the nature of

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about .. the nature of .. things.

(Some people don’t like dots in writing but I put dots where I pause in my thoughts, because I think it helps to show that I am considering what words are best to express the ideas I want to express, and also that the words I eventually settle on may be the ‘best’ ones but they’re not necessarily precisely representative of what I want to say. Just FYI.)

About .. how I am separate from any conditions that I have, or that my body has. But the weaknesses of my body are such that they sometimes directly influence the expression of my self. These thoughts are a strange combination of scientific and existential. There’s a quote I’ve seen on pinterest, and it’s usually attributed to C.S. Lewis but according to wikiquote this is incorrect.

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

I do think that basically, I am a happy person. I am an optimist. I may not always act like I am those things, but that’s because of mismatched chemicals in my brain which are preventing me from remembering that, from living that, in this physical existence. Me, the soul, is a blissful being who believes that the greatest happiness and potential for realising our inner power comes from loving and accepting and being loved and accepted. The me that is here and now in this lifetime still believes those things but is held back from truly living this and touching this power because of the limitations of the vessel required to participate in this physical existence. Perhaps it is that I am not yet evolved enough to be stronger than those limitations, to be able to believe despite the doubt inherent in the body. I have a memory of a scene from an episode of TOS popping into my head. The crew are under attack from a source that they know is not real, an illusion being planted in their brains. And they can understand that intellectually but are unable to face the situation with absolutely no doubt that it cannot harm them because of the nature of their humanity. Spock, being only half-human and having the rigid mental control characteristic of Vulcans, can face the situation with no doubt and by mind-melding with the others allows them to share his absolute conviction. (Googling informs me that the episode is Spectre of the Gun.)

So how is that relevant to me, and this caravan of thought? A couple of things come from it.. The suggestion that if only I had better mental control I could make myself immune to the ‘demons’ that plague me. Or that reality is only what you believe it to be and can only affect you as much as you allow it to? The first idea is one I rank up there with the whole snap out if it type mindset, or even worse the just take some vitamins group. I’m not saying I think vitamins are useless, it is obviously documented that certain deficiences can cause similar depressive symptoms. But that’s not everyone. Not every person on this planet who struggles with depression has a vitamin deficiency. And with snapping out of it, the point is that you can’t do that: no matter how much you tell yourself about the things you have to be happy about, no matter how you try to focus on those, no matter how logically you look at your life to see that there is no reason for you to be feeling this way… you still do. I know I have a fantastic husband, and the kind of connection with him that lots of people only dream about finding. I know we have three brilliant and awesome (if occasionally frustrating and annoying) children. I know that we have a roof over our heads, clothes and food and many things that are not really necesseties. But for all that those things give me joy — I still also have pain in my heart and my brain at the same time; doubt that I am not deserving of these things, doubt that I am doing enough to make my family’s lives’ as good as I possibly can, despair that I won’t ever be able to give enough, doubt that I am good enough for them, fear that one day my fears and doubts will push my family away because they don’t understand why I feel those things. Guilt, because I wish they could understand but knowing that true understanding can only come from experiencing and experiencing what I do is not something I ever want them to have to do.

It’s not always that terrible. Most days, because of the medicine I take and the counselling I have recieved, it’s a background noise that you are so used to that you forget it’s there. It’s the buzzing insects and chirping birds and rustling leaves making the soft noises they always make and they are just part of the landscape. It’s never perfect quiet but you learn to ignore them enough to go about your day. But every now and then, a cockatoo will fly into my garden and the screech he makes is an explosion of pain inside my heart and soul that feels too big for my body to contain and makes me feel that if only I could create some openings in my body, some of the pain would escape and I would feel so much better. I haven’t done that but sometimes when the peace is disturbed it is so hard to hold onto the rational part of my mind that knows it wouldn’t work.

