Archive for category matt’s life

Date: March 18th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

my experiences with being governed

Should I be worried that as a citizen of a representative democracy, I don’t notice any difference between representatives? And I mean real, discernible differences that have a significant impact (positive or negative) on my life – I’d settle for a trivial impact, even.

All the changes in my life over the past 5 or 6 years have arisen from decisions that I’ve made - opportunities that I’ve taken advantage of, limbs I’ve gone out on, risks I’ve mitigated, mistakes I’ve made, people I’ve met, things I’ve read, etc. But ‘people I’ve voted for’ doesn’t fit in that list. I try to do the ‘right thing,’ research who I’m voting for, make sure I’m making an informed decision, but lately I’ve started to become curious whether it matters. I’m tempted to choose what I vote for randomly, the next election season.

I’m not complaining that my vote doesn’t count, it’s something more profound than that: that we’ve gone from an ostensibly dumb conservative republican president to a conversely smart liberal democrat president, and I can’t tell what’s different. We’ve still got soldiers in the middle east, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell might be repealed, but I’m not a soldier, you know? I’m not saying I don’t have opinions on those subjects, but they’re all in abstract, because none of it effects me. Financial crises? I’m doing about as well as ever. National disasters and civil unrest in those other countries somewhere across the sea, where I don’t know anybody and will never have to deal with their problems.

This might sound like bragging, or possibly uncaring, but it’s really not either – it’s complaining. If anything it sounds stupid, even to myself, when I wish that something drastic would happen, a touchstone I could look at and say, “X impacted Y, because I voted for Z.” What if we completely cut ties with middle eastern oil suppliers, and gas price quadrupled overnight? That’d be something. What if suddenly homosexuality was made illegal? What if the draft was reinstated? What if marijuana was legalized? Something big, something to be up in arms about. Something I’d feel good about dropping everything else to either fight or defend.

Short for a blog post, maybe, but the list of ways that my government impacts my life is shorter. I feel like that’s a problem.

Date: March 12th, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about
1 msg

obligatory dead baby joke

foreword: Hey, look at all those fallacies fly! Look upon my rhetoric and despair! In my defense, I’m talking about the way it makes me feel, though, and this is a blog post; so the only person I’m really arguing with is a strawman who doesn’t mind it when I use throw around appeals to emotion. My prose wanders into unfair territory only because I like stringing words together and this is something I feel strongly about.

I don’t like abortion. Here’s why: abortion is murder, and murder is reprehensible. I could probably put together some syllogisms for this if you’d like, but if you’re into that sort of thing you could just as easily do it yourself. Onward to explanations.

Maybe I should do the mortality post first? Spoiler alert – the reason this is the ‘Mortality Blog’ is that I’m making a (perhaps futile) attempt to deal with my fear of dying by treating the subject a little more casually.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that the idea of people dying makes me uncomfortable. Wouldn’t I be a psychopath if I didn’t care whether other people lived or died? Maybe I care too much? Are there some people that just need to die?

Again, maybe I should do the post on the worthwhileness of human life first.

In the meantime, I have the following insight to offer: my problem with abortion stems from my deep-rooted problems with people dying, let alone people being killed. Which brings us to the point of contention - have you already figured it out? – how old do you have to be before you’re considered a person?

Okay, okay, that was a loaded question, no fair. Knowing about logical fallacies makes it okay to deliberately use them as an attempt to interject humor into an otherwise fairly humorless conversation. Somewhere between a twinkle in your parents’ eye and a certificate of live birth, a person appears. The question is, at what point does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a human being?

In the beginning, we’ve got some sex cells, a genome half’n'half cocktail, with daddy’s sperm on one hand, and mommy’s eggs on the other. Are the separate sex cells people yet? I don’t think so. The chances that a petri dish full of sperm will ever develop into a human being has to be awfully close to 0%. It’s probably fair to say human life begins a little further down the line.

