It’s like they’re all on strike and my feet are on fire for no reason
10 Dec 2010 2 Comments
in Personal Tags: brain activity, enthusiastic rambling, flow of consciousness, holidays
I’ve been feeling a great deal more insane than usual.
Kind of like this, except without the whole "crazy achievement" bit, and with more of the "my feet are on fire for no apparent reason, and I may just fall down on my face"
And with insane, I mean (that I’m stealing pictures shamelessly off the internet) the sort of hazy, pseudo-braindead state where you do everything impulsively and do not stop to or are unable to consider the consequences and/or implications of your actions. Also, it seems like it’s incredibly difficult for me to make myself concentrate on one thing for extended periods of time (including, for example, reading — or, well, I can read things for a relative amount of time, but I don’t feel like I’m actually absorbing or ingesting the information, but instead, I’m just… you know, kinda mechanically scanning through the words, which is not a feeling I’m used to), which is highly unusual for me, because I’m exactly the sort of person who will sit down with one task, and then, three hours later, stand up again and move on to something else.
I mean, my concentration and effort is usually, um, concentrated on one thing like a 110%… efficiency? Look, see, this is just a prime example of how I feel — I was only now writing this sentence, and it’s not nine lines long, and I forgot where it was going and what I was going to do with it. I mean, the fact that I’m ABLE to write somewhat coherent (just ask anyone who reads my writing on a semi-regular– oh, right, this is my blog and you’re my readers, so you’re used to my running sentences by now [I hope, and I apologise for my crazy style]) sentences that span that long a.. distance, with the conjunctions and punctuation necessary to make it so, means that I must be able to have adequate amounts of concentration on the thing I’m doing at the moment, right?
But for the past couple of days, it feels like I’m not absorbing anything at ALL. It’s like my brain has gone “ahhhhhhh” after not having to be stressed out by social interaction and trying to remain funny and interesting and lovable to all (because I actually worry about this every time I have social interaction with someone, because I’m like that; actually, that was a lie — I only worry about it if I’m solely with people I know, because for some reason, being great at small-talk doesn’t mean that you’re awesome with sustaining interesting conversation with people you’ve already met before plenty of times [is that even grammatically correct?]), and, of course, not having to worry about academic achievement and whatnot.
Speaking of academic achievement, only three days until results. Holee. It feels so surreal! And all I can think about is how crappily math exam 2 went and how worried I am about the result for math and if that’s going to ruin my chances with everything else and how amazing it would be if I got a 50 in English, though that seems kind of unlikely, because, I mean, I’m good, but I’m not THAT good, am I? Anyway. I’m terrified about math and interested and curious and other synonyms about everything else.
What was I saying…? Right. Increased amounts of insane and brain going “ahhhh” and turning off. I don’t think I even properly finished the sentence in the paragraph before last that took up almost the entire paragraph (see? see? see?) before going off on a tangent about VCE results — our ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank? I’m just guessing, and waaaay too lazy to google). Or, well, my ATAR, because I wasn’t thinking about anybody else’s. Now I am. Freaking boyfriend isn’t interested in his, but I WANT TO KNOW HOW HE DID AS WELL D; And most of my friends, really. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity? Why are people so curious about other people’s business? Because comparing themselves to other people is the only way to tell them that they’re doing it right and they’re not insane?
But there’s a flaw in the system, if you think about it like that… That’s the sort of thing that just encourages stupidity and completely useless and ridiculous rules of society, and thwarts all advancement. If a human being is curious about other people through his desire to remain normal and social, then… I lost my train of thought. Probably something about that idea juxtaposed with the one that curiosity feeds inspiration, or something.
Regardless, what I think the point of this post is that I feel weird, my thoughts aren’t gathering and organising like they should be, and I almost feel like I’m in the middle of some great intellectual meltdown. How could that be? But I’ve been treating my mind so very well… Providing it with different stimulus and doing different things and trying to keep thinking about things and everything, regardless of it being holidays; and with that, I mean that I’ve not allowed myself to fall into the lethargic routine of “get up, watch dvds, eat, shower, go to sleep” that sometimes happens during the holidays… Maybe that’s the problem? Maybe I should give myself a rest?
AARRGgghhh, keeping one’s brain in working condition is so haaaard! Or is it just me? Is my brain just uncooperative? Maybe my subconscious has gone on vacation — or maybe my conscious has gone on vacation, and now I’m living entirely on my subconscious… It would explain why nothing is making — wait, but my subconscious always makes sense. What? Ooh, maybe the little people who do the organising inside my subconscious (because I’ve totally started visualising it as this huuuge hall of filing cabinets, because I’m like that)
Something like that... Except that the people working there definitely don't look so boring, and it's all colour-coded instead of black and white. And the hall is a lot huger.
have gone on a strike or something, except that I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT FROM MEEEEEEEEEE.