It’s very hard to admit that I think about things like that sometimes. I don’t want to seem like (and I realise the irony of this statement) a real crazy person and I don’t want to seem like an emo who wants to do this because all the other cool (uncool?) kids are doing it too. We often joke about being crazy but truly I don’t think I am crazy, because that to me implies a loss of the awareness of reality. I do think that I have tendencies towards exaggeration and paranoia in what my mind tells me people think of me and feel about me but I try to remind myself that I am probably wrong because I don’t think those sorts of negative things about people so why would anyone else do it about me? The place where this comes undone though is when I get reminders that many of my thought patterns do seem to be different than the ‘average’ person — sometimes on big things.. live and let live, make love not war.. and sometimes on random things like writing on roads that always seems to me to be written backwards (they recently painted DOWN SLOW all around the driveway of the complex that we live in) but obviously if everyone thought it was backwards they wouldn’t do it that way.

Then there is the concept of my mind being in control of my reality and if I wanted it enough I could re-form my reality so that this problem did not exist for me. This is a difficult one.. it’s all kinds of philosophical and quantum physics-al and some of the research and theories there sort of make my head hurt. On some levels I do think that we are in control of the reality we exist in but I’m not sure that it’s controllable on the level of.. the person in the physical body. If I can change my reality then I can change other people’s reality, since there are so many overlaps, and that would just create a mess and paradoxical states where different people were trying to create non-compatible situations and it would all end up very… chaotic. I think it’s probably more on the level of… the me that exists beyond the physical body, my higher self if you like.. has collaborated with the same parts of the people who have lives overlapping my own, and we have ended up with this reality and time and place and circumstance that allows each of us to learn and experience what we need to learn in order to grow into something more. Saying that, however, suggests that I chose to be like this and then that just sounds.. well.. masochistic. Or else it implies that ‘all suffering has a greater purpose’ which is not something that I agree with either. But I think maybe some suffering has a greater purpose.. and if the learning does not come from the suffering itself, then perhaps the suffering is necessary to shape you into a person who will be receptive to lessons coming from somewhere else or necessary to strengthen you into a person who can do something important to help others with their lessons.

Maybe it is hard to live with this, to deal with this, to watch the sky and worry about when a cockatoo will flutter in and disturb the peace with it’s screeching.. because I don’t know what the purpose of it is. I don’t know what I am learning or what I am meant to learn. I don’t know with absolute certainty that there is a purpose and a lesson and that I can survive. I don’t have a Vulcan to give me that peace of mind but even if I did I don’t know if it would help. Knowing obliterates the need for faith, and knowing you can survive something means that you don’t have to feel the pain as deeply since you are assured that you will come out the other side anyway. Feeling the pain and struggling to keep the hope that you will survive, struggling to remind yourself that you are not the pain and the blackness, that is the hard part. Keep struggling, keep fighting, keep trying.. trying to remember the true me.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 47 year old television signals bouncing back to Earth

Way better than Hitler! :)

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 47 year old television signals bouncing back to Earth.
[...] “They are signals that left the Earth about 50 years ago and have bounced off an object or more likely a field of objects some 25 light years away”.
[...] “We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

This is so cool. Due to various policies that the BBC used to have about recordings and storage of TV shows, there are a lot of missing episodes of quite a few of their early shows including Doctor Who. Now, because of something in space which has reflected our own TV signals back to us, some of those episodes can probably be recovered. It’s very impressive to me that something that is very similar to one of my favourite book and movie is actually true.

jeg elsker dig

i got another tattoo today. i have been thinking about it for a while, but it took this long to get around to getting it done for a couple of reasons. first, coz it just diid. and also because daniel and i had a bit of a difference of opinion as to my punctuation ;P he was, of course, wrong. i also wanted him to like the font i chose for the text and all of the previous ones i’d shown him didn’t tickle his fancy much.

he doesn’t like intentional ignorance of conventions such as capital letters. in certain situations, i do, and actually think it looks nicer with all lowercase. he claimed that since my intended tattoo was a ‘sentence’, it should have a capital letter. i countered this by saying that it wasn’t a sentence as such, more a floating fragment that was not part of any formal block of prose and therefore not subject to the standard rules. i think he still believes that he is right, but once i found a font that he didn’t mind, he was willing to overlook my flagrant disregard of proper punctuation. (i don’t have a full stop, either!)

