August 23, 2011

            I am a psychiatrist now. I am somewhat of a rookie with only six years of experience, but I work well and take good care of my patients. I smile them and take them by the hand, I listen and nod and often rephrase what they have said themselves and repeat it right back at them. I always test to see whether they will realize I am simply repeating the same thing back at them, but they never do! They get all excited as though I have expressed the most significant insight someone has had in years. It might be helpful to listen to their own thoughts so much, so I keep on repeating, and they often get better.

            I was treating a girl today. I don’t mean a little girl, now, she was about my age, probably a few years younger. She sat in the chair on the opposite side of my desk from me. The chair stood on five wheels, as so many office chairs do, and she pushed to the right with her feet. She traveled with small steps and slowly reached the left wall. Once she touched it and examined the surface of the wall, she pushed with her feet to the left. That’s how we talked. She reminded me of someone, but I didn’t spend a single calorie of energy wondering about what similarity I had found. Every future psychiatrist undergoes therapy and training which teach him to suppress his own issues and personal memories. One learns to perceive the person sitting in front of him and the situation he is in by referring as little as possible to specific personal events. It does work, thank god, because analyzing associations all the time makes me feel overloaded and stuck in my own cage. It’s not a bad cage, one might argue, because it is my own cage, but I never liked cages, even nice ones.

            I didn’t remember her even when she told me her name: Lilitt. I talked to her: How are you today, Lilitt? Are you more certain of what you know now, Lilitt? Not that I was at fault for anything, I just didn’t remember.

            On a Wednesday morning, she came in and said:

            “I have something to tell you, Doctor. I think you’ll love it!” She was beaming, and I was genuinely interested.

            “Of course, I’d be happy if it’s good for you. Tell me.”

            “I remembered you, Doctor.”

            I stood silent for a few seconds—something I never did without a reason. Now the reason was sheer surprise.

            “Did you use to forget me, Lilitt? Do you mean that you forgot me after each session and then had to meet me again anew every time we had another session?” That could have been a new symptom, although it would take us in a completely different direction. “Is that what you mean?”

            “No, Doctor, that’s not what I mean.” She was still beaming. I was relieved she didn’t have that symptom, but that beaming face of hers made me shift in my chair from one buttock to the other.

            “So what do you mean?” I was getting scared now, mostly for my diagnosis.

            She pushed to the right with her feet and made a dash for the left wall. Her feet stepped faster and in front of each other, as though moving across a dance floor. She put out both hands and slid them across the wall. It was the same old wall, and she still smiled.

            “Could you please take out a sheet of paper and a blue pen, Doctor?” she asked from the other corner of the room.

            “Of course, Lilitt. What will we need it for?” My voice was as neutral and friendly as ever.

            Examining every bump in the wall, she said, “I will write five sentences, Doctor, and then pass it to you. Then you will read my five sentences and write five more sentences as a sequel to my five sentences and pass the sheet back to me. Then I will read your five sentences and write a sequel to them and then pass the sheet back to you. Then you will read my five sentences and write a se—“

            She had looked up and seen me bathing in my own sweat.

            “But in order for it to work, Doctor,” she said, beaming from ear to ear as though her mouth had been cut to reach both ears, “we need to step in the elevator.”

            My scalp was boiling with my sweat.

August 22, 2011

            We walked out of the apartment building and turned right. We walked on some pretty ordinary gray tiles to the little shop a little further but still in our building (it was a long building). The shop was far from being a supermarket, but it was red, and we liked that. It was only red on outside, but we still called it “the red place.” We went in and she—damn, she truly is a she—chose a one-liter box of apple juice. She bought it with her own money, and I stood by her side, embarrassed. She pointed to the door with her head, and we left, descending down the stairs back to our ordinary tiles.

            There were small, square gardens in front of the building. They were very low with only grass in them and nothing more intriguing, and their fences were very low, reaching up to our knees. Those fences were painted black by I don’t know whom, but it was a nice, solid black, and it looked good on the grassy green, although a fractured tile here and there ruined their authority. Lilitt and I drank our juice; of course, I let her drink more, I had to be a gentleman. Damn I hadn’t had to be a gentleman until fifteen minutes ago because I thought she was one too. How could have I made such a crucial mistake, I thought; maybe, had I known she was a girl all the time, I wouldn’t have started playing with her at all, so now I wouldn’t have to drink this apple juice. I would have still been reading in my room and arguing yet ignoring the boys under my window. Although this seemed like a better option, my guts rebelled against it. That would have meant to elevator journeys, they said, and I knew what they meant.

