Probe- morning blogger

Bad day

2010-02-16T02:39:00.000-08:00

Practicing typing consistently is one thing; dying inside is another.

I hate everything I write and who I am but not at all; because I should not.

I don`t feel guilty and I should not.
The truth does hurt.

And being a push over is not a good thing.
If you keep compromising you are made to.

It`s not that you`re taken for granted just that the more you keep fulfilling demands that you don`t want to fulfill; then they keep coming. You have to say no at some point. And the `duty` to fulfill certain demands is only a spouse and a parent`s.

Otherwise you`re doing a disfavour to yourself and others and longer you take to say no, the harder it is for the person whom you`re bowing down to take it.

So it is my fault my initial yeses make the final nos harder to bear/fathom/tolerate; the final no becomes hurtful because your initial compromises were not understood as compromises.

So, I `am` at fault; I compromise and there is the misconception that I `want` to give-things-up. But, how can a person not understand, that giving things up under coercion and not by choice is painful? DUH!

And by taking my things or throwing them away you`re not doing me a favor? Why is that so incredibly hard to grasp; throw away your own trash before other peoples. Don`t touch other people`s things; full-stop/period. Alternatively, at least; ask permission. `Genuinely` not like if a person says `No`, `you` explode and expect no roars back.

The difference between a request and a demand.
That`s what it is.

Ingratitude that`s what it is, when a person makes virtually non-existent demands; then the few demands made should be taken seriously.Except the only way to get even a few demands satiated is to make frequent demands, that way when you`re told no it does not hurt that bad Like sending in ten million job applications,or query letters a few rejections won`t kill ya.
But if you apply to only a-few/two jobs rejections hurt-with-out-end/tremendously.

Blogs are not for ranting but personally I feel a good rant can be turned into a nice piece of literature. Books/screenplays have the climatic and anti-climatic rant; why is it unpopular to blog-rant/rant-blog?

because the rant in books and movies is illuminated from fictional characters, whereas a rant on a blog is glued to the blogger; a label. A negative label.

dancing in the stars

2010-01-31T06:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know what good literature or what great literature is sometimes I feel like I know what bad timing is: my timing.

I try to be positive but then I'm not.

Tomorrow:

Wake up five a.m

Bathe

Make breakfast

Do jumping jacks

Contact advertising guy at uni-lever(?) for job interview

Ransack sister's room for ring to get her ring-size

goto mall

goto job interview place

Feel good breathing exercises

be happy smile

Watch Ellen's exercise video.

study

call Sarah

call Mustafa

call Gulraiz

I feel

2007-12-24T19:08:00.000-08:00

Last night was a disaster.I felt miserable wishy-washy needy-wanty , with no shoulder to cry on. I feel funny.Friendless alone , but comfortable not warm. i want to feel warm aand cuddly and coddled and coddling.
Instead I come out angry and bustling with frustration. Infuriated at the gall of it all?! questionmark everything. I want to be held, to play board games and cards in some cozy corner rubbing my eye and yawning lightly and I can't. I don't trust anyone.
There's no point if it isn't safe.
And I don't feel safe. I shouldn't. it isn't.
But I want to.
I want to trust and love and be loved 'without' being used or manipulated or objectified or sexed.That homely childood feeling of just being in that warm soft endearing place ...
To get warmth one must give warmth but warmth can be so easily misintepreted expecially since i'm a woman. Yes I said it , I know men complain about being misjudged when they're just trying to be friendly but they know they aren't. They point it out all the time too. If a girl falls for it she's gullible and naive and if she doesn't then she's shrewd and paranoid.Damned either way.and sometimes he yells at you about being narrowminded just to win your trust and when you consider 'his side' he pulls a fast one.Probably the only situation where the guilty party splats a grin on his face mouthing 'you were right'.and then there's guilt and speculation , why did you consider him? You 'knew' he would why did you let him? do you 'like' him?
Well if you know you don't then why?
"ego": he called you immature/narrowminded,
what did he do to play you?
What was it this time "fine, let's be friends instead, no hard feelings" were you stupid enough to fall for these things (time and again!)or was it that when women say these things they 'actually' mean 'em.
Women 'do' feel comfortable being just friends, women call you narrowminded if they really think you are (unless it's behind your back ,which is bitching literally, not really honest.Us women!)
Stereotypically guys want sex and women want to cuddle.
guys hate cuddling, women refrain from sex (unless they're Pamela anderson types?Men like fake big boobs).

Then again research has shown that 'both' men and women prefer sensuality to the actual act(mating ritual) or its derivitives , then why do men nose in?
I mean why can't two people just be. To have and to hold and to love and to cherish without fondling or perversion?

good old Plato *sigh*
platonic love.
'he' was a man, maybe he was just saying that to 'bag chicks'?
maybe I 'am' shrewd and prejudiced.
I don't know how I got here. I sound like I want a relationship, but really a cozy fire, a few quilts, thick frothy chocolate mousse and family huddled with me would do. Except that there's no one around.

P.S.
I really wanted to meet people last night. i got so upset, I hate it when mummy tries to dress me up. I got a little cranky then 'she' decided that I didn't want to go but I did want to go, which made me madder. I just wanted it to be fun and warm and funny and tremendous. I wish I could drive there then everything would be fine. Or not.

I got angry again
she's gone for a walk.
I feel awful.
It doesn't make me a better person.
or even a good one.

'I wholly disagree with what you are saying but will defend to the death your right to say it'-voltaire

2007-12-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

"Hinduism and buddism are the same except for differences in cosmogyny and the caste sysem"

casually dismissive.
errosive with error?
kay so astrology and yoga come in cosmogyny...
as far as I recall no one could/can convet to hinduism , i suppose it is because of the cast system.

midwest weather 9 ppl dead.
I'm bored
'feel like i should be studying econometrics.
or finishing up 'salt and saffron'
politics: nawaz sharif
supporting venal judges, corrupt feudals...
Cleptocrat BB
ditto and musharraf bashing.

both aggressive speakers looking to charging the city with imbalanced violent rage.
Imran Khan : too unpopular
supporting annd speaking against everything.
constructive criticism?
People like change just as long as they're not told to.

my brother think's I'm a selfrighteous bigot just because I thought the statement:'buddhism and hinduism are more or less the same religion'was/is a bit off.
of course it's intended to be. Controversy spurns thought, discussion, even argument, that's the whole point of making seemingly absurd statements like that.
but are they really 'seemingly' absurd , the devil's in the details , 'obviously' no two religions are the same, no two sects of the same religion are the same. Then can one argue that Two religions are the same religion but different sects... I think their believers will shout a resounding 'No' not for any reason really , just because it's personal.
Afte a little pushing about how chinese astrology differs from indian astrology,
and how yoga is hindu and not buddhistor buddhist not Hindu ... I haven't looked that up, 'cosmogyny' right.
and the difference in the 'caste' system is settled crookedly agaiin with how buddhism lays down/out different rights for men and women(what religion doesn't?)that's a very broad definition of caste/class. Probably a feminist argument.
I'd rather read up on hinduism and buddhism before entering a discussion or argument on it, but I was just taking the bait for good conversation.
It was bait.

It feels beeter to be questioning than merely accepting.
That thing I do, challenging the other's facts , more hinges on something irritating for my brother. but there's no fun in just nodding your head. how can the other have any fun either if s/he is merely dictating notes. discussion is the spice of life, winning ovr an unbeliever is far more gratifying than preaching to those who follow you blindly. "Active participation' , 'active learning' 'active listening' :all involve challenging discourse.
And are irrtating only when the object is 'not to learn' , 'not to change' 'Only to impress' 'being heard and not listened too'
making this 'blog thing' thoroughly unenjoyable :P
it's nice to toot one's horn once in a while.:D
hmm

reticence

2007-12-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

hesitation in tonguewagging...
resitence to overbloated self-analysis...
calm

breathing...
tight
clustered crowded compounding conivving sinister
minister joker jester clown

I'm afraid of what I might say if i open my mouth .. it's scary wondering how long my jaw will drop-hang
and if my lip will lip or tremble or worse saliva might stream out...confusing chaotic miserable
the risk.
is there a risk?

sometimes lines are drawn but not taken seriously
walked upon cracked twisted
walked all over
smeared with a kind of ugly hateful illgotten winning.
stepped on
hard
slow

marked
sitting at a course gathering of dudes(dude means 'fool' in German, like dud)yapping breathlessly and continuously about skateboards and high skies, low skies? 'big dreams and shallow desire', 'a walk in the park' and sometimes, someone 'stark and corky' pukes all over himself immersed in big talk and phoy monologue unaware of the vomit everyone sees spilling all over him , the stench that the other bear... until that apocalyptic moment that dash of rum sickled in calm september rain , the falling of leaves. black jack , he sees his cards and knows he's lost everything. that look.. dazzling...

Ever found yourself musing about what would happen if you said something delicious.
something that would make you the victim of a million pranks. that would stamp on you a forever blend of insecurity bullies taunting every upcoming second of your life.Tarty
crazy
dewy
geeky
obscure
the proverbial 'butt' of all jokes???
do you dream of that moment
do extrema excite you to the point where, it's just not lame enough, not the embellishment of all stupidity.

blah blah

2007-12-13T04:08:00.000-08:00

'still attempting to learno german , zimmr walking frame as i recall ...zimmernummer is either the room or key number. most 'Z' words in english are German... zietgeist zimmer?
zither???
I am blabbing as usual
lost the golden tongue
or the gift of gab i flattered myself into the conceit of having...
have to pay 120 dollars
before the 15th
I don't know how
I should put more energy into this
perhaps nag my financiers/benefaactiors/donors??/sponsors a.k.a my parents about it , 120 that isn't that much it's just four days... i feel weird confused rather.

2007-12-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

2007-11-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

tomorrow I will get chartpaper and foam , and deposit money and make money get a job , this adsense thing really doesn't work for me.

play the game and lose
play your game
your choosing
lose again?
I'll buy you a drink
lunch is on me
and we got free tickets to whereever
however
stay

soundproofing??? how is that done?

bon voyage

2007-11-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.clixsense.com/?2228168
the pendendum
of a crass object
oozing gloriously of insult
and disgrace
the aurora of broken verses torn and dished from scorpian legs
the eve of evil
the tongue of disgust
taste of fire
burning in breath

the time table says 4:30 to 7:30
BUT HOW CAN THE TIMETABLE BE RIGHT
it never is.
learn
learn from the past
move slowly
and eat soil
I lknow this is drivel/bukwaas/bunkum/etc
mua
your hostess retires to dine with disgrace
courtsy... spelling
gaffes
I have class right now.

ginga bread

2007-10-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Crone

I like her voice
and her views

The earth at night

2007-10-24T00:06:00.000-07:00

To view the picture in full size visit:
http://moonlightingw.blogspot.com/.

