Lightning, or Something...

I may have more to say about the rest of the trip later, but we just got back. We drove something like 640 miles today. I expected my mom would want to stop in Rock Springs; she didn't. Then I figured she'd give out at Kemmerer: nope. We made it back at about 9:30 pm, just as it was starting to get dark. I think we were both sick of hotels and wanted to be in our own beds.

Anyway, that has little to do with this post, other than the events occurred on the trip. I suspect that if it weren't for the ruddy "terminal" notification, the only result would have been a wave of regretful nostalgia, which would have been over almost instantly. But being under stress already, something just snapped inside me when we were in Grand Lake. The moment itself was more one of shock (mixed in with other stuff), but afterwards it felt as if something had broken loose, snapped, inside me.

There was a little bit of buildup to it: nothing major, nothing that one might expect to lead to someone snapping: my mom hates miniature golf, and I've always loved it. There's a miniature golf course in Grand Lake, and we walked by it, and I jokingly suggested we could play. It would have been better, I think, if she'd just said "no." Instead, she came up with all sorts of convoluted garbage suggestions, including that I "adopt" one of the little kids already playing to play with. At that moment, I was annoyed, but otherwise fine.

Then we finished walking down the one major street of Grand Lake, and drove down to the lake itself. There were kids out learning to sail, people in rented pedal-boats, kids building sand castles: pretty typical of the place. What wasn't typical was that I was suddenly angry. Not with the people there, not even with my mom in particular, but just angry. It took me a while to figure out why. I have always, always, wanted to rent one of those pedal-boats, or take a sail-boat out, or...or any number of things, and I've never had an actual opportunity. My mom won't consider any activity even remotely physical, and, when my dad was saner, he just thought it was a waste of time.

It was like the day just died before my eyes, right then and there. I turned around and walked back to the car without saying a word, and, more unusually, without even taking any pictures of or around the lake. It took me the better part of two days to get over that feeling of emptiness and isolation. For whatever reason, the drive back home helped quite a bit, as did a hike later in the same day. On the hike, it occurred to me that there might be a career option open to me that would let me do things that I love while maintaining most of my freedom. I don't know if a year is enough to establish myself sufficiently to make a living at it, but I'd like to try: photography. Most of the later events that helped clear the angry fog revolved around light and color and imagery, too, so I think there may actually be something there. I might also just be going insane, but it's better than feeling like a rather large chunk of scar tissue has been ripped out of my heart and a piece of leather nailed in its place.

So that was my last two days. Time will tell if that was a useful thought I had after having my heart ripped open or just a desperate grab for something to hold onto.

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Random Phrases from the Trip

It's a bug eat bug world... *pause* It's a car smash bug world.

It's windshield wiper eat smashed bug world.

Pick one speed! [To a car ahead of me on 287... Speed limit was 65; the car was randomly alternating between 55 and 65; at the next passing lane, I zhoumed around it]

You have to go faster to zhoum. [To a car trying to pass me in a similar passing lane. The last two pickups had zhoumed around me (I'm spelling it the way I was pronouncing it), and this one just sort of limped.]

The room just sort of rotated... the walls are kind of like echoing.

That last one was me after we finally got to Fort Collins and I'd had both food and a Thai tea float. Between the caffeine, the sugar, and the long day, I was rather out of it. I suggested that my mom should drive us to the hotel. It didn't help that Princess decided to wander off last night and not come back until midnight. On the plus side, in between calling for her and going out with the flashlight, I got almost everything done last night, so I didn't have much left in the morning. On the minus side, I was driving on not enough sleep. I took a few naps while Mom was driving, but I think my 20 minutes of meditation outside Rawlins did more good than the naps. Mom thought I was sleeping. ^/^

Okay, too tired to think of more to say now. Also probably too incoherent.

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Insert Suitable Disaster Cliché

Well, I was having a pretty decent birthday yesterday. Then my mom found a little notice in my mailbox that I had some certified mail waiting for me at the post office. Foolishly, I went to pick it up. It was from ISU. My 2009-2010 contract will be terminal, meaning that, "barring a change in administration"*, I do not have a job after spring semester 2010 ends.