            I read her sentences while she drank the better part of the juice. I took out my blue pen, the one the teacher had given me for writing very beautifully. Of course, that made the rest of the section angry, but that wasn’t enough for me to pretend I didn’t want or care about the reward. Because, come on, how does anyone give you a free blue pen? I stood thinking over Lilitt’s five sentences. I underlined some words, maybe even drew circles around them, and connected them with jiggling arrows. The direction of the association, or which brought about which, was the hardest task of all, so I should have just drawn lines, but the damage was already done: I had drawn arrows. I can’t just abandon a decision I’ve made because it bugs me so much I feel I’m going to burst any moment now. But I had to abandon one thing, and that was Lilitt. Don’t be surprised, we all know that a friendship between a girl and a boy at the age of slowly entering puberty is not a good idea for both of our systems. I repeated my decision to myself every morning for about a month, and then I began avoiding Lilitt. I tried to do it slowly, methodically, gently, and I thought I was succeeding, but to her I may have stumbled like an elephant in a glass shop because she stopped contacting me in any way only a few days later.

            That was it for the elevator journeys. I felt a little hole, sometimes a big hole, in my chest or throat, depending on whether stupid tears welled up inside my eyes. Please don’t say that to Lilitt, though; I’ll probably get so embarrassed that I won’t talk to her for a year, although we are on good, quite good and hopefully even better in the future, terms now.

Does Marijuana Make You Stupid and Does It Help with Priming and Finding Associations?

From "Does Marijuana Make You Stupid" on Wired Science: The Frontal Cortex: "The scientists found that “there were no significant between group differences.” In other words, the amount of pot consumed had no measurable impact on cognitive performance. The sole exception was performance on a test of short-term verbal memory, in which “current heavy users” performed slightly worse than former users. The researchers conclude that, contrary to earlier findings, the mind altering properties of marijuana are ephemeral and fleeting:

The adverse impacts of cannabis use on cognitive functions either appear to be related to pre-existing factors or are reversible in this community cohort even after potentially extended periods of use. These findings may be useful in motivating individuals to lower cannabis use, even after an extensive history of heavy intake.

This study builds on previous work by Harvard researchers demonstrating that the learning and memory impairments of heavy marijuana users typically vanish within 28 days of “smoking cessation.” (The slight impairments still existed, however, one week after smoking.)


Interestingly, the scientists found that marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends to distantly related concepts. As a result, we hear “dog” and think of nouns that, in more sober circumstances, would seem rather disconnected, such as “leash” or “hair.” This state of hyper-priming helps explain why cannabis has been so often used as a creative fuel, as it seems to make the brain better at detecting those remote associations that lead to radically new ideas."

Why PTSD Rates Remain So High in the US

From "The VA Fails at PTSD Treatment--Again" at Wired: Neuron Culture: "A few days ago the Times ran a story wondering why antipsychotics aren’t helping American combat vets with PTSD. The Times calls this finding ’surprising.’ Yet it should surprise no one. For one thing, antipsychotics haven’t worked very well for off-label treatments in general. But the real problem is that almost nothing the US Veterans Administration (VA) tries works for American vets with PTSD."


"The first benefit is health care. PTSD is by far the easiest mental health diagnosis to have declared “service-connected,” a designation that often means the difference between little or no care and broad, lasting health coverage. Service connection also makes a vet eligible for monthly disability payments of up to $3,000. That link may explain why most veterans getting PTSD treatment from the VA report worsening symptoms until they are designated 100 percent disabled—at which point their use of VA mental health services drops by 82 percent. It may also help explain why, although the risk of PTSD from a traumatic event drops as time passes, the number of Vietnam veterans applying for PTSD disability almost doubled between 1999 and 2004, driving total PTSD disability payments to more than $4 billion annually.

Perhaps most disastrously, these payments continue only if you are sick. For unlike a vet who has lost a leg, a vet with PTSD loses disabil- ity benefits as soon as he recovers or starts work- ing. The entire system seems designed to encour- age chronic disability. “In the several years I spent in VA PTSD clinics,” Frueh says, “I can’t think of a single PTSD patient who left treatment because he got better. But the problem is not the veterans. The problem is that the VA’s disability system, which is 60 years old now, ig- nores all the intervening research we have on re- silience, on the power of expectancy, and on the effects of incentives and disincentives. Som times I think they should just blow it up and start over.” But with what?"

The Human Brain--Unique to Shrink During Old Age

From "The Incredible Shrinking Human Brain" on Psychology Today: "It is true that many of our parts wither as we age, our brains among them. Octogenarians are liable to have brains 15% smaller than Justin Bieber's brain. Imagine that! Humans it seems are unique among primates in that we are longest-lived with the largest brains, and are also susceptible to neuropathology in the late stages of life, such as dementia."

10^500 Possible Universes!!

"The original hope of physicists to produce a single theory explaining the apparent laws of our universe as the unique possible consequence of a few simple assumptions may have to be abandoned. Where does that leave us? If M-theory allows for 10^500 sets of apparent laws, how did we end up in this universe, with the laws that are apparent to us? And what about those other possible worlds?" from The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking.

