Archive for January, 2006
The Warmth
I’d like to close my eyes and go numb
But there’s a cold wind coming from
The top of the highest high-rise today
It’s not a breeze cause’ it blows hard
Yes, and it wants me to discard the humanity I know
Watch the warmth blow away
Do you think I should adhere to that pressing new frontier?
And leave in my wake a trail of fear?
Or should I hold my head up high
And throw a wrench and spokes by
Leaving the air behind me clear?
Don’t let the world bring you down
Not everyone here is that fucked up and cold
Remember why you came
And while you’re alive
Experience the warmth before you grow old.
incubus
‘Incubus lyrics?’ I hear you (those of you who know Incubus anyway) call out. Come, surely after a week of no posting you can do better than that?
Truth is I can’t.
At first I wasn’t posting because I was doing so well with my new-found light therapy and was so excited to be back at school and at work that I just wasn’t putting aside the time to be online. Now the last couple of days I’ve been avoiding posting…basically out of concern for those who care about me who read this…and not wanting to subject them to the ‘compellation of thoughts’ that is actually going through my head right now.
After an amazing week, light therapy seems to be on the fritz. And how am I feeling? Pissed off frankly. I can’t focus, I have no motivation, I can’t work…and the real kicker is that I love the stuff that I’m studying. It breaks my heart to fall behind on readings and not get as much out of class as I know I could.
So why the Incubus lyrics? Mostly because I have a post about individual will that I would like to get up over the next few days, that is likely to involve lyrics of theirs….so that has me revisiting them in general.
This particular song because while I’m downright pissed off I haven’t lost faith. There’s a tonne worth experiancing. At the (extremely probable) risk of sounding ridiculous: the Universe rocks, frankly. The only reason you won’t find yourself getting what you want out of it, is because something is messed up in your perception (of it, yourself, your relationship with it, or all of the above).
That’s all I have to report.
That, and: I’m not impressed Canada. Stephen Harper? Seriously….*tsk* *tsk*
January 25th, 2006
Typically one of the most difficult things to adjust to in Japanese culture is the Onsens, or public baths. Just as the name implies, the basic idea is going to a public bath house.
A gai-jin’s (foreigner’s) first (couple) experiances with an Onsen can be quite tramautic. Well…mine was anyway. …it was during a week-long school trip to the south of Japan, and my classmates and I were required to use the Onsen (which is to say forbidden from using the showers in the hotel rooms). For the Japanese students in the class (everyone but me) this was no big deal. But I was a little un-easy: Get naked, get clean (which is to say wash yourself in the very open concept shower section with little stools for everyone, and showerheads placed about 4 feet apart from each other), hop into swimming-pool-sized-hot-tub thingy with all female classmates….hmmmm (to all the guys reading this: don’t get too excited, you’d have been with the guys).
None of my fellow classmates seemed to think much of it though, so I just went along with what everyone was doing and tried not to get too stressed out. (…imagine though, the predicament of trying to fit in and make sure you’re doing what everyone else is doing (and therefore needing to look at them), while simultaneously trying not to look at them (do to their nakedness) *sigh*). …anyway, once you’ve had an experiance or two with an Onsen, and the novelty wears off, the whole thing really grows on you. It’s just so relaxing and peaceful, and liberating in an odd way (to those raised in notably prudish western cultures).
I remember just before coming home to Canada, my host father, some friends of his and I climbed Mount Fuji. …It’s not really a difficult mountain to climb (it’s basically a glorified hike), but it does take a while, and after going straight up, and straight back down in under 24 hours your body is really feeling it. Directly after coming back down the mountain we headed to an Onsen. Given that I was the only female on the expedition, I was alone in the women’s section of the public baths (which is to say I didn’t know anyone, and noone approached me or spoke to me at all (partially because you don’t do that…but probably partially because I was a gaijin, and sometimes it’s just best to ignore them 
)). It was so gloriously beautifully relaxing. Sitting there soaking in water from natural springs, at the base of Fuji…*sigh*.