Let’s move on to other more exciting words – penetration, ejaculation! Thousands of joyous sperms wriggle their way towards fertilization. They’re on their way, the egg is waiting at the other end of the obstacle course. But is it soup yet? That’s getting trickier, because if you just wait, there’s a chance that the alpha tadpole will cross the finish line, the touchdown will be converted, and any number of sports metaphors I’m probably doing a terrible job of pretending I understand will set things on the right track for birth, 9 months later. Personally, the fact that the sex cells are still separate makes me think that this isn’t yet a human. It’s two halves of a whole, which will likely hook up, but it’s not necessarily going to happen. It’s a chance of a chance of a chance. At this point, spermacidal lube and whatnot is still in play, and maybe none of the swimmers will make it to the other end of the pool. Sports metaphors are nothing but glibness, coming from me.

Fertilization. My college dropout education and terrible memory for trivia (also a quick look at wikipedia’s article on the topic) tells me that at the moment of fertilization, the sperm merges with the egg, and boom, you’ve got a nice neat set of human DNA (well, ideally, anyway.)

(I’m going to take a moment here to point out that ‘Ooplasm‘ is another – and in my opinion, superior – term for ‘Ovum.’ Thanks, wikipedia!)

So now we’ve got one cell, made up of leftover bits of gamete, containing a brand new strand of DNA, freshly spliced together from mom and dad’s contributions. It’s an embyro!

And as far as I can tell, an embyro is getting much closer to being a human. There’s really only one more ‘right place at the right time’ consideration: implantation. The brave little potential person floats back downstream, passing all the disappointed-looking sperm who didn’t make the grade, and is looking to latch onto the uterus to keep things moving in the right direction. En route, it busies itself mitosis-ing, so we’ve got multiple human cells at that point, each possessing a copy of that person’s own unique DNA.

This is where I feel like we’re entering the territory of ‘life.’ Once the little guy has latched onto the wall of the uterus, it takes a few weeks to go from embryo to fetus. At some point it stops being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells’ and starts being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells that could,‘ or maybe even ‘the brave little human that is.’ Which is why I don’t have any problems with contraceptives – the morning after pill stops that brave little bundle of cells from even bundling, or hopefully from making it to implantation.

But once you’ve got a little embryo latched onto the insides of you, I think you’ve got a life in your hands. That life could’ve come into being through terrible circumstances, it could be a love child or a hate child, it could be an accident or the fulfillment of hopes, it could be a blessing or a curse, but it’s still a life. It’s a human. If you let it alone, it’ll grow up as big as you are. Days after being born, it’ll grab your finger and smile at you. If you give it a few years it’ll even try to start talking to you. It’s gone from ‘potential’ to ‘person.’

If I were to change my mind about abortion, that would be one area to look at: when does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a person. However, you might agree with me on this point, but disagree on the degree to which I take the next one – killing people is wrong.

It’s a topic for another blog post, which is on my to-do list. But for the time being, let me say that I’m of the opinion that killing people isn’t a good thing. Yes there are nearly 7 billion of us, and that might double sometime in the next century, but human life isn’t cheapened by being common or easily obtained. Somewhere at the root of this feeling is the idea that if a person could turn out to be me, could turn out to be you, then who knows who else might turn up. And we’ll never know, if that person gets killed off early.

… and now, the problems.

I’m not unaware of the ‘but what if’s floating around my opinion. I apologize for the intentional double-negative, but like I said earlier, humor in a relatively humorless situation.

“But what if it’s killing the mother?”
“But what if it’s a rape baby?”
“But what if it’d be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
“But what if it has little prospect for any kind of meaningful life?”
“But what if the process of bringing a baby to term will completely derail the life of the unwilling mother?”

I’m just coming up with these off the top of my head, and they’re horrible. They’re absolutely awful questions, the kind that make people cross their arms and huff, “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” during a particularly insensitive round of ‘would you rather?’

#1 – According to Matt Lohkamp, self-defense is a totally okay reason to kill someone. Murder is no less horrific in this case, but I’d be comfortable giving the murderer a nice tight hug and murmuring, “It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing.” If complications from pregnancy are going to kill the mother, she should be able to choose to kill her unborn child to save her own life. Fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide.