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Death Hiding in the House

Again from The Tiger's Wife: "He looked in the hall cupboards and the china cabinets, the armoires where boxes of old newspapers and diagrams were kept. He looked in his father's room, always empty, in the wardrobe where his father kept his old military uniform, under the beds, behind bathroom doors. Back and forth he went thorough the house, latching and unlatching windows with useless determination, expecting, at any moment, to look inside the oven and find Death squatting in it--a man, just a man, a patient-looking winged man with the unmoving eyes of a thief." (p. 244)

A Quote about Doctors and Children

A quote from Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife:

"'When men die, they die in fear," he said. "They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living--in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand--but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on your own. Do you understand?'" (p. 154)

Quantum Physics, Electromagnetic Wavelenghts

I'm considering studying physics after this...

On quantum physics: "Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect the past." (p. 51)

On wavelengths and evolution: "Our sun radiates at all wavelengths, but its radiation is most intense in the wavelengths that are visible to us. It's probably no accident that the wavelengths we are able to see with the naked eye are those in which the sun radiates more strongly: it's likely that our eyes evolved with the aiblity to detect electromagnetic radiation in that range precisely because that is the range of radiation most available to them." (p. 56)

"When a speed limit sign reads 60 miles per hour, it is understood that your speed is measured relative to the road and not the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.," (p. 57)



All this is from Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design

August 18, 2011

            Sometimes we left our elevator, although not too often. We sat on the sidewalk and listened to tires on the asphalt. There were little stones that the cars crunched on, softly, as though eating peanuts. The street was steep, so the cars had to go slowly. Their engines made a constant humming noise that made the crunching of tires sound even warmer. With our eyes closed, we guessed from which side the car would come. You’d be surprised how hard it is—maybe the sound gets reflected and therefore comes from both sides, I don’t know. Sometimes there is music coming from a neighborhood restaurant. In those cases, we smile at each other: we are lucky to have a beautiful background for our acute tire sounds. It’s like looking at a candle when you have the sun in the background—the sun is much brighter, but for a second you only see the candle because it’s so much closer and so much more yours. We listen to the neighborhood restaurant music the whole time, but when we hear a car approaching, we tune in to the frequency of its tires’ sound and when it’s right in front of us, it fills our eardrums with the softest, brownest, peanut crunching sound in the world.

            “Let’s get some apple juice,” Lilitt said and started on his feet.

            “Hey, I don’t want any juice,” I said, still sitting on my edge of the grumpy sidewalk. “And I haven’t brought any money.”

            “I’ll get you a juice, don’t worry.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

            “I really don’t want any juice.” I still sat on the sidewalk.

            “What’s your problem with a simple box of juice?”

            “I just don’t want it! Why do we have to get up from our sidewalk only because you want juice? What if I don’t feel like getting juice right now?”

            Lilitt stopped shifting his weight. “That’s what my mom says to my dad all the time. That we do things only when he wants to do them.” I didn’t have anything to say. It’s not like I’d seen his parents argue.

            “So you’re saying I’m like my father.” At this moment, Lilitt would have scratched his beard if he had one.

            “I’m not saying anything about your father. I’m just saying you want juice and I don’t want juice, but you want us both to go anyway.”

            He sat down next to me on the edge of the sidewalk and closed his eyes. I did the same, so that we could listen to some more tires on the asphalt.

We went back to our elevator, and as I waited for him to finish his sentences before passing them to me, I looked at his left hand leaning on his knee and holding his chin. I couldn’t imagine beard growing on that chin, somehow, I don’t know why. And I felt stupefied right there, looking at his focus on the sheet of paper.

My chest was numb, and my hands were numb, and my legs were numb down their entire length. I had to cut this snake venom off before it reached my forehead, that’s why I had to say what was on my mind.

“I feel way too inferior when I’m around you,” I said to Lilitt.

“It’s only because I’m so much smarter,” she said, and her smile sent a joking spark my way.

Lilitt—she. That’s when I realized she was a girl. It didn’t strike me, I just knew it and it didn’t make much of a difference. Lilitt was still Lilitt, she was still finishing her last sentence right there on the sheet in front of me in the dusty, green elevator. The sound of it moving up and down had become our shared song by now. She stretched out her hand to give me her sentences. My hand flew out in front of me, and the sheet sank into my fingers like butter sinking into bread.

Her eyes shuffled around and her lips moved and pressed against each other trying to keep words inside until she finally straightened her back, looked at me, and inhaled.

“Do you want to get some apple juice now?”

“I do feel like drinking a little apple juice now, yeah,” I said and we got up. The elevator was rising to the 28^th floor, so we waited for it to hit the top, then pressed 1 and got out once the elevator was ready to open its doors for us at the bottom. I was thinking about the juice. She was so embarrassed to ask again, what else could have I said?!

