hummingwolf | Entries tagged with frothing at mouth

You associate happiness with children and believe that misery is a sign of maturity. When bad things happen to the good person you want yourself to be, you consider it validation, proof you are truly an adult now that you endure things you never imagined when you were a kid. You see your life as significant when you find yourself screwing it up so royally that you rival anyone in the history books. You do things to hurt yourself just to prove you are no longer an infant, and you rationalize dragging others down into your pit and inflicting them with your wounds by saying they should have been mature enough to know what was coming, the way you did, the way you know it every single time you twist that knife in your own sullied flesh. You call your attitude "world-weariness" or (God help us) the "wisdom of age" when what you're really talking about is the result of willfully making the same damn mistakes over and over. This, to you, is what it means to grow up: Melancholy punctuated by the occasional tragedy. If it must all be self-inflicted, that is the price you willingly pay just to avoid being seen (by yourself or others) as a deluded (happy) child.

If any of the above sounds like you, please smack yourself now so I won't have to.

~~~

Lately I've been insanely tired, brain filled with fog. Didn't want to talk to people, though some kind of nonverbal companionship would have been welcome. It's one of those times when I really miss having a pet. Since online interaction tends to consist of words of some sort, I've been staying away more than usual.

Then today, in the middle of the day, I had some time of terrible clarity, terrible because what I was seeing and sensing were those webs we weave around ourselves and others, tendrils creeping out to try to twist and turn people as we will, threads in a net of manipulation and deceit. (I tugged a little on a few threads, just to see if I still knew how. I'm hoping I can find a pair of scissors.) Yeah, it was exactly the sort of clarity that can inspire bad song lyrics and worse philosophizing. I was very much of a misanthrope this afternoon, at least till I gave up and took a nap.

The thing that gets me about the ways people screw up their lives and the lives of people around them is that, while we may often legitimately claim confusion as an excuse, so much of the time we act knowing exactly what we are doing, act with that terrible clarity. We see our contributions to the web we're trapped in. Do spiders ever trap and eat themselves from the inside out the way people do?

From today's

catholic_quotes:

Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

- Richard M. Nixon

Nixon wasn't any more Catholic than I am, but he probably had some Catholics on his enemies list.

Current Music: John Cale, "Look Horizon" (on Launch)

$hummingwolf: Part of a julia fractal in colors of fire and smoke. (Fire-flavored fractal)$

I don't mind if someone tells me that I don't seem to fit in this dimension, that I seem to have come from somewhere else. It's been said before. I may cackle if someone describes me as "ethereal" and wonder about the drug abuse history of someone who calls me an "angel" in a non-ironic way, but I don't have a problem with people who think that way. It's not as if I weren't raised by a man who said "No child of mine will ever be human!" after all.

And I don't mind if someone is thrilled with the fact that I'm not part of "The System"... wait, yes I do mind. Don't wax rhapsodic about the fact that I'm not working. Do not tell me that it's beautiful that I haven't "bought in to our culture's ideas about working," because frankly it is not my choice to be unable to work. I tried for years to figure out how to get some kind of gainful employment and the realization that my attempts weren't going to work left me painfully depressed for a long year and pretty damn frustrated now. Whatever issues you may have with your job and your life and the materialistic culture you think you hate do not change the fact that my inability to physically deal with regular employment really pisses me off. Before yesterday, the last time someone had been so pleased by my non-participation in "The System," it was a conspiracy-theorist troll who didn't believe in paying income taxes and lived off the grid as much as he could manage. (The guy was a Usenet troll as well as a troll face-to-face. Contrary to popular belief, the most annoying folks you see online are not always quiet and mild in "real life." Some people really are like that.) Getting the same basic unhelpful reaction from someone whose fees are largely paid by Medicaid is amusing, but not amusing enough.

