Snow Week Project: Saturday
what's in a brain? that which we call a thought. or more — a tangle
Warning: This is going to be pretty random. Experimental diaristics, eheee.
Brain: NAH. Things in the text are more connected than they appear.
aka: What in the world did I do today?
Disclaimer: It’s no longer Saturday due to a random nap from 9 pm to 1 am. Nap attacks do tend to occur more often with the temporal disorientation brought about by early darkness. Sunset yesterday: 4:20 pm. A coincidence. Nifty shape.
~7 pm: Have recent Facebook export, will transfer to external drive to free up space on the computer. Ah, might save some images from/to my brother in the past 15 years. Whoa, not making a dent in those. How many? Twelve thousand. Maybe we do talk more than I thought.
~6 pm: Playing an MMORPG. Light solo PvE (player vs. environment), my go-to. In the guild chat, a guildie mentions that “you can’t divide by zero.” Mildly annoyed by absolutes, as usual, I interject: “sure you can, just gotta invent the corresponding math.” Maybe it’s been invented already, but my days and six-hours-per-weeks of learning math ended in 12th grade. Another guildie sends me a DM about non-Euclidean geometry, and we talk about math and/as philosophy, Star Trek Vulcans, “Darmok” (my favourite Star Trek episode — which reaches into meaning, linguistics, narratives of self and place), poetry. We agree that language isn’t perfect, but I think that in the space between it and “perfection” there’s plenty of room for poets.
Note: bug the philosopher I’ve recently met in person, after reading his horror poetry. I knew I had things to bug him about, if only I could find them in the fog.
I don’t want to disappear like the proverbial donkey in the fog, I do that a lot. (Romanian saying: a dispărea ca măgarul în ceaţă — without a trace. Hm, good name for a Substack publication.)
~3 pm. The Internet-browser tabs in my “video” tab-group are currently YouTube (the account that follows mainly 20th century history) and a streaming service running It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I’m the kind of person who gets to Always Sunny after watching Mythic Quest, another Rob Mac project. I be current like that. Adjacently, I did learn how to pronounce “McElhenney” — and also “[J. M.] Coetzee”, as J. M. himself pronounces it, but no one listened to the video I sent in chat, in the breakout room of a Zoom meeting where native-speaking Anglophones (which I am not) were spending an intriguing (to me) amount of time discussing the potential proper pronunciation of “Coetzee” using personal-perception vibes appearing to be related to Afrikaans. We’d tolerate anything but silence, wouldn’t we?
This week, I finally cancelled the TV part of my “home services” bundle. It had jumped to C$53 monthly, and I’m not watching that much TV, only the “premium” streaming channel. In fact, I never installed the TV box. Took 30 minutes on the phone — with a “regular” representative (sales) and a Cancellations Department one (also sales). We laughed. “I have this amazing offer that I only share with select customers…”; “I know, I’ve already been over that one with the other rep.” Cancellations sometimes happen if you make an additional-sales call too many times, especially if the customer’s object permanence is a little fuzzy and your missed-calls serve as reminders.
~4 pm. Between the Yugoslavian war decade, the most infamous Romanian serial killer, and folklore about the sense of time in spirit realms, an almost-century-old tango, Zaraza. This is much the same arrangement I’d heard in a version that became immensely popular across the ocean.
https://www.todotango.com/english/music/song/668/Zaraza/
Yeah, I’m “unfocused”, but I have thoughts about that too. (Surprise!) Especially thoughts about people who like to inform me of this focus deficit (it’s happened before), roughly at the same time as they marvel about some of the connections that occur in the chaos to which I’m quite accustomed.