#2 – Self-defense isn’t going to work for children conceived of rape. The Futility Closet‘s ‘Duet‘ post today is actually what prompted me to write about this particular subject – it pulls a quote from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” It’s not a perfect comparison, I know. But it makes you think. It makes me think, I guess, if nothing else. If you find yourself responsible for the life of another human being, entirely against your will, what should you do? What if the disgust and nearly indescribable trauma of the act of rape itself taints the normal baby-bonding emotions, to the point where you’re disturbed by your own child? Is it okay to kill the child?

Again, fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. It’s such a terrible thing that attempting to imagine my way through what it’d be like to find myself in that situation makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’m going to admit I haven’t come up with an answer I feel great about. Maybe there is no ‘good’ answer. I do, however, feel comfortable supposing that the answer you arrive at depends on context. Sometimes some people are going to choose to abort the child, other times other people are going to choose to keep it. Maybe only very rarely will the latter case be seen. But what if, what if?

At best, I think I can say that this isn’t necessarily a question of life-or-death (as opposed to #1) – it’s a question of easy-or-uneasy. You’re choosing whether your own quality of life is more important than the actual life of your unborn child. It’s terrible! It’s a terrible decision! It’s a decision no one should have to make, yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s the choice at hand. Should you kill your child so that your own life is easier to live? Let me repeat one last time: fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. If anyone has any insight to offer on this particular point, I could probably use some.

#3 – This overlaps with another subject I should probably consider for the future: euthanization, suicide, that idea that death is ever preferable to life. Oh that’s a sick idea. That rubs me in completely the wrong way. The idea that the bleakness of death would ever be a nice change from the harshness of life just… it wrenches at me, physically. This is so much shitty stuff to deal with in this topic, geez.

Given relative certainty that the life in question will never make it to birth… I would be very close to giving it a ‘maybe.’ A horrible birth-defect that would barely allow the child to live past the first month? “….mmmmmmmaybe,” Matt mused, teeth clenched, face contorted by an elaborate grimace. Let’s enter the world of my imagination for a moment: I am a fetus, and some terrible twist of fate has left me missing most of my head, and all the important things my little head is supposed to contain. Gross. But since this is imagination land, I know then what I know now – that a brief life of pain and misery is preferable to a non-existent life.

But that’s how I feel personally, now, barely a quarter of the way through my own lifetime. So maybe it’s not fair for me to assume that someone else would feel the same as me – and yet, I don’t have any frame of reference for any other outlook apart from: survival is of supreme importance, and a terrible life is always better than a lack-thereof. The trauma of dealing with your child dying naturally, possibly in extreme pain after a heartrendingly brief and tortured existence… you’ve got to weigh that against sending your child to oblivion. Again, it’s not life-and-death, it’s picking between an easier life and a harder life. Personally, I’d like to think I’d pick the harder life, if it meant giving someone else even a short-and-sour taste of life before they met oblivion.

#4 & #5 I have less sympathy for. We’re moving farther and farther outside of the question of ‘a life barely worth living’ and close to “It’s not fair!” ala The Labyrinth. It’s easy for me to sit here with my lack of a uterus and relatively low chance of being raped, let alone impregnated, and say, “well ideally…” – and maybe that’s a hint as to why abortion rolls further towards being a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a ‘human issue,’ but still. If you have to choose between college and a baby, between prosperity and a baby, between peace of mind and a baby… it hurts to think that someone would be selfish enough to choose murder to make their lives easier, and it scares me, because it makes me wonder how far they’d be willing to take that.

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject at the moment – that kind of sums up where I’ve found myself after a few years of contemplation. I’ll definitely take another post to delve deeper into mortality, and survival, because that feeds into this. There is of course one other rather obvious omission from all this – the issue of legality. I’m still not sure how I feel about that, which means in the meantime, I’d rather it was legal, so that other people can sort it out for themselves. I’m not ruling out a future point at which I might reach the conclusion that abortion should be illegal in certain situations – I certainly don’t think that’s impossible, or even unreasonable. I think that there must be such a thing as a ‘frivolous abortion,’ though I don’t want to consider outlier data until I’ve dealt with the more common reasons behind it.

tl;dr: murder is wrong, abortion is murder, therefore abortion is wrong.