So... now I have to find something else that will keep the bills paid. I was freaking out yesterday until it occurred to me that there was an interestingly ironic option available: apply for a D.A. fellowship and actually get my doctorate. I'm still not entirely sure I want it, but it's a fallback plan if nothing else materializes. Another fallback plan would be to get certified to teach high school, but for that I need to talk to a guy in the department who knew exactly which classes someone with an extant master's degree needed for that.

My reactions have varied from disgust to terror to anger to, oddly, relief. The fact is that I'm a bit sick of what I've been doing. A break, even a forced break, might be a good thing. So long as I'm still able to keep the bills paid, anyway. Looking at the D.A. requirements, it will take at least 2 years, if I max out to 12 credits each semester, 3 years if I stick with the saner 9 credits. I won't be making as much, but I survived on the master's level stipend for several years, so I should be able to manage.

I'm still going to be checking job sites and such, and if I can grab something with full benefits that pays at least what I'm making now, I'll probably take it. INL is one potential option, and they are currently hiring people, but at this moment none of the positions are ones I can take. Unless someone wants to teach me to weld, stat. At this point, if something comes along that pays well and starts before my ISU contract expires, I might just be tempted to get out of the damn contract.

*I went to ask someone exactly what "terminal" meant, and he kept using the phrase "barring a change in administration." I sort of want to think this means that a change is likely, and if the rest of what I was told is accurate, there may be a mass riot soon. Apparently every contract lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences got one of two letters: terminal or temporary. Terminal means your contract will not be renewed, period. Temporary means it might be renewed, if they feel like it. Now, at least half of the lower level classes at ISU are taught by contract lecturers, more than half in the math department. They're essentially saying that they don't give a damn if we come back or not. I realize that they're trying to get out of paying benefits, but I guarantee you that if they don't change their tune soon, they won't have any contract-lecturers left. They're probably hoping that some of us "terminals" will accept a part-time job, with no benefits. I'd like the chance to tell them exactly what they can do with their part-time jobs...

As for me, I'm sort of crossing my fingers that it's all a bad dream (and I suddenly have a rather literal appreciation for that phrase), but I'm feeling better now that I do have a fallback plan. I would be surprised if I did not get accepted into the D.A. program if I applied, and that would give me a few years breathing room. I'm not ready to leave Pocatello just yet. The other fallback plan is to try again to publish a book... thing is that most authors don't actually make enough to live on from their books. There are the top-tenners, and then there's everyone else. *shrugs*

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Depressive Stigmas

What happens if I don't take my medication? I turn into a zombie. Everything turns flat, it seems almost as if things lose their color, like all the colors fade. I feel like my body weighs so much that I can't even hold my shoulders up. I become lethargic - I can't get myself to do anything. I don't feel sad; I feel nothing. Empty, blank, flat. Great things can happen, but they don't make me happy. Awful things can happen, but they don't make me sad.

What happens when I take my medication? I'm myself again. The medication doesn't make me feel happy; it makes me feel. With the medication, my emotions come back; I can feel happy or sad. I enjoy it when things are going well; I get sad or angry when they go poorly.

~MarkCC @ Good Math, Bad Math

I seem to have made it through my bout with depression, amazingly without the aid of pharmaceuticals. Some would say that makes me "better" than people who need the pharmaceuticals; I would say it makes me damned lucky. I've talked to people who actually think that all you need to do if you're depressed is "snap out of it." It's obvious that such people have never, ever suffered from genuine depression. They've had the "oh, I'm a bit down today" variety.

In my case, I was able to keep functioning through sheer effort of will, but I didn't give much of a damn about anything. The place where this manifested most obviously was in getting bills paid. I would know that the bill was sitting there, that I had the money in my checking account to pay for it, that the checkbook was under the bill...and I could not motivate myself to get up and do anything about it. I managed to push through that often enough to avoid losing anything other than cable...mainly because none of the other companies were as ridiculously uptight about late payments as the cable company. One of the signs that the depression was lifting was when I would sit down almost immediately after receiving a bill and get it paid.