August 17, 2011

            I met the boy from the fifth floor on weekends. None of us felt like going out on a weekday, but weekends were fine. We took trips in the elevator. We brought cards and sheets of paper with a pen in the elevator, sat on the floor, and pressed number 28, the top floor. We played a little cards, and when we reached the top floor, we pressed 0, the basement. It was a little scary to have the elevator doors open on you in the basement, but we endured it as a kind of courage building training. We started writing on the sheets as we were playing cards: jotting down something interesting the other had done while coming up with his next move, for example picking his nose with his ring finger. That’s a really hard thing to do, but I found out later that it was a habit of my friend’s. Oh, I haven’t introduced him: his name is Lilitt, with double t, I know, it’s like what the fuck. It’s a considerably easy name after you say it for a couple of days. Your tongue gets used to touching the roof of the mouth so much in a few seconds, and there is a sweet aftertaste. My mom said it was a girl’s name, but I think she is just ignorant to today’s trends.

            Lilitt and I started sharing the notes we had written about each other and each commented on the other’s notes in written text, of course. The we created a new game. We did create it together, I don’t know how it so happens that we had two matching ideas at the same time. So, what we did was that we came up with a character, described everything we could think of about him, and put him in a story. Five sentences, then the other continued and wrote his own five sentences. I will be so nice as to share with you some of the characters that lived inside Lilitt’s head and inside mine too. This all happened on the floor of the elevator while it went up and down, up and down, probably hating us for not letting it rest and trying to send us in the ditch, but, at least for the time being, without success.

Steins; Gate Anime

Steins; Gate Anime

I just started watching this anime about a group of people who decide to set up their own lab, a very miserable and funny lab, and their microwave turns out to be a time machine. They hack into SERN's system (obviously relating to CERN) and find out that they've succeeded in creating a mini black hole which allows people to travel in time, probably. There are weird switches in time, memory alterations, and travels back and forth. They talk about alternative lines of reality, i.e. different options for things to happen and develop that exist parallel to each other. This last part is a nice combination with the fact that I'm reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and he's explaining almost the same thing there.

August 15, 2011

            “I had my first orgasm today,” she said to the policemen. “Not entirely first, I mean, but the first one caused entirely by someone else. I usually touch myself while the guy finger fucks me. Not this time. The simply touched me, and I twisted in his hands like a little worm. We had sex at first, he moved inside me, I got wet. He came pretty quickly and felt guilty, so he started touching me. His finger was burning right there on the right spot, and I could only twist and twist. Usually guys don’t know where to touch and how hard to push. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I need to be honest for the sake of justice.” The policemen shifted uncomfortably but professionally. “But this guy knew what to do. I repeated ‘yes, yes’ a few times because I knew it was coming. I didn’t believe it cause I’ve never come by a guy’s hand, but it burned my whole pussy, and the whole of me was electrified to ashes. It happened, I came and twisted and shouted, even though when I come on my own I am quiet like a fish. The whole electrifying epic was over in a few seconds—thank god, because it’s hard to withstand orgasms, I’m not kidding, just think about how it draws out your energy—and I lay with my face touching the guy’s face. I couldn’t smile and I couldn’t speak. He expected me to say something, but I couldn’t because I was still thinking: a guy made me come, I’m not so difficult, just maybe. He rubbed his nose against mine.”

            “And you didn’t stop at the red light because?” the rounder one of the two policemen asked.

            “I was thinking about that orgasm! Come on, gentlemen, you know what it’s like to give yourself an orgasm and what it is to have someone else give it to you. It’s a bit like tickling, unfortunately. You can’t really tickle yourself because you know when to expect the tickle. With the orgasm, you still get it and you are not exactly sure when you’ll get it, but you still control everything because you control both the movement of your fingers in circles on your clitoris as well as the strain of pleasure and the perverted pictures going around your head to turn you on. That’s why there must be a difference between masturbating and letting someone else do it for you.”

            “So you were thinking about the sex you had with that man while you were driving? When you hit the trash bin?” the not-so-round policeman asked.

            “Yes. Is that illegal?” Both policemen opened their mouths and then closed them. As though they had just caught an egg between their teeth and swallowed it whole, they waited for some weight to go down their throats.

            “You shouldn’t do that, miss,” the round policeman spoke again. “You shouldn’t think about such hot or, well, sexually charged situations,” the not-so-round policeman had poked him in the ribs, “while driving. Or you see what happens—you hit a trash bin.”

            “Sounds so ominous,” the not-so-round policeman said with half his mouth. Had he used his entire mouth, sexually appealing saliva wouldn’t have stopped flowing from the round policeman’s mouth and neck.

            “I know, sir, but I just couldn’t not think about it. All the energy, all the electrifying force still remains in my body till this very moment, and I find myself longing for someone to subdue it even though only an hour ago a man was doing his best to subdue it, and I even thought he was doing a very decent job with this orgasm and all. So I don’t know why I’m still looking for someone to subdue it.”

            The two policemen had now joined sides again, and saliva was flowing from a corner or two on each policeman’s mouth.

