![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This was in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rialian's journal, by way of someone else... and I found it very interesting as well.
dear self
Think about your direct bodily experience of life. No one can lie to you about that.
Sometimes I wish they could - but I don't think that bodily appearance was the point of this...
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen?
Virtually nil, on the average. I watch Enterprise on Wednesdays, and the Adult Swim block of cartoons on Sunday nights. That's it. I have plenty of tapes, but I rarely play them to watch them - usually just for the sound of speech while I do something else (which I know is bad - I should wean myself from "white noise") - and even so, they are for the most part what I consider "intelligent TV": MST3K, Space Ghost, Red Dwarf, and Fraggle Rock are the bulk of it.
A computer screen?
Way too much. I used to get headaches from staring at the screen this much - nowadays, I've built up an immunity (so it seems) to 8-12 hours a day of computer. I treasure talking to my belovedenotsola for a good deal of that time, but really, I should probably restrict a lot of the other stuff I do online, and use that time to work more majik (not just a pretentious alternaspelling, I use it to mean magic that is peculiarly Faerie) or practise more witchcraft or do more exercise or something.
Behind an automobile windscreen?
Like the TV, very little. My commute is short. I don't do a lot of traveling, or driving around shopping or on errands either. I do not generally find driving fun in itself either.
All three screens combined?
Well... the computer is the big one.
What are you being screened from?
My love? Contact with magic? *blinks* Not that you can't get at it through a computer... but like my continual reading of books rather than actually getting down to practic... it's a way of seeming like I'm doing something without doing something, combined with a fear that if I don't keep taking in information, I will miss something, something vital, perhaps that magic word that will actually make me magic. The magic thing, the last thing, the magic powder or drug, the magic something, just the little help I need to actually get there from here.. maybe...
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? (Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things you want to do? Do you have enough energy to?)
Surely not, but the working existence saps a lot of my will to live. In a way I'm sorry I took swing shift, because I still detest getting up in the morning, so I don't. So I get up, go to work, come home, and then go to sleep. And never accomplish anything. If I worked day shift, I'd still hate getting up in the morning, but at least I'd have my whole evening to do stuff because I still wouldn't go to bed before midnight or something.
And how many hours a day do you sleep?
6-10 depending on whether I have to get up the next day. I tend to stay up until about 3 or 4 in the morning either way, hence the difference in length of sleep. My natural cycle is not-quite-nocturnal: stay up til a bit before dawn, sleep til afternoon.
How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours?
The minutes and hours that add up to your life?
See above about work. Blah. I've actually heard of purposefully isolating oneself from any indication of time (save daylight) for as long as possible as a way of connecting to magic and the Otherworld. Keep meaning to do it, but I think it's only going to make it into the slate in the time between quitting work and moving to Canada. Right now building savings and milking my benefits is priority.
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What will you get later that could make up for this day of your life?
Living in a place that I more belong, with the person (people) I belong with...
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings?
Well, yes, because most of the time they are scary in a bad way (as opposed to an exhilarating way). In fact, it's not so much "blocking" responses, as they seem to never come up in the first place. At gatherings of "people like me" I do so a lot less. In big masses of people (for example, the mall) I tend to shrink going "oohhh... soo... many.. humans... "
And who prepares your meals?
Myself, mostly. My work shift means I'm not home for the dinner my mother makes for my dad. I take myself lunch at work, or buy it from the cafeteria. Breakfast I always make myself.
Do you ever eat by yourself?
Almost all the time. My whole family does. We hardly even eat together on holidays. This doesn't bother me, though. Should it?
Do you ever eat standing up?
Hm, sometimes, but not that much.
How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
Too much, and hell no. But I still eat it. When I lived in Sac I shopped organic whenever financially possible. This meant cutting out a lot of convenience foods but I felt a lot better about it.
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than on the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards?
Interesting synchronicity - just finished Seven Wild Sisters by Charles de Lint and this is one of the sub-themes in the book: is having a fridge and a cell phone really better than growing one's own food in a garden, harvesting what you don't grow in the woods, and having an ice house and no electricity?
Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
"I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies)
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks?
I do my best not to take prescribed paths whenever possible. I stay on the grass. ;)
By moving, working, and living in two and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled... instead of wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?)
I schedule myself because I like it. I do hate it when it conflicts with others' schedules trying to dictate what I do. I like to be in control of myself. Do what I want, when I want. (Don't we all?) I do wish I could just wander and actually live that way. I don't yet consider the risk worth the benefit. I wish I could wander around North America as I pleased, without having to worry about border security and stuff... but really that's a wish for a lot of underlying world peace, for that to happen. *sighs*
How much freedom of movement do you have -- freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
*cries, and explodes*
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting for the bathroom -- learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges?
I'm not sure I quite understand this. I rarely wait in line, I don't wind up waiting in traffic, I eat when I want to as much as possible, I don't take the bus, I rarely have to wait for a bathroom stall. I do have my punishing and ignoring things though...
How are you affected by holding back your desires?
I hate myself, I think I'm wrong...
By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom?