Right, where was I? Oh, basically--I don't mind flakes. Some of my favorite people are like unto crispy breakfast cereal. Sometimes I am one of those people myself. Don't believe that I object to a "flaky" idea because of its flakiness. What I object to is having my life romanticized by someone who doesn't have to live it. Go ahead and believe that my health problems are caused by my origins in some other dimension if you like. Maybe it's even true. I'm glad you think I'm very spiffy. But don't try to tell me how wonderful it is that I'm here in this world without giving me some assistance or at least suggestions on surviving here. Do not rhapsodize about my life when I don't know how I'll be eating next month and my lungs are filled with goop and I'm hurting and I'm tired and I'm bloody well pissed off at life in general, thank you.

Your fricking tax dollars at work.

Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Babble, "Love Has No Name" (on Launchcast)

My problem this year is that I put all of my eggs in just half a dozen baskets, when I really should have them in at least two dozen baskets. Of course, this isn't easy when you have only one egg. I'm hoping I can find a really amazing omelette recipe. If I combine my egg and that black fungus from the Thai grocery in just the right way, do I get a cheap apartment or do I just get a funky egg?

Current Music: neighborhood soccer

I'm having one of those days where I alternate between a firm belief that I must do thirty-eight things as soon as possible and an equally firm (yet clearly not stable) belief that anything I do is useless, utterly useless, and I may as well give up on it all right now. Firm, yet somehow unstable beliefs are such annoying little oxymorons. (In high school I once defined "oxymoron" as "someone who still doesn't know that Stridex fights pimples best," but that's neither here nor there.) It's almost as if my mind is bouncing back and forth between two universes: one where the state of the entire cosmos depends upon my efforts, and a second where I am powerless over even my own life. Neither of these universes seems to be intimately connected with the world my body's living in, so I'm trying to act as if what I do has just enough of an effect for calm, unrushed action to be worthwhile. Easier said than done. (Silly brain.)

Right then. I've got plans to do two things later today and I've decided I'll be happy if I manage to do both.

gurdonark's mention of 801 in a post got me wondering if 801's music were available on Launchcast. It's not, but there's a fan station which plays old stuff by folks like Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. Fits my mood reasonably well, so I think I'll listen until it's time to do something else.

Current Music: Gary Numan, "Cars" (on Launch)

$hummingwolf: Part of a julia fractal in colors of fire and smoke. (Fire-flavored fractal)$

Downstairs just now I saw a note on the household message board which made me angry. You know how sometimes something someone says will leave you lightly frothing at the mouth and it's all the more frustrating because you know that there's nothing you can do for a few hours anyway? I hate that. I hate it even more when the person I'm angry with is me. Again. Oh, sure, I know that I've got problems, but those are mostly problems I've had for quite some time and if I had any decency at all I'd have figured out a way to work around them by now.

Argh. I swear, I'd march into my bedroom and administer a resounding slap to myself right now if I thought it could do any good.

Current Mood: self-annoyed
Current Music: morning birds and a clip-on fan

Look, I am hardly qualified to be a grammar maven. Among other things, I pepper my writing with sentence fragments, I am overfond of use of "but" as a conjunction, I sometimes perpetrate run-on sentences that could enter and possibly win the Boston Marathon, I love to cruelly split infinitives, and I will surely be arrested one day for punctuation abuse and denied visitation rights with all but the most mature and strong-willed of exclamation marks. That said, a few things in other people's writing have been getting under my skin lately and I need to say something before they take up permanent residence in my endodermis.

"Your" is a possessive word. Use "your" when speaking of something belonging or somehow connected to the person you are thinking of as "you", as in "Your housemates would be much happier with you if it weren't for your habit of leaving your dirty socks all over the kitchen counters."

"You're" is a contraction of "you are." Yes, many possessive words have apostrophes and "you're" has an apostrophe, but the presence of an apostrophe does not make "you're" possessive any more than the presence of an apostrophe makes "can't" possessive. Example: "You're not leaving this house like that, are you? You're dressed in nothing but your dirty socks! You're a disgrace!"

"Its" is another possessive word without an apostrophe. Please do not misuse "its" as "its" has its dignity and will resent its humiliation for years to come.

"It's" is a contraction of "it is." While "it's" is frequently misused and should probably be used to its mistreatment by now, it's still not happy about it.