Just to clarify, I’m not usually this insane. Just read any of my blog entries. Ok, except for the previous three ones. In all honesty, I think that when my brain starts functioning properly again, I’m going to fix the description of this blog and clarify the about page and stuff like that — because this is fairly ridiculous.
Hey, there was a moment there when I was actually thinking clearly, woo! I’m kind of on the edge of thinking clearly and feeling completely out of it, and I still have no idea why. Underneath all of that, and all of my excitement and everything, I feel a bit tired… Maybe. It’s hard to tell.
Maybe next time I post, I’ll be more of a sound, sane state of mind.
Maybe.
Don’t get your hopes up, though.
Some sorts of tranquilizers and peace, everyone.
p.s. Har har har c wat I did thar?
Interpretative dance as a metaphor
09 Dec 2010 5 Comments
in Personal Tags: brain activity, frustrations, late at night, sleep deprivation
I wish I was funnier. And more concise. Definitely more concise. In that way, maybe I would be more tolerable and more relatable to more people and more people would hence like me! And read my posts. But the only thing I’m really good at is writing loooong pieces of incoherent babble (and even that is mostly about me… I can’t be that interesting, except to my crazy stalker significant other, can I?), and I don’t know how many people appreciate that. I don’t even take really good photos! They’re only there to distract you from how long a post I’ve written/you’ve read! Besides, a disturbing amount of them involve my feet.
What’s with that?
I love socks, though. I want more quirky socks. Quirky t-shirts and quirky socks I can wear with them. I’d be so quirky that the world would implode.
I’ve been all over this before (except maybe the wondering about the feet and then fangasming over quirkiness bit), so I’m just going to go ahead and have an internal dialogue between some of the alter-egos floating around in my, um, personality (well, that’s an expression that I haven’t seen before) and transcribe it down for your convenience! Let us call the characters, incredibly unimaginatively, Anna 1 and Anna 2.
You know what, screw that, we’ll just call them Dancing Elephant and Hopping Grapefruit.
Hopping Grapefruit: Hey Elephant, why’s your dancing so sad today? Dancing Elephant: Oh, it’s just because my only skill is interpretative dancing and I can’t really seem to get an audience, though I haven’t really been trying at all, because I wouldn’t know where to start anyway! I suppose I should look for other interpretative dancers and then be incredibly invasive and totally advertise my own dancing abilities, but I’m just scared of being rude to other dancers, you know! Plus, it seems like a lot of effort to find interpretative dancers that I’d like; I’m a very specific sort of dancer, though I couldn’t for my life tell you what my dancing is like (or what it’s interpreting, really), but I always know that they’re never right! Hopping Grapefruit: Phew, you sound like you’ve got bit of a self-pity spiral going on there. And I don’t mean a pirouette, har har har har! Dancing Elephant: No-one gets your humour, Hopper. You’re all lonely and sad and you think everyone loves you and your quirkiness and at the same time you act like you don’t care, and you try to convince yourself that it’s just better to be yourself and ramble aimlessly about some sort of a spiral or pirouette or whatever, than to try to pretend to be something you’re not! Guess what, Hopper — it’s not working! Hopping Grapefruit: Geez, slow down, big guy, no need to get so butthurt over one joke. You said it yourself, Elephant, you’re not putting in the effort that you should be putting in. No wonder there’s no results. I’ve seen your routine, and that’s incomplete as well! How could people possibly come and appreciate your interpretative dance, if you don’t even advertise it to anyone? Or if you don’t finish it off? Or if you don’t seek the company of other interpretative dancers? How can people like you if they don’t know you? Dancing Elephant: But I’ve been going to this club where I do really short bits of dances and I’ve got a lot of interested friends there… I think. It’s usually kind of hard to get any response from them in any sort of a way… Hopping Grapefruit: Eh, you’re fine. You’ll just have to waggle that behind of yours a bit more vigorously — no more complaining until the work is done; then you can complain! Besides, how important is interpretative dancing to you anyway? And shouldn’t you be dancing about something that is actually meaningful to you — maybe you should start doing something with your life that would give you more joy and pain to interpret, and your dancing would become more rich, instead of just being an extension of your everyday life! Dancing Elephant: So if I were to make a dance out of this conversation… Hopping Grapefruit: To be honest, it seems to me that this conversation is a bit flat, satirical and straight-forward in the sort of way that it doesn’t seem to flow at all; nor does it seem to need to. I don’t even know if that sentence I just uttered was grammatically correct, so that just tells me that… I completely lost my track of thought. Dancing Elephant: What I think you’re saying is that this conversation is under-interpreted? Hopping Grapefruit: Er… That’s not… Ah, never mind, sure, why not; that’s exactly what I’m saying. *both Dancing Elephant and Hopping Grapefruit turn to Little Anna, the mayor of Brainville* Hopping Grapefruit: So how was that? *Little Anna nods vigorously, seeming relieved* *Curtain*Roight. Have fun trying to make some sense of that! I bet that when I wake tomorrow morning, I won’t make any sense of it either, so don’t worry. Bottom line is, if you know any awesome bloggers that you follow, please to share them with me~
I’ll be back with richer tales later, I promise!