Click on it to goto the medium sized photo.

No pictures of joy

2007-10-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Joy is a tiny lunar crater located in the irregular ground just to the west of Mare Serenitatis. It is a circular, cup-shaped feature with a slightly raised rim. The crater was designated 'Hadley A' until it was renamed by the IAU. The Mons Hadley mountain is located to the west-northwest in the Montes Apenninus range.

But here's crater lake:

Please,Click to enlarge the picture's beautiful big

JOY

2007-10-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

Copernicus is a prominent lunar impact crater located in eastern Oceanus Procellarum. The crater Copernicus is estimated to be about 800 million years old, and typifies craters that formed during the Copernican period in that it has a prominent ray system.

ethereal mosaic prozaic

2007-10-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

sleepily odd
confusedly strange
and shattered to a grief principle higlighting the joy of waiting.
There once was a man from Istambul
...
i don't know any limericks...

http://www.sullivan-county.com/identity/
Lewis Loflin and Willie Matin debates...
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/54469

This charector doesn't like Noam Chomsky either...
http://www.sullivan-county.com/id2/index1.htm

When has any Pakistani newpaper ever published a cartoon of a montrous-looking "Jewish" Nazi???
I mean that's absurd beyond rendition:
the Nazis oppressed Jews, hellooo????

however since it is against the law to make and publish any anti-semitic(since they are considered to be racist) cartoons and articles I feel that Mr.Loflin has to answer to the law.

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jews.htm
one of Willie Martin's articles...

What I'm confused about, is how ppl convert to Judaism, I mean if they're supposed to have the blood of Jacob...

passive smoking

2007-10-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

‘You look pale, it’s so much fun when teachers get nervous” Nadir eyed him doggedly
“He’s not ‘your’ teacher’’ I begged to differ, almost chivalrous, it was more his joy than his teasing pupils that bugged me.

‘I just had to’ she droned weakly ,as her mouth left his and she tried to make off, he yanked her by the arm and you know…
“This is how it’s done. If you must plant a kiss do it right”
“I stand corrected…was that better?”
“A little oddball-ish, try this?”
“That ‘is’ better!”
“You see the benefits of learning!”
“Of being taught”
“Uh Hun… would you mind sitting through this class” he made room on his lap
“Well, it is just so interesting and I’m in no hurry”
“Atta girl always ready for a challenge… (She kissed him hard) Now you’re getting the hang of it”
“They say practice makes perfect”
“I don’t want you doing any homework for this class” he admonished sternly
“No homework!” she Exclaimed enthralled, “this is my favorite class of all”
They continued with their exercises when a stranger walked in.

“I fell on him...accidentally” she stumbled verbally.
“Um yeah” the entrant answered… as sir asked with loving concern , “you didn’t hurt yourself did you?” holding her hands , arms legs , kissing her head as she fumbled about confused.
To this the newcomer objected, “Let her alone”
“It is alright” she mumbled walking out with the suddenly personal intruder
“No it isn’t teachers can’t do that” the boy rambled on, outraged.
“I fell on him okay, he was just comforting me”
“I saw the way he mauled you”
“Just shut up”
“What is it, are you ashamed of it?”
“It is none of your business, I don’t even know you”
“But”
“Oh just shut up already!!!”

You say you'll leave me... all the riches

2007-10-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

The unfortunate truth is fortunate indeedy...I've found that virtue reaps favour in constipated discomfort only to sing bad songs and badly too.
I had the strangest dream last night , reminding me of the unsafety(?) of my home. Bomb blasts, Benazir's back.'Mohsin Abbas dawn news' feedback@dawnnews.tv
Well I've nightmares with linionesses(no mane) tapping against my windows not roaring or anything. I understand that they hunt. Or maybe they were shaved lions who decided on this rare occasion to not roar.
This however isn't my first lion dream, I wonder what they symbolize.
"No muslim can attack any woman, as Islam prohibits it"-BB...
Wasn't the suicide-bombing predicted?
Anyway the T.V's buzzing behind me in slow depressive tones , remniscing over yesterday:
www.dawn.com probably has done a lot of coverage.
You say you want diamonds in a ring of gold

you say you want love to work out right
... to last through the night

all the promises we made from the cradle to the grave when all I want is you...

Anyway I thought I had something to write.
How about a Kumun , a follow-up on the lumun and the worldmun , with teams from Karachi participating??
perhaps 'man proposes, God disposes'

Anger management-yesterday

2007-10-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

So,how does this go? "my name is, mein nama est Nadia and I'm an anger-holic??"
anyway so it be and so it is. I have a problem,it stinks, it doesn't work for me. I know it's caused by anxiety, which is caused by people and my inability to adapt and cope with weird illegal uncomfortable irreligious situations. funny how even the most normal looking folks do the strangest most dastardly things. Anyway i can't really do anything about them , so little things trigger and charge me up to a surmountable fit of rage that continues for an entire day, which in turn is completely wasted(my work proliferates for the next day thereof and therefore)and ultimately simmers to a morning headache.
The stimulus is usually my mother, because she's trying to help.and while I have no doubt about her philanthropic intentions, it is a pain indeed. and I don't understand why mothers can't take a hint.I know that's horrible of me.
However ignoring my bouts of rage until their momentum rises to an apex only leads to trouble and I'm sure every mother who goes through life thinking that she's being charitible and nice when she's annoying you, knows surely(not surly, which is another word) that she has it coming.
To what avail? to what point? it's as though the book of life has shifted into a dusty corner , has been read and reread and each every time the words remain unchanged. yet somehow there is a want of an end not yet reached by a means used and abused to exhaustion.
Anyway I used every swear word i know and understandibly in reation, my ma went ballistic. I don't see fasting as a testament to my faith rather a decent attempt to improve(it and myself). and attempts can be unsuccesful(don't I know it).
What is lucid however is that pages need be turned and i'll have to change,since she's never going to. as she was being nice right , by serving me when i want to be left alone by doing stupid dances in front of my so-called friends. it's okay when i do it they're mine , but it's embarrasing when she does. and there are other habits of 'wannabe cool' mum stereotype that cling onto her like tar on a 'getting paved again' karachi road.
I don't wish to discuss it however.I need to be more tolerate less distracted, blame less, move on, if smething bothers me I can try talking about candy canes and butterflies though when ur angry spite seeps through always, thus that would be utterly pointless, except to get a laugh from ma initially.
There's excercise, yoga , seeing a therapist? continuing learning german , making a time-table, that as history has shown I won't follow.Perhaps prayer and breathing excercises might help, if the pollution lets me inhale an oxy-friendly ercentage of toxins and others chemicals.Karachi's the most polluted city in the world. dehli comes second, number 13 is New York.
my daddy thinks that if i'm upset with amma/ma then i'm suddenly inclined to liking him which is not the case at all. That kind of sits at a certain fixed tempo but it's never enough to blow me to bits. I think it's because I expect from mother. 'if you expect great things you're bound to get disappointed or to not rejoice if things work out."i expect her to understand ans she acts like she does(like all mamas0 but she doesn't so it's always a disaster waiting to happen being fed with lies until the truth demands a part and wrecks everything.
Toodles
keep breathing
even if the good air/bad air ratio isn't exactly healthy/salubrious??
carry your parahernalia and off to work...
life is a fine thread of do's and don't's ...
scripted for those you cannot read...
I meant to write 'who' not 'you' but this fits.

nice blog

2007-10-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

http://tiarasmussensblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/john-polkinhorne.html

hoping karma will leave a comment
though I don't really care for it(or so I claim 'cause I'm not getting any... well, that too hmmph I'm not high on rape!ten-foot distant please! beware of pepper spray and tear-gas).
thinking of Einstein's TOE (the theory of everything)...
I'm reminded of the testimonial I wrote for ayesha on orkut:
"kahaan ho tum
chalaay aao muhobbat ka bulawa hai

Ayesha's really funny,friendly,cute and pretty(and so aware of it :P, and that's a good thing)
Keyword:'CONFIDENCE'
Ayesha has an aura of beauty trust joy oozing out of her (even when she's complaining)
Her frequent foot photography , made me wonder if she had this fashionable reckoning affinity towards her massive and delightful sandal/shoe collection or maybe she (like Albert Einstein)was interested in the T.O.E (theory of everything(seriously I'm not making T.O.E up))some claim the string theory(the smallest particle in everything is a minscule vibrating string) is the T.O.E
('wonder how ppl distinguish between freak science and theorectical physics)

Anyway ,I was talking about Ayesha , who according to the above mentioned theory is made up of atoms made of electrons and nuclei , which in turn are made up of quarks which are made up of vibrating strings :O i.e Ayesha is a collosal manifestation of a zillion dancing strings(as are we all muhaha)"

Karachi's the most pollluted city in the world.
Is there any way I can mark the blogs I've commented on, apart from posting links?
www.cliparound.com/tag/trading - 38k
:I don't know what this is is

no luck with church-art or David and goliath...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_goliath

though cliv and ture are tussling in my head
I'll try 'top-wall-corner'?
nothing zero zilch
alas!
maybe I'll remember.

new-bie

2007-10-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know how long I have to wait before I shake-off this new-kid-on-the-block image.Albeit and admittedly it is nice.As if I'm almost invisible , the world is my sounding board and couldn't careless.'like sreaming to deaf ears or not screaming at all, just thinking out loud or something of the like.
In the morning my Parents celebrate their vows with a good ol' verbal brawl, spangled with colourful vernacular and sweet succulent sarcasm it's quite moving but it doesn't drive me to tears.I guess I'm paralyzed to it's momentum and frequency, enough to solemnly state that it doesn't affect me at all, except for my occasional vomit of spite on this very page.
You're witnessing history in the making 'fellas. Don't be crass now.I cut my foot in passing. Through my room , my pa calls it 'The king's highway' 'cause every one's cruising through it, bipeds, quadpedals(my cats)... I bet there are eight legged spiders too,(which creatively manifest their future domains in every top-wall-corner crevice in my room.Top-wall-corner-crevice I knew the word for that one! I'll probably have to wiki 'church art' and find it.Wall-corner-crevice! hark barf and bah...hmm anyway.Spider-web decorum is hot!

