animals know so much we don't

when the family dog is lying on his side in an effortless display of sublime relaxation, I can't help but crouch down on my knees and pet him. if the sun is shining through the living room windows and onto portions of the floor, he'll choose a spot where he can sunbathe. if you start petting him and then stop, he'll twitch his front leg once as if to say "no, keep going." if you're a warm-hearted person, there's no way you can refuse his wish. I think the reason his leg twitch is so effective at eliciting more petting is that we can appreciate how he feels. we've been held, nearly sleeping, as children. we don't want the attention or that sense of security to end. I would've rather spent the night in my mother's arms than be put to bed. more accurately, it's a combination of two things that renders me incapable of refusing his requests to be petted more. 1. knowing how he feels 2. the remarkableness of knowing how he feels despite our being different species that he chooses to ask for more attention by a feeble twitch of his leg just adds to the sense of likeness. he has found it to be the minimum action required to get results, and it's easy to sympathize with that rationale. he has his own large, square dog pillow in the alcove outside my room. after years of perfecting relaxing positions he discovered that hanging his head slightly over the edge of his bed feels good. in the evening, before I go to sleep, I come say goodnight, petting him in intervals separated by a twitch of his leg. how strange, to be living amongst and cared for by another species. he is nearly ten years old. sometimes when he's lying on his side I give him a back message, as I'm sure he appreciates this at his age. I wish we went on more hiking and camping trips, he really enjoys those. I take comfort in knowing that love transcends physical form. I'm going to cry when he dies.

you look vaguely familiar

after reconsideration, and a couple recent wicked dreams, I've decided to embark on a second attempt to document my dreams. this time, however, rather than write with as much detail as possible, which in my experience has led to the mutation of recollection, I'll limit myself to a couple short sentences. just enough to convey what I remember being very affected by. with any luck, the brevity of this documentation will evoke the undistorted images of the original dream in my mind, and if I'm really lucky, these vivid images will trigger recollection of the dream's mood and subtleties, which cannot be written down. I'll keep my dream notebook at arm's reach from my bed and leave a dedicated ink pen on its cover. location justification is that documentation accuracy is directly related to time since occurrence and I expect I'll wake up during the night needing to write things down. justification of ink pen trumping lead pencil is that when having half woken from an intense dream, I doubt I would have the energy required to leave a mark on paper with lead, whereas an ink pen requires less pressure.

comfortable upperwear

buttoned shirts. 2 things: -as I button and unbutton shirts, I wonder how much damage I would sustain, and whether I would survive, if a bullet went through my chest at the location of the button my fingers are working on. -one of the advantages buttoned shirts have over t-shirts is this: they can be removed without obstructing the view of the wearer. this property is important when there's a girl on your bed. in my experience, the girl will disappear during the interval of time when my view is obstructed as I remove the t-shirt. and then I wake up from dreaming. it's a let down, with the most appropriate response being a discouraged sigh. if only I wore buttoned shirts in my dreams more often; that way, my view of her would not be obstructed as I removed it. as a consequence, she would not disappear, because there's something of an unwritten rule about things in your field of view having to wait until you've looked away before they vanish. it's because of this rule that I think the phrase "it vanished before my eyes!" is used as an excuse far more often than as an accurate description of what happened. on a related note, the universe is a large place. it's extremely unlikely, but possible, that my divine complement lives on earth.

providing the camera lens variety

selecting a handful of family pictures out of tens or hundreds is a depressing activity. this has very little to do with it being tedious, and has mostly to do with having to glance at images of smiling people one after another. speaking personally, looking at a few stills of smiling relatives evokes a similar, though attenuated, expression from me. but beyond a dozen pictures, my facial muscles stage a silent protest, all of them in a state of relaxation regardless of what is perceived by my eyes, and I long for the upcoming photos to be of landscapes sans people or, at the very least, of people sleeping. too much of anything and you're liable to become desensitized to it. this is all a lot like how an audience watching kill bill volume 1 will become desensitized to blood halfway through. in the case of a bombardment of smiling people pictures, it's as tiring as when someone keeps repeating your name.

I have a new pair of shoes coming in the mail. I am not a fan of the lime green lettering, but that can be modified. when they arrive, my socks will stay dry even when I'm a pedestrian on wet sidewalks. haraa

the snow is melting. the dirt is waking up from hibernation.