Here's the thing, though. I didn't use pharmaceuticals, but I did use a meditation practice. Meditation has been shown to alter brain states. Instead of taking a drug to alter my brain chemistry, I adopted a practice that would do so. I tended to keep with practices that seemed to improve the condition, but it was largely a matter of trial and error. I can't see how that is "better" than using a pharmaceutical to achieve the same effect. Such a practice is a major time commitment, and has to be done everyday if you want to keep receiving benefits. The pharmaceuticals are a hefty monetary commitment instead, and have to be ingested everyday to receive benefits. Which have you got more of, time or money? And do you have enough patience to give a meditative practice time to work?

I do think there are further benefits to a meditation practice, particularly one that utilizes physical meditations like taiji and yoga, and I do think everyone could benefit from such practices. But I am not about to tell someone who is so depressed that he/she can't get out of bed to go do yoga asanas. Pharmaceuticals would be a much better option at that point. Maybe, maybe, after the pharmaceuticals have helped enough, such a practice might reduce dependence on them, but, then again, it might not. Whether it's worth trying is entirely up to the person who is suffering.

In my case, since the meditation practice works for me, I prefer to rely on that. It doesn't require a doctor's visit or a prescription. It does require a strong commitment to the practice. Most people who are depressed wouldn't be able even to contemplate such a commitment. When I began it, my goal was to keep it up for 36 days straight, and that was all. Just 36 days. I did not expect to make it through those 36 days, but it gave me a goal to concentrate on. Rather to my amazement, I made it through 36 days, then 108, and I've just passed the 900 day mark. That's 25 cycles of 36 days, when I didn't honestly expect to make it through a single cycle of 36 days. I've even expanded the practice since then. But, that's me. That's not going to work for everyone, any more than a single pharmaceutical remedy is going to work for everyone. It helps that I'm a touch obsessive-compulsive and have a fascination with numbers, so that counting the days actually served to motivate me when I began. Now I still keep track of the numbers, but it's more a matter of interest than of motivation.

But what if that hadn't worked for me? What if I hadn't lucked into a practice sufficient to keep me sane? I don't know. Best case scenario, I think, would be that I wound up on some sort of pharmaceutical. Worst case? I don't think I would have suicided, as the only time I felt suicidal it was ginger-induced*, but I might have gotten to the point of not giving a damn about anything, including the job that pays my bills, or the cars coming on a street I needed to cross, or... One way or another, the situation would have gotten worse and worse.

*I've determined that if I'm perfectly awake and healthy, ginger just makes me a touch sleepy. If I'm already tired, ginger makes me feel depressed. If I'm already depressed, it can make me feel suicidal. I no longer cook with ginger.

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Delusional

I've mentioned before that I occasionally get a sensation like there's a threatening presence nearby. While I have an image of that presence (usually a large, monstrous humanoid), I do not see it, or hear it, or have any other physical sense experience of it. It is purely in my mind. The first time I took Zyrtec, the Zyrtec brought it on. "Paranoia" is described as one of its possible side effects, and I guess my form of paranoia involves this particular delusion.

The most interesting thing, though, is that I discovered in meditation that I could deliberately evoke the delusion, and that I could make it go away again.
I was hoping that this would allow me to quiet it if it arose on its own. It didn't, at least not during the one chance I've had to try it. Thankfully the delusion doesn't come on very often, though if it did I might stand a better chance of working out how to make it go away.

The only way to describe how I brought it on deliberately is from a phenomenological standpoint; then I'll speculate as to what might be going on physically. One of the meditations I use is to visualize bringing energy up the spine and out through the top of the head. One day, and I no longer remember why, I was playing with bringing the energy up through different parts of the head. In one particular "location", I felt the paranoia and sense of presence begin to emerge. I withdrew the "energy" and the paranoia went away. I tried various places in the head, most with no noticeable effect, but that one place, at the back left of the head, always brought on the delusion.

