Mizblog

On Monday night, our lab went to Everett’s new apartment in K-town for Mr. Pizza. Joel regaled us with tales of his adventure in Ibiza, and then we all walked over to a Korean karaoke establishment. It was much fun! I had 1 glass of beer the whole night, and then drove people home safely. I got home and crashed at about 3am.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 7am, expecting a possible call from Nepal. The call didn’t happen, so I tried to go back to sleep. I was very uncomfortable and finally decided it just wasn’t working and I should get up and get coffee, but when I looked at the clock it was 9am. I’d slept 2 hours and didn’t even notice.

Tuesday evening I got home from work around 8pm with a few groceries I’d picked up on the way home. While putting them away, I spotted a cockroach on my refrigerator. Immediately I went into cleaning mode, cleared all the bags and boxes and plates and trays from the top of the refrigerator, and wiped the whole thing down with a hot soapy rag. It actually cleaned up pretty well, but while I was washing some of the big plates we’d stored up there, I turned and saw that I’d disturbed some more cockroaches. Even as tired and as hungry as I was, I was more angry that these little bastards were invading my living space, and I was determined to exterminate them all. I even tried to move the old refrigerator to clean behind it, until I started worrying that it might break.

Anyway, after all that effort I went to bed with one more clean area in the kitchen, and creepy crawlies in my head. I laid awake for 3 hours in the dark before my consciousness time traveled to morning. 5am. Allergies had kicked in. Coffee. World of Warcraft for my jc daily quest. Then some mindless travel while reading the news on the web, drinking coffee, and generally being a zombie. By about 10am I was again tired and went down for another shot at sleep. This time the dreams came almost immediately, and I knew I was dreaming because Saranya jumped on my back and tried to poke me in the eye like she often does, while Sangeeta yelled from the other room telling Saranya to leave me alone. I thought “oh, this must be a dream” and then it changed into something less memorable. After an hour of REM sleep though, I feel much much better.

I’ve realized that becoming a father has caused real changes in me.

• I’m much more security-conscious
• I’m willing to sacrifice sleep in order to have time to myself
• I’m more worried about death

I’ve been sick for a few days now. Nothing serious, just some congestion. Well, a lot of congestion. In fact, I’m a snot factory. A booger explosion. Keep clear.

I had a nap yesterday afternoon, and while waking up from that sleep I had not so much a dream but a fear. I was afraid of being dead. Writing it down now makes it seem so trivial, but I felt a deep fear of never having access to memories or sensations again. What else is life but memory and sensation?

Oh yes: anticipation, plans, and goals. These seem to be important components of life, or at least of staying alive and being successful as a reproducing organism and/or a member of a society. We have goals relating to whatever our function is, we make plans to achieve those goals, and we try to anticipate the consequences of our actions in order to formulate the steps of our plans. Unless of course we’re stupid, in which case we take steps that aren’t likely to take us to our goals.

There’s a popular saying that insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same repeated action. I have a problem with this, and not just at the superficial level where there are hidden variables or probability waves or whatever that can really cause different results from repeated actions. My problem is that this isn’t what I think of as insanity – it’s more like stupidity. More generally, stupidity is choosing actions that are not likely to bring about the achievement of your goals, whatever those might really be.

Addiction is a sort of hard-wired stupidity. We get locked into a feedback loop with our rewards system. Normally, we assess our progress with our emotions. When we’re doing well, we feel good. When things are going poorly, we become angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, etc. Ideally, these negative feelings should motivate us to make changes and adapt to our new environment. Unfortunately, there are ways to suppress them and bring about positive emotions without making progressive changes. Drugs are a prime example. Use a drug and you feel good. Now the system that normally works to guide you to your goals has been sabotaged, and now your goal is to keep tricking it for as long as possible. Other things can do this as well, and they’re all things associated with addiction. Eating, drinking, sex, gambling, masturbation, etc. All of them are ways of managing feelings, but they all have potential negative consequences. When you get into the negative consequences but you maintain the behaviors anyway, that’s when the addiction becomes apparent.