Self-talk therapy , guess i don't really need it since I'm A-okay or so I insist , but you know mothers and doctors, and mothers who are doctors, well it is highly likely that you don't. But I do and have one regrettably.
Any breathing space I get my grip on is a welcome escape from hypochondria.
what's on your face?
what's onyour foot?
recently I threw her down with continuous 'what's on my leg?'
my leg is an onus Picasso would be proud of , incarcerated severed spotty dotty dry and mucky ... it all started earlier this month when i aggresively plucked a hair and a boyle resulted. Horribly painful, looked like sonething out of a horror movie..still does actually , but in a different way. anyway I kept showing her my ghoul-like leg and it badgered her to the bone and mummy's all humourous spite when she's like that but oh Fun!
I could be the devil!
whooops sorry.
just a little colorful chatter folks no lascivious intent here... though I have been acccused of being gauche and uncouth quite an elusive bit.
well hiya and biya!
mua
gracious gracious
see you later on 'wet wild and woolies' when I'm no longer pathologically drunk.
what the word for foot, 'podo-??'?

paraphernalia-everyday needs-provisions
it means a host of other things but I'll go with that one for today.
lubricious is different however
it's like lewd intentionaly rude about sexual matters
very different from just being open.

guten morgen

2007-10-09T21:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.thecitizensfoundation.org/how_you_can_help/donation_methods.php?id=5&query_dir=how_you_can_help&query_focus=donation_methods

education for the poor

wie gehts dir?
gut sehr gut

Tag
toll
Wie heißt du?
wee hies du
ich nama es Nadia.
wie bitte?
woher kommest du?
hmm
grune
my sister got a green car .
Ich spreche nur ein bisschen
ein is one ich is i bisschen is little and spreche is speak.
Woher kommest du?
wo here coms du...
from where come you/
ich komme aus Pakistan
i come from/out of "
ish comma iooz ...
Du sprichst sehr gut Deutsch.
or
Sie sprechen sehr gut Deutsch.
You speak German very well.
deutsch-land(lunt)
ich komme aus deuschland...nien??

this is informative

2007-10-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

http://biladsham.blogspot.com/
http://www.mcspotlight.org/people/interviews/ritzer_george.html

creative freedom
"Personal Daily Horoscope of Monday, 8 October 2007
for Nadia Siddiqi, born 27 November 1985

©Astrodienst AG

Subjective thinking
Weak, transient effect: This influence can signify a critical time in your communications with the people around you, particularly those with whom you are intimately involved. The danger is that your feelings and emotions will overwhelm your rational intellect, making your thinking so subjective that no one else will be able to relate to what you say. Nevertheless you have a strong need to communicate about your emotions. You should avoid dealing with controversy by changing your own views every time someone disagrees with them. You will tend now to change your views according to the prevailing wind, but this may result in compromising yourself if the people you have "agreed" with compare viewpoints. However, it is natural for your opinions to be in a state of flux at this time. Just be honest about admitting it.

The interpretation above is for your transit selected for today:
Moon Square Mercury , exact at 05:24
activity period from 7 October 2007 to 8 October 2007."
-www.astro.com

Nadia siddiqi

2007-10-08T01:39:00.001-07:00

http://www.emmahumphreys.org/nadia.html
she's Nadia siddiqui though.
but cool.
hmm
feminists against wife/woman-bashing
however this picture's mine.

so woman-bashing what's that about? anger-relief, being mental, owning a person , marking ur territory
I have one thing to say to you mr's and mis's (ha Mrs)
don't!
This public service message was brought to you by
Nadia shireen siddiqi
happy blogging

Disney-fication

2007-10-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

The American dream?
"Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs in disneyfication is the substitution of place with an idea – one that is idealized, homogenous, and limiting. Disneyfication is problematic in that it only presents a simplified version of reality. The name obviously comes from Disney, whose presentation of ideas to children has traditionally been an idealized, optimistic representation of the world that doesn’t engage the realities of the world. This amounts to the filtration or censorship of ideas – ideas that fall outside a utopian vision of reality are eliminated."http://www.davelester.org/category/second-life/
Anomie reinvented...hmm
'Modern Times'Charlie Chaplin Film about alienation from monotonous unrewarding work in a Fordist company (I think?)
Ritzer's macdonaldisation
irrationality
homgeniety
...
the vividly chaotic assumption of the 'known'-existence of one apophtegm, one ruling ideology, one indiscriminate tautology,one grand truth...Stifling opinions,perpectives,culture,diversity, lateral thinking,tolerance? and the like, entirely.
I'm thinking about joining second life,I'm afraid it might be too time-consuming.
SIMS with real people???
M.U.D
'should check it out in the holidays

sell yourself- hail to the abnoxious con-artist

2007-10-08T00:13:00.000-07:00

The great fanciful curator of the continual brain-biting offence of theft perhaps caused by an irreversible case of kleptomania??strolls in with a wily rictus painted on his face, the devil's in the detail they say, they who?
What I can't stand is the salesperson demeanor. That wanton casual attitude that isn't casual at all maybe sleezy maybe fake maybe a little daunting in a way that it makes you clench your purse tighter or even strangely concious of ur sternum...what is marketing , sorry for being overly overtly simplistic and satirical about this but yes what is marketing?
"The art of selling to people who don't originally want to buy"
to me that's the devil's work it doesn't even pretend not to be sinister or gauche. It is exactly what it poses as: a sleazy guy in an expensive suit playing 'chase the fanny??"

Okay that was over the top. I'll just go with an analysis that makes me come-off as less spiteful and more annoying.
i was rude today very rude...to one such charector. and I feel bad 'cause it happens to be my father(though the entire category of men of that nature irks me to respite). 'but not bad enough to apologise 'cause that's only asking for more.

I understand that MBAs and salesperson's of the like are taught to sell and oner-up and perhaps even cheat and steal and be total ruthless self-selling self-centered pigs and it isn't their fault therefore and then there's the pat on the back that they give themselves 'I duped her/him!" look at me.

and for what? standing forcibly at a person's doorstep selling encyclopedias to those who can't read.
maybe I overreacted
this instance was no more annying than the rest but I barked and I feel exactly as bad as he wants me to, which means he's giving himself kudos.

anyway i'm learning German online and since this computer lies in the ultimate no-privacy hell-zone AKA my living room.I can't repeat words out loud without whoever wants to listen, listening.
Wie gehts?
means "how are you?"
gut means good
there's also the obvious:hallo
Anyway so he comes up and starts yapping about Germany(and he doesn't know German)
and how (in his gimmicky salesperson style) he 'happened'to 'overhear' me practising 'wee gates'(which isn't how it's pronounced it is more like 'gits' or something)and so I correct his pronunciation 'I'm only 'just' learning myself'
so he gets defensive(again all smirky smug one-uppy and unreal defensive, not the usual natural defensive) and says you mispronounced 'und' it's oond(I think it's actually ount-ish) right. So I snapped (naturally defensive) and I kinda felt bad 'cause he didn't snap at me but that doesn't remove his intention hmm
thus this somewhat shaky tirade.

Anyway, it really isn't about that. Moreover it concerns the need to study alone without interruption and so on. And the whole grinning grinch type just gets on my nerves.

WTO-A very important cause

2007-10-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.worldtoilet.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=92
You might think this is funny or some kooky-gibber-jabber from mad-magazine but bathroom privacy is a very serious, sensitive and important issue.
This W.T.O works to help people avoid abuse and contracting disease by informing people of the importance of things like cleanliness(water shortage leaves certain people without flushes,or the luxury of washing their hands(and other things no water or toilet paper) each time they go,others still, have no access to any toilet(or a variation of one, suited to their limited/ing resources) at all).
This org also works to build public loos in such areas where people can poop in privacy.I remember reading this article in the grammarian'99 about the marvel of the W.c. after a fgew lewd less than funny jokes on the Boy's urinal and bullies as such ....moving on , yes ahead of that , there was a nice little para on the wonderful working of the flush. that i would gladly add here changing the words and sentence-structure in case this could turn into a copyright violation case.Anyway here goes:

What was I looking for? unedited blog crap from my msn space

2007-10-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

What was I looking for?

The path is long; the road rough and blinking signs everywhere: some distracting, some enticing and some for the hopeless wanderer who keeps walking on. To where, the scent draws him/us, closer without reason except for reasonable doubt, curiosity reaching out pulling us/him/‘children of the age’/rats like muses, pied pipers and sirens. The rapture of endless possibility, what can be, as opposed to what is/was but something far away in a distance, across oceans, landscapes, skies and realms? Seven proceeds, forever grounding us to our fate, or what we believe to be set for us to kill that charge, to stifle the impetus of dreams, we wander still hoping, some call them moods, others insanity loneliness? boredom?, dynamism, the want for something different, to make a difference, to control a desirable brothel of devout followers, led blindly to the image, that dim green light which recedes as you approach it, imaginary untouchable and always distant. That’s capitalism in a nutshell, a drive towards something that is infinite in amount and distance, conjured by something better and better but never the best. You can never content yourself with what you have because there is so much more awaiting you, up for grabs. That opportunity you missed, that game-show you should’ve been on, the millions you could’ve made. The money/time you lost because you didn’t take a lucky initiative.

First rule: the more money you have, the more money you can make, money in the bank grows on interest, the bank profits ruthlessly more (especially in ‘Islamic banking where they ‘don’t’ even give customers a bite of their profit (in the name of interest), and your money loses value with the course of inflation, in which case there ‘is’ no incentive to keep money in the bank ‘better to invest it in plots of land and other profit making devices. Invest in stocks? (No stockbroker claims to really know anything about stocks, albeit many are employed because they can sell anyway.)Invest in anything use ‘capital’. The more money you have, the more interest you’ll get, if you don’t have at least a certain amount of money you will get no interest at all and your money will in time ‘lose’ value, and incur the loss, from what you could’ve made from it, if you accumulated enough, to put in a bank. “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

Second rule: steal people’s ideas publicize them, Bill Gates did, and it is the American way. If you can’t think something up rob someone who can and take all the credit ‘cause the other person was a sitting duck. You gave the idea value by selling it, without being sold, it wouldn’t ‘have’ value/a price tag. As unethical, ruthless and stupendous that logic is, it works. As the saying goes: It’s a dog eat dog town.

Third rule; Move it, hut two three four, yes motility is the key to success; it was Hewlett & Packard that made the wandering manager rule. They were/are right, not just to gain information but to use it. We all know how easy it is to become a celebrity? Why don’t we jump at the chance, we have ‘more’ interesting lives than most writers why not bring it to the screen, simply because we don’t want to move and be pushed around? Easy industries fear competition, because it’s so easy to show them up. The easier a job, the harder it is to get it, because the founding thespians/entrepreneurs monopolize it. Own it. ‘We were here first’ is all it comes down to.

