I've been feeling not so great lately. I can try and trace reasons although I'm not sure how legitimate they would be since whenever my mood changes in some way I add a shiny new explanation and remedy and then barely remember the ones before or exactly what events led up to them or not events maybe but just series of feelings or even series of decisions that lead to me feeling bad. When I got home this morning I felt a little like vomitting from depressedness maybe although I can't be sure that's why - maybe it's because I haven't eaten in a while or I'm just making it up because I can never be sure what I'm making up at the time only sometimes I can tell later but then even later than that I might learn something new and change my mind again - but I felt like throwing up and then maybe crawling into bed for the day. Prior to this was a train trip in which my mood had swung many times between feeling good from the music or feeling like I could write something to feeling there was is not enough time to consume all the books etc. I want to especially because I'm so slow at it and so there's no point bothering with it and - I'll say it - dread for the coming days of work and nothing to look forward to until sunday night when I will see jared next but only as a mild break from the dread since that will only be for a little while and then not again until tuesday. I'm bad. I need constant attention or I will hate myself. Which is silly. And maybe I've been encouraging feeling of badness, actively choosing them over other options but then maybe that's because that's kind of how I feel at the moment and I need to have a dark period so I can feel like I did after this mornings' not vomitting and deciding that no I would not crawl into bed for the day because that would be a bullshit choice that would maybe gratify me on some level but I'll just end up feeling like shit and more importantly what can I be to other people if that's all I am because that's a good reason not to let it go too far if there is a good reason for that and so I decided this is bullshit and there must be something I can do and then I had to urge to go on the computor and then I read Amanda's blog and then I felt like blogging myself because maybe this would help my delineate a few things? Things happen, suck it up. I'm ok now.


[Edit made later after feeling better and consequent better ability to analyse the situation]

Self-diagnosis: postpartum (postnatal) depression; symptoms include

• Sadness
• Hopelessness
• Low self-esteem
• Guilt
• Sleep disturbances
• Eating disturbances
• Inability to be comforted
• Exhaustion
• Emptiness
• Inability to enjoy things one previously enjoyed
• Social withdrawal
• Low or no energy
• Becoming easily frustrated
• Feeling inadequate in taking care of the baby (or feeling like one cannot take care of the baby)
• Impaired communication in speech and writing
• Spells of anger towards others
• Increased anxiety or panic attacks

So now I just have to find my baby. I think the government stole it.

all this talk of selves is making me hungry

I think the film in question is called Night of the Living Dead but I can't be sure, it's just too subtle and scarey to understand anything!



You can watch the entire movie on youtube. And when I say "you" I mean you, since my computor/internet connection couldn't possibly handle it.
My first embedded video! I'm moving up in the world.

Oh McSweeney's, you have all the advice I need to get through life. For example, if I wake up one day buried alive I now know how to handle the situation with confidence. Thank you Jim Stallard! Although I'm not sure what this means: HLY SHT BD ALV. GT HLP, BRG SHVL, OXY, BR (NT PBR) Somebody please help me understand. So far I've got "holy shit buried alive. Get help, bring shovel"... don't know what the rest means. Does anyone?

And omg more zombies plus Thriller world record! That many zombies together dancing like Michael Jackson, holy piss awesome

and pretending i was finally free

More Foster Wallace is my hero:
He just writes in a way that fits so perfectly with me that it seems specifically aimed at me sometimes.
I read this article he wrote about the Maine Lobster Festival - he was assigned to a regular reviewy piece and he ended up writing an incredibly accessible article about the ethics of eating meat, accessible in that it touches on the more complex arguments but sticks to the most basic one that is do the animals seem to show a preference to avoid pain? undeniably yes, and you can't really just avoid that (he has such a way of trying to look at all the sides of an issue not so it seems tedious or overly scrupulous but vital), which has made me more vegetarian, although this doesn't mean much because I already avoid meat where I can most of the time, but I'm not going to demand my mum only cook me vegetarian meals because that would be war.
DFW=swoon

and the birds flew around like the whole world was ending

Here's a graduation address given by David Foster Wallace. I find it perfect. He is my hero. Here's an excerpt if you don't want to read it all (but excerpts don't really capture it...):

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

I've been listening to Ani DiFranco's song Independence Day. It's not the style of thing I've been into in a while, pretty much all year, but it feels important to me right now for whatever reason.

