gummybrain

switching websites

2004-02-27T19:34:00.000-05:00

I'm moving my blog over to gummybrain.blog-city.com because there I can post pictures and receive comments. I'll put a link to that site from here once I figure out how to do that.

Obsession of the day, this week, my life...

2004-02-21T21:22:00.000-05:00

How to direct my obsessive energy toward productive things like finishing my novel or helping to cure Alzheimer's disease or even just reading a goddamn book instead of how to fine tune my neurochemistry with drugs and/or alcohol or how to exist on candy without weighing 400 pounds or all the other nonsense that goes on in my head in this endless looping pattern.

On a similar note, I was working on my book this afternoon feeling completely unmotivated and without any imagination at all so I decided to take a nap. While napping I had a long, intricate terrifying dream of being trapped in a twisting tunnel, cornered at every turn by some psycho (mostly ones that I've known and dated) who forced me to eat ground glass. By the time I found my way out of the tunnel I was spitting out bloody bits of glass at my mother who was busy washing dishes. She told me to go back to the tunnel and she'd bring me a glass of water but before she arrived Nick Nolte (who I thankfully have not dated) threw a martini glass at my throat.
Now why couldn't some of that imaginative energy been present when I was conscious and trying to work on my book?

Sunny San Diego

2004-02-18T01:46:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to give southern California a chance. I lived in Irvine for a few years and hated it but that's Irvine, Orange County. San Diego has the same weather but it's a city - it must have some cool places (unfortunately I think the Death Museum closed a few years ago - I wonder what they did with the John Gacy clown collection). I took my niece for a walk today and while all the houses look the same, the landscaping around them does vary a bit. One of the weird things about this place is that everything is beautifully landscaped, especially for a desert, but you never see anyone gardening. Not a single man, woman, or child with a bright yellow knee pad and pansy-covered gloves and gardening shears. But there are a few key spots where Mexicans hang out in the wee hours of the morning showing off their muscles to every truck that passes by hoping to do some manual labor for way below minimum wage. T.C. Boyle gives a great depiction of southern California in his novel, Tortilla Curtain.
A really priceless thing I saw on the highway today - an SUV advertising pet cloning. A place that stores your pet's stem cells so that when Aster gets old and kicks it you can recreate him. Go to www.caninecyrobank.com. Think of the behavioral experiments you could do in your own home!

2004-02-12T20:42:00.000-05:00

Sobriety is a wonderful thing. I know this because after almost a year without booze, I had about eight martinis two nights ago and am still suffering for it. I had fun but not worth two days of being hungover plus a fat lip and a bruised nose. My thoughts are still like sludge working slowly through my gummy brain. But before getting drunk my brain was working too fast and I couldn't keep up with it. Wouldn't it be cool if we could somehow modulate the pace of our thinking with a pocket-sized digital encoder rather than caffeine, nicotine, methamphetamine, booze, valium, ritalin and prozac? Speaking of which wouldn't it be nice if someone compiled a database of people's depressive symptoms and which antidepressants worked for them and which didn't so there wouldn't be so much hit and miss in psychiatry? Maybe I'm way off base here but I think different clusters of symptoms would respond similarly to specific medication. This is a project I hope to undertake someday if anyone will give me money to do it.

All of them had hair of gold, like their mother

2004-02-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

I can't take my hat off because I spent four and a half hours yesterday getting my hair done. It's now blonde with stubborn orange streaks and about to fall out of my head. It's also about five inches shorter than it was a couple of days ago. I don't understand people who keep the same hair style for decades or are afraid to cut their hair or change the color. It's just hair and it'll grow back. Then why, as I sat in the hair chair yesterday afternoon, Rob blowdrying my bright, multicolored hair into a frizzed out mess, did I almost start crying, think about joining a convent so I could wear a habit for a few months, and contemplate telling him to just shave it all off? One of the things that dawned on me about ten years ago was that I would be treated better by people if I changed my clothes once in a while, didn't look like I was about to drop dead of starvation and exhaustion, and paid some attention to my appearance. This was a revelation to me at the time but I still resent the time involved in making myself presentable to the world and feel like it goes against some of my basic principles. Being human sucks sometimes.