Who doesn’t have talent? Who doesn’t have a face/personality that projects ordinary people, who can’t play themselves? God’s script is the best script ever written without contest, and we all have our scripts and we play our roles better than anyone can/could. So what’s up with watching other people do things we can relate to? Individualism? Narcissism? Or simply laziness? Maybe it makes us feel like we belong, as though we aren’t alone, someone ‘cares’ enough about us to imitate us on screen; ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’, make it glitzy and glamorous and it all the more flattering, it allows us to brag to ourselves about how we could do/are doing so much better/more. And then resent them for the money they make and don’t really deserve as our jobs serve greater purpose, ‘we’ perform higher functions. And they make money off standing ovations, simply by applauding ‘us’ and we applaud them for their minute effort? ‘Make it real’ cut the superficiality/glitz out, the closer they get to being us, the more we clap and the more money ‘they’ make.

That’s what reality shows are for… who better than a doctor to play one, an actual patient works better than a dummy with ketchup spurted on his/her belly?, is privacy really ‘that’ big an issue? If ‘creative’ artists can see the real thing to spruce up a fake blood sauce, why can’t the audience see it? If you’re willing to enact it why not show the real thing? It costs less money, is far more genuine, why not? Maybe the seriousness of our jobs is at stake. Maybe it’s the aforementioned ‘first rule’? We feel that because we don’t use/acquire/require a lot of money to do what we do best we are being exploited. We are robbed of the money we could’ve made if we were frauds/ actors/not playing ourselves but ineffectively attempting to play others. So doctors/professionals write scripts for shows and profit from the ‘art’ rather than the ‘actuality’ while using their credibility to claim to portray the real thing. Of course they couldn’t do this if they were working at the time; Emergency room medical personnel wouldn’t have that kind of time. So the ruse is unveiled they project their version of the past and inject general knowledge/hearsay/ secondhand information into the fictitious enactment of the present/future.

So, we live in an age of corruption, nepotism, gambling, dissatisfaction/anomie /disenchantment and we tolerate it in the name of meritocratic ‘competition’/capitalism. Those who have money generate it; those who don’t, are stuck in themselves, unless they walk the extra mile or simply get lucky, play that winning bid/gamble. Who wants the stats? How many upwardly mobile entrepreneurs took a ‘risk’ requiring only ‘dumb luck’ to get to where they are? All of them. And how many ‘risk takers’ actuality make it? A few, is it because of ‘meritocracy’? Is it the intelligent, the talented, the genius or simply the big street-smart bully with his gang of lumber heads that takes all? What is the ‘capitalist’ debate? It’s a stability model, Survival of the fittest ‘sell yourself’, forget ethics, chuck morality, use sources eat off your daddy’s pocket. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we know why, you know why? Then what is the problem why stick with a disparate system that does not work?

Insecurity arrogance, we are afraid of ‘real’ competition, we are afraid of getting our worth, in the words used to describe the alternate system of government of the Marxist Lenin ‘To each according to his/her needs, from each according to his/her ability”. Russia had 100 % literacy, 100%employment and was the best scientific innovator in the world at that time, under that rule, in his time. The statistics speak for themselves. We’d rather stick to chance/faith/the gamble than rise/fall to ourselves: our actual worth, true merit. To live in a world where words actually mean something, where right is right and wrong is wrong, justice ‘is’ served. No, we find comfort in lies, fraud and acting. We find comfort in the idea of being ‘blessed’ with no effort/fault of our own. We alienate ourselves from truth because we are afraid of how it might hurt: always going for grabs, crying over missed ‘opportunity’, deriving satisfaction from winning that whopping fortune from a silly old lottery ticket. We don’t care about merit, of ‘whether’ we ‘deserve’ money. We use the word in our defense, but no, it isn’t merit: It’s gambling and no ethic/religion/moral can defend it.

How is ability or need measured? I don’t agree with that philosophy/concept, simply because there is no real measure of aptitude or requirement. There’s test-taking , but that measures test-taking skills, your ability to reproduce and memorize information collected and discovered by somebody else, that is what will take you to Harvard/MIT(no Einstein or Thomas Edison there, neither went to any fancy schmancy schools, no ‘inventor’/’creative’/.‘genius’ ever did, feel free to contest me on that, even Harvard admits it’s true) and/or having a rich parent with connections not test taking skills, but people with connections, with rich daddies with similar jobs ‘do’ better, than people who get good scores at ivy league schools, because they have know-how, nepotism works, look at Bush he’s no exception, what holds him up? His government, his lobby, the senate that supports him, he’s not doing a one-man job; it’s the entire constitution, who in the UN council voted for the war in Iraq? The US vetoed the majority vote. Who in the US senate did ‘not’ vote for the Iraq war? Was it Kerry, no…Ladies and gentlemen, the senate controls the president. Bush’s first term, a lot of Muslims voted for him, because of Hilary Clinton’s New York address, in which she supported Israel against Palestine to win the New York Jewish majority and become senator. The second time ‘round Bush Jr. had a Christian evangelist following, after Condoleezza Rice, President’s ‘speech writer’ (and daughter of a ‘priest/preacher’ was it? No…but something similar), wrote Mr. Bush a tirade with the word ‘crusades’ on emphasis: The next president of the United States? Who knows?

No, it is not about ability or need but simply fairness, ‘equal’ opportunity, we were ‘All’ created with ‘equal’ rights , we should have an equal education , an equal standing in society and equal opportunity to do what we can with Passion and ‘skill’. I’m not saying everybody should be a doctor, but everyone should be given the ‘chance’ to make that ‘choice’ irrespective of class/status/money/where friends and family stand. We should take/give tests, that is how we commend/use the knowledge accumulated by great minds and excelling in the right tests makes us job-worthy, information/time efficiency is what is tested and is ‘very’ useful. Maybe like most of Europe we should have a socialist government where education and basic provisions are free for all? Quality control, standard and standardization: Who/what will insure that? Corrupt officials; is it a matter of trust or being trustworthy? Insecurity jumps right back , it’s as though we trust ourselves to foul up and therefore ‘try’ nothing, ‘stability’ model ,peace: leave things as they are and whine about it. That is our dictum and our fault.

A system of equal opportunity, ‘capitalism’ assumes a zero-sum game, i.e. all jobs are occupied(classical economic full employment assumption), all resources are efficiently used, the scenario is as ‘perfect’ as it can be and success and failure is up to the players even though there is a grand divide between the haves and have-nots. China is still 80% communist and her ‘open’ economy works with a parody of rules, regulations and restrictions, this is not a ‘golden’ example of capitalist victory as is so frequently propagated as. The alternate assumptions are simple, there isn’t full employment, jobs are created as people ‘need’ (demandàsupply) work, not people employed as ‘required’. Confusingly the demand supply could work in the opposite direction as jobs ‘pay’, employees are the ‘product/sales item’ not the customers therefore prospective employees should make themselves desirable and hirable. The truth is that it works both ways both employees and jobs are ‘in’ demand , both are created to fulfill/balance-out that demand and both increase over time , the efficiency of this process is questionable. Is the best available person for the job hired setting corruption and nepotism aside? There is still the ‘likeability factor, ‘there is no accounting for taste’, and as Max Weber pointed out complete objectivity cannot be reached, taste will always override commonsense and research, if you ‘don’t like a person, maybe he smells or picked his nose or doesn’t ‘fit’ your individual criterion/taste you will instead hire somebody who does, because you’ll feel more comfortable with/ (have more trust/confidence in) an employee you ‘like’. Even you go against your preference, you will be less tolerant of this person and he/she wouldn’t last very long, irrespective of his/her degree/qualification.

Then there is the ‘right’ applicants are you getting a slice of the ‘right’ cake? Job descriptions/pre requisites are not detailed, the kind of person you want to hire may not even know it. It is a matter of information and motility as well pride and prejudice. People don’t know what they’re best suited for and neither do companies or even career organizations, an organized efficient system would not have these problems. If every member of a population was trained under the same system of schooling, measured by the same criteria then a true evaluation would be possible as was the case in Russia. Presently, it is not possible to evaluate where you stand. After the evaluation process career/job selection would be much easier, as ‘standardized’ schools do not have problems with being ‘recognized’ or ‘good enough’ simply because they are all the same. Equal education and equal opportunity, even if extra-tuitions are not permitted students will be home schooled, and yes ‘advantages’ and disparities will still be there, but a lot of ‘schooling’ prejudice will end. As there will be no complexes about better/worse school/schooling, everyone will believe in a fair chance and put in all they’ve got to be ‘good enough’ for the professions they want to get into respectively. Belief is a strong thing and ‘organization patriotism’ is vile that makes the ‘system’ superior to the individual. You cannot allow people to identify themselves as ‘cogs in a big machine’, we are not that, the individual is higher than the system; individuals create systems not vice versa. ‘Elitist’ ‘English medium’ ‘Cambridge system’ ‘London School system’ remnants of our anglophile heritage, meaningless totems we use to get that extra pomp. there are intermediate students getting scholarships to IVY league schools, their system of education is actually closer to the ‘American’ high school, a lot of ‘accented’ American citizens actually study intermediate when they come here,

1) Well it is because the Cambridge system requires that they take their O’ level exams and ‘then’ two years of A ’levels

2) It costs a lot more

But ‘our’ false complexity filled ‘British’ snobbery compels us to look down on them as they resent and look down on us. Then their ‘British’ inferiority complex, they want to be ‘American’ and think they’re too snotty to be colloquial. I, for one, have from childhood to now been bugged about my ‘so-called’ American accent. Nothing’s acceptable, everything’s inferior AND YET IMPRESSIVE: Leg-pulling horny ‘British’ comedy/mockery.

I had a friend; she went to school on a public bus and a girl in metric SPAT on her, why? O’ level snob. My ‘friend was ‘not’ good-looking, humble, shy and not at all offensive. Her crime was simple: O’ level snob. It’s the same the other way around.

Driving off to somewhere new, I wonder where the spoke of wheel will stop me, or maybe I await the ‘dhujh’ of my engine when the petrol needle halts at empty. Nothing breaks me, plastic bags flying in the deserted sandy landscape worthy of its name. I drive on unafraid unmoved awaiting something… what is it that I wait for? Advancement change? Beauty? Freedom? fragmented torn and chivalrous I stand without direction and face for I have lost myself time and time again awaiting silly signs and totems ruled by indecision , torn apart , whimsically avoiding my task.