Date: March 10th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, technology + design, things to think about

stuff to talk about

So… what, I only ever post to the mortality blog when I have a particularly interesting dream, or when someone dies? Is that really worth paying for a domain name?

The mortality blog is meant to record things that might otherwise disappear when I die, let’s be frank. I’m not sure where it all fits, how to get it all out, but it seems important that it be accessible, somewhere, in case someone finds it interesting. In my own totally biased opinion, I’m an intriguing and complicated person. But how much of that matters to anyone who isn’t Matt Lohkamp?

Some of the stuff that might otherwise end up here probably shows up on Facebook. Which is cool, because it almost serves a different purpose – Facebook posts reach a very specific audience of friends and family and coworkers and classmates, who are generally people I feel I can relate to well-enough to discuss sensitive issues. Whereas the mortality blog is public. I mean, no one reads it, but they could if they wanted to – is that significant, that anyone could read my blog but no one does, while only a couple hundred people can read stuff I post on facebook, and a couple dozen actually do?

Well maybe I’ll roll a bunch of topic ideation into the end of this blog post along with a well-intentioned but completely unrealistic resolution to write here more often.

We could talk about money: how much money I make, how much I should be making, the way I decide how much to charge clients, etc. We could also talk about how the practice of tipping makes me uncomfortable.
We could talk about procrastination, a favorite subject, and why I spend my downtime wishing I had something more important to do, only to find myself getting distracted by the most insignificant things when I actually have something more important I should be focusing on.
We could talk about sexuality, because I can’t help having that running through my head every other day of the week.
We could talk about my extremely preliminary attempts to wade into… I don’t know, feminism, privilege, rape culture, whatever all that stuff is; and why I’m even interested in it.
… or on a broader subject, we could look at how I look at things – my approach to new subjects, to sorting out how I feel about things, how I measure the extent to which other people’s feelings figure into my own opinions, etc.
We could talk about life and death, since I’m scared to death of my own mortality (and everyone else’s) and yet can’t seem to help thinking about it sometimes. We could talk about abortion and the death penalty, if we wanted to talk about controversial stuff.
We could talk about video games and computer games, because I have all kinds of experience with that stuff.
We could talk about music. I like lots of different kinds of music – I mean, mostly a few kinds, but the exceptions to the rules are heinous exceptions, and I do take perverse delight in appreciating art that other people ridicule or revile.
Maybe I could do some thinking about the relationship between morality and legality – are they mutually exclusive? Are there issues that are primarily the domain of one or the other? Regardless of how I feel about abortion, gay marriage, and monopolies, should there be laws that address them, either to protect or prohibit?
The extreme degree of disconnect I feel with our government. How is the office of the president of the united states important if nothing he does directly effects me? Same question, senators and governors and mayors. After all the effort of ‘doing the right thing’ and educating myself and voting, does milk cost any less? Does gas? Can I roll through a stop sign with impunity when it’s clear no one is coming? Does anything that our elected officials do actually impact my life? That might be a good thing to write about, yes.
My interest in places like 4chan? I mean yes, perverse appreciate for ridiculed and reviled art, disdain for taboo. Maybe those things would be good to think about.

… that’s some stuff. Oh, and maybe,

why I still haven’t upgraded this blog’s wordpress engine to 3.1, and how funny it is that I call myself a web developer who is good with wordpress.

well I feel better. Maybe sometime in a couple months I’ll actually make another post. I wouldn’t hold my breath (because I’d likely asphyxiate, though I’m pretty good at holding my breath for a long time.)

Date: December 25th, 2010
Cate: matt's life

ann

I knew Ann ever since I can remember… according to mom, the first word I figured out how to say was ‘meow,’ and I knew that Ann was the lady with the cats. Ann and Ty were probably my favorite couple out of my mom’s friends (right behind Tom and Michelle, who won by default for owning a SNES) because they were nice patient people, and had some dogs and cats. I’ve always liked animals. It was weird when Ann and Ty split up, though it makes sense now that I know a little more about it. It was weird when Ann died, too, and it makes sense in a horrible sort of way.