<3

Here's a ninja poem by Emily Kwickinson:


Flower, Pretty Flower

Flower, pretty flower
I stop to smell you
you take my nose away.
Wait a minute,
why are you so sharp?
You are not a flower.
Now I have no nose,
face, bloody face.


Ask a ninja is the awesomest.

yo sukkafish, i'm falling before you, i'm falling before you

lol
Also, I got my external hard drive today. Measurements: a cd x my hand with all the fingers tight together x the end of a usb cabley thing, and probably the weight of those things. And it cost me $116.99 (including postage). Woo me! I think I might get a lap top. And last week I got firefox and vlc. I am on my way to catching up with all the cool kids

On a clear night if you look close enough you can just make out love and other plaaaaneeets

So I think that politics (i.e. who to support, what policies to support etc.) is too fucking huge so I would have to put so much time into becoming informed about it, time that I would rather spend on other things, that there is definitely no point in forming opinions because if I did they would be hopelessly inadequate. There is so much you'd have to look into to really understand things it's insane - for the first thing there's the actual policies themselves, to understand which you'd have to understand every field evaz (looking into all the theories of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology etc. [also involving learning all about these as well, meaning further research]); all the different theories of economics; all the different theories of...all this other stuff that I don't know the words for, but in short everything; then you have to take into account that people lie and misrepresent and everything people say is laden with rhetoric and their own point of view which is personally and contextually situated; and then you would have to also understand everything about yourself in order to see how you were interpreting the stuff you were researching. i.e. know everything eva.
But I guess I'm going over the top a little. Probs you can still be informed without knowing everything eva or at least try but I have other things I would prefer to do. Probs this makes me a terrible person.
I thought someone at work backstabbed me pretty bad but apparently she didn't (although you never really know if someone's telling the truth/whole truth or not but you can't just always treat everything as though it's lies it's juts that it's not surprising when things turn out to be so). So that's nice.
And as I was writing this stuff I came across a Wall Street Journal article that talks about this a little. Here's an excerpt:

"...And yet at the debate, when one citizen-questioner invited both candidates to think aloud about the responsibility of our representatives in Washington, they both gently suggested she was cynical.

She was not cynical. She was informed.

Why would anyone trust either candidate to help dig us out of this if they can't speak frankly about what got us into it?

One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it's all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow. I have grown impatient with the strategists from the campaigns, the little blond monsters who go on cable TV to give us their bouncy, aggressive, tendentious talking points. They are like the men on the plane, the gargoyles with BlackBerrys who think the race is about them and their personal win/loss ratio, who think history is their plaything, who stay up with the press in the bar sipping Perrier and calling it seltzer, and who advise their candidates, in essence, to talk down to the voters, to the American people. They treat every crisis as if it is a political fact to be used for gain or loss, and not as a real crisis, something that deserves a response of gravity and seriousness.

It is asking a lot to ask a political animal to be thoughtful, because they find meaning in action. They are propelled through life by the force of their hunger. But now and then you want to see them think. You want to see them speak the truth. This is one of those times."