…relevance to today? I took a month off yoga and today was my second day back. My body is killing me. It feels good to be using muscles again, but to use them so intensely, and then step out into the frigid Canadian winter….it just doesn’t make the muscles happy. ….I really really would love to visit an Onsen. …something tells me we don’t have one in downtown Toronto though(…or that if we did, I wouldn’t like to be caught naked amongst those frequenting it)!
Ah well.
p.s. still torn about NDP vs. Green. …Conservatives are ahead in the poles. …if we have a Conservative government I’d be all over some NDP seats to even the scales out a bit. …and I really like Olivia Chow (who happens to be running in my riding). ….but I’m all for the Green philosophy, and feel it’s important to get their percentages up so people start taking them seriously. Thoughts?
January 16th, 2006
Pst!– Go vote BifSniff Cartoons as ‘funniest blog’ (you have to scroll down lots, ‘funniest blog’ is down toward the bottom, after ‘best sex blog’…(it’s best not to ask I imagine)).
Their weekly cartoons are usually quite funny, but I’m especially a fan of the one they have up this week. Any fellow attempted-programmers out there will love it!
January 14th, 2006
So I’m back at school, and beginning light therapy, and things are good. I’m almost ridiculously excited about my classes this term, which look a bit like this:
Personality and its Transformations
Bases of Cognition
Modes of Reasoning
and
The Phenomenon of Religion
*sigh*…life just doesn’t get any better than that.
I think, though, that it is definately the course on the theory of personality that I am most excited about. The professor seems like a really brilliant man, with a philosophy on teaching that I respect alot. He ‘invited’ us not to take notes in lecture and told us to treat the readings for the class like pleasure-reading, not to bother with highlighting or memorizing, because we’d never memorize it all anyway, and he wanted us to have a general understanding of what we were talking about that would stay with us rather than an ability to regurgitate facts that would get lost a week after the final.
The course is about how the personality develops throughout an individual’s life, and how that process has been transposed during differant times and cultures throughout human history. Pointing out that we haven’t changed much genetically over the last 150,000 years or so he likes to explore ideas about the human condition (stories, myths, etc) from people in as many differant eras as possible, believing that they were all dealing with the same personality development no matter what their technological awareness or scientific knowledge.
For example, on the first day he helped us explore the ancient Egyptian concept of Freud’s ego, super-ego and id. For those without much background in Freud, the idea goes that the ego (individual) is stuck trying to balance the id (basic and profane impulses from hunger and thirst to greed or sex) and the super-ego (the over-arching moral sense), and that life is a struggle as the ego attempts to hold the balance in place. In the case of Freud’s analysis we see a very individual and scientific (by which I mean observable, or at least defineable) division. The Egyptians had an idea which was much more abstract, but was equally brilliant, and perhaps more insightful (or helpful). They had three God’s which can be seen together. The first God is Osiris. Osiris is made of stone, but is old, crumbling and blind. The next is Isis. Isis is associated with the moon and the underworld. And the last is Horas, a falcon, with the single penetrating Egyptian eye. So how does this relate? Osiris represents society. He is solidly in place, but he is blind, and behind the times, and crumbling to pieces. Osiris is like the super-ego, the moral sense we’ve developed about what we’re ‘meant’ to do. Isis is like the id. She represents the underworld and the unconcious–the part of us which is most natural but most hidden from us. And Horas is the ego, stratifying the two. What makes this so brilliant, is the penetrating eye. To the Egyptians the question went like this: betrayed by society, and susceptible to the conditions of nature what is the individual to do? Pay attention! Keep your eyes open. And you will maintain a balance.
(…oh…and while on the various representations of this idea. Trinity anyone? Or in the Catholic tradition: Mary, God and Jesus anyone?)