Cool Short Anime: Rain Town

Very nice short anime by Hiroyasu Ishida: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLAfM1RXwRs&feature=player_embedded

August 14, 2011

            I hate the boys in our apartment building too. Once they came back from school, they used to ring the doorbell and ask me to play basketball with them. Every fucking day! I played once because my mom basically pushed me through the door to go pass a ball, bounce a ball, and try to get a ball through a stupid hoop. I was so convinced I was wasting my time that I never went out with those kids again, but they kept on ringing our doorbell for months and months! Can’t you just get it when someone doesn’t want to touch your stupid ball? In the end they got it, and I could enjoy a calm afternoon without anyone ringing the doorbell except for my parents, but that cannot be avoided. When that became the accepted practice, though, I sometime heard those boys talk about me, gathered under my window (we lived on the first floor).

“Maybe he’s got hemorrhoids, so he can’t move around too much, hahahahhaaha!”

I don’t have hemorrhoids! I wanted to shout, but I wasn’t exactly sure, so I asked my mom.

“Do I have hemorrhoids, mom?” I asked one evening at the dinner table. My dad wanted to laugh, but my mom had a very stern, worried face on, so my dad didn’t laugh. Maybe he thought they would differ too much if he laughed and she was shocked.

“Why, baby, would you think you had hemorrhoids?” she asked, her lips moving like painted lines on that edgy, stern face.

“I just wanted to know,” I said matter-of-factly.

“No, you do not have hemorrhoids, I am quite certain,” my mother concluded.

“Excellent,” I replied.

Now I really could tell the boys I didn’t have hemorrhoids, but I had to wait for the right moment. I had to wait for about a week until they gathered up again under my window apparently to tease me. But this time they were saying I was insane, or with a mental disorder, as a respectful person would say. Now I had one more question for my mom.

This went on for a while, but I couldn’t tell the boys anything because I always missed the right time. I thought about simply telling them “I don’t have hemorrhoids” or “I’m not insane” (again, I apologize to those with mental disorders for the discomfort this is causing, or to those with hemorrhoids), but I couldn’t just say something like this with the prospect of it being a lie.

Anyway, a new boy moved into our apartment building. I watched his parents drive a truck with all their furniture and unload it. It took them a full day to bring it all up to their flat and put it in order, I imagine. The boy was shorter than me, but his face said he was of the same age as I. He looked dreamy and not especially concerned with daily problems, so I couldn’t let him get sucked in those annoying boy’s group under my window. I had to approach first.

On that same evening when they moved in, I took a box of cookies from the kitchen cupboard.

“It is a little too late for cookies, don’t you think, darling?” my mom sang. Her voice became so high-pitched on “-ling” that my jaw tightened to protect my ears from disintegrating.

“I know that, mom. I will simply take them up to the new neighbors’ flat. They might want to eat them for breakfast.”

“This is such an amazing idea, darling! Would you like me to come with you?” I had to get out before my head had exploded from the scream-like pitch.

I took the elevator from the first floor, our floor, to the fifth, their floor. From today on they would occupy flat No 53, which required you to turn right after you left the elevator. You close the door of the elevator carefully because otherwise it slams and makes the whole building jump, turn right, make three or four steps and come to a halt in front of the Richards’ door. On that particular evening I rang the doorbell as shortly as I could. My feet were trembling, and my hands were trembling, and my entire torso was trembling. I had to succeed on this mission, I had to unite myself with this new, dreamy boy because otherwise we were both lost, or so I liked to think, because there was no reason to believe that he would also be lost if he didn’t join me. If I had been just an evening late, he could have blended with those typical, cruel assholes who, nevertheless, still made my spine send a chill across my whole body whenever I thought of them.

He didn’t choose those boys, as I know now, but back then when I stood in front of that stupid door, I didn't know. I listened to the footsteps drawing closer from within and wondered whose they might be. In a few second, the mother opened the door with the father behind her back and peering at me from above her shoulder. My heart had come up in my throat, so I looked down to retain some composure and extended both arms towards the newcomers. The box of brown cookies with pieces of milk chocolate, also brown, startled them just as much as my face pointing straight at the floor. The mother touched my head and my hair with a surprisingly warm hand. She said they couldn’t take the cookies, but I shoved them in her stomach, so she had to take them. I caught a glimpse of their boy as he approached down the hall behind his father to see what was going on: in case he missed something on this first day of living in the New Flat, he would never forgive himself. He looked at me, and a child’s eyes met another child’s eyes, which shouldn’t be anything special, only in our case it was. My victory depended on this stupid little boy who suspected nothing. The mother asked me to come inside, but I frantically refused by shaking my head in such a way that every single hair on it must have held on to its follicle with all it might. The three of them must have found me interesting, but my feet felt like gummi bears by now, so I retreated to my elevator.