Mom got a call from Ann, who said she’d been having trouble breathing – a trip to the hospital was in order, and while we waited to hear back on how she was doing, we went to grab dinner. The next morning, Mom called to tell me that Ann was gone. Just like that. Something weird with her lungs, her circulation, she couldn’t breath, and that was it. It’s fun to anthropomorphize health problems, talk about battling cancer or whatever, but let’s face it, sometimes you don’t die because you give up – you die because your brain doesn’t have any oxygen to work with, and shuts down, whether you like it or not.

Opiate of the masses indeed, sometimes you just want to put aside your problems and get high for a while – and in a world where it’s hard to look anywhere without seeing evidence of entropy, religion’s promise of an escape to the mortal prisons we’re born into sounds pretty nice. Strange to think how easily I slip into ‘dear god’ -type thoughts – prayers to an imaginary friend that I don’t even play with anymore. But death is horrible, and I guess if it makes people a little crazy, that’s understandable.

As much as I hate it, the mortality blog is going to see more entries like this before the last one – when I’ve gone the same way. I wonder who’ll write the last post? Will it be my brother? Some future children? A friend, or a lover? Will death come too suddenly for me to write down my passwords, so no one will ever breach the digital spaces where I’ve stored the bits of myself that I’d rather keep private for the time being?

Finally, earlier this year (or was it the last?) Ann had another hospital visit – her heart actually stopped for a while, but they got it going again. If ‘borrowed time’ existed, maybe she was living on it. I wonder what it was like, at the end?

Date: November 25th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: hardware store nightmare

shopping at some sort of hardware store with James, wandering around, trying to find one particular thing. we were also looking at possible Christmas presents for our family.

then once we found what were were looking for, we went up to the checkout area. suddenly things shifted a bit, and I was waiting in line with uncle Steve. I’d stripped off all my clothes at some point in the store, but was still carrying my pants slung over my shoulder. I was holding a bed sheet wrapped around myself.

So then I came up against a classic embaressing dream dilemna: I had to get my wallet out to pay the cashier, but I couldn’t do that and hold the sheet at the same time – everyone was going to catch a glimpse of me naked. I was fumbling to try anyway, when everything changed -

“Get down, get down, get down!” the bagger shouted, pointing at me – no, PAST me, I realized, as I spun around, and saw a decrepit old man slowly drawing a revolver with a long barrel out of the side pocket on his wheel chair.

“He’ll shoot you,” the guy continued, trying to warn the old man’s caretaker – the old man nonchalantly pulled the trigger, holding the gun off to one side, there was an explosion, and the bullet richocheted off the floor and out across the store.

We all backed away, shocked, and then I watched him slot in another bullet, then calmly point the gun at his caretaker and pull the trigger – then at the cashier, then the bagger, then me, then uncle steve. He shot at each of us, and we all fell – but he missed me. I curled up at the end of the checkout stand, out of sight for a moment, trying to play dead and at the same time fumble to pull out my phone and call 911…

I was half awake when those last shots were fired, the sound still echoing in my ears, and even though I already knew it was a dream, I still laid without breathing or moving for a few seconds before I could force my eyes open, to make sure that the blurry scene around me was really my darkened bedroom, and not the checkout line with the psychopathic old man.

Date: November 16th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: making the zombies real

It was a convention akin to PAX – my housemates and I had managed to get into the main event, where some company was poised to make some sort of fantastic announcement. Showing off, they peppered the seating with flatscreens that you could plug your laptop into and play with your friends while you were waiting.

We were making fun of one super nerd, skinny and small with long ratty brown hair, who was wearing what looked like bear pajamas, and saying everything stupid thing that came into his head loudly so that everyone else would hear. Me and Ryan speculated that he was the Molly Monster, reincarnated as a bear.

Finally, the presentation started – and my perspective sort of faded, picking back up after it was over, and we migrated out of the event hall. I caught something out of the corner of my eye, and, telling Andrew and Ryan to wait a few seconds. I ducked after a shady looking guy, and my suspicions were correct: he was selling a new kind of drug that basically enduced group-hypnosis and let you explore a fantasy world, accompanied by anyone else who had dosed at the same time. Naturally I wanted to try some – and we were headed back to wherever we were staying for the night anyway, so I bought 3.