The next story he told was one of a scorpion. We were talking about the human tendancy to flee from things they don’t understand. Novel people, places and things represent a potential threat to us–not just ideologically, but on a fundamental biological level. This is why the 3 year old is afraid of the monsters under his bed. He’s just old enough that his amygdala (responsible for core emotional responses, like love or fear) and his hippocampus (responsible for his map of the world) are starting to develop fully. He’s starting to get a sense of the world he understands as it is seperate from the world he doesn’t know anything about. When the light goes off, he doesn’t know anymore, that he understands the room he is in. He becomes scared, and in his fear he begins to associate everything he knows to be dangerous and bad with the dark places in his room. Monsters (usually reptilian, because of our innate fear of reptiles) MUST be under his bed! Eventually he grows out of this particular fear (hopefully) but the process of associating his greatest fears with the unknown is unlikely to ever leave him (….has anybody started thinking about the Western Capitalists tendancy to demonize Muslims yet? Or vice versa for that matter?). So anyway, this tendancy is very natural, and helps to protect us. But the unknown doesn’t just represent threat, it also represents the potential for reward, or the discovery of something new. So the healthy well-developed personality doesn’t just flee from novelty, it keeps its eyes open and cautiously explores it to see what benefits might be inside. This means stepping out of the world the individual understands, and may open the individual up to a completely new way of looking at the world (which can be scary) but if all goes well the individual will arrive at a new and better established understanding of the world than the one he began with. The story of the scorpion is the story of the individual who never tries this.
Imagine a large circle drawn on the ground. A scorpion, representing the human individual, is placed within this circle. He runs around inside of it, mapping it, and declaring it his home, and refuses to step outside. A division is made. The circle is seperated in half, and the scorpion traps himself on the one side. He scurries around within his newly defined border. Again the circle is divided in half. Again the scorpion scurries. Again it is divided. This process continues, each time driving the scorpion to scurry faster and faster, until finally he is trapped in a space so small he can’t move. So he stops. He lifts up his venomous stinger, and stabs himself in the back.
If we are unwilling to challenge our ideas of the world or broaden our perspectives over time they will get smaller and smaller and fold in on top of us. Eventually there will be nowhere to turn but onto ourselves. Unfortunately, however, if we’ve spent so long denying ourselves the process of exploration and learning, and refusing to open ourselves up to the worlds of others, when we turn into ourselves all we will find is hatred and fear and emptiness. And there will be nothing to do but die.
Frightening, and dark. But brilliant (sort of makes me think of Nietszche actually–who I’ve always been a fan of pretending to be able to psychoanalyze)–keep your eyes open. Explore the world carefully. It’s exciting. And if you keep moving outward, farther into it, you will become a stronger, wiser, more resiliant, more independant individual. But if you hide within the world you already know, you will become more and more hollow, right up until the end…
…that’s how the personality works…
January 13th, 2006
What is a good frame of mind for multi-tasking I’m not sure exactly. I would imagine it’s one of those things that falls on an abstractly defined gradient. All I know is that I almost poured grated parmesan cheese into my glass of milk…and that can’t be good.
January 11th, 2006
So the story goes a bit like this: I so completely did not want to leave Ireland. My last night was filled with tears as I struggled with all the wonderful memories of time with family and friends over a beautiful Christmas season. By the last week, it was Toronto that had started to seem like an imaginary dream world…Ireland felt so incredably completely like home. …and yet, even that last night, with the thought of having to leave hanging over me every second, if I actually pictured life in Toronto (work, and volunteering, and classes and family and friends) I couldn’t help but be excited to know I was going back to it. …So I guess I can’t really complain eh?
I’ve started uploading pictures into an Irish Christmas album over on Flickr. …It’s definately not even close to being complete yet, so check back to it over the next week or so…
Anything else to report? …hmm. Well I think I may have decided that I’m not travelling through the States again. I flew through the Newark airport on my way home. I have to admit that I was excited to land on a clear enough day to see the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty out the window of the plane. …that being said the terrible feeling of trying to get through security and customs (as a young plainly dressed Canadian female) there combined with the fact that the stores there only accepted US dollars (it’s an airport people… with Euro and Canadian dollars I should have been able to buy a bottle of water and a magazine!) just made me shudder. …it was fantastic to land on Canadian soil.
right. Well I’m off to the bookstore. Time to go back to school! 
January 9th, 2006