“Actions speak louder than words’ seems that every military leader we’ve had says that, not that the politicians are bearable or that it isn’t a ‘welcome’ change. It wakes us up to what we know and knows we will not ‘act’. Funny and ironic the gist of the civilian mentality, we are back to the ‘stability’ model. Peace is only achieved when problems are resolved it isn’t passively awaiting the barbarians. ‘Act’ don’t starve yourself get up and eat, do everything to survive , that ‘is’ what religion dictates, on the one hand there is tolerance on the other: “fight with those who fight with you’.

V for vendetta, interesting film, does it offer any new information? I think not, but it sums up a lot quite nicely: neatly.

5:56 PM | Add a comment | Send a message | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Blog it
greed or blind injustice
http://www.dawn.com/2006/07/18/top1.htm

What was I looking for?

The path is long; the road rough and blinking signs everywhere: some distracting some enticing and some for the hopeless wanderer who keeps walking on. To where, the scent draws him/us, closer without reason except for reasonable doubt, curiosity reaching out pulling us/him/‘children of the age’/rats like muses, pied pipers and sirens. The rapture of endless possibility, what can be, as opposed to what is/was but something far away in a distance, across oceans, landscapes, skies and realms? Seven proceeds, forever grounding us to our fate, or what we believe to be set for us to kill that charge, to stifle the impetus of dreams, we wander still hoping, some call them moods, others insanity loneliness boredom, dynamism, the want for something different, to make a difference, to control a desirable brothel of devout followers, led blindly to the image, that dim green light which recedes as you approach it, imaginary untouchable and always distant. That’s capitalism in a nutshell, a drive towards something that is infinite in amount and distance, conjured by something better and better but never the best. You can never content yourself with what you have because there is so much more awaiting you, up for grabs. That opportunity you missed, that game-show you should’ve been on, the millions you could’ve made. The money/time you lost because you didn’t take a lucky initiative.

First rule: the more money you have, the more money you can make, money in the bank grows on interest, the bank profits ruthlessly more (especially in ‘Islamic where they ‘don’t’ even give customers a bite of their profit (in the name of interest), and your money loses value with the course of inflation, in which case there ‘is’ no incentive to keep money in the bank ‘better to invest it in plots of land and other profit making devices. Invest in stocks? (No stockbroker claims to really know anything about stocks, albeit many are employed because they can sell anyway.)Invest in anything use ‘capital’. The more money you have, the more interest you’ll get, if you don’t have at least a certain amount of money you will get no interest at all and your money will in time ‘lose’ value, and incur the loss, from what you could’ve made from it, if you accumulated enough, to put in a bank. “The richer get richer, the poor get poorer.”

Second rule: steal people’s ideas publicize them, Bill Gates did, and it is the American way. If you can’t think something up rob someone who can and take all the credit ‘cause the other person was a sitting duck. You gave the idea value by selling it, without being sold, it wouldn’t ‘have’ value/a price tag. As unethical, ruthless and stupendous that logic is, it works. As the saying goes: It’s a dog eat dog town.

Third rule; Move it, hut two three four, yes motility is the key to success; it was Hewlett & Packard that made the wandering manager rule. They were/are right, not just to gain information but to use it. We all know how easy it is to become a celebrity? Why don’t we jump at the chance, we have ‘more’ interesting lives than most writers why not bring it to the screen, simply because we don’t want to move and be pushed around? Easy industries fear competition, because it’s so easy to show them up. The easier a job, the harder it is to get it, because the founding thespians/entrepreneurs monopolize it. Own it. ‘We were here first’ is all it comes down to.

Who doesn’t have talent? Who doesn’t have a face/personality that projects ordinary people, who can’t play themselves? God’s script is the best script ever written without contest, and we all have our scripts and we play our roles better than anyone can/could. So what’s up with watching other people do things we can relate to? Individualism? Narcissism? Or simply laziness? Maybe it makes us feel like we belong, as though we aren’t alone, someone ‘cares’ enough about us to imitate us on screen; ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’, make it glitzy and glamorous and it all the more flattering, it allows us to brag to ourselves about how we could do/are doing so much better/more. And then resent them for the money they make and don’t really deserve as our jobs serve greater purpose, ‘we’ perform higher functions. And they make money off standing ovations, simply by applauding ‘us’ and we applaud them for their minute effort? ‘Make it real’ cut the superficiality/glitz out, the closer they get to being us, the more we clap and the more money ‘they’ make.

That’s what reality shows are for… who better than a doctor to play one, an actual patient works better than a dummy with ketchup spurted on his/her belly?, is privacy really ‘that’ big an issue? If ‘creative’ artists can see the real thing to devise the contents and texture of fake blood sauce, why can’t the audience see it? If you’re willing to enact it why not show the real thing? It costs less money, is far more genuine, why not? Maybe the seriousness of our jobs is at stake. Maybe it’s the aforementioned ‘first rule’? We feel that because we don’t use/acquire/require a lot of money to do what we do best we are being exploited. We are robbed of the money we could’ve made if we were frauds/ actors/not playing ourselves but ineffectively attempting to play others. So doctors/professionals write scripts for shows and profit from the ‘art’ rather than the ‘actuality’ while using their credibility to claim to portray the real thing. Of course they couldn’t do this if they were working at the time; Emergency room medical personnel wouldn’t have that kind of time. So the ruse is unveiled they project their version of the past and inject general knowledge/hearsay/ secondhand information into the fictitious enactment of the present/future.

So, we live in an age of corruption, nepotism, gambling, dissatisfaction/anomie /disenchantment and we tolerate it in the name of meritocratic ‘competition’/capitalism. Those who have money generate it; those who don’t, are stuck in themselves, unless they walk the extra mile or simply get lucky, play that winning bid/gamble. Who wants the stats? How many upwardly mobile entrepreneurs took a ‘risk’ requiring only ‘dumb luck’ to get to where they are? All of them. And how many ‘risk takers’ actuality make it? A few, is it because of ‘meritocracy’? Is it the intelligent, the talented, the genius or simply the big street-smart bully with his gang of lumber heads that takes all? What is the ‘capitalist’ debate? It’s a stability model, Survival of the fittest ‘sell yourself’, forget ethics, chuck morality, use sources eat off your daddy’s pocket. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we know why, you know why? Then what is the problem why stick with a disparate system that doesn’t work?

Insecurity arrogance, we are afraid of ‘real’ competition, we are afraid of getting our worth, in the words used to describe the alternate system of government of the Marxist Lenin ‘To each according to his/her needs, from each according to his/her ability”. Russia had 100 % literacy, 100%employment and was the best scientific innovator in the world at that time, under that rule, in his time. The statistics speak for themselves. We’d rather stick to chance/faith/the gamble than rise/fall to ourselves: our actual worth, true merit. To live in a world where words actually mean something, where right is right and wrong is wrong, justice ‘is’ served. No, we find comfort in lies, fraud and acting. We find comfort in the idea of being ‘blessed’ with no effort/fault of our own. We alienate ourselves from truth because we are afraid of how it might hurt: always going for grabs, crying over missed ‘opportunity’, deriving satisfaction from winning that whopping fortune from a silly old lottery ticket. We don’t care about merit, of ‘whether’ we ‘deserve’ money. We use the word in our defense, but no, it isn’t merit: It’s gambling and no ethic/religion/moral can defend it.

How is ability or need measured? I don’t agree with that philosophy/concept, simply because there is no real measure of aptitude or requirement. There’s test-taking , but that measures test-taking skills, your ability to reproduce and memorize information collected and discovered by somebody else, that is what will take you to Harvard/MIT(no Einstein or Thomas Edison there, neither went to any fancy schmancy schools, no ‘inventor’/’creative’/.‘genius’ ever did, feel free to contest me on that, even Harvard admits it’s true) and/or having a rich parent with connections not test taking skills, but people with connections, with rich daddies with similar jobs ‘do’ better, than people who get good scores at ivy league schools, because they have know-how, nepotism works, look at Bush he’s no exception, what holds him up? His government, his lobby, the senate that supports him, he’s not doing a one-man job; it’s the entire constitution, who in the UN council voted for the war in Iraq? The US vetoed the majority vote. Who in the US senate did ‘not’ vote for the Iraq war? Was it Kerry, no…Ladies and gentlemen, the senate controls the president. Bush’s first term, a lot of Muslims voted for him, because of Hilary Clinton’s New York address, in which she supported Israel against Palestine to win the New York Jewish majority and become senator. The second time ‘round Bush Jr. had a Christian evangelist following, after Condoleezza Rice, President’s ‘speech writer’ (and daughter of a ‘priest/preacher’ was it? No…but something similar), wrote Mr. Bush a tirade with the word ‘crusades’ on emphasis: The next president of the United States? Who knows?

No, it is not about ability or need but simply fairness, ‘equal’ opportunity, we were ‘All’ created with ‘equal’ rights , we should have an equal education , an equal standing in society and equal opportunity to do what we can with Passion and ‘skill’. I’m not saying everybody should be a doctor, but everyone should be given the ‘chance’ to make that ‘choice’ irrespective of class/status/money/where friends and family stand. We should take/give tests, that is how we commend/use the knowledge accumulated by great minds and excelling in the right tests makes us job-worthy, information/time efficiency is what is tested and is ‘very’ useful. Maybe like most of Europe we should have a socialist government where education and basic provisions are free for all? Quality control, standard and standardization: Who/what will insure that? Corrupt officials; is it a matter of trust or being trustworthy? Insecurity jumps right back , it’s as though we trust ourselves to foul up and therefore ‘try’ nothing, ‘stability’ model ,peace: leave things as they are and whine about it. That is our dictum and our fault.

A system of equal opportunity, ‘capitalism’ assumes a zero-sum game, i.e. all jobs are occupied(classical economic full employment assumption), all resources are efficiently used, the scenario is as ‘perfect’ as it can be and success and failure is up to the players even though there is a grand divide between the haves and have-nots. China is still 80% communist and her ‘open’ economy works with a parody of rules, regulations and restrictions, this is not a ‘golden’ example of capitalist victory as is so frequently propagated as. The alternate assumptions are simple, there isn’t full employment, jobs are created as people ‘need’ (demandàsupply) work, not people employed as ‘required’. Confusingly the demand supply could work in the opposite direction as jobs ‘pay’, employees are the ‘product/sales item’ not the customers therefore prospective employees should make themselves desirable and hirable. The truth is that it works both ways both employees and jobs are ‘in’ demand , both are created to fulfill/balance-out that demand and both increase over time , the efficiency of this process is questionable. Is the best available person for the job hired setting corruption and nepotism aside? There is still the ‘likeability factor, ‘there is no accounting for taste’, and as Max Weber pointed out complete objectivity cannot be reached, taste will always override commonsense and research, if you ‘don’t like a person, maybe he smells or picked his nose or doesn’t ‘fit’ your individual criterion/taste you will instead hire somebody who does, because you’ll feel more comfortable with/ (have more trust/confidence in) an employee you ‘like’. Even you go against your preference, you will be less tolerant of this person and he/she wouldn’t last very long, irrespective of his/her degree/qualification.