Later, at the house, we had somehow brought the annoying nerd back (I think he was hitting on me,) and after we more-or-less drank him under the table (it didn’t take long before he was passed out on the couch) we excitedly cracked open the packaging on the drugs. Ryan suggested that we do them like cocaine – he demonstrated, popping his capsule open, pouring out about a tablespoon of chunky white flour-like powder, then leaning in and snorting it up one nostril.

“Whoa – it comes on fast,” he warned, as Andrew and I followed suit.

My vision was swimming, blurring and twisting, darkness bleeding in from around the edges, and we all sort of slumped forward onto the table to enjoy the experience. There was about 30 seconds where we were all paralyzed, blind and unable to move, except that we could still talk before the game started -

“Who’s that on the couch again?” Ryan asked.

“The new Molly Monster, remember?” I reminded him.

When I opened my eyes, I was lounging on the couch in a log cabin. Ryan was standing unsteadily against one wall, and Andrew was sprawled unconscious over a chair.

“Have you been up long?” I try to ask Ryan, but there’s a noticeable lag between my trying to speak, and the words actually coming out, so I end up sort of slurring the words.

Andrew fidgeted, then opened his eyes – and within a few minutes, we were all walking around, shaking off the effects of transitioning from the real world to this new one.

The rules of this new Dead Rising game were simple – you were given a safehouse, which contained a bunch of weapons to get you started, several exits, vending machines and/or stocked refrigerator, and furniture to nap in while you were recovering from outings. After three days, the several exits would become unsecured entrances, and you’d have to defend yourself against as many waves of enraged zombies as you could, using all the weapons and tools and allies you’d found from the surrounding territory up to that point – until finally you had to duck back into the saferoom, and end the game, getting points for each piece of ordinance, each rescued survivor, and each zombie kill.

I found the melee weapons stash on the back porch: lengths of pipe, aluminum baseball bats, complicated looking sword/cudgel things, night sticks (which Ryan decided to wield two of) and legit mace-and-chains, which I said I’d hold onto. Andrew found a glock and remarked that it looked like something that had been used in a movie we’d seen, so he would take that.

Afterwards, we had a few awkward moments where the game was still giving us time to explore our safehouse and the border of our property – the zombies were all at half-opacity, we couldn’t swing and hit them, and they weren’t aggressive. So we sat up on the roof, drinking out of the maltov cocktails we’d found – which turned out to be filled with brandy.

—

Analysis time!

PAX is a gaming convention in Seattle that Andrew and I have gone to for the past few years. It’s always been a big deal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it had fixed itself in my mind as the prototypical convention setting.
The nerd sounds like a variety of people we could’ve met at the real life PAX, or even people I knew from college or highschool.
The bear pajamas were identical to the bear suit that the main character wears in Serial Experiments Lain, the cyberpunk anime I’ve been watching lately.
The Molly Monster was a real guy that Ryan and I met at a halloween party – he’s now right up there with Karma Kurt on the list of ‘people we meet who are high on something and have alliterations for names.;
Also, we met Karma Kurt on a camping trip with another friend of ours, who used to pass out on our couch at parties, much in the same way that the bear-suited nerd did.
Dead Rising 2 is a real game, and the whole concept of your safehouse being unimpeachable, but only provisioned with basic supplies, the treasures being outside with the zombies there to stop you from getting to it… that’s the game, basically. I played a demo/preview version a month or so ago, and thought it was fun.
Speaking lag – we were playing a game after all. Also, my brother and I were voice-chatting while playing a game called League of Legends last night, which may have contributed.
The glock – I don’t remember what Walter Sobcheck wielded in The Big Lebowski, but we all understood that it was that character that Andrew was referring to – the character he’d dressed up as at one of our previous halloween parties.
Also, Ryan and Andrew and I have been known to get together and play Left 4 Dead 2, which is another multiplayer zombie video game, though very different from Dead Rising – we just played last week, in fact, while Andrew’s friend was visiting.
Oh, and the maltov cocktail brandy at the end was probably Metaxa, our house’s favorite brand of brandy, which I myself was enjoying a sip of before I went to bed.

