happy rapture

shit! i should have donated more money!

                                 

change is hard

i reached as far as my arm would go, but he let go. so i'll move on. i'll read the forums and reach out to people in the same place i am. of course he got defensive like my previous post said he was the incarnation of ted kennedy. of course he asked me to leave him be, which i will. i am trying so hard not to be bummed. i am confident that i made the right choice. i can hopefully get over this and like he said "worry about my own family," which i do incessantly.

my peanuts painting

i got a kazoo. i am tickled to death about my new found ability to hum trombone and trumpet riffs. i started another painting yesterday. i planned on it saying "how strange it is to be anything at all" and put my favorite equations in the background. i am just so intrigued and turned on by the sciences. i read an article this morning explaining why the universe is flat; according to Einsteinian equations,  mass would have to comprise < .02% of the universe, and the majority of the composition of the universe is dark energy. apparently 19 billion years ago, dark energy was dark matter? i have also been reading different physics blogs trying to explain away CERN's neutrino findings. some of the article are pompous and almost like, brace yourself, the authors are scared of change or the implications of the finding. there is just an odd sentiment towards the special theory of relativity. change is difficult for all of us, i guess.

natural reward center

it blows my cognitive self away that people with high IQs get themselves chemically addicted. it amazes me how the rewiring of the brain enables the addiction to drive the bus.

my name is ruby, and i have a friend that is addicted to pharmaceuticals.

he has owned a little section of my heart since we were kids. he has been there for me in ways no other friends have in my life. i love him dearly and am so bothered that his life has become what it has. he is college educated; in fact, he used to be quite brilliant at utilizing all of his facilities and applying them to his field. he has always had a dark side. once a brooding angsty teen, he has always identified with deep lyrics and bass rhythms.

one day, after college, he started smoking heroin. some of his friends were also doing it. some of MY friends were doing it. the heroin smoking was far too casual. i was not invited to their gatherings. i was kept mostly in the dark, since i am a bit of a prude. eventually, one of my dearest friends quit dabbling and let me know what was going on.

apparently my pharmy friend used pharmies to wean himself off of the heroin. he and his closet friend have told me about the withdrawals; how awful, painful, nauseating, mind fucking getting off of black tar was. but pharmies helped decrease the symptoms ever so slightly. enough, unfortunately, to increase activity in the brain's natural reward center. god damn the lizard brain!

he admitted to me over three years ago that he has a problem with drugs. he called me late one evening. our friend was in need of an intervention. he started using at the same time my pharmy friend did, they did together. the friend was pathetically addicted, as he spent everyday in search of a fix and lying to the love of his life. pharmy friend knew at that time that both of them needed help. our mutual friend got help. his new wife moved him across the country and has not enabled him to be a loser.

my pharmy friend, however, has not gotten away from opiates. he has convinced himself that he has too much pain to get off of the drugs. the consumption patterns are up and down; he won't be able to get enough fix for a week (taking so much he passes out) and then is able to "cut back" and only take the "bare minimum." i beg and plead with him very so often to go to rehab since he doesn't have a job and his parents own his house. unfortunately, his parents use (legally? Probably.) pharmaceuticals as well and may not fully understand what's going on.
they are all good people, whom i love. he will sometimes slip up and give me details of his life that paint a junkie's picture. he has lost jobs, friends, potential love interests.

some days i just can't stand the thought of talking to him because i am lying to him. i can't have a philosophical conversation with him because i can't let go of his addiction. i can't pretend to not know he is slowly killing himself with vicodin. i can't pretend i am not heart broken that someone that i love and used to look up to is now someone i wouldn't leave my children with. someone that i am not certain would not steal from me. the fucking opiates are driving the bus.

i am bitter. i am mourning. i am starting to understand addiction.

sartre's implied being

to counter my unproductive reading habits, i carry around with me, Being and Nothingness. i read it while i am  trying to forget my worries. it is easy to get lost in sartre and feel like something else matters.  i am not far into this piece of grandiloquence work. i think i have reached the fiftieth page and turned back twenty pages to reread. for the last four years. when reading heavy philosophical  texts, i still underline and highlight like a college student. 

here are a collection of lines that i think i may comprehend. 