Then there is the ‘right’ applicants are you getting a slice of the ‘right’ cake? Job descriptions/pre requisites are not detailed, the kind of person you want to hire may not even know it. It is a matter of information and motility as well pride and prejudice. People don’t know what they’re best suited for and neither do companies or even career organizations, an organized efficient system would not have these problems. If every member of a population was trained under the same system of schooling, measured by the same criteria then a true evaluation would be possible as was the case in Russia. Presently, it is not possible to evaluate where you stand. After the evaluation process career/job selection would be much easier, as ‘standardized’ schools do not have problems with being ‘recognized’ or ‘good enough’ simply because they are all the same. Equal education and equal opportunity, even if extra-tuitions are not permitted students will be home schooled, and yes ‘advantages’ and disparities will still be there, but a lot of ‘schooling’ prejudice will end. As there will be no complexes about better/worse school/schooling, everyone will believe in a fair chance and put in all they’ve got to be ‘good enough’ for the professions they want to get into respectively. Belief is a strong thing and ‘organization patriotism’ is vile that makes the ‘system’ superior to the individual. You cannot allow people to identify themselves as ‘cogs in a big machine’, we are not that, the individual is higher than the system; individuals create systems not vice versa. ‘Elitist’ ‘English medium’ ‘Cambridge system’ ‘London School system’ remnants of our anglophile heritage, meaningless totems we use to get that extra pomp. there are intermediate students getting scholarships to IVY league schools, their system of education is actually closer to the ‘American’ high school, a lot of ‘accented’ American citizens actually study intermediate when they come here,

1) Well it is because the Cambridge system requires that they take their O’ level exams and ‘then’ two years of A ’levels

2) O'levels/alevels costs a lot more

But ‘our’ false complexity-filled ‘British’ snobbery compels us to look down on them as they resent and look down on us. Then there's the good old ‘British’ inferiority complex, they want to be ‘American’ and think they’re too snotty to be colloquial. I, for one, have from childhood to now been bugged about my ‘so-called’ American accent. Nothing’s acceptable, everything’s inferior AND YET IMPRESSIVE: Leg-pulling horny ‘British’ comedy/mockery.

I had a friend; she went to school on a public bus and a girl in metric SPAT on her, why? O’ level snob. My ‘friend was ‘not’ good-looking, humble, shy and not at all offensive. Her crime was simple: O’ level snob. It’s the same the other way around.

check out ' A scanner darkly":

http://wip.warnerbros.com/ascannerdarkly/

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July 17
hmm
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 8214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196 4428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609

Bush?

who in the American senate did not vote for the Iraq?

was it Kerry

was it Al gore

was it Bush?

the war would've happened democrats or republicans

Bush's first term: a lot of 'muslims' were specifically voting for Bush jr , because of Hilary Clinton's pro-Israel, antiPalestinian stance in NewYork(the voters there are mostly Jewish , she wanted tto be and bacame a senator)

Is Bush a pawn? all presidents are when you have Countries with 'strong' parlimiantry legislation , an org like the CIA , which will drop u dead if you make one false move and a trillion biggerthings than the media's raving evangelistic sadist 'fortunate son' playing his act.

The point: politics will always be dirty ruthless and 'secretive'

so why don't we just talk abt something interesting and worthwhile instead?

like 'growing trees' :D
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July 16
Forward the revolution,our time is now
Fertilized soil can be dried up to sand: This process cannot be reversed. Sand is useless in agriculture (unless you want to grow a cactus). Then, why do we waste our soil? Why do we throw away seeds? There is not enough food/fruit, not enough plantation and too much pollution, a depleting ozone layer, global warming, and what do we do? Ignore the basics. Plant a tree for crying out loud! We’ve known about how easy it is from kindergarten, plant a seed, used fertilizer depending on the PH level of the soil, water it (if you have enough water to live on , you have enough to water a plant) give it sun and air , if there are any further complications, read up on gardening , it’s doesn’t take a genius its not rocket science. We have fundraisers to build (ghost) schools, why not seed raisers to plant trees in those schools and elsewhere.

Electricity, it is easier to generate it than to steal it. What’s common though? Why? Lack of information, knowledge, take a pair of apples stick too cheap electrodes in it and let there be light, Thomas Edison worked at a railway station, how rich could he be? The problem with us is we’d rather charge whatever energy we have in a violent or criminal cause, we think it’s easier and smarter to us nitrogen fertilizer to blow things up than it is to use it to make Eden on earth. We have the misconception that it is easier to steal/destroy than create/grow, simply because the former is faster, to quote the lyrics of a song I forget “One tree to make a thousand matches, It only takes one match to burn a thousand trees” I say ay, forward the revolution to this, I say we don’t lack brain power/aptitude, what we do lack is a positive spirit, the surge to embrace the simplicity of functioning goodwill, we’d blame Big bad bush or Al-Qaeda for all our problems , who are the target? Us: civilians, and who are the recruits? Don’t look to far the answer is just the same, if governments and terrorists are bad because the play at the masses (Shakespeare’s mob) with jolts of fear and bouts of destruction, we are bad because we play along , we join in.

Who gives Bush power? His government. Who gives government power? People. The people are us. WE: the youth of the nation, the drawing/sitting room intellectual critics, it is us. What do we do to make things better? What do we do with our knowledge? Frustrate ourselves label ourselves cogs in a big machine , with no spirit of innovation or entrepreneurship we scout for jobs and complain of their unavailability, when we ‘can’ create jobs for ourselves, silicon valley wasn’t built in a day? Do our engineers not know how to build solar panels, why buy the technology when we can build it at home, improvise it, innovate it, develop it, we have the resources, and we have the information, what stops us? Laziness support/ funds? What pushes us down? Did apple have ANY OF THOSE THINGS to begin with , the answer is that we push ourselves down , we undermine our own abilities ‘cause we’d rather work at a ‘multi-national corp.’ or a chemical plant then use ‘simple’ ideas to better ourselves. Do it as a side thing? Do something? What is the point of knowledge that is practically beneficial when we’re sitting ducks, not using it, not putting ideas to action? Praxis: our savior , as long as we laze around wait for others to take action , we see the fault in their ways , criticism equals frustration , Do it yourself , rise , speak , work implement , the time , is now. Your time is now. Unfortunately only children/young people who have neither experience skill nor degrees to actually work efficiently and maturely are the ones that are interested, the rest of us, the people who can, would rather mingle at silly parties say spiteful things, frustrate ourselves with politics and like any distressed damsel await a hero/angel/miracle to save us. “Waiting for the barbarians” we whine passively deft in our purpose, crowned with a fool’s glory, writhing in self molded pain

And what would passionate hot-blooded young Semi-skilled half-educated labor do? Children of the Y-generation brought up to question and weep over the treachery of Israel, the unfairness that rules our planet derives our attention, grown up knowing about , relishing over matters we have no actual control of, what happens when you frustrate yourself with your lack of control? Deviance: destruction, emotional withdrawal, anomie, deregulation disenchantment, fighting, war and for what? Another song’s lyrics “War, what is good for, absolutely nothing”: The little people dependent on authority on illogical rules and laws that stifle us, choking confining, what Islamic org motivates growth or education, or the self-reliant beautiful teachings of the Quran? Two words: jihad and superpower, that’s all we hear from our Maulvis and yes there are missionaries (expeditions funded by our Zakaat) sent to the states to tell people that ‘dogs’; should not be kept as pets as they are ‘Na-pak’. Yes, that’s where the money goes, educated and pillaged by idiocy and ignorance, we are the fools ladies and gentleman, we fund the taking of our children’s lives by overextended drug abuse, in Kashmir, in Afghanistan , in Waziristan and we account for the ‘welfare’ of sadistic ‘religious scholars’ that we deem ignorant. It is in fact ‘Us’ , as we don’t care about how our banks spend our money , we don’t care about what our ‘Zakaat’ is funding ,we don’t bother to take that one extra step. We think ‘politics’ and using a fancy vocabulary makes us ‘concerned’ citizens.

Well, rise march take off your blindfolds, stop duping yourself, you are the enemy and the victim, hoodwinked and foolish. Epitomic ideal figurines representative of how ‘jahaalat’ (the age of ignorance), lives on and we breed it.
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July 11
belief orange and tango
" I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden by the shore"-the beatles har pal muskurahut jaan ke paar asli zindagi maazoor aur bad haal manzoor hai ya naheen , dil farogh zinda aaj idhar eik saya eik roshan diya eik aazmaish eik dor ki eik mustaqbil ki eik aur char chand ki roshni sooraj dhaley aur muzboot aazmaish kaam aur dil jaan ki jiyo jaago laroo marro lekin darna manna hai- me"five minutes ago? here we are again you and I wondering why do u wonder and visit and lurk??? we're all in hiding either from or with ourselves burried in commericialism drama and crowd life

or sitting alone in the dark

I'm not into literature either , Junaid(in testimonials) called me 'La belle dame sans merci" so I was hoping you'd differ , all I want are simple discussions on the news, math and things to that effect, numerology even, did you get my report.
I'm not into literature, I like shakepeare but I'm too literal and objective to go one the wandering 'lit 'freak path.

