you spend a lot of time imagining having to leave behind your sweet husband and family and friends and you know that if you were given just a few more years, you'd manage to make something of yourself, too, and you make it in to work but barely but you just spend the whole day reading cancer blogs and making increasingly frequent coffee runs and this is every day for years (and somehow no one calls you on it at work)?

No?

Baffling anxiety was, for the longest time, like, my way of being in my world. I don't really know what ignited it, though I do know what fuled it - bird flu was a real boon for my crazy, boyoboy. And then, it stopped, if not all-of-a-sudden, almost. I wish I could take credit for it stopping, and I am sure there is some sort of cognitive trick I played on myself, but it wasn't a conscious effort, that's for sure. I feel like I was so terribly anxious my brain could not deal with it own crap anymore and just cut it out. Which is not really a reliable way of expelling the nutso, since letting the nutso run its course probably could just as easily wind up with you living in a lead-lined basement and muttering to yourself.

Haz(z)ard recently said to me "you know what I like about you?" (shiny hair? cutely bad singing voice?) "I like that you don't really speculate. You have hopes and all, but you don't really predict things. You would be a terrible pundit."* I took this as a real compliment, first because who wants to be a good pundit, second because it aligned with something I am learning to value in myself - the fact that I do not really value control. I am sort of an accidental Buddhist, eager to interact with the feedback loops I inhabit in what I believe are positive ways and yet unable to emotionally invest in the outcomes of my actions. Reconciling myself with this tendancy, learing to see it as a kind of wisdom, has been a big feature of my separation from my anxieties. This whole process, and this whole sort of acceptance has been more pronounced in my dealing with Big Problems than in my negotiating the fine grain of my days and years, and I am still able to get unduly worked up about when the pharmacy will close or whether I will like school or if Haz(z)ard is conducting his job search exactly as I wish he would, and I suspect that terms of how one inhabits the universe/how it inhabits one, those actually ARE the big problems.

That sounds terrible. That sounds like my experience in school > humanitarian crises. Let me rephrase. To the extent that I feel like a lot of this whole business is about interacting with unknowable loops, and not about purposefully creating results, I have a suspicion that interacting with oneself/family is creating one's own guide for interacting beyond.

I have been thinking about taking a class on non-accidental Buddhism. Am hesitant bc I am a giant yuppie douche already. Hesitance mitigated by fact that a) whatever, b) large part of the appeal is fat cute Buddhas who look a lot like a friend of mine who I venerate anyway.

*This was in response to a conversation I had with his father that was basically him all "It is folly to support anyone but Hillary bc. she is strongest candidate," and me being like "I dunno, whatever, sure, I still hope Gore will run,** and am attached to him even if he does not. That is the extent of my beliefs about the primaries."

**I relate to him. I think he knows what's what with feedback loops. Plus, he stepped on my foot once and now we are bound together in the eternal locus.

Beaches

Went out to Breezy Point today. For all my complaints about Flu Spork, it is a fine thing to remeber how much of Flu Spork there is. And the southern beaches of Long Island are always particulalrly beautiful, in their sparse, expansive way. And very ancient-feeling. It is easy to imagine yourself a Canarsie Indian 500 years ago, if your peripheral vision is not particularly good.

Isn't it funny that the place where the Rockaway Indians lived became Richmond Hill, and the place where the Canarsie Indians lived became the Rockaways? And who even knows who lived in Canarsie.

An insomniac's observation

Amazon's endless subcategories constitute a pretty special kind of chaos. Consider: I search for "rhetoric" and confine my search to "Books."

I am given another series of options, from "Cooking, Food and Wine" (one book in that category, and this is it) to "Professional and Technical" - which I select.

Ok, now this is pretty straightforward - I am dealing with categories like "Law," and "Business Management" and... "Education."

Within "Education," it gets a bit funny again - we have "Counselling," "Curricula," we have "Lesson Planning," "Pedagogy" and the very un-specific "Specific Skills" among others. And then "Theory," which ok, I know I am kind of biasing the sensibility of my sample by choosing, but... oh what blossoms once I choose! "Educational Reform" next to "Non-Formal Education," "Decision Making and Problem Solving" next to "Leadership," all alongside "Aims and Objectives."*

At this point, things start to rein themselves in again, but - this is SO internet, this imposition of the jumbled structure of our own minds on to the tools we create to aid them. SO FRIGGING INTERNET.

It's 3:30. The past few nights have found me insomniac for the first time in years. Does it show?

PS. For an informative intellectual experience, imagine how a conversation - analagous to this search, but with a real human librarian, might unfold. "Well, what KIND of book on rhetoric?..."

In this new 2.0 economy...

My leetle bruzzer, Spinny, has gotten a job as a bike messenger. I suggested to my mother that perhaps she could arrange with the agency to call her if he was not wearing a helmet.

She then advanced the possiblity of some sort of micro-finance arrangement in which mothers fund the companies that employ their children, which companies are then bound to make children wear helmets and call home.

I think the power of mommies is undertapped.

a thought on rusty's thought's on whatever rusty's thoughts were on.

I get - I really, really, really, really get - the folks who don't so much like the people with, like, IAmBigLiarHahaha! names commenting on their forreal work with their real, fancy names on them. I was, I promise, on the real-name side of this divide. I would get tons and tons of "you are dumb slut!" comments, or the more insidious "you would be great if you weren't a dumb slut" comments when I wrote for Magazine. And I couldn't even sic my boyfriend on these people bc they were fake!

No, but it was really unpleasant, actually - the criticism felt so much like having some anonymous gross guy whip it out and start wanking away on the subway, which, another post. But anyway. My editors advised that I grow a thicker skin, and I did, to a degree - I'd certainly recommend that strategy to anyone who is going to spend time around the 'tubes, just for sanity purposes.

But when we move away from a discussion of the pure expedience factor of various skin-thicknesses, can I say that I think a lot of the interestingishness of my writing at the time required that vulnerability? That unfounded assumption that people would take my words in good faith? Not that they wouldn't question or disagree, but that they weren't masked and hiding behind the computer screen ready to shame the first person who gave them an in. My writing's different now, and maybe I needed to learn how to deal with random shamers, but I'm just saying - something is there that wasn't before the shamers, and something that was there before the shamers (and that contributed to whatever discussion it was that i was having) is lost.

That said, oh my god, anonymous forevs. I don't think Staid Profession has reconciled itself to the new, public dimension of young workers' lives,* and while I think that will eventually happen, I am just not ready to be on that vanguard. I've given already.

*This is why the "you still build a reputation with pseudonymous comments" is a bit nerfy to me. The possibility of correlating a real life with food and dogs and monies to an internet presence is like, a non-negligible difference between pseudonymity and normal-nymity. I don't know, I don't belong to any non-three-dimensional communites, and so my analysis of them is likely to be not superinsightful. But there is begins to be, for what it's worth.

Did you know?

Providence is AMAZING! I bought a book there called "The Frenchman in Mohammed's Harem." And this other book! Called "Galaxy!" That's from the 1960's and is supposed to be space-erotica! But it's the least erotic thing EVER. Oh wow. Pictures and captions TK when I can stop freaking out.

Meanwhile, on a recently-discovered Earthlike planet...

Someone finds herself drawn to self-help and DIY books over any other kind of written word. Hello Alien Violet! I am totally going to space-fax you The Worry Cure.