Again, not really understanding. When around my beloved, we tend to have sex whenever we feel like it. If I feel like masturbating, I do it. This isn't a problem at work as it might sound - I never feel like it at work anyway. (Echh!)
Is pleasure dangerous?
Say what?
Could danger be joyous?
Again, say what?
Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see stars in it anymore?) Do you need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving?
Dear gods, yes. Stars, stars, need stars. See precious few in this urban environment, but even those few glittering on frost on my car roof were enough to spark an epiphany a few years back. Never underestimate the stars.
Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants?
Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving?
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
(Didn't you just say that?) Um... the dog is my mother's. I think of pets as familiars, or I don't want to care for them. Caring for another being that separate from my own is.. an interruption. That is why I will not have any children. An aquarium would be for the "feng shui" value - just moving, soothing water.
Do videotapes of yourself and your friends fascinate you, as if you are somehow more real in image than in life?
Um, no. Videotapes disgust me, as though they revealed to me how I really am, how others see me, how ugly and nasty I appear to others, which is even nastier than what I see in the mirror.
If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching?
No, it would be one of those depressing German film noir things that goes nowhere and has no apparent reason for being.
And how do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?
Huh?
How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication -- audio, visual, print, billboard, computer, video, radio, robotic voices -- as you wander through the forest of signs? What are they urging upon you?
Got me, man, I mostly ignore it.
Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Hell no. I need that all the time. I get quite a bit of it, in the late AM afterenotsola signs off and I'm truly by myself, people asleep all around me in the house, etc. I crave that kind of aloneness now and then.
Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted?
...whhh...?
Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude?
...the aforementioned late morning? where I know that if I needed someone I could find someone, where the silence and solitude is chosen and cherished?
How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these?
Only on occasion, actually. Other things take precedence in my mind.
Do you ever find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence?
Not sure what this means. Rarely do I burn something as a means of destroying it. Tonight I burned a "Desert Storm / Desert Shield" stamp that I'd kept for over 10 years, not as a way to disrespect those who were on that path of destiny, but in the feeble hope of stopping worldwide war. Usually I just destroy things as a matter of privacy (bank statements, credit card applications, etc.).
Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?
Dear gods. All the time. I need my tribe and have no idea where they are anymore. The place i thought they were, they appear to maybe not be. I really don't know.
Do you ever feel ready to
L O S E C O N T R O L ?
Paradoxically, no. I am a special kind of control freak. I do have some boundaries about where i cannot Have Control, but when it comes to myself, I have some very specific and picky desires about what I perceive to be control over myself...
rialian's journal, by way of someone else... and I found it very interesting as well.dear self
Think about your direct bodily experience of life. No one can lie to you about that.
Sometimes I wish they could - but I don't think that bodily appearance was the point of this...
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen?
Virtually nil, on the average. I watch Enterprise on Wednesdays, and the Adult Swim block of cartoons on Sunday nights. That's it. I have plenty of tapes, but I rarely play them to watch them - usually just for the sound of speech while I do something else (which I know is bad - I should wean myself from "white noise") - and even so, they are for the most part what I consider "intelligent TV": MST3K, Space Ghost, Red Dwarf, and Fraggle Rock are the bulk of it.
A computer screen?
Way too much. I used to get headaches from staring at the screen this much - nowadays, I've built up an immunity (so it seems) to 8-12 hours a day of computer. I treasure talking to my beloved
enotsola for a good deal of that time, but really, I should probably restrict a lot of the other stuff I do online, and use that time to work more majik (not just a pretentious alternaspelling, I use it to mean magic that is peculiarly Faerie) or practise more witchcraft or do more exercise or something.Behind an automobile windscreen?
Like the TV, very little. My commute is short. I don't do a lot of traveling, or driving around shopping or on errands either. I do not generally find driving fun in itself either.
All three screens combined?
Well... the computer is the big one.
What are you being screened from?
My love? Contact with magic? *blinks* Not that you can't get at it through a computer... but like my continual reading of books rather than actually getting down to practic... it's a way of seeming like I'm doing something without doing something, combined with a fear that if I don't keep taking in information, I will miss something, something vital, perhaps that magic word that will actually make me magic. The magic thing, the last thing, the magic powder or drug, the magic something, just the little help I need to actually get there from here.. maybe...
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? (Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things you want to do? Do you have enough energy to?)
Surely not, but the working existence saps a lot of my will to live. In a way I'm sorry I took swing shift, because I still detest getting up in the morning, so I don't. So I get up, go to work, come home, and then go to sleep. And never accomplish anything. If I worked day shift, I'd still hate getting up in the morning, but at least I'd have my whole evening to do stuff because I still wouldn't go to bed before midnight or something.
And how many hours a day do you sleep?
6-10 depending on whether I have to get up the next day. I tend to stay up until about 3 or 4 in the morning either way, hence the difference in length of sleep. My natural cycle is not-quite-nocturnal: stay up til a bit before dawn, sleep til afternoon.
How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours?
The minutes and hours that add up to your life?