I was studying computers last year , figured I'd switch to law , couldn't leave math alone , so I opted for econ, math1 math2 stats1 stats2 'very' technical
even eco is a bit.
I don't like theoretical physics and 'God' philosophy... it feels like speculation without reall boundaries.Just my opinion , not an ultimate 'truth'

I don't know last summer, there was a train crash around Karachi and the number of dead were far more significant , it happened cos the conducter/driver couldn't read a signal and 'our' trains are very old. I think just as 'bollywood' projects , (in movies like 'Dil hai hindustani,even rang de basanti) that the first politically correct move is to blame it on 'terrorism and pakistanis , though technically there was not a single Pakistani in the sept11 attacks or even in the Indian plane hijacking , Arabs and afghans are 'not' Pakistani... the idea is to bring the neverending conflict of kashmir to the table.
Its time , India, its media and its politicians stop dragging 'Pakistanis' into it , 'cause that gives Fox news and Bush an excuse to drag us in , and we are geographically in a delicately strategic position as 'we' were during the last world war... we have enough crap,refugees and drugs fleeting from the Afghan border , afghanis , the Taliban who don't even recognize us as muslim , who blame Pakistan and Ayub Khan's failings for their post-war disaster.Pakistan as usual (it always happens during military rule) was being america's scared little lapdog, and still is
Its understood that drugs trade orgs fund terrorist activities in and around Afghanistan , but no one's doing anything about the poppy feilds?
the Taliban , their link to al-Quaeda? no proof , no admittance nothing
bin Laden? who is he? 'where' is he?not Pakistani that's for sure.
It's all a ploy to get Afghanistan and Pakistan undercontrol , cos we're right in the middle of everything literally. Everyone knows that the Iraq war was/is for oil
and now Iran? if they had weapons , the weapons would be a threat in themselves and no 'idiot' Bush would dare to attack.
Except if there was a nuclear forcefield like in Asimov's science fiction story "There breeds a man" it would suffer a huge loss in energy that it would be best avoided even then/if.
they will not have Pakistan's support unless Musharraf darling wants anarchy and chaos, see Balochistan used to be a part of Iran , and the tribes in waziristan and joining up with tribes in NWFP and Afghanistan , because they feel wronged and as Mushy pointed out 'they are and have been wronged" and the military a divide weakened force wouldn't 'want' to stop them.And couldn't anyway , '50' officials 'kidnapped' in Iraq, how can bush expect dear old Mush to control anything here?
You want explanations? it's no conspiracy it's all around you , open ur eyes use ur head and work with things you 'do' have control over like global warming/dimming, go green , plant the seeds that you so often throw away , they come cheap there's not enuf food in the world and there's a whole lot of pollution , not to mention dried up soil becomes sand and cannot be recovered. I know its a gradual process but do you rally want the world to turn into a desert washing away by a meg tsunami?
cos hey you like everyone else would rather bicker and speculate abt dumb old powerhungry politicians and their transperant mindgames.7:31 AM | Add a comment | Send a message | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Blog it
July 08
golden panorama
Ĥeroin chic says:

i cant stand "lol" either

dee dee says:

lol too

dee dee says:

that's automated too typed after a joke even when u don't feel like laughing

dee dee says:

but then how do you convey an actual laugh?

Ĥeroin chic says:

some people actually say lol in real life

dee dee says:

a feeling

dee dee says:

empathic magic a click a a volcanic mush gush

dee dee says:

an actual deep meandering thought a lonely magnetic want a dopey dazed current of affection

dee dee says:

deep subtle nearolinguistic heart to heart

dee dee says:

meshed into a 'hiccup'??? a very cheesy

dee dee says:

finale It was a usually boring lazy sunday

severence

2007-10-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

John N. Mitchell - "The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

if-Rudyard Kipling

I have mosquito bites all over my left arm...
this isn't random at al its casual colloqu... but not random...
i'm still a die-hard salinger fan and am happy to learn that flatuates is a word for 'farts'...hmm

Dawning is an age an era an epoch
a feathered bird shooting thru the skies
in eminent and caustic glory
rise and fear

haven't been doing anything much , I had a fight with some guy yesterday, we weren't really friends anymore, anyhow, 'but you know me, well maybe you don't.
Well... I have habit of beibg in denial when it comes to letting go.. I whine I annoy I poke and badger 'why don't we talk' anymore?' "why are u being mean to me?' etc etc and get what's coming
comeuppance(pence?) karma retribution I don't know.

well I'm never speaking to him again.
' removed him from my facebook list
and feel like a real dumb ass for clinging so long
I mean we were'friends' not in a 'relationship'
friends don't break-up

'friends' part
on civil terms

that dictum's a fluke
wake-up call finally answered

but i guess i should've taken it in, understood when he started teasing me abt dating this was obviously going to be ephemeral .
so great
slow-learner
toading to the finish line
musing upon tomorrow's lie

coronary from mukhan

2007-09-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Acha, so I can't stand this platform...
wish I could get past it.
morning papers stink.
mukhan is the udru word for butter
and mukhan-lagaana is buttering someone up..in the english context too
WEll now I'm begining to not hate blogger so much so hey and hi and boo.
I was complaining then however.

To keep the members of our solace and kind community sacrosanct and protected from evil-doers such as me or you...
I'm not making any money off adsense but I've had visitors which is nice I suppose.
I wonder if they're doing strange things with my photos... a lubrious thought scrawled across my thinker tinker.
Norm- I'd like to define normality as everyone thinks they have the right to.
Sometimes I don't excercise my rights... :(

Hamlet:
To thine ownself be true and it must follow as the night the day and thou canst be false to any man-

But that dread of something after death
the undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveller returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than travel to those we know not of.-

a)The whole thing:
To be or not to be, that is question:
Whether 'tis nobler to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
Or by opposing end them?

To die: to sleep;
No more;and,by a sleep to say we end
the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
that flesh is heir to,'tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished.

To die;to sleep;
To sleep perchance to dream:ay there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?(terribly famous line)
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life;
For who could bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of disprized love(Hena insists it's 'despised', she studied it,it could be? a lot of shakepearean words are contested. I feel it is 'disprized , since he lost her love rather respect, when she assumed he was mad, and he drove her mad in return since she was still atttached to him),the laws delay;
The insolence of office, and the spurns
The patient merit of the unworthy takes,
when he himself might his quietus(in slence ?) make;
With a bare bodkin(nude ref hmm)? who would fardels(?) bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,(no one knows the troubles he faced! no one knows his pain!)

But the dread of something after death
the undiscovered country from whose bourn,
no traveller returns puzzles the will;
and makes us rather bear those ills we have,
than travel to those we know not of?

Thus conscience makes cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er the pale cast of thought,
and enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action-

(Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe;
desingning futures, where nothing will occur-Sylvia Plath)

What's in a name , a rose by any other name would smell as sweet-Juliet(Though 'Ann of green Gables' vehemently differed,..Katherine with a K is so much more distinguished was it? than Catherine with a C, and good old Cathy erases the 'K' and chalks down a 'C')

The earth like water, has bubbles-W.S
Et tu Brute/Brutus?-W.S

then there are the less-than-fortunate 'Rosalind's a roe and a crow" Mercutio speeches
and Romeo's Rosiland's-She hath Diana's wit and chastity and perfection speeches.

and Queen Mab, echo, Aurora... stuff i barely recall and currently lack refs for.

and here's If-Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
but make allowance for their doubting too,
if you can wait(something very important at Lecole)
And not be tired by waiting
Or being lied about don't deal in lies,(inuendos hard to forgive!)
And yet not look to good nor talk to wise,(says the definitive of
'the pompous prig')

If you can dream
and not make dreams your master;
If you can think
and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
and treat those two imposters just
the same
If you bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools;
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop and bulid 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And-which is more-you'll be a Man, my son!

funny odd

2007-09-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

I've been advised to punctuate.
so here goes.
punctuating away.
i am.
jahwa!
hmm
I think i flirted with someone today..."uitterly boring experience"??
anyway i was looking at him and smiling and he was smiling and played with hair a bit bounced about a bit and i got abashed hmm

I don't know why i'm making such an issue of it.
really don't know.
it really bothers me though.
quite a lot.
like i should box myself or something.
or maybe I'm just gloomy for other reasons i refuse to deal with.
or hmm
forgotten how to write
if i ever knew how
talent dances bobs about ebbing flowing
until there is none
or the illusion of it is vanquished
anyway have to do research for thus lumun thing
that i#m not too hot on
really have to do some research 'Nepal's stance on the palestinian-Israeli conflict'
can't see pictures on my facebook funwall..
and my vampire is beat
poor vampire
lyari boxing sounds incredibly interesting
I should study econometrics.
ciao

Dreaming reminds me of 'sea fever'- John Masefeild(who was never at sea), New york,New York-Sinatra and Peter Pan too, "And straight on 'til morning"

Sea fever:
I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagull crying.

I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife:

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Frank Sinatra - New York, New York Lyrics

Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York

These vagabond shoes
Are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it
New York, New York

I wanna wake up in a city
That doesn't sleep
And find I'm king of the hill
Top of the heap

These little town blues
Are melting a way
I'll make a brand-new start of it
In old New York

If I can make it there
I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York

New York, New York
I want to wake up
In a city that never sleeps
And find I'm a number one, top of the list
King of the hill, a number one

These little town blues
Are melting a way
I'm gonna make a brand-new start of it
In old New York

And... if I can make it there
I'm gonna make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York

It's all about the journey even if it never happens, eh?
this is 'me' signing off

apophthegm memory article

2007-09-28T04:05:00.000-07:00

onus deprived

ennui eternal

ignored again or not enough

blur or unending disaster

comeuppence or faith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
the real rain man.
"Extremes of Human Memory

By Joshua Foer
Source: National Geographic
mindpowernews.com

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). "S," a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he'd first heard them.

But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there's one on each side of the brain—include an arch-shaped structure called the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. The memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area is the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.

AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.

What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress's print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.

The Man With No Memory

I met EP at his home, a bright bungalow in suburban San Diego, on a warm spring day. I drove there with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist and memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center, and Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP's home some 200 times, he always greets her as a stranger.

Frascino sits down opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that gauge his common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the temperature water boils at. She wants to demonstrate what IQ tests have already proved: EP is no dummy. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house, sat down at my table, and very earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.

"What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks.

"Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?" He chuckles and shoots me a sidelong and knowing glance, as if to say, Do these people think I'm an idiot? But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, "But that's a really interesting question you've got there. Really interesting." He has no idea he's heard it many times before.

"Why do we cook food?"

"Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity.

"Why do we study history?"

"Well, we study history to know what happened in the past."

"But why do we want to know what happened in the past?"

"Because, it's just interesting, frankly."

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.

"Hmm. It says memory loss."

EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.

Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness.

On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which one can only imagine must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he'd be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can't remember and a future he can't contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. "He's happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't have any stress in his life," says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.
"How old are you now?" Squire asks him.

"Let's see, 59 or 60. You got me. My memory is not that perfect. It's pretty good, but sometimes people ask me questions that I just don't get. I'm sure you have that sometimes."

"Sure, I do," says Squire, kindly, even though EP is almost a quarter of a century off.

Memory and the Damaged Brain

An enormous amount of what science knows about memory was learned from a damaged brain that is remarkably similar to EP's. It belongs to an 81-year-old man known as "HM," an amnesiac who lives in a nursing home in Connecticut. As a child, HM suffered from epilepsy that began after a bike accident at age nine. By the time he was 27, he was blacking out ten times a week and unable to do much of anything. A neurosurgeon named William Scoville thought he could cure HM's epilepsy with an experimental surgery that would excise the part of the brain that he suspected was causing the problem.