My best guess is that my energy-imagery is, in fact, activating different areas of the brain in different ways, and by focusing on that particular location, I activated the area of the brain responsible for the delusion. I don't know if the area is actually in the back left of the brain, or if there's something about imaging that area that activates the problem-zone. I was mildly disturbed when I discovered this, but also curious to know whether I could use it to make the delusion go away once it had already begun. All I can say is, not in the once chance I've had to try it.

That chance was last week, after I watched the Lost season 1 premiere. It was late at night and I was tired, and the combination of adrenaline and worry about the "monster in the woods" was enough to activate the delusion. I tried to visualize withdrawing the energy from that area of the head, and moving it to a different location. No go. Whatever I tried, the delusion remained active. I can only speculate as to why: (1) I was too tired; (2) The activation process was not similar enough; (3) Too much adrenaline in the system to calm down; (4) ?????.

I was disappointed. So I did what I usually do when the delusion comes on: leave more lights on than usual and open doors with extreme caution. The problem is that even though I know full well that the sensation is not real, it still feels real, and the simplest way to maintain control is to give in just enough to the paranoia to keep it from exploding. So I spend a little more on electricity, and peer cautiously through doorways before entering, and otherwise function normally. Still, I'm just as glad that this only comes on maybe once or twice a year. It would be exhausting, otherwise.

I should note that technically this is classified as a hallucination, not a delusion. I use the label delusion because there is no involvement with my physical senses. I do not have a sense of "seeing" someone in the room with me. I "feel" a presence in my mind, and that presence has a visual appearance associated with it, and a spatial location, but there is no genuine physical sensation: only mental impressions. I suppose if telepathy worked, it could be described as a "telepathic hallucination", but that seems a bit of a stretch to me.

One more item that might be of interest: when I have genuinely tried to activate belief in deities (including, for instance, the Christian deities), I have generally given up because that also activates the delusion. I'll leave readers to draw their own conclusions from that.

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Might Explain a Few Things...

Your Aspie score: 116 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 76 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie



Take the Quiz.


At Barnes and Noble today, I happened across a children's book titled All Cats Have Asperger's, and picked it up. It was short enough that I read the whole thing in the store. Essentially, it seems to be aimed at kids who either have Asperger's Syndrome or who have friends/siblings/etc. with Asperger's, to help them understand what's going on. What struck me, though, was that a lot of the described traits seemed very familiar. So I searched for an online quiz, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity.

Here's a shorter one. On it I scored 31, which is just below the listed threshold of 32.

So there's a good chance I have a mild version of Asperger's Syndrome. Funny thing is that I mostly feel relieved to know that there's a reason for some of the disparity between what I experience vs. what the majority of the population seems to.

As an interesting side-note, I think I would have scored higher before I started teaching and before I started doing taiji. To teach, I had to overcome some of my aversions related to being surrounded by lots of people, and taiji took care of a lot of my physical awkwardness. Some of the other questions related to habits that I had consciously worked to overcome, too.

One odd question that I had to answer "no" to: "Do you tap your ears or press your eyes (e.g. when thinking, when stressed or distressed)?" I almost answered "yes," except that I tend to tap my chin, lips or mouth, not my ears or eyes. You know how most kids count on their fingers when they first learn? I counted by tapping my chin. So I think that, for the spirit of the question, it would have been accurate for me to answer, "yes," but not for the question as actually phrased.

And one last thing... They say people with Asperger's are "overly literal" about figurative language. I've always assumed this to mean that they don't understand the symbology. However, I generally understand the symbology and choose to be overly literal instead, mostly because it amuses me to do so. I have no idea where that might fit into the overall spectrum.

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Boundaries

Words begin as the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. When everything is flowing, there is no need for words: there is only the flow. Then, something happens to disrupt the flow. Suddenly words become useful. The door won't open; the hammerhead flies off; the water glass spills. Words first describe the situation, then perhaps become useful for correcting it. Unlock the door; get a new hammer; mop up the water. In that moment of dissolution, when the flow breaks, lies the place where we first become aware that there was a flow. Words won't get us back to that flow. They act as a substitute, but so long as the words remain, there can be no flow... There's a zen koan: "Where is the one who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to speak to."