this tattoo is, in a way, a lot more personal to me than the first. the first one is basically just a celtic type design that i really liked. and there is a meaning to it but the meaning that i see in it is not necessarily what the design traditionally represents and not necessarily what the person who published the tattoo flash intended it to mean either. i see it as representing the cycle of existence, the interconnectedness of everything and everyone. i saw a quote once but i can’t seem to find out where it originated, it simply said everything is connected to everything else.

jeg elsker dig

jeg elsker dig is danish. there are lots of pages on the internet listing how to say it in lots and lots of languages: je t’aime, ti amo, ich liebe dich, ik hou van jou… i love you. obviously my choice is primarily because daniel is danish, but that is not all there is to it. i very much wanted something that represented him and our children but i am not into name tattoos. some people get birthdates, or co-ordinates, but to do that for each of them would start to get bigger than i wanted. i had already decided that so i was balanced, this one should be on the inside of my right ankle, since the first one is on the inside of the left wrist.

so in trying to figure out what to do, i came back to why i wanted to have something representing them on my body. (something other than the stretch marks, anyway :P) because i love them and they are what is most important in my life. and what simpler way to represent that than simply saying ‘i love you’? but it still wasn’t quite right, because anyone can say that and read it and it is meant to be something specific to those people, and that’s how i came upon having it done in danish. also i want it to be a little bit mysterious and magical.. and there are not a lot of people around here who can read danish.

being danish is part of daniel. not only was he born there but he comes from a culture with a long and rich history that has influenced many aspects of our modern world. despite their generally inaccurate and highly cliched reputation, viking explorers went further than anyone else in the same era and that is to be admired. my children are a part of that heritage, having inherited it from daniel. i may share the same name but it is not part of my blood in the same way that it is part of theirs.. but now it is, in a little way, a part of my body.

it sort of relates back to the way i see my first tattoo. not only do i love daniel, stephanie, abigail and kristian but i love all that came before them and all that will follow after them, because it is all part of .. everything, just as i am. i like that it is both a simple statement about my favourite people and a more profound statement about how i see us all as being part of something bigger.

how i am

A lot of people are in the habit of also asking how you are when they greet you. I am not. I worry sometimes that they think I’m being rude, but I’m not.

I hate being asked how I am, because I know that they generally expect me to say something like ‘fine’ or ‘good’ or maybe even ‘great’. But I can’t answer like that.. because very often I’m not. Or I’m not necessarily not good but how I am cannot be summed up into a simple word. So I am left floundering wondering how exactly I should answer, because I don’t want to lie, because that would be rude, but I also don’t really want to give a truthful answer because I’m pretty sure that’s not what they actually want to hear. And depending on who it is asking, there’s a good chance that I might not really be comfortable with explaining the whole truthful answer to them. Revealing the extent of my struggles is not something I can do with everyone. So if I manage to get past this hurdle and mumble out a ‘fine thanks’ or similar, I’m still off kilter from the momentary panic caused by trying to figure out the right answer to give, that I generally forget that the social convention is now for me to return the enquiry until after they’ve already walked past or moved on or whatever.

So then I’m left wondering if they are now walking away thinking that I’m rude, or maybe just strange, and that bothers me because I’m not rude (well, sometimes I am, but in these cases I am not trying to be), I’m actually a nice, polite person.. it’s just that they were the ones that flustered me by asking me a question for which there is no simple answer. And that in turn makes me feel annoyed at them for putting me in that position in the first place.

Hence the reason that I don’t ask people how they are, even if I am the first one to extend a greeting or even if I have more than a passing interest in their wellbeing, like with Daniel or my Mum or someone else who is a friend rather than just an acquaintance. I don’t want to inadvertently cause someone else the same inner discomfort that I get caused every time someone asks me how I am. And I am reasonably sure that for the people that I do care about, if there is something I need to know about that is upsetting or annoying or making them sick.. they’ll tell me anyway. (Some of them will even tell me multiple times. Not mentioning any names. Kristian.)