Now to go do what I was SUPPOSED to be doing — that is, catching some z’s. *grabs net, puts on safety gloves and charges off*
Have a picture of a dancing elephant, though:
A tired play that takes place in my brain
24 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: 35 days, authors and books, brain activity, reading, suspense, writing
At this point in time, I’m seriously beginning to think if I’ve somehow “calibrated” my sleeping times in a pattern that comes, not only after 10 pm (seriously, precisely quarter to ten, my body begins going “oh, it’s almost ten, we can start relaxing now — unless I’ve been to the gym, that is), but immediately after school, too. This was SO not the first — not even the FIFTH time in which I’d come home from school, eaten lunch (because I even had a short day!) and then thought that I’d relax a bit in bed by reading Cracked (ok, I understand that it’s beginning to get pretty much pimping right now, but I really, really, really love Cracked) before heading to do some hardcore math and chemistry homework, for my plan to be foiled by my drooping eyelids, difficulty to focus on what I’m reading and the eventuality of falling asleep.
To understand my bewilderment, you have to consider what I revealed in my previous post: even the Goddamned lunar cycle makes me sleep worse, which means that I’m an incredibly light sleeper with a super-efficient bodyclock that has the incredibly annoying tendency of waking me up some ten minutes before my alarm goes off. Also, I wake up to the softest sounds and never have to be shaken awake, if I know I have to be somewhere the next day. And I don’t sleep in cars or planes or anything that moves, unless there’s some sort of a horizontal plane that I can use and if it’s quiet and dark. This aforementioned piece of information about not sleeping in moving vehicles became especially bitchy to me during the, what, 30 hour (including the times we spent waiting on assorted airports) flight from Helsinki, Finland to Melbourne. I think I slept like 4 hours during that entire span of time, and that was only with a pillow on those tray things that you lower from the backrest in front of you, me bent over it all weirdly and in pain after it.
So, I’m quite at a loss as to why I’ve suddenly began to crave sleep as drastically as I have. At this moment (with my eyes still pointing in separate directions and my brain feeling like the slow mass of grey goo that it is [very good time for updating my blog, isn't it?]), I felt as if it could’ve been my subconscious complaining about the dreariness that is the routine that I’ve been subjecting it to for the past countless weeks. Like this:
Me: [Goes through weeks with only doing anything apart from schoolwork and occasional chats with her Significant Other on one day of the weekend; otherwise procrastinates by reading Cracked.com, an assortment of other websites, and does her homework like the good little fuck she is.]
Brain: BRAIN NO LIKE MONOTONE. BRAIN DEMAND ACTIVITY. [Awaits for some change maliciously]
Me: [Is rather oblivious to the demands of Brain, and hence continues with the dreary, exhaustingly boring routine]
Brain: BRAIN GAVE YOU WARNING AS PER USER AGREEMENT. BRAIN TAKE ACTION NOW. [Angrily and abruptly ceases all activity]
Me: Blblblblgrbl? [Falls asleep]
But then again, considering the amount of learning and activity that I am actually forcing my brain to do, actively, every day — with all of my subjects, really — the absorbing of new information and feverishly trying to remember at least the main idea of old lessons and still trying to keep thinking about the plot of Inception and witty comebacks to pseudo-assholes at school, it would be perfectly reasonable if the scenario went more like this:
Me: [Constantly learns a lot of new things and goes back to revise old things, and while she seems to be resting at certain points by, for example, reading Cracked.com, she is really reading fascinating notions about pop culture and, well, culture in general, which make her generate her own opinions about it and consider the different aspects of those; etc.]