See above about work. Blah. I've actually heard of purposefully isolating oneself from any indication of time (save daylight) for as long as possible as a way of connecting to magic and the Otherworld. Keep meaning to do it, but I think it's only going to make it into the slate in the time between quitting work and moving to Canada. Right now building savings and milking my benefits is priority.
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What will you get later that could make up for this day of your life?
Living in a place that I more belong, with the person (people) I belong with...
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings?
Well, yes, because most of the time they are scary in a bad way (as opposed to an exhilarating way). In fact, it's not so much "blocking" responses, as they seem to never come up in the first place. At gatherings of "people like me" I do so a lot less. In big masses of people (for example, the mall) I tend to shrink going "oohhh... soo... many.. humans... "
And who prepares your meals?
Myself, mostly. My work shift means I'm not home for the dinner my mother makes for my dad. I take myself lunch at work, or buy it from the cafeteria. Breakfast I always make myself.
Do you ever eat by yourself?
Almost all the time. My whole family does. We hardly even eat together on holidays. This doesn't bother me, though. Should it?
Do you ever eat standing up?
Hm, sometimes, but not that much.
How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
Too much, and hell no. But I still eat it. When I lived in Sac I shopped organic whenever financially possible. This meant cutting out a lot of convenience foods but I felt a lot better about it.
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than on the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards?
Interesting synchronicity - just finished Seven Wild Sisters by Charles de Lint and this is one of the sub-themes in the book: is having a fridge and a cell phone really better than growing one's own food in a garden, harvesting what you don't grow in the woods, and having an ice house and no electricity?
Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
"I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies)
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks?
I do my best not to take prescribed paths whenever possible. I stay on the grass. ;)
By moving, working, and living in two and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled... instead of wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?)
I schedule myself because I like it. I do hate it when it conflicts with others' schedules trying to dictate what I do. I like to be in control of myself. Do what I want, when I want. (Don't we all?) I do wish I could just wander and actually live that way. I don't yet consider the risk worth the benefit. I wish I could wander around North America as I pleased, without having to worry about border security and stuff... but really that's a wish for a lot of underlying world peace, for that to happen. *sighs*
How much freedom of movement do you have -- freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
*cries, and explodes*
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting for the bathroom -- learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges?
I'm not sure I quite understand this. I rarely wait in line, I don't wind up waiting in traffic, I eat when I want to as much as possible, I don't take the bus, I rarely have to wait for a bathroom stall. I do have my punishing and ignoring things though...
How are you affected by holding back your desires?
I hate myself, I think I'm wrong...
By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom?
Again, not really understanding. When around my beloved, we tend to have sex whenever we feel like it. If I feel like masturbating, I do it. This isn't a problem at work as it might sound - I never feel like it at work anyway. (Echh!)
Is pleasure dangerous?
Say what?
Could danger be joyous?
Again, say what?
Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see stars in it anymore?) Do you need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving?
Dear gods, yes. Stars, stars, need stars. See precious few in this urban environment, but even those few glittering on frost on my car roof were enough to spark an epiphany a few years back. Never underestimate the stars.
Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants?
Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving?
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
(Didn't you just say that?) Um... the dog is my mother's. I think of pets as familiars, or I don't want to care for them. Caring for another being that separate from my own is.. an interruption. That is why I will not have any children. An aquarium would be for the "feng shui" value - just moving, soothing water.
Do videotapes of yourself and your friends fascinate you, as if you are somehow more real in image than in life?
Um, no. Videotapes disgust me, as though they revealed to me how I really am, how others see me, how ugly and nasty I appear to others, which is even nastier than what I see in the mirror.
If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching?
No, it would be one of those depressing German film noir things that goes nowhere and has no apparent reason for being.
And how do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?
Huh?
How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication -- audio, visual, print, billboard, computer, video, radio, robotic voices -- as you wander through the forest of signs? What are they urging upon you?
Got me, man, I mostly ignore it.
Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Hell no. I need that all the time. I get quite a bit of it, in the late AM after
enotsola signs off and I'm truly by myself, people asleep all around me in the house, etc. I crave that kind of aloneness now and then.Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted?
...whhh...?
Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude?
...the aforementioned late morning? where I know that if I needed someone I could find someone, where the silence and solitude is chosen and cherished?
How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these?
Only on occasion, actually. Other things take precedence in my mind.
Do you ever find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence?
Not sure what this means. Rarely do I burn something as a means of destroying it. Tonight I burned a "Desert Storm / Desert Shield" stamp that I'd kept for over 10 years, not as a way to disrespect those who were on that path of destiny, but in the feeble hope of stopping worldwide war. Usually I just destroy things as a matter of privacy (bank statements, credit card applications, etc.).
Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?
Dear gods. All the time. I need my tribe and have no idea where they are anymore. The place i thought they were, they appear to maybe not be. I really don't know.
Do you ever feel ready to
L O S E C O N T R O L ?
Paradoxically, no. I am a special kind of control freak. I do have some boundaries about where i cannot Have Control, but when it comes to myself, I have some very specific and picky desires about what I perceive to be control over myself...
