Adventures du jour!
Me: I need a day to slack off and take it slow.
Also me: [Dances to EDM.]
Someone mentioned cologne and I got jealous so I put some on: Hades/Immortal Perfumes. I might have to get more of this one. It smells like someone said, “You need to be spoiled rotten” and dropped you in a private library filled with leather-bound books and a leather couch that smelled like good tobacco and spilled Drambuie.
I slept in fits and starts, again waiting up to down a bottle of water (thank you, trusty water bottle). I got up feeling both pleasant and angry/salty, the good kind of angry/salty that is able to focus outside oneself instead of turning inward.
Yoga: The balance poses are still kicking my ass. Shaky legs for sure; I’m sure I won’t make much progress until I have the needed muscles built up. Better control in releasing muscle groups/nerve clusters while in down dog; I had some “Hulk shoulders” discomfort going on this morning for a while but it faded. Becoming more comfortable with building a little muscle there, I think because I’m able to release the traps and don’t feel so “locked in” as I add to the muscle mass. The muscles there remain flexible.
Yoga Anatomy remains slow going as I try to process the little bits and pieces of wisdom:
“More movement in a joint is not always better. There are joints in which it’s appropriate to have a small ROM, and working to increase that ROM might make it harder to maintain balance in the joint space and increase the chances of damaging your joint.”
Uh…extending that out to the obvious metaphor, HEY MAYBE IT’S OKAY TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING FLEXIBLE FOR OTHER PEOPLE SOMETIMES, EH?
Walk: I didn’t go far; I got obsessed with the fog versus sunlight battle this morning (and Three-Pointer was walking with me again this morning).
I pondered the idea that a lot of things that tie up our time disproportionately are distractions from misuse of power. Wherever there is unnecessary bureaucracy, it seems like if you scrape it back, there is also distraction from misuse of power.–Trying to get Ray signed up to change her voting address was a hassle. Getting healthcare (particularly mental health care) is a hassle. Gender issues are a hassle. Racism is a hassle. The news cycle is a harassing cycle of despair. Despair is a hassle. Sexism is a hassle. And on and on. That’s the public side.
On the personal side, the way that assholes try to wedge themselves into your circles is a hassle. The way they leverage your good intentions to undermine healthy relationship boundaries is a hassle. Trying to “prove” and evict a known harasser from a friend circle is a hassle, one so common that there’s a name for the coping tactic of warning vulnerable people not to “step on the squeaky stair.”
I’m thinking this stuff and Three-Pointer is out walking with me, and it’s like–as a character made from my mind–he suddenly gets what I’m trying to say, that corruption doesn’t just happen on an institutional level, but a personal one, and they kind of ultimately connect (for example, at work, where people can throw unnecessary bullshit at you both as a person and as a cog in a machine). Off he went to consider that. It’s a relief, because he is A N G R Y, in a way that goes from good/positive-change anger to bad/self-destructive anger in a snap. If I have to learn how to have that feeling (and I do, because what you’re confident about can’t be used against you), then having him, as a character, learn to make his anger more effective should be helpful for both me and the story he’s in. We shall see.
I got back, posted things, screwed around, took a nap. I played around with Midjourney, not sure what I wanted to do, and “out of the blue” plugged in a few terms, which just so happened to include a term, “fnord,” that’s from Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy; if you don’t know the books, they’re very THEY LIVE!-esque. Or vice versa. Something like that. My subconscious saw an opening and dove right through it: THINK ABOUT THIS MORE. Okay, subconscious, okay!
Midjourney had no idea what the term meant. I’m currently trying to teach her how to see the fnords–basically, trying to see what she does when I attempt to give her the glasses from THEY LIVE! She’s not truly intelligent, but Imma try.
I’m watching the implosion of Twitter with interest. Musk is acting like the dog who doesn’t know what to do once he catches the car. What’s really interesting, though, is that other billionaires are just sitting back and letting it happen. It seems like Musk is isolated form the wider community of people who own waaaay too much shit.–I think we’re watching the collapse of Twitter; I’ve predicted for a while now that Musk is going to end up an asocial recluse like Howard Hughes. I feel pity for Musk as a human losing his grip on his mental model of the world, no matter how flawed it is; I feel cold anger toward him for treating people like things; I feel outrage at the billionaires watching this all go down and saying, “Yes, that will be the last time Twitter gets used against us, then. What a troublesome, crass man.” I just hope it doesn’t set electric cars and space shit back when everything folds inward. Twitter was never perfect, but it was occasionally a very useful tool. I don’t think bucketed things like Mastodon are going to be any kind of useful replacement.
Time for more Goth Girl. Onward.