… I think that’s all the stuff. Super interesting, right? I went to bed at like 2:30 AM, and woke up a few hours later – it’s so early in the morning, and I haven’t had enough sleep, but somehow this dream still woke me up. Crazy! I’m going to try to go back to sleep now – hair cuts and DMV visits need to happen tomorrow-today-whatever.

Date: October 22nd, 2010
Cate: matt's life

hilda

My mother’s mother’s mother, born 70 years before me, we lived in different worlds – and now those worlds will never again overlap. You were wizened and frail, the toughest old lady I knew, and even though you’re gone, that effort wasn’t for nothing – I carry a fraction of your genes with me, as does my brother, as do our cousins, and we all carry your memory. It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing – and if your belief in heaven is borne out, I hope I’ll have the chance to catch a glimpse of you there. It’s hard to find something that I can take with me, separated as we’ve been by geography and generations, but for now I have african violets, and I have an afghan that could just as easily have been made by my mother or grandma, a triangle waveform that means some extra to me now. I wish I had been there for you at the end, but maybe being here afterwards is what’s important, because it’s over for you, and the rest of us still have lives to live. But we’ll miss you, great grandma.

Yakima Herald – Obituaries: Hilda Susanna (Lapp) Seibel

Date: August 21st, 2010
Cate: dreams
1 msg

alien attack dream

During the day, we were mostly safe – we were staying in a complex that I’d seen before, a sort of religious complex (probably based on first methodist in downtown pdx) that was like half school half convention center, with wings and rooms and stairways. The first night we weren’t sure what was happening because the incursion was small – the little bugs, of the flying and crawling variety, were on their own, with no zerglings or tentacles to back them up. Still, some people got swarmed, and we found out what happened when you got infected – you didn’t turn into one of them, you just rotted, dissolving from the inside out into a corrosive bio sludge, that settled down through the structure into the ground, and waited for nightfall before spawning a new wave of creatures.

So we eventually barricaded ourselves properly, sealing potential access points, killing the bugs that made it through – big skittering silverfish, and orange and red wasps, swinging lazily in the air as they zeroed in on anyone caught out in the open. The zerglings dashed around, never destructive, more like scouts, tapping experimentally on doors and barriers, windows and walls, looking for a weak spot. Of course, they were vicious too – someone was eviscerated, and we had to seal off that area, as it’d be where the bugs came from the next night.

During the day we ventured out to collect things, to try to find infected areas and expose them to sunlight, which ate away at the runny flesh of the creatures and turned them to ash. We tried to take time to enjoy ourselves, to get a little sleep even, but we were getting worn down – each night we had to ward off our attackers, and each day we had to recover from the attack.

Eventually, the tentacles found us – deep-rooted tubes of muscle burst up through the ground, spines snagging on nailed boards, ripping through cardboard and plastic. We made it out, somehow, and retreated to my mom and dad’s house. We tried to seal it off too, but we knew it would only be a matter of time before enough biomatter had accumulated to form another tentacle. I was in charge of sealing things – I wrapped the toilet in saran wrap, ducttaped cardboard and bags over the windows, plugged drains with rubber cement. We weren’t concerned about breathing – if the bugs got in, oxygen would be a moot point.

—

So that’s basically a combination of I Am Legend and the zombie attack mission in StarCraft2, which is cool – I don’t think it was ever particularly terrifying, but it definitely fits the alien/zombie horror sort of idea. A bit like Signs too in that regard. The Zerg influence is obvious, of course – maybe my subconscious is telling me to play more StarCraft?

Date: July 29th, 2010
Cate: matt's life

summer in the city in the summer in the city

So I’m busy again, deadlines are looming, livelines are potentiating, and I feel like I’m percolating – like maybe something is bubbling up. Of course, I feel that way off and on a lot, so it’s not really anything particularly noteworthy.