I swear it was my Jr. High home-ec classroom, but it was also our home. The freezer was full of ham, bacon, and other pork products, as well as large amounts of candy. Sangeeta wanted to eat the candy but I was arguing that we should wait until Christmas because that’s how we do things in our culture.

Then the dream changed. There was a pretty Russian girl who was naked and rolling around on the ground. She was completely encrusted with dirt and gravel though, so she might as well have been fully clothed. She was doing some erotic dance or something, and then she got up and went over to sit on a nearby log. She lit a match off of a rock on the ground, put the flame up to her mouth, and breathed out orange fire. Then a retarded girl came up to her and she breathed the fire into the retarded girl’s hair, which ignited and burned. The retarded girl just sat there and watched herself be consumed by the flames. It was especially ironic as she calmly watched her eyeballs burn. At the end there was nothing left except charred bone, and the Russian girl complimented her on the wonderful BBQ aroma.

I had a very strange and disturbing dream last night.

It started documentary style. I was on a team expedition, wading through a tidal swamp with a lot of wrecked wooden ships protruding from the water. Suddenly the tide started coming in and the water was rushing by so fast it made the ships look like they were under full propulsion. We were nearly swept away!

Anyway, back at camp we were getting ready to brace for a huge thunderstorm when they discovered the body of their project supervisor, dessicated and charred, with an old fashioned hockey mask over his face. He was also wearing a white jumpsuit, but it looked like his body had dried up inside it and left it mostly empty. I could smell the disgusting odour of charred flesh, and I wondered how long the body had been in the tanning bed. When they went to get a closer look, he woke up and started to move groggily. They removed the mask to reveal that his face was blackened horribly. It was ghastly. He was obviously dazed and didn’t know what had happened to him, asking “what’s the matter?” When his crew held up a mirror so he could see his face, he stared uncomprehendingly for a minute before reaching up to feel the damage with his own hands.

Some of the charcoal rubbed off on his fingers.

It’s 2am. I’m awake. Got a meeting downtown at 8am and I’m not going to oversleep. I’ve already slept 5 hours tonight. Dreamed that I broke off a tooth, and it had wooden roots.

Been doing PLM development hot and heavy for weeks now, and there’s no break on the horizon.

Went to church at St. Joseph the Worker last Saturday. It was their 50th anniversary as a parish. Lots of Vietnamese and hispanic people there now, which is neat. They sing stuff in Vietnamese. Sounds funny. Anyway, I remember feeling very sorry for all those people. The rituals that bind them together and comfort them also blind them and fetter them. Knowledge is a frightful and terrible thing, but Faith will enslave you. The thing that bothers me the most is all the evil crap that gets tied into all the good parts. I agree that it’s good to be nice to others and that violence sucks, but the Bible has mixed opinions on the subject. Interesting that no modern church focuses on the war and killing in the scriptures, but it’s all in there. You should read it for yourself sometime, and think about what you’re reading!

I had two dreams last night.

The first involved me being at a Marine training facility on an island on the equator. They were filming a documentary on the effects of the rise of sea level caused by the melting of the polar ice caps, showing a powerful tidal surge into their facility. It was very dramatic.

The second dream was mainly at a house party. The dream had many sexual overtones but no actual sex. For example, there was a female movie star lying naked on a table, covered by a black gauze table cloth. We greeted each other by eye contact, since we’d ridden the same bus to get there. She had a film coming out that weekend and had been talking about it with people she knew on the bus. Apparently she lived in Redondo Beach but wouldn’t take the bus there for fear that stalkers would find out which house was hers.

In the corner of the main room was a group of Playboy models (sadly they were not naked) chatting like schoolgirls. It was an interesting party.

Sangeeta and I ended up crashing on one of the twin beds at the house after the party. Sarala (Sangeeta’s sister) also joined us in the bed. It was a small bed, so we were pretty tightly packed in. It was a Tim sandwich. We were all naked too, which made things both more exciting and more uncomfortable.

Then I woke up.