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to not have to struggle. To ask everyone you greet how they are because you genuinely have no concept that for some people it’s not a simple enquiry but an interrogation that sparks off a mini panic on the inside because they don’t know how to answer. I wonder, because I can’t imagine. I really cannot comprehend being so unencumbered by the inadequacies of my own intellect that these interactions could be so simple and honest that as soon as you’ve asked and heard the positive answer, you’ve already moved onto the next topic since that one didn’t require any further action by you.

What do these people do with their brains the rest of the time, when they are not struggling against themselves? What else could I do with my brain if so much of it wasn’t dedicated to just managing to do the things I have to do?

partners

Some of our friends got married a couple of days ago. Daniel first met Richard when they were doing the same programming course. It was before Abigail was born. They have two daughters who are both about a year older than our daughters so they like to play together sometimes. Richard is one of those disgustingly friendly people who talks to anyone and he has also become quite good friends with Lisa and Allan so he and Lydia and their girls often visit there too which the kids love.

They went to Fiji to get married. We were invited but unfortunately it was not a practical possibility for us. We always drive past their house on the way to taking the girls to school and the other day Kristian observed that their cars were still at their house. The unspoken ‘accusation’ was that if their cars are still there how can they have gone somewhere? I explained that you have to go on a plane to get to Fiji so that is why they left their cars at home. And then since it was the day that they were getting married I mentioned to him that they were getting married that day. I think this caused some confusion. “But will they still be married to the same person?” he wanted to know. Meaning would they still be married to each other even though they were getting married today. I don’t think he has any concept in his head of people being together but not being married.. not because we have told him that people must be married but because he recognises their relationship as being of the same nature as mine and Daniel’s, or Nanny and Grandad, or Nanna and Grumps even; and all of those people are married. Therefore, the way to describe Richard and Lydia is “married”, even though they technically weren’t.

But it’s hard to explain that to a child, and Daniel and I may have even been guilty of describing Lydia as Richard’s wife sometimes, simply because we know that is a word that they understand and expresses the appropriate degree of intensity of relationship, as opposed to saying “girlfriend,” which seems temporary, or.. “his.. person that he is.. with,” that sounds, well, vague. There just isn’t a good word to describe the relationship between people who are not legally married even though for all other intents and purposes they have the same type of relationship.

I’ve noticed a lot of people nowdays using the word “partner”. I don’t like this. For me it has a different meaning. It’s either something trivial like someone you have to do an activity with at school, or.. it’s the person you want to be your wife or husband, and consider as your wife or husband.. but you don’t get the piece of paper and the legal and social benefits of marriage because you’re both the same sex. I understand that probably most people don’t get this and it’s because of my upbringing around same-sex couples that have given the word ‘partner’ those added layers of meaning. Yet it still makes me uncomfortable when people use the word, for two reasons. First, because if I am randomly talking to a person I don’t know very well, (which admittedly does not happen very often), say it is a woman. And she says something about her ‘partner’. My likely response is to be “oh, what’s her name?” And then she will look at me strangely and say something like “Jason,” which is pretty much unmistakably a man’s name and then I feel like and idiot and she thinks I’m an idiot.

The second reason is because of the part about how it means that your partner is someone who should be your husband or your wife but legally can’t be. People who aren’t gay calling their non-married spouse their partner is insensitive. It’s the word that people who can’t get married are forced to use because it’s not technically correct to call that person your husband or wife. When you use that word and you don’t have to it makes me feel like you have no appreciation for the difficulty a person feels when their relationship or their family is not given the same rights and recognition that everyone else’s is. But I’m pretty sure that most of these people actually have no idea how it feels as a child to be made to feel by the rest of the children that you are inferior to them because your parents aren’t married and they’re not getting married, because the laws of a country that claims to value diversity does not respect and value them enough as people to allow that. If the person you care about is more than simply a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, then why not make them your husband or wife? Seize the opportunity that you have for your relationship to be recorded on paper, recognised as significant not just by yourselves and your friends and family but by the very social and legal system that provides order and security in our society. Seize it, appreciate it, don’t waste it, because there are so many people who would love to have that chance and don’t.

