(no subject)

[sanpaku_backup]

The whole day can be summed up as discovering that it's very hard, when you have poison ivy, to think anything other than, "right now, I have poison ivy, I have poison ivy, I have poison ivy." (Or really something less conscious and more primal than that, which could only be expressed as a constant whimper.) For the whole day. You see someone? You want to say, "Hi! I have poison ivy. Look at my scaly and pustulous arms."

I actually woke myself up in a panic last night from all the scratching. I did eventually get a few hours' relief, but it has been excruciating. I survived a drive up to Boston to get the sukkah from tapuz and laurens10 by propping my forearms in front of the air conditioning vents turned up at full blast. (But it was great to meet them. I noted ruefully, as I have many times in the past couple of years, that we had to move to Providence in order to meet all the cool people in Boston we should have met when we lived there.)

It occurred to me that it would be a neat project to explain at some point how I know the people I know on LJ. It would involve circles and hubs and arrows of acquaintance. But I have no time for projects beyond those I've already committed to.

When I got home, instead of putting up the sukkah, we took advantage of having a babysitter around the corner, and put the canoe out on the Pawtuxet for an hour. Sorely needed!

The baby has turned some kind of conceptual corner in the last couple of weeks. As I write this she is reading books to herself. And hiding them under the cover and climbing around on the bed, but mostly turning the pages and pointing out what's on the page.

I should finish the paper tonight, at least, after The Wire. I did find the last piece of information I needed to make it at least minimally respectable in time for the conference (my other reason for driving to Cambridge). Then it's just assembling the sukkahs (mine and the shul's), working on two copyediting projects, and the extra work that comes from only being in the office three days this week. And we have guests Tuesday night. I don't even want to think about this week, really.

Comments

Blissful repose

[flw.livejournal.com]

I was just working up a theory on apparent time compression and expansion during moments of intense sensation!

In normal moments we have our normal perception of time.

But during intense pain or discomfort, the present seems to expand into a yawning chasm (is there any other kind? Can you type "yawning" without either "chasm" or "abyss" following? And can you type "abyss" or "chasm" without "yawning" in precedence?). In this state, one cannot imagine a future or a past. The perception is so overwhelming, man! IT EATS HISTORY!

Of course, during intense joy, one is rarely thinking ahead or reminiscing either. But then the quality of the blurred now is expansive and blissful.

I am sure this has been better put by someone else. Eternity is not a time, eternity is timelessness. Something like that.

But I think time perception is trainable. And I think that by concentrating on the task of training the minds' eye to look forward or backwards in time while one's present is dominated by unpleasant sensation has potential as a pain management technique. In fact, it sounds like meditation to me.

All this because I finally read a mental model for Special Relativity that made sense to me.

Re: Blissful repose

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Oliver Sacks wrote something about this in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. No shit.

Re: Blissful repose

[flw.livejournal.com]

How do you know that "Oliver Sacks" is not one of my many pseudonyms?