On to another peeve: If your place in a sentence would normally be filled with the word "me," the presence of another person does not turn you into an "I." If you would say "She gave Buckingham Palace to me," then do not say "She gave Buckingham Palace to Fred and I." You have not become a subject of the sentence just because you have someone else around to back you up. You also have not become owner of Buckingham Palace--you are delusional and need to adjust your medication.

Between you and me, "between you and I" is never good grammar. If you don't believe me, ask yourself whether you would say "I swear that evil teddy bear lying between us looked at me and growled!" or "I swear that evil teddy bear lying between we looked at me and growled!" If you would say "between us," then stick to the same case and say "between you and me." If you would say "between we," you are not speaking English; you may be speaking a pidgin or creole based on English, but you are not speaking English.

Now it's time for me to fix myself a nice cup of tea and spend the rest of the day wondering how many sad and silly grammatical errors I've made in this post.

Pedant Mode: OFF

[Edit: I don't mean to criticize people's LiveJournal posts. After all, it's your journal and you should be allowed to say whatever you want however you want as long as nobody gets hurt. What I'm tired of seeing is a profusion of certain basic errors in published writing passed along to the public by editors who really should know better.]

Current Mood: pedantic
Current Music: Ancient Beatbox, "Bourée à Pichon"

Oh good grief.

Why is it so many people think they're healing when all they're doing is finding something else to be dependent upon? That's not health by any stretch of the imagination--it's just finding a new way to hide your emptiness from yourself.

Don't mind me. This is just the crazy woman ranting off in the corner. At least I'm not talking about you-know-what.

[Edit: I'm not talking specifically about anyone likely to pay any attention to this. Though come to think of it, the people I'm thinking of wouldn't pay attention to this even if they were reading it.]

If you're one of those people who have an overabundance of energy--or would have if you got to sleep at a more reasonable hour instead of spending half the night watching TV or surfing online--and you're complaining that your life is empty because you never bother to get off your ass and follow your dreams because it's so much easier to sit around playing computer games or chasing after your latest sex object or bitching to your friends or lovers or coworkers or random strangers on the street about how empty your life is because you haven't fulfilled your dreams: Shut up. I'm losing sleep here desperately fighting to find a reason to keep on breathing and you people are really pissing me off.

Rationality? Goodbye. Logic? Pffft. Sanity? What have you done for me lately? Leave me alone, the whole lot of you. Here I've been patiently being reasonable and logical all this time and where has it gotten me? Sitting miserably at home dehydrating myself because logic tells me things will keep getting worse and I can't stop crying.

Silly hummingwolf, stop trying to figure out whether what you're able to do can possibly make things any better and just do it anyway. You'll be much happier.

~~~~~

Interestingly, I've learned that the state people have approved me for benefits (pending my sending of a few forms). Interesting, because the folks up in Baltimore who made that determination are the same ones who sent Social Security the information upon which they based their denial of benefits.

~~~~~

Oh, don't expect me to be irrational all the time from now on. I'll endeavor to be insane more often, but the knowledge that you're the only person in the room who's making any sense at all is like a drug. It's insidious, really.

If there is anything more frustrating than having a brain which refuses to work properly, it's having a brain which is quite willing to work--but not in the ways you need it to work at the time. My brain today would love to make intuitive leaps and connections, to range far and wide in airy realms (or possibly watery realms? cloudy realms? the misty mid region of Weir?); but today I need it to work down-to-earth in practical realms. And it won't do it. Grr... I didn't wake up depressed (for a change), but this really isn't helping my mood any.

In other news, why is it that so many people who listen to Loreena McKennitt also listen to Enya? How do they reconcile this to themselves? Is it merely that both are female singers who sound somewhat Celtic? Beyond superficialities, they have nought in common. Loreena McKennitt creates music of haunting beauty, while Enya's sloppy soporifics are clearly created in service to Satan! How can so many people be so dreadfully deceived? How--

(The hummingwolf, now noticeably frothing at the mouth, is removed from the room by some nice young men in clean white coats, much to the relief of the audience.)