“being is. being is in-itself. being is what it is.”^{(page 29)}

as sartre sets out to exhaustively iterate consciousness, it seems rather endless and undefinable because of consciousness’ necessary coupling with being. to begin, sartre states: “all consciousness is consciousness of something.”(page 21) this statement can be sorted out by comparing it to similar statements, ‘all smelling is the smelling of something,” or ‘all seeing is seeing of something’, since, nothingness has no flavor, odor or visual object-hood to taste, smell, or hear, there must be it’s opposite, something, to have these sensible characteristics. (note: using any ownership on nothingness [or ‘it’s’] is logically impossible but the nothingness i am referring to here is representation of the lack of somethingness.) i suppose further one might add that the somethingness that consciousness could have a vagueness to it. does this statement imply that by having consciousness, other things exist? perhaps, but sartre only implies clearly that being is objective. being cannot be subject because subjective truths already imply that something exists. sartre is trying to state that being is objective to us because we are always already thrown into being as such. further, being is a phenomena, it presents itself to being and in this way also presupposes its own existence. “it is that which escapes, that which by definition will never be given, that which offers itself only in fleeting and successive profiles,"(page 22) sartre states, a statement which reeks of sartres’ phenomenological predecessors, like husserl, who postulated that very idea in Being and Time. (my little piece on the application of phenomenology to video games )

“consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence,”(page 24)

a thing cannot lose its essence without ceasing to exist, and the essential nature of a natural kind, such as water or gold, is that property without which there is no instance of the kind.” the concept of subject that has consciousness is interdependently connected to the concept of its essence. they are inseparable.

“the primary characteristic of the being of an existent is never to reveal itself completely”(page 24) another way to think of this is by placing something as close to your eye as you can, without touching your eye; the eye or mind cannot evaluate what it is in front of it. or,  if you were to blast a note from a trumpet directly into an ear; although you might recognize the first note of Taps if it were not so close to your ear, the note would feel more like pain and less like a B note. when things are too close to our senses they cannot be revealed entirely. the essence of being is something that one can never experience, since it is inseparable from consciousness, and to begin with, one cannot separate themselves from their consciousness.

“any judgment about being already implies being,” to which Sartre replies, “it is not necessary to pass beyond the being of this meaning toward its meaning.”(page 25) this line of reasoning reminds me of the skeptical cartesian cogito. by using the faculty of judgment one is already engaged in an act of being. the reply that sartre offers is confusing but here is my understanding:

being as two statements: BEING FOR ITSELF

                                      BEING IN ITSELF

“it knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being." (page 28) 

the best wednesday, ever

on the drive down to evergreen today, my eyes were inundated with yellow and orange. the hue of the scenery was such that around nearly every turn of the road i strongly desired to stop and admire the glow of the leaves basking in the sunlight.

Beirut tonight. so fucking excited.

on the way down, we very much enjoyed listening to: sun king by the Beatles and never ending math equation by modest mouse.

busy. inspired. fall.

i have not been able to carve out an hour to blog these last couple weeks. i have been doing a bit of traveling to and from denver, and doing a lot of creative baby things.

the science world seems to be inspired also! the most interesting stories are being published. if you are interested in science, you have probably heard about the neutrino particle. firstly, turns out, the neutrino has mass. secondly, and most importantly, the peeps at CERN doing the OPERA experiment have published an paper showing how the neutrino can travel faster than the speed of light. you can read the published paper from my dropbox account, here.  now, there is much speculation in the physics community about the possible short comings of the findings, and they are not going to be taken lightly. after all, the idea of light's speed  is at the base of most of the theory of special/relativity. einstein would be elated to know that a particle with mass can travel at or faster than (c) the speed of light. there is also much speculation by observers like myself about the possible implication of time and time travel if something can move faster than light. this possible finding may not directly change our lives or perceptions of the universe in this lifetime, but perhaps the human race is closer to understanding some truths about our existence.

i also encountered a super interesting article about scientists at UC Berkeley  "decoding" brain waves and "translating" them to images. Slate.com did a piece, including the images, which you can find here.   the website for UC Berkeley has the data and clips, and an explaination that goes a little further, here. i urge you to visit and thumb through. it is terribly interesting.

leaving for denver to see my favorite indie band, Beirut! i am to uranus excited for the show. so i am listening to every single song of theirs until the moment i get to the show!

i tots mcgoats want this for xmas, a beirut music box! .
i love the take away show, beirut style.

romance

i recently did a survey on the book of face for my married friends. i asked them if their husbands were "romantic" and the overwhelmingly repeatative response was "no". there were a few friends who have spouses who really seem to have a flare for romance. i followed through with some of the ladies with romantic husbands, i asked what they did that was romantic. The answers included: dates, flowers, trips, jewelry, surprise events (sky diving, rafting, skiing), home cooked meals, spa time, cards, poetry... the list goes on and on and only a few ladies replied!

the list inspired me to qualify my idea of romance. i have come up with a list. just for reference, in case my husband asks.

qualifications of romance:
hand holding
kissing sessions
setting up the baby sitter for an evening alone
setting up and executing a date(of any sort really)
hot springs at night
a single flower
oil massage
slow dancing in the bedroom
a whole movie of snuggling
love notes!!

i am nearly positive that life gets in the way of fiery hot romance that you see in ridiculous movies, but what is stopping anyone from making life more romantic? other than a Y chromosome? this season always inspires a faintly romantic feeling in me. one that i desire to keep alive for the snowy season. i am putting "being more romance" on my list of ways to better life. now to inspire my significant other to do the same...

current tonal amusement: death cab for cutie, what sarah said