There's more... but I'm not finding a way to put it into words. It's as if words themselves are a switch between the flowing and the distinct, a red susurrus veil of electrified silk that divides words and experience. I think there's something important to be learned from that divide, but I'm not yet sure what it is... Perhaps the place where one can live with mindfulness is directly on the divide. Or perhaps I'm grasping at nothing.

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Twilight Poem

It's poetry Sunday at Daylight Atheism. The poem this time has some good thoughts and imagery, but at first I didn't care for what I took to be a lack of texture. Now that I re-read it, I realize that the texture is that of a whispering desert night, and I like it much better with that realization. Two short excerpts below:

The sea of sage-brush, breaking against the purple hills far away.
And white alkali-flats, which shimmer in the mirage as beautiful blue lakes, constantly retreating.
The mirage paints upon the sky, rivers with cool, willowy banks;
You can almost hear the lapping of the water,
But they flee mockingly, leaving the thirsty to perish.
...
The Desert cares no more for the death of the tribes than for the death of the armies of black crawling crickets.
Silence. Invincible. Impregnable. Compelling the soul to stand forth to be questioned.
Dazzling in the sun, whiter than snow, I see the bones
Of those who have existed as I now exist. The bones are here; where are they who lived?

~Charles Erskine Scott Wood

Those last four lines come eerily close to thoughts I have been having recently. Yet I remain unconvinced that the physical world is all that there is. I don't know what else there is, nor if that "else" is reachable by human beings. Three things stop me from drawing the curtain over the possibility. (1) A voice I heard after my Great Grandma's death. Not a clear voice, just a barest whisper. It came once and never again. I certainly could have imagined it, or it could have been an odd conjunction of real sounds that somehow combined into my name. But I remain uncertain. (2) More recently, the sight of my grandma's body. I saw it, and knew instantly that "she" was not there. Whatsoever she had been was no longer in that body. Mayhap it simply vanishes at death, yet... *shrugs* (3) The I-Ching. It is very strange to feel you're having a conversation with a book, yet that is what the I-Ching provides me. Perhaps the conversation is only with my own subconscious interpretations of the words ... yet I remain uncertain.

None of those instances are meant to convince anyone else, only to lay out the basis for my own thinking. I have no firm conclusion either direction, except, perhaps, calling out anyone who claims certainty as a charlatan. All things return to That-Which-Is... do any of them return in a form recognizable to those from whom they have departed, or even recognizable to whatever is left of their "selves"? That I cannot answer. But in my more relaxed moments, I cannot help but think, "To die would be an awfully big adventure." (~Peter Pan, Hook) (Note: it's not an adventure I have any wish to rush into, in case I just worried anyone. But it is interesting to wonder why those who claim to know what lies beyond also have no wish to rush there...)

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Technically, a Holiday

Happy Crass Commercialization of Romantic Obsession Day!



Or, in the immortal words of Charles Emerson Winchester, III: "Valentine's Day? Delightful. They can all meet in a garage in Chicago." (M*A*S*H ~Season 7, Ep. 26)

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Signs of Tiredness

I'd just gotten home yesterday afternoon and was removing my boots. Pouncer came over to watch.

Me: See, I've got external paws that I can take off! Don't you wish you did?!
Pouncer: Mrow?

Pouncer also gave me one of his looks that I tend to interpret as confused or puzzled. Can't say that I blame him.

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The Phenomenology of Qi

This had been on my mind anyway, and Ebonmuse gave me the perfect excuse to expound on it. The problem with telling people that there is no such thing as qi, is that many people have experienced a sensation that they interpret as qi. Ebonmuse even has a physiological explanation for one of these sensations: The Ideomotor Effect. Beautiful stuff, particularly as something like this very effect is taken advantage of in push-hands. From Wikipedia: "The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action."

Mark once asked Kayo Robertson how to follow someone who wasn't moving. Following in push-hands means, essentially, responding to another person's movements, and simply staying with those movements (without tensing up). Kayo responded, "You think you're not moving?" Kayo placed one hand on the center of Mark's chest and told him to try and not move. There were still small movements that Kayo could follow and use to push Mark out. Wikipedia describes reflexive movements, but I think unconscious or unintentional would be a better descriptor in this example.