August 11, 2011

            I never liked camps anyway. You have six to eight weeks to get used to the other kids, show them what kind of kid you are, and choose friends and foes. With some of them you play, with others you exchange dirty looks, so later you can point at them and laugh behind their backs.

            That’s why when I was nine, I refused to go to camp. What was I supposed to say when my mom asked me why? “Because all the kids are assholes, mom,” and I’d be grounded for life or maybe sent to reform school for using inappropriate language. My parents looked at several different camps and tried to talk me into going, but I was as firm as a rock: I was not going. My parents were annoyed to high heaven, but in the end they gave up. They would still be working during summer, so I would stay at home alone all day. They talked to the neighbors, arranged for the old hag living two floors above us to visit me every three hours, and in return, my dad would fix her stove (not that my dad was an established electrician, but he loved to say he had a good hand for machines; in the end, saying so often must have done the trick).

I stayed at home, played, read, ate. My parents unplugged the TV and hid the cable every morning, so I wouldn’t watch “programs that do not help children flourish,” but after less than a week, I found the cable, looked at all the possible ways to plug it in, went round in circles like a dog chasing its tail in both directions, and finally found the right way. I put one end of the cable in a little hole in the back of the TV and the other end in the outlet, and then pushed the big, round button that says ON/OFF. The screen came to life; I was victorious. I watched boring adults sit with their backs straight and discuss and discuss. Their voices kept on jabbed my chest until I found the NEXT button, which changed the program. I found a cartoons channel and stayed there. More than an hour or two must have passed because the old hag entered the hall. Damn you, all you devils in hell, couldn’t you poke me in the ribs right before she came in and tell me to switch off the damn TV?

“Oooh, Daniel, I see you are watching TV. I am an old woman, so my memory might be deceiving me, but I have this gut feeling… oh yes, a feeling that your mother told me to immediately report to her if you find any way to watching TV. What should we do now, boy, what should we do? You are such a sweet kid, I wouldn’t want to cause trouble for you, but, you know, I made a promise to your mother…”

She sounded like a corrupted policeman trying to hint that you should give him money, yes, a small bribe, yes, right now. You are surprised, what, are you stupid? Okay, if you are such an honest man, here is your ticket. Have a nice day, mister, and think more quickly next time.

I bribed the old hag. I would put a spoonful of sugar in a matchbox each morning (my mom gave me sugar for my morning tea), and when the old hag came over for the first time that day, she would bring a tall jar. I would pour the spoonful of sugar from the matchbox to the hag’s jar. In this way, she would steal, almost invisibly, but still steal, from our household every workday. I am quite certain this made her day, which perfectly explains why weekends were always rainy for her. 

August 10, 2011

            “Dear jellyfish, how do I escape?”

            “Wait, let me google it. A sixteen-year-old girl says she want to escape. Aha. Do you mean you want to escape from your parents’ house?”

            “What? No, jellyfish, I mean—“

            “Okay, second result then. From school? From the system in general?”

            “No, not exactly, jellyfish—”

            “Damn it, google, stop giving me up! From all your dumb ass so-called friends, then?”

            “Please shut up for a second, dear jellyfish! I am asking how I am supposed to escape from my own point of view! I am tired of seeing everything through my own eyes and from my own perspective!”

            “I got it, google, who would have thought of that,” the jellyfish rubbed what was apparently its beard with one tentacle. “Okay, my baby girl, that’s not specific to a sixteen-year-old girl. It’s not even specific to humans. We, jellyfish, ask ourselves the same thing over and over again throughout our lifetime. Do you know how annoying it is to constantly see everything through a blue mist of swaying tentacles in front of your face? It’s similar to having eyelashes constantly stay in your face and blink with you every single fucking time. I’m guessing of course, jellyfish don’t have such useless shit such as eyelashes, but I imagine I would have taken them all out in about a month of my birth. Yes, yes, don’t look at me with such bursting disbelief, I tried to sting my own tentacles until they came off, but the elders punished me. You know what I had to do? Had to stand fucking immobile, like seaweed only swayed by water, and look at my tentacles. If they saw me not looking on my tentacles, all three elders would come and sting me on the head, which fucking hurts. A masochistic bunch, those elders. So I looked at my tentacles, wanted to sting them off, bite them off, scream them off (although jellyfish technically don’t scream). In a few hours, though, I got used to the shapes of my squishy, blue tentacles. Some were a little longer than the others, some were a little thicker, some were pointing somewhere funny. It turned out the fit like a puzzle. They closed around me and each fit with the one next to it, so they formed a balloon around me and hugged me warm and squishy. Baby girl, your tentacles are your own tentacles. Or in your case, your eyelashes are your eyelashes, which is about ten thousand times more disgusting than tentacles, but let’s drop the matter now. Every single species is trying to change themself because something in them makes their point of view crappy, their perspective unbearable. Cut the crap, I say. Spend a day or two looking at your eyelashes, girl, and they become yours.