I would like to see an object the size of an uncooked tapioca pearl with so great a density that its weight on earth is 10 tons. if it were placed on the ground, could one watch it sink and disappear as if the soil were quicksand? catching the speck, as though it were a baseball, would be a bloody affair, tearing through the palm on its way towards earth's core.

void matter projections

unfortunately I can’t take credit for this gem of a hypothetical idea, but I was lucky enough to be in the discussion when it came up at a party a couple months ago. like most hypothetical ideas, this one requires that an assumption be made. however, it's not a very difficult assumption to make. all you have to do is assume that the most widely held theory on the origin of the universe, the big bang, is correct.

step one: very shortly after the big bang, when the outer radius of exploding matter is relatively small, freeze time.
step two: take a break and relax if you need to. you've stopped time, so nothing is going to change in this thought experiment until you're ready to proceed.
step three: consider the claim of this hypothetical idea as outlined in the following if then statement:

if you know the initial conditions at the moment you froze time (i.e.* the location, density, and velocity (speed and direction) of all the matter) as well as how all the atoms/quarks interact with each other, then you know the future of the universe. this includes knowing when and what things will happen on earth, such as when the trees in central park will lose their leaves and where each leaf will fall on the pavement. and also larger things like the location and size of sun spots on our sun or any sun in the universe at any time. and of course you would similarly know that I would be at this moment writing about it, because the atoms in my fingertips would have to contact the atoms in the keys on my keyboard, given the initial conditions known moments after the big bang.

I like this idea because the implication of its claim is simultaneously immense and irrefutable, as far as I can make out. it's the same principle as knowing the path of a billiard ball if the magnitude and direction of the force applied to it is known, only on an almost inconceivably more complex and larger scale.

my contribution to the discussion was merely to propose that if a hypothetical supercomputer existed which had suffient computational power to account for all the interactions of matter in the universe, if it were supplied with the correct initial conditions, then it would know the future, essentially replacing the "you" in the the claim of step three with a machine.

eli adamantly opposed this proposition, stating that the supercomputer would have no way of accounting for the atoms of which it was itself composed. I, however, don't think it would be too big of a computer science problem to write some code making the computer aware of it's own existence. afterall, I have no trouble understanding that I am composed of some of the matter that was unleashed during the big bang.

*fuck, that's 2 i.e.'s in as many posts of mine!

"what can I help you with? what's on your mind?" "my brain."

something that hasn't happened for awhile has happened recently. I've caught myself using the same word, or variations of the word, too often, i.e. some others, some people, sometimes. maybe it's still happening, just look at the 1st word in this post. I need to consult with a group of neurologists and figure out what is going on. I'm afraid that, beyond hindering communication, overuse of a word could influence the way I think. A worst case scenario would be that my thoughts are built from a skeletal structure of variations on a word. I can best communicate what I mean with the aid of the figure below.



what is shown is the groundwork for a thought in the worst case scenario. the complete thought would be formed by filling in the blanks between the variations of the word. this process is in stark contrast to the way I imagine most thoughts are formed, in a fluid, flexible, associative way. what would be happening at the neuron level to create such a restrictive thought process? would neurons that should normally be separated by some distance be clinging to each other as if by static electricity? trying to conceive of what's happening at the neuron level, in order for the same word to keep popping into mind, by imagining that the neurons are clinging to each other as if by static electricity brings me to my next point:

while the use of similes and metaphors to explain abstract concepts is obviously popular because of how much easier it makes things, I think they're overused. it's true they can lead to insights, but I think that more often they lead people astray of the abstract concept.

what better way to ridicule the use of similes and metaphors to describe abstract concepts than by using them to illustrate their own negative impacts? using a simile or metaphor to describe an abstract concept is like taking a hot shower without turning on the fan, so that steam accumulates. the abstract concept you're trying to get a handle on is the reflection in the mirror, and when you exit the shower you can vaguely see the reflection, but it's blurred on account of the aforementioned stream.

if it wasn't clear, the words in bold are intended to show that I'm still afflicted by this mental ailment.

life inside books

on sept. 6th 2006 I posted something that touched on what this post is about. having taken a couple creative writing courses for elective credit, I've come away with a sense that when you've written something in the 1st person, people tend to think that you've actually experienced the things you've written about. this attitude is helped along when the protagonist of a famous novel is claimed to be a manifestation of the author in the story. and garry trudeau is on record as buckling under pressure from hardcore fans and acknowledging that michael doonesbury, the main character of his genius comic, is modeled on himself. still, why is it hard for some people to believe that I didn't actually fall overboard on a cruise ship and nearly die of hypothermia even though when it was my turn to read what I'd written, that's what I read? it's fiction, let me pretend to be a victim of near drowning! actually, this whole post is an exercise in gullibility. the cruise ship story example would suggest that I actually wrote such a story and one day read it to my shocked classmates, when truly I've never written about drowning. truly.