Brain: [Wheezing] Brain… can’t — do it! Brain not very good multi-tasker; Brain need time to sort it all out. Brain fascinated, but getting a little scared! [Rushes off to put out a sudden fire in one of the overflowing archives, looking distressed]
Me: [Is somewhat aware of Brain's pickle, and feels sorry for it; but keeps on reassuring herself and Brain that there's only so much of it left and after that, they'll embark on a lovely intellectual adventure where stimulus will be specific and hand-picked]
Brain: BUT BRAIN CAN’T DO NO MOOOORE! [Throws a tantrum, begins sobbing and takes an axe to the bleeping dashboard thingy]
Me: Bbhhhh– [Falls asleep]
Either way, it’s some four hours ’till my sleepy-time, and I still haven’t begun doing any of my math and Chemistry homework. It’s relatively alright, because the chem homework due date was shifted forward to Friday — and yet, I’m feeling rather skeptical for my physical & mental status on thursday afternoon, since I’m already falling asleep on bloody tuesday afternoon. Oh GOD but I am in need of a holiday. On the summer holiday, in which there won’t be any homework, this’ll be my brain activity:
Me: [Engages in pleasantly stimulating leisure activities whenever the fuck she wants, changing activities when the older one becomes unnecessarily boring]
Brain: [Excited] Ooh ooh ooh Brain want read now! Brain want beach now! Brain can’t decide — can read on beach now?
Me: [Smiling slightly, obliges to Brain's wishes]
[EVERYONE lives happily ever after]
*sighs* I can’t WAIT. But before that — I am so sorry, Brain — there’ll be a hell of a lot more studying and revision and practice and doing questions after questions after questions, and oh God that report SAC on Ethene production that is due in in less than two weeks’ time that I have no clue how long it will take…!
Day 14: Your favourite book
I like this question. As you may have realised by now, I have a sort of a passion with writing and reading. Sadly, I haven’t been able to do much at all of the latter, and very little of the prior that has nothing to do with schoolwork or this blog (but at least the blog keeps my creative demons from howling and rattling their cages too much), this year — that’s for perfectly understandable reasons. Also, I try not to agitate my brain further by giving it “useless” information to digest, along with the things it NEEDS to know for the exams around November. It was a sort of similar situation last year, and hence my bookcases — there’s three of them — have been collecting all these books that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. Below, you can see a picture of my bookcases (there’s actually three individual ones of them), a TV that is not connected to anything and random crap that I have stored there (the picture in the lowest right shelf is the “evolution of me”, as visualised by a friend of mine), and my books (yes that is the Twilight series — I USED to like it [but never thought it a literary wonder, mind you], got sick of the hype and now refer to it when intellectually discussing the Twilight series and its merits and faults): 133 to date. Some of them are missing, as they’re scattered around my room, and at least one is in my sister’s room. MOVING ON.
For as long as I’ve had at least 75% of the brain power I harness today (well, not so much to say about that, after explaining why the hell I’m developing some sort of a mild case of narcolepsy), I’ve refused to name my favourite book. There are so many different books out there that speak of so many different things, in so many different styles that explain things in so many different ways that offer so many different opinions and revelations — it just seems sort of blasphemy to pick one out of all of them and parade that around and say “this is what is most important to me, because it’s most awesome of them all.” I may be exaggerating what the whole concept of a favourite book entails, but that’s how it comes across for me. In fact, in relation to the context essay thing that I posted yesterday, I might add that the reading experience of each book becomes significantly enriched by the books you’ve read before that. Prior knowledge and understanding of language and ideas and how storytelling works, for example, give you a heightened insight to how some clever author is attempting to bring his/her ideas across.
And that is why you don’t give university-level novels/other works of writing to high school-level students, bloody VCAA. No matter how intelligent we are, we won’t have the necessary skills/experience to actually pick all of that apart.
But I do freely admit that I have favourite authors. As with music, my favourite authors are simply authors from whom I can read any books or other bodies of writing and enjoy them all almost equally. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I like their books more than I like the stray book from another author that I have liked a lot and placed in my bookshelves, but it means that whenever these selected authors publish new books, I am thrilled and excited and hardly ever disappointed. These authors, who have gained a special shelf in my bookcases, are Robert A. Heinlein, Neil Gaiman and Mika Waltari (a great Finnish author — and, incidentally, the only Finnish author that I like, to date). Check out any of them — I personally think they’re rather awesome.
Day 15: A movie that made you cry
Day 16: Something you’ve procrastinated about
Yep, that’s the sound of me heaving a huge sigh and helplessly glancing toward my math books, so peacefully lying on my bed. How darling they look when they’re closed like that! And what horrors those seemingly innocent, blue covers hold within them! Wish me luck; I hope I’ll still be alive when the schedule for sleeping rolls in, eh?
Peace and mushrooms (have I wished that already? I think I may have); take care of yourselves, and don’t get hit by a lighting. That’d just suck. Or be awesome. Regardless. Don’t do it.