Some people feel, I think, like they should voluntarily give up their right to marriage until it is a universal right. I don’t know the exact quote but I have read several times that when asked when he and Angelina might get married, Brad Pitt responds that they will get married when everyone can. I understand his reasons for that but I disagree.. One of the reasons that anti-same-sex marriage supporters give against it is that allowing gay people to get married will violate and dilute the sanctity of god-given ‘straight’ marriages. This is about as ludicrous as anything I’ve ever heard. How can two other people’s choice to be married to each other have any effect on the inner workings of anyone else’s marriage? Shouldn’t we instead be talking about how much we value and appreciate our marriages and express our desire that everyone could dream of that and know it could come true? Show that our relationships are strong because we make them strong.. and if they are not, maybe you should think about whether or not that person should really be called your husband or your wife. And maybe if they worried about their own relationships instead of other people’s, they would realise that the genders of the people involved in a marriage has as much bearing on the likelyhood of it being a successful relationship as the weather on Mars does.

Maybe we just need to change the definition of the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.. so that when we use them we are talking about a permanent relationship that both parties intend to last for the forseeable future. I know plenty of people who are not (legally) married that I essentially consider as being so, but just because it works that way in my head doesn’t necessarily mean it works that way outside of my head. I know that there are lots of people who would look at me strangely or question my wording if I were to make a comment about my friend and “his husband”. “But how is that possible?”

Changing the practical definition of the words doesn’t totally fix the problem, though, because as long as the legal definition remains separate there sort of remains a need to be able to differentiate between two people who have made a personal commitment to share their lives and two people who have signed a legal document to that effect. Otherwise you have the same problem that I described way back at the beginning of the entry in trying to explain how Richard and Lydia can be getting married when as far as the simple and uncomplicated understanding of a four year old child goes, they already are.

satellites with rings

Interesting conversation with Kristian yesterday afternoon while we were waiting outside the school for the girls.
(K is Kristian, J is me and M is my mother.)

K: I can see two moons in the sky!
J: That’s interesting..
M: yes .. especially since this planet only has one moon.
K: I can see TWO moons!
J: Are you sure they’re both moons?
K: Yes.
J: (partly to self) “That’s no moon..”
K: Yes, there are two moons.
J: Oh.
K: What do you think it is?
J: Oh, I thought maybe it was a Death Star.
K: What?
J: A Death Star.
K: A dead star?
M: Death Star.
K: It’s not a dead star.
J: Not dead, Death! Death Star.
K: A deaf star?
Now we are becoming somewhat amused.
M: No, not a deaf star. That would be a star that couldn’t hear. A Death Star.
K: A Jeff star?
Laughter.
M: Yes, it’s a Jeff star.
K: I can see one moon and one Jeff star! … When’s Abigail going to come out?

–

And some grown-up embarrasment thanks to Stephanie. She was tidying up the dining table that had become somewhat swamped in kid’s belongings and scraps of paper and things. And apparently one such scrap left behind by an adult. I was in the kitchen and she walks in holding up a small piece of card. “Do you need this?” she asks.

I look, and squint to figure out what it is. It’s the insert from the packet of something that Daniel bought a month or two ago came in. I only read as far as the words “Cock Ring”. Oh my god. “No, put it in the bin,” I tell her in a rush, trying to seem casual.

She leans over and puts it in the bin and I start to breathe a sigh of relief. That could have been awkward. But then she turns back around. “What’s a cock ring?”

SHITE! “Er.. nothing. Just nevermind.”

“Should I look it up on Google?”

“NO!” I all but yell, picturing the kind of results you’d get for that particular search. “NO! Do not do that.” Fuck a duck. I sigh. “It’s… a thing for grown-ups.”

“Oh.” She gets an embarrased look on her face and rapidly goes away. Hooray for ten-year-olds being embarrased by the thought of sex.