candy review #2 - The chocolate-covered gummy bear

2004-02-05T16:52:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I was leary at first, too. But I've found these chewy chocolately little treats to be the perfect transition food. Like say you're eating chocolate pretzels balls but you want to switch over to gummy dinosaurs. Do you want to go directly from the pretzel balls to the gummys? No, it's too big a switch from crunchy salty chocolately to gummy chewy sweet. That's where the c.c.g.b.'s come in. They introduce the gummys along with the chocolate so as not to startle the taste buds. I know it sounds crazy. But it works. Try it. You'll see.

Random Post-novacaine thoughts

2004-02-05T16:25:00.000-05:00

I could write a biography of my dentist after all the time we've spent together this month. I know about his abusive father, his nasty alcoholic stepmother, and his days as a deadhead. I know his views on religion, drugs and Republicans. What does he know of me? That I can say Uh-huh without using my mouth. My fifth filling this afternoon. Tomorrow I have a root canal, another filling on Monday. And as I write this, my tongue still half-numb with novacaine, I am eating a swedish fish. This is getting to be a problem. But hey, if I only end up toothless, and not with lungs charred by cigarette toxins and a liver bloated by too much ethanol, I'll be a happy old hag.
I don't think many people know all of the uses of the dental drill. I used to use one to shave the skulls of rats. When you've shaved enough of the skull, so that only a thin covering remains over the brain, it becomes translucent and you can see the vasculature of the cortex. I loved that part of my grad school experiments - taking the picture of the surface of the brain. I'd print out extra copies and use them as postcards. Unfortunately, I didn't really give a shit about how the auditory cortex responded to different intensities of sound which was supposed to be why I was doing the experiments. Hence, my abbreviated grad school stint.
I'm looking for a new grad program so that I don't have to start paying back my student loans in July. Any suggestions, please e-mail me.

Losing the Thread

2004-02-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, an excellent book of essays on fiction. Here's one part that speaks to me.

When we hear words like "deniability", we are in the presence of narrative dysfunction, a phrase
employed by C.K. Williams to describe the process by which we lose track of the story of ourselves,
the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act. One of the signs
of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it
does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it.

Last fall, I went to a reading that Mark Salzman gave from True Noteboooks, his book about teaching writing in a maximum security juvenile detention center. He said that one of the things he thought most important about being human was life's narrative thread - being able to say how one thing lead to another and got me to the place I'm at today. But with these kids he taught, it was different. It was like they spent their lives spinning around on a teacup ride and when they stepped off the ride they were in jail with no idea of how they got there.
I think I lost the narrative thread of my life sometime in the last year and I've been making shit up since then so that I can convince myself things make sense. I head back to the West Coast in a week and a half. Maybe I can find the thread out there.

The Red Line sucks.

2004-02-03T17:17:00.000-05:00

I spend half of my life on public transportation which only supports my misanthropic inclinations. This afternoon I got on the red line in Harvard Square (after a mad dash because the train was entering the station as I was desperately shoving bills into the automated token machine which, by the way, never works), and sat down in the only available seat, wedged between a stinky drunk and a schizophrenic. The psychotic was doing incredible things with his voice - in a really high voice with a big smile on his face he looked up, at nothing that I could see, and chattered on about roses and sunshine, sometimes laughing, then he made a static sound like changing a radio station and turned his head toward me, his voice now low, and cursed and mumbled angrily. All the time he was rocking back and forth, hitting me in the hip. The drunk reeked of booze and months of body odor and asked me for money, almost incoherently. I didn't give him any simply because I don't have any. (I make eight bucks an hour before taxes which doesn't last long with my compulsive shopping habit.) He got pissed off and called me a tight ass. I got up and moved down the train after the assault by those two. Then at Park Street the Super Bowl Parade crowd got on. Picture it - big men, bellies full of beer, pounding on the plexiglass of the train yelling, "GO PATS! YAAAAAH!" The overabundance of testosterone on one T car was astounding. What I find flabbergasting are the ads at the back of magazines and in newspapers for testosterone pills. Is it just me or does anyone else think there is already way too much testosterone in the world and that there are far more valuable things for researchers to devote time and money too? And while I'm on the subject, who was the genius that decided erectile dysfunction was a major health problem in this country? From what I can see, erectile overfunctioning is a far greater health risk.

