FactCheck.org

This is my favorite site by far, and anyone who receives chain emails from either side or is having a hard time just distinguishing fact from reality should look through this site to find a little bit of accuracy. They have no alliances, and are only around to remove the spin.

On a totally unrelated note, THIS is just tweaking my little brain into such a fit of happiness I can hardly contain myself. Obviously the universe is paying attention to the fact that my only guilty pleasure these days is a hearty batch of tortilla chips, and has decided to bless my existence by combining Origami and Puffins.


I love how all puffins have this look of being perpetually earnest. This little guy is just aching for you to spill your troubles to him, right after you give him that sandwich you brought yourself for lunch.

Pretty

Swirling Green and Roaring Silence

A week before my parents told my brother and I that they were getting a divorce, I dreamt that all four of us were standing in the front yard under a orange-pink sky. There were hundreds of tornadoes coming towards our house and there was nothing that we could do. We all stood there, separate from one another, each of us pointed in a different direction. We had to look over our shoulder in order to see the others. I don't remember dreaming of any sort of impact. I don't remember any one of us making much of a sound. All I remember from that dream is standing there, waiting, and being terrified beyond belief.

My dreams have always been slightly, um, creepy. I have dreamt of things that have drug themselves into my waking life with startling accuracy, sometimes to the point of which I am five seconds ahead of the oncoming scene, and dreadfully uncomfortable about it. I never spend too much time delving into what could be my next prophetic night time excursion, but I do pay attention to certain occurrences in my dreams, and most importantly how I deal with them. I am no soothsayer beyond that of what women naturally possess, I am however a firm believer in symbols, but particular to individual psychology. Tornadoes fascinate and scare the living hell out of me. They are the force of nature that places a primal terror in my bones. You don't know they are coming until it's almost too late. Your only salvation is huddling under a mattress in a bathroom or packed in a closet on your knees holding on for dear life. When I dream of tornadoes, these connotations do of course become cliff notes to the overall interpretation.

I dreamt of a massive beast of a tornado the other night. It was black and evil, spewed smoke and chewed up everything in its path. I was dodging every turn and twist that it made until I thought that I had gotten ahead of it for a moment. The road was closed and I tricked the cops, fleeing into the darkness that was between me and the road my mother lives off of. I heard the police shouting and scrambling to find shelter. For some reason there was no wind where I was, my feet were still on the ground, I was aware that I was fatally close to the tornado. When I finally plunged through the darkness and reached her house there was not a leaf displaced, a shingle gone, nothing was wrong. I stood there and stared up at this monster, swirling green, and roaring in absolute silence above the property. Not one sound. It was then that I realized this was not our tornado. This tornado belonged to everyone else.

I don't know...it all sounds like a James Cameron movie to me.

Tomorrow morning CERN is going to turn on their 16.9 mile long particle collider in an effort to recreate the Big Bang on a smaller scale, or so they say. It may be the world's most impressive water slide, and the joke would totally be on us. Anyway, I'm really putting my faith in the fact that I don't know nearly as much about physics as those peeps over there, and most likely, they will not destroy us all.

I like to think that everything is much less complicated than 99.9% of all humans make things out to be. I have learned that our bodies are many times stronger that we give them credit for and many times more fragile than we can ever realize. This happens at the same time. A person can reword every single daunting question that has ever been asked so that the answer is simply a Yes or a No. Sometimes the answer is both, Yes and No. Will tomorrow's experiment destroy us all? Yes and No. It's up to each one of us to provide the particular details.

Yesterday I learned that my thyroid hormone had jumped to a whopping 31.0!!! In a world of inverse and parallel relationships, the thyroid levels are no exception. More is less, less is more. Normal ranges end at 5.1, so 31.0 is a little high, which is low actually. No wonder I needed to sleep well over 11 hours a day....

Here's the little guy causing all the hubbub. Looks like an HR Geiger-inspired cervix.

For the Love of Palimpsest

I am most guilty of one thing: erasing. I put something down, only to erase the majority, which is also erased eventually. Why I have such committal issues to blank pages, will I ever really know? Probably not. I do however find these scraps of paper lying about my archives with layer upon layer upon layer of erased lines and words. I find so many in fact that my latest psychoanalysis is that I may simply love the ghost image of ideas layered in discord on top of one another. It may just be as simple as that. In which case, the ideas were never really meant to be read but solely for the act of writing and erasing.

"A palimpsest is a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again." However, it can also be architectural, artistic, geological, astrological, even forensic. In my freshman year art history course at UT I had the joy of being taken down to the basement vaults of the art history departments and placed in front of an illuminated manuscript from the 5th century. You could see lines, indentations, and marks that didn't make it to the final inking. Ghost marks of his frustration, penance, exactness, viewable only by tilting your head just right to catch the light. As an artist I look for those marks. I look for the slightly misshapen eye brow, toe, corner of a building that shows me the spot where said artist just couldn't get it right, until finally they did. Almost, good enough for the final print. While that is not a physically evident palimpsest, it implies that one lies just below the paint itself.

I did it

I cleaned it all up. The final stage of thyroid chaos clean up is now complete, the rest is gravy. I spent all of my yesterday trudging through my monument of inefficiency. Before I began the process I imagined that this would be comparable to one large and very tangled ball of yarn. One hundred square feet of tangled yarn. My assertion was correct, and this was the first time in my entire life that I have been able to stay on task so diligently and completely.

When I was quitting smoking last year, my glorious hypnotist spent a lot of time with me searching for guilty pleasures. Things to do when one's reward system starts to become more detrimental to improvement. For example, after my first hypnotist session, all I wanted was a very full and very cold pint of beer. I could actually feel the beer in my body, as if I were drinking it in reality. The completeness of visualization that I was able to create was so impulsive, immediate and wholly effective, that I felt confident it could become my greatest tool. Alcohol wasn't the best thing to be gravitated towards, but it's a very typical response. Now that I am having to excommunicate certain foods and drink from my diet again, I spend a lot of time visualizing eating those foods until the urge has passed. I call it "quieting my inner brat."

My reward after completing the daunting task of thyroid chaos cleanup was being able to sit and draw at my work station, a nice and very long hot shower, followed by watching some series on HBO. I recognized that this would have been the perfect time for a nice, large glass of red wine. Possibly paired with the sloppiest Tex-Mex I could find at 10PM, a large queso and saltiest bag of corn chips on the face of the planet.

I had a huge glass of water instead and put my aching body to bed. Who gets a gold star?

Workout of the day: 5 burpees, 20 pushups, 50 squats, 50 sit ups full range, no med ball

An old favorite