I had a dream last night after only 3 hours of sleep. It woke me just after midnight and I had to write it down because it was so interesting.

My friend and I were selected to pull a prank. It seems a woman wanted to scare her family into getting better household security by having us burgle her house. When we went to meet her at her house, I was dressed in a bunch of old mismatched hockey pads and a hockey mask, and carried a plastic sword. My friend was dressed in a blue FuBu jumpsuit with a hood, and he had his t-shirt pulled up over his nose so all you could see was his eyes and some hair sticking out.

The woman told us to get in through the back door. We’d need to find a way to get it open, and in the mean time we weren’t to let on that she knew anything about the prank, even if it seemed nobody was watching. With that advice we headed off to the back yard.

The yard was nice and grassy. The back porch was actually along the side of the house, but its deck was covered by a roof and walls, with three steps leading up from the grass to the black painted deck. Once there we saw the glass doors and, inside, a mouse with a key taped to his back. I thought of Pirates of the Caribbean as we tried to coax the mouse over to the slot under the door. Then a big dog came from inside the house to bark at us through the glass door, and the mouse ran away.

At about that time, I looked back into the yard and saw our hostess walking across the lawn with a basket of laundry. We froze and then hit the deck, flattening ourselves as much as possible so she wouldn’t see us easily. I thought this was somewhat absurd, since she’d just sent us back here, but I wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if she spotted us. Anyway, she didn’t look at us at all. She continued past the porch opening and out of view to the left.

We were still trying to figure out how to lure the mouse back when I again saw someone walking across the lawn. This time, however, it was a figure dressed in a blue FuBu jumpsuit with hood and a t-shirt pulled up over the nose. WTF?!? I silently pointed the person out to my friend, and as we watched, he/she turned and met our gaze, then continued walking across the lawn.

Something was obviously strange here. We decided to abandon the back door and follow the blue FuBu, which brought us to the waterfront. There, our mark met up with another stranger in mismatched hockey pads and mask! Suddenly I realized that my friend and I were the real targets of this prank! These two were going to cause some havoc and get the authorities looking for two freaks fitting our description, and leave us to catch hell for their misdeeds. Well, not if we had anything to say about it they weren’t…

We followed them to a residential neighborhood. They split up and approached two neighboring houses. I snuck up on my simulacrum as he rung the doorbell of one of the houses. As the woman of the house answered, he shouted “Haha! Remember me? From porn?” and brandished a red jelly dildo at her, threateningly. I quickly lunged forward and, with my plastic sword, smacked the dildo out of his hands. I shouted “Begone, wretched slime! And don’t let me catch you trying this crap anymore!” as he ran away.

I was vaguely aware that a similar scene was playing itself out in blue FuBu next door, but before I could go to investigate, I awoke.

I had a strange dream last night.

We bought a house on the side of a hill. At the top of the hill our street was crossed by a road that led to the highway. At the bottom our street ended in a T, with the left side road descending a curving grade toward the beach.

A few doors up the hill from our house, someone had put some wheeled dumpsters next to the curb. I went to examine them and found that they weren’t properly blocked from rolling down the hill. I accidentally set the first one rolling and it crossed the street and destroyed a parked car.

I deliberately sent the second one rolling. It crossed the street too, swiped a different car, and then went back toward my house! It went up the driveway and (because I shared a driveway with my neighbor) smashed my neighbor’s car. It bounced off and went back into the street, so I ran and jumped onto it. We got to the T intersection and it turned left and started rolling down the hill toward the beach.

That’s when the country music started playing. The singer was going on about how it’s so crowded nowadays that the only ones who can see past all the trucks are the other truck drivers, and so on. I recognized the song by name: “I Don’t Know If It’s True, But It Sure Makes A Great Song Title!”

At the beach the dumpster and I ended up in the ocean. I waded to shore and eventually climbed up the rocks to see what was going on. Turns out that the ocean was just a stream, but it was washing some really big trees down with the current, and they were knocking down other trees alongside the stream.

And that’s when I woke up. It was 3am.