candy review #1 - The Swedish Fish in all its glorious incarnations

2004-02-02T18:45:00.000-05:00

A mini red Swedish fish is the ultimate candy. It's been my favorite food since I could chew. The flavor and consistency are unlike any other food substance. The red is the best, followed by the rare purple, then orange (which tastes like Fruity Pebbles - another delectable item), then yellow and green (which have a more common citrus flavor). A school of these mini creatures can be chewed any time of the day or a single fish can be sucked on and savored. They're also portable and can be kept in your pocket without attracting stray lint (unlike their gummy worm cousins). The bigger fish are also tasty and can be substituted in a pinch but cannot compare in delicacy to the mini and have been known to cause occasional gastrointestinal upset.

Things I believe that have no basis but a slight queasiness in my stomach

2004-02-02T11:15:00.000-05:00

1. That all Americans will someday be working for Walmart.
2. That meteorologists will soon be extinct.
3. That long-term prozac administration will cause frontal-temporal dementia, increased substance abuse and STDs, and/or absence of original thought in Hollywood (oh, wait, that's already happened).

Rover Rant

2004-02-01T12:09:00.000-05:00

Why are we spending billions of dollars to put twelve wheels on Mars? Does anybody give a shit what kind of rocks are on this neighboring planet? Apparently. When discussing this with two friends last night, both excited about the recent Rover roving, I asked what they expect from this intergalactic mission. Now, knowledge for knowledge sake I can't argue with - there are plenty of things I want to know that will never benefit mankind (like the perfect combination of caffeine and sugar intake so that I can only sleep four hours a night and not get tired) - but they talked about using Mars as a water source and building orbiting cities in space using the resources on Mars for sustenance and finding higher life forms that can show us how to live. So, if I have this right, Mars could be used as a backup when we've exhausted this planet of all its natural resources. Done with Earth, let's move onto Mars, then Venus perhaps? And what about looking for higher life forms here to show us how to live? Like DOLPHINS! I don't believe in reincarnation but if possible I want to come back as a dolphin or a bat (cause I'd like to be able to echolocate and hang upside down without all the blood rushing to my head and have such an amazing auditory cortex). A month ago I would have said a shark but having spent the past few weeks almost living at my dentist's office with two more fillings and a root canal to go, I wouldn't want to have that many teeth.

Saturday morning rant

2004-01-31T14:35:00.000-05:00

January 31, 2004
Sometimes I think the universe is trying to drive me mad and I have to pool all my energy just to fight off the gnats trying to fly up my nose, into my brain, and burrow little pathways through my cortex. I'm waiting for the red line this morning, sleep-deprived, drinking a Giant One with extra sugar from Dunks and smoking my first cigarette of the day, and I find myself staring at that most irritating of all ads - the one that says "DO YA KUYA?" and has three shimmery people on a roller coaster in Vegas of all places. My personal image of hell. What genius came up with rum+roller coasters as an ad campaign? I almost hurled looking at it. In fact, the last time I was in Vegas (to be the maid of honor in my friend's wedding), my boyfriend vomited tequila all over the cab, then mumbled incoherently until he passed out in our hotel room. Then I get on the T, my eartips frozen from the unending arctic temperatures in Boston this winter, and I'm in a car where every one of the ads is for Budweiser. What are they trying to do to me? It's not bad enough that everytime I go outside I freeze my buns off and I don't have time to use my light visor and I'm working in retail- now I'm bombarded with so many ads for booze that by the time I get to work I need a drink. Am I overly sensitive now that I don't drink or is alcohol suddenly fashionable? Yesterday I was at Urban Outfitters and they had all these t-shirts with beer logos on them. Comfy t-shirts that I might have bought and worn if they weren't advertising cheap, nasty beer. I think it's all part of Bush's evil plot to numb us all into a perpetual state of ennui while he takes over the world, then makes everyone work in retail.