Ebonmuse also suggests that most of the other reported effects of qi flow are due to suggestibility in the practitioner. There are some instances where I strongly suspect that is the case; look for Henry Wang's push-hands videos on You-Tube, for example. There are some problems, however.

My first experience with qi was before I had any idea there was such a notion. I was riding on a bus, either in junior high or high school. My feet kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, as if there were a coal burning roughly in the center of the bottom of each foot. I looked around, wondering if something was wrong, but no one else seemed to notice. With great effort, I managed to pull my feet up off the floor, and the sensation decreased noticeably. Years later, I had a similar sensation during a qigong exercise, and suddenly I knew what it was I'd felt on that bus. Even stranger, the place where I'd felt the hot coal has a name: the bubbling well. Certainly, my latter experiences could have an element of suggestibility to them, but that begs the question of why I felt heat in a location that is believed to be a center for qi flow before ever hearing of qi flow or that there was an energy center in that location.

Another problem with the pure suggestibility hypothesis is that beginning taiji students often spontaneously report feeling heat in their hands. Usually I don't even mention qi unless students express interest in it, or mention such sensations. I'm not claiming that the only explanation is a metaphysical energy source; I am claiming that the sensations are real and a result of the taiji practice. What the practice does to result in those sensations, I can't say, at least not in physical terms. It's simpler, and more useful, just to call it qi-flow.

Why? Because it feels like an energy flow. Mentally, it can be manipulated as if it were an energy flow, at least in one's own body. If it's not an energy flow, then it's probably an artifact of the way the brain processes information coming in from the body. That's not going to help people figure out what to do with those sensations, however. And they are useful sensations in the context of taiji. They tell practitioners when the body is lined up correctly, and treating the sensations as actual energy flows tends to give people exactly the right impression for adjusting their own postures. Most of the time. Every so often I locate a different flow that turns out not to be the one we're aiming for in the taiji form, and then Don and I argue about it, and he nearly always turns out to be right.

As for where the maps of the meridians and such came from, I would bet solid money that they came from practitioners of the martial arts and meditation, noting where these "energy" concentrations felt like they were located, and whether they felt any flows between them. One more personal anecdote: in our morning warm-ups, we rub the centers of the right palm around the center of the left foot 36 times, and then switch to left palm on right foot. I was told this was supposed to be good for the kidneys. After a few weeks of practice, I could feel a sensation, almost like an electrical current, running from the center of my palm, up the arm, over the shoulder, and down to the middle of the back, where it seemed to collect. I had to look up where the kidneys were, and it turned out that they were exactly where the energy felt like it was collecting. It took several years before I got a similar flow running up from the center of the foot to the opposite kidney, and I still don't always get that one: it seems to depend on getting the presumed energy centers in the feet and hands precisely lined up.

Do I think there's actual electricity flowing from my limbs into my kidneys? Possibly. Then again, it may just be another artifact of the way the brain processes sensation. What I know is that I experienced that in the absence of any expectation of feeling such a flow, and before I knew for certain where my own kidneys were located. So I'm inclined to be dismissive of anyone who just dismisses the meridians as hokey nonsense with no physiological correlates. There is something to them, even if it's not a literal energy flow.

For the record, I would like it if qi turned out to be energy in the sense that the term is used in physics. That would just be cool. However, I don't think I'll be convinced of that until/unless I manage to physically affect some inanimate object without physically touching it. And, yes, periodically I do try. I suspect that if I ever did succeed, my first thought would be to wonder if I was having a psychotic break-down.

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Sanity!

This is from today's Narbonic (I'll fix the permalink when I have access to Firefox {fixed}). Dana sounds a lot like me when I've had lots of chocolate (or Thai iced tea) ... only I usually don't build the random things that I ramble on about. ^/^

I suspect that it's more suspicious to proclaim, "My sanity is intact!" than to proclaim, "I'm not crazy!"

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