On the other hand, I’m trying to take a different tack on this current round of work. In the past, I think I’ve been sort of taking some things for granted, and not being up front about the way I prefer to work – not out of any sort of delibrate dishonesty, of course, more because I’m willing to let a lot slide, and I (possibly unfairly) assume that everyone else too. I realize that I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy a comparatively stress-free life of responsibility only to myself – “someday you’ll have a wife and family,” I am consoled, “and you’ll understand,” but those people don’t know me very well. I’m not sure whether I’m really the marrying type.

But I’m not that lucky. I do wish that I could deal with problems the same way a cat does – by staring them down until you decide whether they’re scary enough to run away from or tame enough to ignore. Maybe that’d be too unstable of a life, though, because I really would have to run – away from a messed up relationship, away from an angry client, away from impatient debt collectors. I’m a little to sedentary for that, I suspect. Instead, I’m more of a fight-or-ignore person, although I’m not sure if ignoring a problem counts as fight or flight – can you run from your problems by pretending that they don’t exist? Can you fight your problems by refusing to acknowledge them, denying them direct influence over your life? Is it a question of semantics?

Conjecture aside, I think things are going well – I’m making such a conscious effort to be organized, possibly to an unnecessary extent, to make up for the fact that it doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’m beginning to suspect that this lack of aptitude is slowly screwing me over. Is it possible to be completely self-assured but still lack an advanced degree of self-motivation or self-control? I feel like I’m writing Carey’s one-liners for Sex and the City. “My night at Brooklyn’s hot new club left me sleepless and wondering: are we really what we eat? Or what we don’t eat, as the case may be?”

My point, dude, is that I feel like things are going well. I’ve been procrastinating, but I’ve been doing it on much more reasonable terms, and I think I’ve been doing a better job of procrastinating productivly. Anky is helping, though I have a feel StarCraft2 won’t. Oh well. All work and no play.

I’ll be interested to see how my sleep schedule looks when I get back from the coast on Monday – will I flip back over to waking up before noon? Will I sleep even later? turn in next time!

Date: July 9th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: repairmen

I was doing some computer work for an asian family (vietnamese, maybe) just up on SE Foster where it splits off from Powell. They seemed nice enough, and considerate enough to stay out of my way while I worked. They lived in a trailer home type thing, a spacious one, but still just a line of rooms all the way to the back. I’d driven my broken down black jeep over to their place, and it’d died just as I reached their street – I managed to push it up next to their trailer before going in.

I wasn’t the only one doing some work for them – they’d hired a group of three other guys to fix some other mechanical and plumbing stuff in the back of the vehicle. I saw them as they walked past, and didn’t think much of it – until one of them started kicking the father guy. Just beating the shit out of him, knocked him to the ground, then kept going, standing above him and kicking him over and over.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, on my way over to help – but one of the guys, a big black guy (possibly the actor who played john coffee in that green mile movie) – stepped up to me and asked me what my problem was.

“What is this shit?” I tried to say, but he was already throwing punches at me, which I was trying to catch in my hands and push away, but I’m really no good at fighting, just good at being pretty dogged about staying concious despite pain.

But at least fighting with me distracted them from the family, who had three kids, a grandmother, and the father and mother, all living there. The kids were screaming, and despite everything, I managed to tackle the guy who turned towards them after saying he was going to make them shut up. I guess I passed out at some point, though, because when I woke up, I think I was at burger king or something, and mom was there. I couldn’t tell if it’d really happened or not – I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I ran back to the house, not really sure if I wanted it to have been real or not. My car wasn’t out front at the house – but I had woken up at a fastfood place not to far from where it all happened, so it couldn’t be fake, right? A dream within a dream?

There were police up the block, surrounding the smoldering remains of a burned down building – the parents were out front at their trailer, and the kids were up the street, playing foursquare in a park. I wandered over to join them.

“Did you know those other guys?” One of the kids asked me.

“Nope, I just happened to be there at the same time.” I said.

I was way better at foursquare than they expected.

… and that’s it. WEIRD! This was kind of a super immersive dream, pretty specific stuff happened, and it had that whole aspect of re-waking up and still being in the dream. maybe I was close to waking up AFK at the same time as I was blacking out in the dream?

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