It's hard/impossible to know what's real. This information isn't 'getting me down' though anymore, it's just something that needs to be realised. A basic lesson of life I guess. This shirt really appeals to me. I just find it nice and also a little comforting and a little...just kind of perfect. Maybe I will get it.
I'm feeling like I might like to move out, but I'll wait a while and see. I'm not sure if it's really worth having to work more and maintain my life/a house more when home isn't really a problem, I'm just feeling on quite a different wavelength to my parents. We'll see.
Other things: Ummm, I don't know. I got my Who Killed Amanda Palmer cd and my I Killed Amanda Palmer shirt the other day and I purchased a 250G (that's the abbreviation that all the cool kids use right?) hard drive that's only the length of a pen and like 200 grams or something insane like that. I like consuming!
Also, Rishi, if you're out there, here's a website for you!
Love

I think that all creative work is inherently representational, self-consciously or otherwise. So when women are represented as creatures with no intelligence of their own further than how best to dote on their man this is simply employed for the purpose of communicating something experiential that cannot be reduced to its politics, but is felt. This idea of course has its limitations, in that it can ignore the very real influence of the political in everyday life. Also, I know I am hypocritical about it. When it comes to something I'm not particularly passionate about at the moment I'm thinking about it like the prior I dismiss it as mere representation, but when it comes to something I have some investment in at the time I see it more in political terms, such as the way some people look at contemporary USA and say it's going to hell because I think that shows they're dismissing good things and only seeing bad. But on a basic level I think it is all representations of parts of humanity that transcend political reductionism.
I realise that the same is thus true for everything I think. So I'm content to say "oranges are delicious; if it wasn't for the fact the last few bites are just not-nice-tasting pulp they would be the best fruit ever" or "that person's shirt is fucking stupid" or whatever general value judgement because I'm aware that it's only my opinion. This means that I am comfortable stating value judgements as though they're True. But if I keep that up will I come to forget the more subtle feelings and believe my words?

Also, I am so embarressed by this blog and by so many things I have written to people and shown people of myself and it feels like I let these huge slippages appear in the me I want to show to the world that others don't let appear so I just look like the biggest retardloserevaz. This has a lot to do with trying to be in the world in particular ways by only going through particular motions of awesome ways of being without actually having the full context of that awesomeness, such as deciding to be honest about particular things that really have less to do with honesty that with other things, or thinking it would be great to build a community of such and such people by writing one thing but never really working on the more important parts of that. So I've decided I must self-regulate more and bottle things like creative impulses up more and not let anyone know and then maybe they'll actually grow and only be shown to the world when they are worthy.

let's live and breath our eulogies

A few days ago, an American writer named David Foster Wallace killed himself, finishing off a more than twenty year battle with the hell of depression. I hadn't heard much of him before he died, but when he did, the McSweeney's website posted a tribute to him, and I thought I'd have a look at his stuff. I borrowed a book of essays called A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again, and i have been blown away. His writing is so impressive. He was amazing. Check him out. And it inspired to to write the following (i think i was thinking along these lines before, and his death jsut really pushed me along).


Sometimes people die. And when they do, people who knew them start speaking, weaving this poetics around them, around the idea of their lives and who they were and what they meant to the world, and sometimes this is falsified, so that Joe Blow across the road who used to yell at you to shut up and stay off his lawn when you were a kid but who once gave you a cookie when you were crying after you fell of your bike one day but who you don’t really know anything about, has posthumously become this emblem of saintly generosity and the best in humanity, and we must keep his memory alive.
But the people who are still living usually don’t get such treatment. What will we say about them after they have died? What will we say about our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our best friends, our parents, our sisters and brothers and favourite lecturers?
There is this poetics that is mostly reserved for the dead, or else the distant idol, that brings such an appreciation of their lives. I remember going to the funeral of some old man many years ago – maybe my grandfather, maybe someone else’s, I don’t remember – the things that were said about him there amazed me. Apparently, he had done all this stuff in his life that I had no idea about because no one ever really talked about it, especially as he grew old and senile and became in some ways a burden to be put up with out of duty rather than this person worthy of admiration. Because when you live with people day in day out you easily forget things that would render them worthy of such worship in a eulogy, or else you don’t think of this half as poetically as you do after they’re no longer with you.
Maybe sometimes we should all pretend our favourite people have died, and weave beautiful mythologies around their lives.