Stephen Hawking on Free Will

"In the case of people, since we cannot solve the equations that determine our behavior, we use the effective theory that people have free will." --Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design

A Part of the Brain We Know Almost Nothing about

a part of the brain we know (almost) nothing about: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-tree/201108/the-brain-region-shouldnt-be-there

What McDonald's Knows about Your Brain

cool neuroscience article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201108/7-things-mcdonald-s-knows-about-your-brain

August 8, 2011

            I’m usually a girl, but sometimes I feel like I’m a guy, a real guy with a throbbing dick. For example, yesterday my friends and I were going swimming, and as we were walking there (I don’t know why we didn’t take the bus or something), I saw this girl standing by the road. Her face was white, and her hair was dark—nothing special—but something about the way she moved that skeleton with meat and skin on it drove me insane. I knew she was a girl just like I am a girl, and she smiled at me, while I tried to smile but simply couldn’t because my insides were constricted and screaming. Suddenly, I was reduced to a sexless worm without any feeling of self-worth.

            She must have been some kind of prostitute to be standing by the road and waving at every passing car, and my friends looked at me strictly under their eyebrows: “You are about to bring a whore along? And all this even though you are a girl! Even we, guys, don't let a girl lead us by the dick that much.” But what can I do. She is so pretty and sweet and she has taken me to be hers. It turns out that we won’t be going swimming because we somehow end up in the classroom. She is sitting at the desk in front of me, and she is so close that it suffocates me. My friends ask me if I want to go get some sweets with them, but I only murmur, “I can’t, guys, I can’t stand it anymore,” while I rock left and right on my chair, rubbing some precious places. Everyone laughs like dogs barking, and I realize how much I just embarrassed myself. I whisper in her ear: “I didn’t mean it that way,” and she replies “Come after me in a few minutes. You need to get to the Leaky Cauldron first, then to the dungeons, then to Mrakon-Alley, and finally into the Burrow also known as the archives.” Don’t ask me, all you Harry Potter fans, why the names came out that way. Three minutes after she left, I got up, tried to say bye to my friends, but they weren’t looking anymore, and left for the Leaky Cauldron. I keep on thinking of myself at that time as a boy, when I was completely a girl. Don’t ask me why. I saw numerous flasks of potions, all in green and black (yay, original). I passed through people’s rooms and watched people make their beds. Again, no idea why the path had to pass through people’s rooms. If they were going to build that under our school, why didn’t they at least make an effort not to defile everyone’s privacy. I get to the Burrow (the Archives), and she really is there, waiting. I almost thought she had played a trick on me and left up or down some highway. But she was there in her white sleeveless top, in a narrow room that looked as though a giant rabbit had dug it out. I tried to put her down on the bed. I knew I was a girl, but it didn't matter anymore because all I could see was her mouth and everything else I simply touched. I knew I had to get inside of her and for a few moments I thought of myself as though I had a dick ready for action. Then I remembered I only had my fingers and tongue, but lesbians tell me that’s plenty. I’ve never slept with a girl, so I couldn’t wait to take everything off her and leave only skin and meat attached to a beautiful, romantic skeleton. I didn’t know what I was doing, when a grandma and her grandson entered our room. They didn’t say anything, simply moved in and demanded one double bed. They stayed in our room and unpacked, while I simply wanted them to stop. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, but it was a mess because we all said parts of things in order not to trouble the others. Each said a part of something, even though we all knew the whole but didn’t dare say it brutally out loud. In a minute, my loins were so, so, sooo on fire that I left all restrictions behind and lay over my lovely girlie, madchen, devoika, whatever you might please to call her because she, with her lovely, deceitful face, with her perfectly normal white top, turned me into an unprecedented storm. I was just about to touch her arms, her neck, and, if I dared, more, when it turned out I was alone in my red-sheeted bed. My legs and arms were cold with anticipation, and it took me a minute or two to realize I was cold because I had kicked off my blanket! Right now! Right now is when I had to wake up to pull the blanket up to my chin! Right when I was about to have sex with a girl for the first time in my life! I closed my eyes and begged for the dream to come back. It didn’t, so I made up my own scenario, but it sucked because I was now conscious, although still with a storm huddling in my throat. 

August 7, 2011

            Whenever I see a warm, bright scarf, I wait for what’s coming along. Students generally go into the chapel for meditation: some have done meditation before, others are constantly looking around, afraid they might do something wrong. There are some that wear colorful, warm scarves. Every time I see them, I wonder how those scarves don’t fall off but stay so comfortably wrapped in soft folds around their necks. They are what nowadays would be called hippies. Their hairstyles (if they can be called styles) vary from kind of long to very long, and every hair is obviously free to follow its own course in life. A loose shirt falls upon a skinny chest and stomach. These people don’t exercise much, but they don’t eat much either, so their skin is tightly pulled over untrained muscles. The colors of their clothes rarely match, and their shoes are usually funny. When they sit on a pillow, begin listening to their breathing, and soar off this surface of reality, they see it all fit. When they put an end to their meditation, they walk out of the chapel clean and floating. They look as we, normal people, do when we have gone through an inhuman training session and have just taken a fresh shower. It must all be in the scarf they’re wearing. 

