Tampa Zoo…Feeling “fine”…ChatGPT AI…BigBug
Adventures du jour!
Ray and I went to the Tampa Zoo yesterday. It’s set up VERY well! But, alas, eventually I ran out of people juice, and we left before dark so we didn’t get to see much of the holiday lights.
The day before yesterday, I was *feeling* fine but had a couple of close friends gently nudge me to check on me.
I used to get super defensive about people checking to see if I was okay. “I’m fine! HAHAHAHA FINE SEE FINE!!!” Then, well, my life fell apart around the divorce and Ray told me to get some therapy, and people stepped up and reached out to me, and I finally just…gave up and was officially not fine.
Since then I’ve learned how to let people tell me various things I don’t want to hear. I even figured out how long it takes me to change my mind (about three hours*) during the general public emergence of #metoo, when I started timing how long it took for me to come to grips with finding out various people I admired were sexual abusers.
What I’ve found is that:
–Being wrong sucks.
–Being not-fine sucks.
–Letting people tell me things I don’t want to hear sucks.
–Identifying that I’m not being personally attacked, but rather cared for, sucks.
–Feeling like I’ve failed the other person for making them worry sucks.
–Acknowledging that I feel “off” sucks.
–Acknowledging that I still feel “off” through the rest of the checkup and have to try to have a conversation anyway sucks.
–Feeling like I need help sucks.
–Acknowledging whatever personal bullshit that caused people to check up on me sucks.
–Actually asking for help sucks.
Everything after that is pretty good, though, even if I have to keep reminding myself that I have to let people say nice things.
The *first* time I asked for help, I was terrified out of my mind. Okay, the first…dozen times? Something like that. But it turns out that I’d been surrounding myself with good people; I just had to weed out the few bad ones so they weren’t whispering in my ear that I needed to keep everyone *else* at a distance.
As far as I can tell, whatever was going on went like this:
–I’ve been disenfucking a bunch of stuff over the last six months or so.
–I unsnarled a bunch of stuff lately and decided that one of the next things was “not being afraid of myself.”
–Body went, “Ah, yes, menopause, let us fluctuate some hormones” at about the same time I had some “not-a-migraine” symptoms show up. And I’m off ADD meds.
–I hit a minor trigger (that I didn’t identify at the time but in retrospect aha) that would *normally* make me have at least a minor panic attack, but I didn’t need to, so I didn’t.
–Body hunted around for a different, non-panicked response to all that and decided that “manic/bitey” was a good choice to explore.
–Mind decided “manic/bitey” was an unsafe state, but we’re trying not to be afraid of ourselves, so we’ll just pretend that nothing is going on and we’re fine. FIIIINE.
Yesterday I woke up feeling yucky and hungover, drank a bunch of water, did some Midjourney prompts to try to catch how I was feeling (images of feminine-looking automata and mechanical dolls), thanked the friends, admitted I was having issues (on FB), and asked for help getting myself back together.
Thank you to everyone who witnessed me being not-fine and who didn’t yell at me (which is always what I expect, because reasons), and particularly to everyone who reached out to ask questions, give suggestions for books and movies and songs and other geeky things, and generally just be there.
Ray gave me a luxurious amount of attention at the zoo; we did the thing where everything that comes out of our mouths is a comedy routine for a while, and I managed to get some of it recorded. That makes me happy.
It took us about five hours to get tired enough to want to leave, to become tired enough to act like normal people who can just slow down and relax. In the end, we both needed it, I think.
This morning, despite being sore, I feel very peaceful. I still have symptoms of not-a-migraine (hands and feet swollen, in particular), and my ADD is acting up horribly, but I feel secure and confident. Stuff went wrong this morning and I didn’t think, “Oh, it’s all my fault” or “Oh, that means [insert catastrophe here].”
I feel like something old and bad got pulled out of my body, a long slim fishy-bony thing that ran between shoulder and hip, on the sides that used to really bother me. It was weird on the walk; my balance was off for the first time in a while. I came back and danced some and got things kind of where they need to go, after a few near-misses with the wall. In particular one shoulder feels too high. In the mirror it looks fine; my hips are a little off but not as much as usual. I expect to have a neckache as bones adjust their way up my spine.
Safe. Peace. Rested. Happy. Confident. Clear.
Other stuff:
–Yoga/walk/movement: I’m sore as hell today, no surprise, but the knee is finally settling down and stabilizing with the isometric leg exercises. I get the feeling that I could easily strain it again, though.
–AI: I went back into ChatGPT to check on how it was running, and it was able to spit out variations of fairy tales that weren’t exact copies, AND it was able to interpret the short story “The Circular Ruins” by Borges (incorrectly; it added an element that didn’t exist in the story). It won’t run anything “in the style of” yet, and its poetry is bad. I tried doing something “in the style of Lewis Carroll,” and it wrote me something about a character named Lewis. And jokes? NAAAAAHHHH. I also ran a bunch of marketing-ese prompts and got a ton of subpar marketing material. (And it refuses to acknowledge Midjourney or write image prompts, hah!!) But all of this is a huge leap from where it was a month ago, and I’ll be tracking this AI more closely from here on.
–I finally finished watching BigBug, the Jeunet (City of Lost Children/Delicatessen) movie on Netflix about AIs and humans. I liked it! but wow was it an effort to get through, because of the nasty behavior from the humans. Monique the android was my favorite character, although I wanted to abduct all the house non-humans and take them home with me.–There’s a suggestion at the end that it’s the ability to appreciate and create humor that’s the real test of the humanity of an AI (aside from intelligence or as part of true intelligence, I’m not sure). I like that idea quite a bit; I have already been working with humor as part of prompts to gauge how sophisticated an AI is. I’ll likely be more conscious and intentional about it from now on. I realize that it’s sort of moving the goalposts for general artificial intelligence, but…I don’t actually know what intelligence is, either, so as stuff “feels” more intelligent and I explore it further, I run into limitations in my understanding and have to adjust it.
Here’s hoping that you’re safe and warm (you Northerners especially) and that good things come your way soon!
*Some things I have to change my mind about require multiple stages, with three hours per change–and it often takes some time to become aware that there’s a subsequent change that needs to happen. But overall, about three hours once confronted with an error on thinking.
