What are your top ten favorite movies?
In no particular order, because like most things, it depends….
Pi
Phone Booth
Requiem for a Dream
One Hour Photo
The Fifth Element
Fight Club
Girl, Interrupted
Hackers
SLC Punk
Flatliners
Honorary mention to 13 Ghosts
What do you enjoy most about writing?
Where to start here? I know the question is limited to a single answer because it says, “what do you enjoy most“, but you have to evaluate the options first, right?
Writing can be an emotional outlet, first and foremost, and though I may not “enjoy” the process of a particular emotional release, I love that writing provides that for me. And then, I can enjoy or appreciate what I have written after the fact, so there is that.
Writing can be a beautiful form of communication, sometimes portraying things that the spoken word simply doesn’t allow for due to the immediate nature of that form of communication. You can’t say something, reach out, erase the words that you blurted out, and replace them with something else. With writing, you can; you can take your time and edit a piece until it’s just right.
Writing has dualistic qualities that I admire. It can be soft or harsh, painfully direct or compassionately subtle, immensely complex or incredibly simple – it all depends on the context and needs of the situation. Writing can be a vessel for nuance and undertone, and the interpretation of that depends on the reader. That’s why it is important to know your audience, I suppose.
Writing also supplies a hard copy back up of your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas and explorations. Speaking about these things can be great, but it can also be forgotten or mis-remembered. Writing, at least for me, provides a snapshot of the truth of my existence at any given point, and can also provide a robust history of that truth over the years.
What it boils down to is that I enjoy using writing in a variety of ways, and it always delivers. Writing is an extremely adaptable, completely dependable thing to have in your life.
Self-sabotage is real.
Who really is the most dangerous person I know?
What would I do if I had kids at this point?
I found myself wondering about this a few weeks ago, and I’m not really sure why. I had decided quite a long time ago now that I would not be having children. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to…. I always wanted children, and I think that would be an amazing experience. But I do have a chronic, debilitating disease that will likely be a contributing factor to (if not the cause of) my ultimate demise, and I would not want to place my kids in the same situation I was placed by a situation with parent with an acute, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease.
So, how would I handle that if my efforts to not be a parent had failed?
I would like to think that I would have taught my kids the things that I wish I had been taught, and to be there for them in ways that I wish my parents had been able to be there for me. But admittedly, I say this with many more years of perspective, learning, and healing than I would have had were I to become a parent in my 20s or early 30s. So, would my kids’ situation have been all that much different, or would I have ended up creating the same type of wounded child and equally dysfunctional adult? And would I be in a place now where I am resolving certain things from my past, or would I have ignored that need for the sake of being a parent?
A long time ago, I believed that everything happens for a reason. I lost that belief for quite a while, but I think it’s starting to reform in my heart. I think that maybe I never had children because I wouldn’t have been able to give them the care and compassion that I would have wanted to with my current situation. And that would have translated into regret.
Anyway, I started listening to a podcast called MeSsy a few weeks ago, and this week’s episode talked about the sometimes heartwarming, but often difficult and heartbreaking moments that come with parenting with MS. And, honestly, it gave me some perspective on what my parents may have gone through all those years ago, which is something I never really considered. I assumed that they didn’t consider or perhaps even know the impact that things would have.
I don’t know. This whole thing feels vaguely like a projectile vomiting of past trauma kinda thing, but I think it is important to consider the idea that things may happen for a reason, and also to consider, even in hindsight, what others are or may have gone through when they do/did things that wind up hurting us. And that is not to excuse that behavior, but to forgive it and move on with your life free from that burden.
How many thoughts a day do I lose because I don’t take a few seconds to write them down? Doing this every day has made carrying my notebook again more and more enticing.
Why, a, bee, gee, I, jay, kay, oh, pee, queue, are, tee, you.
All of these words contain a letter that has the same pronunciation as the word itself. Granted, in two cases the letter is a word, but still. It’s interesting.
What is the word for being tired of everything in a given situation, and no longer giving a flying fuck, but in more than just a passing, irritable moment kind of way? For some reason, I think that German would have a good word that fits this description…
Numbers really are amazing. They are central to existence, and patterns in those numbers can be seen everywhere. It truly is beautiful.
I find it funny how much emotion plays a role in how you perceive or experience certain things, and how that can change over time. This pertains specifically to music, at least in this moment for me.
I mentioned a TOOL song in something I wrote earlier, and I was inspired to listen to the entire album. I originally got this album when I was 15, and would listen to it over and over on my cheap Walkman knockoff with crap headphones. First and foremost, I’d just like to say that am thrilled that the portable listening experience is so improved from that time. Aside from that, it baffles me how the way you think of a song, or what it means to you, or how you feel listening to it can change over the years, and how life experiences can make you realize that what the song meant to you at that time is probably not what the artist intended, and certainly not at all what it means to you 20+ years later. It’s amazing how the lenses of emotion can color things in such different ways. That said, none of that matters because you had an emotional experience, evolving or not, and I believe that is the goal of any musician.
For example, the album Aenima. I have said before that this album saved my life a number of times, and I absolutely believe that. But, listening to it now is such a different experience. The song “Eulogy” has a great intro. Building layers of sound that start off crisp and light, becoming more and more complex, adding deeper tones gradually until it crashes into a rumbling bass and drum line that just picks you up and carries you off, complexities still lingering underneath. I probably listened to the first two minutes and 40 seconds of that song over and over hundreds of times when I first got the album, just to hear and understand all those different sounds. The acoustical intricacies of that song just called to me.
I think the reason those details resonated with me is because of my complex and chaotic emotional state at that time. The title of the song, and my clear obsession with it and the rest of the album caused some… tension. And rampant miscommunication. A friend of mine destroyed three different copies of the album because he thought that it was causing me to feel a certain way. But in reality, it was giving me something else to focus on, something that I could identify with so I didn’t feel quite so alone, and something that gave form to emotions that I couldn’t even put into words.
That is the power of music.
A Peculiar Cerebral Tangle 