August 6, 2011

            “Okay, I’ve got a question,” she said, happy with herself. “You know when you go to bed early in the morning?”

            “Jellyfish do not have the same sleep cycles as humans do, you should know that. We also don’t have beds to go to,” the jellyfish interrupted.

            “Fine, if you go to sleep early in the morning, it so happens that the day knocks on your door and interrupts whatever you are doing. For example, I might be talking to my friends, or thinking about things I really want to think about, or listening to music that lifts me up. And then the day breaks in. What can be more obnoxious? Then I am forced to hurry into the next day although I am still living in the previous one.”

            “So is your question ‘What can be more obnoxious?’ It doesn’t seem to be that, but that was the only question you formulated in that moving speech of yours.”

            “No, that was a rhetorical question! Gosh, even jellyfish should be able to get something so obvious. No, my question is, well, it’s something about why I see the early day that way or if I can do anything about it.”

            “Oh, come on, even the original golden fish couldn’t have answered that! But I am an old blue jellyfish, so I’ll tell you whatever I can tell you from the jellyfish wisdom I’ve soaked up. It’s your fault you see the new day as a nuisance. Yeah, it kind of surprises you. Fuck, then look at it as a surprise, a pleasant one at that! Something you haven’t planned doesn’t have to be a nuisance. Surprises can be quite pleasant, especially if they include romantic red roses. True, the arrival of a silly, cold day is not conventionally romantic, but I’m sure there’s some crazy bastard out there who weeps with joy every morning when the cold, repulsive sun rays lay on him for the first time that day.”

            “Thank you, jellyfish,” she said.

            “Blue jellyfish,” he corrected. “It indicates my rank.”

            “Oh, please take a jellyfish rest very soon, well before I’ve walked home. You have your own weird issues to take care of, and only then can you tell me what to do about my weirdnesses.”

            “Okay, I’ll text you when I feel better.” The jellyfish didn’t try to sound manly or to tell her he had no weirdness problems. A blue jellyfish, probably high in rank, went to the deeper waters in the sea. If he starts drowning, he’ll give her a call.

August 5, 2011

            “The crisis hit us all hard, didn’t it,” she said and made a second attempt to get her toes in the water. Yesterday had been a chilly, windy day uncharacteristic of August, and the water hadn’t had much sunlight to absorb. Her friends and she wanted to go swimming at midnight, but they had to wear jackets, so getting naked and wet (not the perverted meaning, mind you) when the wind blew hard as hell did not seem like an extremely appealing idea.

            “Excuse me, are you asking questions or not? I am getting cold, and I need to move around, or the water inside me will shrink in volume, which constricts my cells.”

            “That is quite a compelling explanation; I hadn’t thought about jellyfish in such a way.”

            “Thank you for not considering my brothers and sisters and me not alive enough.”

            “Um—“

            “Ask me something!”

            “Damn, fine, I’m asking!”

            She was a girl who asked too many questions, usually ones that came out of a complete nowhere. Imagine a group of friends, including her, sitting on a wooden table in the mountains on a summer day, probably talking about the fries they are eating or about the flies trying to eat their fries. As a completely logical continuation of the conversation, she asks, “Does anyone here know anything about hunting dogs?” People have fun following the leaps her mind makes, but no one has enough time to waste as to understand why it makes them. But now, confronted by this blue jellyfish—a modern variation of the golden fish—her mind blanked out.

            No, wrong, it didn’t blank out, but its voices began shouting simultaneously, each trying to shout louder than all the others put together. She stared at the jellyfish, which scared it.

August 3, 2011

            They went to the seaside for a couple of days. They stayed up late each night till early morning. Then they slept till the afternoon rolled around and the heat woke them up to find their bodies drowning in sweat and bleeding their hearts out for a glass of water. Each night was splendid and glossy in the beginning and sloppy and normal in the end. The sunrise made her anxious. It meant that a new day had arrived when she hadn’t kissed the old one goodbye yet. –REWRITE OR DELETE

            One of those mornings they all went to bed because the sun was rising steadily well above the roofs of houses. Sleep began to crawl up her legs, but she sprang up. She looked around their little blue room: boys and girls were sleeping on every bed on crumpled sheets. She left the room.

            “I am the blue jellyfish. I would usually bring three of your wishes to reality, but due to the financial crisis I only answer questions now. Good enough?”

            She had walked the beach, almost empty and cold. A blue jellyfish had come up to the sand where it meets the waves and becomes nicely brown. Her feet penetrated the water and retreated, freezing.

Explaining Politics through Psychological Research

A very cool article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/the-selfishness-of-trust/