In 1953, while HM lay awake on the operating table, his scalp anesthetized, Scoville drilled a pair of holes just above the patient's eyes. The surgeon lifted the front of HM's brain with a small metal spatula while a metal straw sucked out most of the hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding medial temporal lobes. The surgery reduced the number of HM's seizures, but it soon became clear that he'd also been robbed of his memory.

Over the next five decades, HM was the subject of countless experiments and became the most studied patient in the history of brain science. Given the horrific outcome of Scoville's surgery, everyone assumed HM would be a singular case study.

EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy black-and-white MRIs of their brains are uncannily similar, though EP's damage is a bit more extensive. Even if you have no idea what a normal brain ought to look like, the gaping symmetrical holes stare back at you like eyes.

Like EP, HM was able to hold on to memories just long enough to think about them, but once his brain moved to something else, he could never bring them back. In one famous experiment, Brenda Milner, a Canadian psychologist, asked HM to remember the number 584 for as long as possible. To keep the number on the tip of his tongue, he used a complicated system, which he recounted to Milner:

"It's easy. You just remember 8. You see 5, 8, and 4 add to 17. You remember 8, subtract it from 17, and it leaves 9. Divide 9 in half and you get 5 and 4 and there you are: 584. Easy."

He concentrated on this elaborate mantra for several minutes. But as soon as he was distracted, the number dissolved. He couldn't even remember that he'd been asked to remember something. Though scientists had known that there was a difference between long- and short-term memory since the late 19th century, they now had evidence in HM that the two types of memory happened in different parts of the brain, and that without most of the hippocampal area, HM couldn't turn a short-term memory into a long-term one.

Researchers also learned more about another kind of remembering from HM. Even though he couldn't say what he'd had for breakfast or name the current President, there were some things that he could remember. Milner found that he was capable of learning complicated tasks without even realizing it. In one study, she showed that HM could learn how to trace inside a five-pointed star on a piece of paper while looking at its reflection in a mirror. Each time Milner gave HM the task, he claimed never to have tried it before. And yet, each day his brain got better at guiding his hand to work in reverse. Despite his amnesia, he was remembering.

Theories of Memory

Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM have lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things you know without consciously thinking about them, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror. Those unconscious memories don't rely on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They happen in completely different parts of the brain. Motor skill learning takes place at the base of the brain in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning at the brain's center. As EP and HM so strikingly demonstrate, you can damage one part of the brain, and the rest will keep on working.

The metaphors we most often use to describe memory—the photograph, the tape recorder, the mirror, the hard drive—all suggest mechanical accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences. And for a long time it was a commonly held view that our brains function as perfect recorders—that a lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can't be found it isn't because they've disappeared, but only because we've lost access to them.

A Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield thought he'd proved that theory by the 1940s after using electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients while they were lying conscious on the operating table. He was trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy, but he found that when his probe touched certain parts of the temporal lobe, the patients started describing vivid experiences. When he touched the same spot again, he often elicited the same descriptions. Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.

Most scientists now agree that the strange recollections triggered by Penfield were closer to fantasies or hallucinations than to memories, but the sudden reappearance of long-lost episodes from one's past is an experience surely familiar to everyone. Still, as a recorder, the brain does a notoriously wretched job. Tragedies and humiliations seem to be etched most sharply, often with the most unbearable exactitude, while those memories we think we really need—the name of the acquaintance, the time of the appointment, the location of the car keys—have a habit of evaporating.

Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has tried to estimate the cost of all that evaporation. According to a decade's worth of "forgetting diaries" kept by his undergraduate students (the amount of time it takes to find the car keys, for example), Anderson calculates that people squander more than a month of every year just compensating for things they've forgotten.

The Woman With Perfect Memory

AJ remembers when she first realized that her memory was not the same as everyone else's. She was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I was not happy because I hated school," she says. Her mother was helping her with her homework, but her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started thinking about the year before, when I was in sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then I started realizing that I was remembering the exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago that day." At first she didn't think much of it. But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly one year earlier.

"Each year has a certain feeling, and then each time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of 1981 feels completely different from the winter of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the petite madeleine cake that sent Marcel Proust's mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of Things Past. Their mere mention starts her reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten levels deeper and more intense than that."

"My brother used to say, 'Oh, she's the Rain Man.' And I was like, 'No I'm not!' But I thought, what if I really. . . . Am I? Is there something wrong with me?" At one point AJ considered setting up shop on the nearby boardwalk as the Human Calendar and charging people five bucks to let them try to stump her with dates. She decided against it. "I don't want to be a sideshow."
It would seem as though having a memory like AJ's would make life qualitatively different—and better. Our culture inundates us with new information, yet so little of it is captured and cataloged in a way that it can be retrieved later. What would it mean to have all that otherwise lost knowledge at our fingertips? Would it make us more persuasive, more confident? Would it make us, in some fundamental sense, smarter? To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about oneself. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of our memory's shortcomings?

The dream that AJ embodies, the perfection of memory, has been with us since at least the fifth century B.C. and the supposed invention of a technique known as the "art of memory" by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos.

Simonides had been the sole survivor of a catastrophic roof collapse at a banquet hall in Thessaly. According to Cicero, who wrote an account of the incident four centuries later, the bodies were mangled beyond recognition. But in his mind, Simonides was able to close his eyes to the chaos and see each of the guests at his seat around the table. He'd discovered the powerful technique known as the loci method. If you can convert whatever it is you're trying to remember into vivid mental images and then arrange them in some sort of imagined architectural space, known as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible.

Peter of Ravenna, a noted Italian jurist and author of a renowned memory textbook of the 15th century, was said to have used the loci method to memorize the Bible, the entire legal canon, 200 of Cicero's speeches, and 1,000 verses of Ovid. For leisure, he would reread books cached away in his memory palaces. "When I left my country to visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I can truly say I carry everything I own with me," he wrote.

It's hard for us to imagine what it must have been like to live in a culture before the advent of printed books or before you could carry around a ballpoint pen and paper to jot notes. "In a world of few books, and those mostly in communal libraries, one's education had to be remembered, for one could never depend on having continuing access to specific material," writes Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory, a study of the role of memory techniques in medieval culture. "Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories." Thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, was celebrated for composing his Summa Theologica entirely in his head and dictating it from memory with no more than a few notes. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder could repeat 2,000 names in the order they'd been given to him. A Roman named Simplicius could recite Virgil by heart—backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest of virtues since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. Indeed, a common theme in the lives of the saints was that they had extraordinary memories.

After Simonides' discovery, the art of memory was codified with an extensive set of rules and instructions by the likes of Cicero and Quintilian and in countless medieval memory treatises. Students were taught not only what to remember but also techniques for how to remember it. In fact, there are long traditions of memory training in many cultures. The Jewish Talmud, embedded with mnemonics—techniques for preserving memories—was passed down orally for centuries. Koranic memorization is still considered a supreme achievement among devout Muslims. Traditional West African griots and South Slavic bards recount colossal epics entirely from memory.

But over the past millennium, many of us have undergone a profound shift. We've gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of technological crutches that we've invented so that we don't have to store information in our brains. We've gone, you might say, from remembering everything to remembering awfully little. We have photographs to record our experiences, calendars to keep track of our schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store our collective knowledge, and Post-it notes for our scribbles. What have the implications of this outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for our society? Has something been lost?

To supplement the memories in her mind, AJ also stores a trove of external memories. In addition to the detailed diary she's kept since childhood, she has a library of close to a thousand videotapes copied off TV, a trunk full of radio recordings, and a "research library" consisting of 50 notebooks filled with facts she's found on the Internet that relate to events in her memory. "I just want to keep it all," she says.

Preserving her past has become the central compulsion of AJ's life. "When I'm blow-drying my hair in the morning, I'll think of whatever day it is. And to pass the time, I'll just run through that day in my head over the last 20-something years—like flipping through a Rolodex."

AJ traces the origins of her unusual memory to a move from New Jersey to California that her family made when she was just eight years old. Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and familiar, and California was foreign and strange. It was the first time she understood that growing up and moving on necessarily meant forgetting and leaving behind. "Because I hate change so much, after that it was like I wanted to be able to capture everything. Because I know, eventually, nothing will ever be the same," she says.

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, believes that at bottom, AJ might not be all that different from the rest of us. After the initial announcement of AJ's condition in the journal Neurocase, Ericsson suggested that what needs to be explained about AJ is not some extraordinary, unprecedented innate memory but rather her extraordinary obsession with her past. People always remember things that are important to them. Baseball fanatics often have an encyclopedic knowledge for statistics, chess masters often remember tricky gambits that took place years ago, actors often remember scripts long after performing them. Everyone has got a memory for something. Ericsson believes that if anyone cared about holding on to the past as much as AJ does, the feat of memorizing one's life would be well within reach.
I mention Ericsson's theory to AJ, and she becomes visibly upset. "I just want to call him on the phone and yell at him. If I spent that much time memorizing my life, then I really would be a boring person," she says. "I don't sit around and memorize it. I just know it."

Remembering everything is both maddening and lonely for AJ. "I remember good, which is very comforting. But I also remember bad—and every bad choice," she says. "And I really don't give myself a break. There are all these forks in the road, moments you have to make a choice, and then it's ten years later, and I'm still beating myself up over them. I don't forgive myself for a lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to protect you. I feel like it just hasn't protected me. I would love just for five minutes to be a simple person and not have all this stuff in my head. "Most people have called what I have a gift," AJ says, "but I call it a burden."

The Seven Sins of Memory

The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Most of the things that pass through our brains don't need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has developed a taxonomy of forgetting to catalog what he calls the seven sins of memory. The sin of absentmindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his 2.5-million-dollar cello in the back of a taxi. The Vietnam War veteran still haunted by the battlefield suffers from the sin of persistence. The politician who loses a word on the tip of his tongue during a stump speech is experiencing the sin of blocking. Though we curse these failures of memory on an almost daily basis, Schacter says, that's only because we don't see their benefits. Each sin is really the flip side of a virtue, "a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects." There are good evolutionary reasons why our memories fail us in the specific ways they do. If everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or thought about was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we'd be drowning in irrelevant information.

In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an inability to forget. He remembers every detail of his life, but he can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. He can't prioritize, he can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."

To age is to forget, also. Roughly five million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and even more suffer from mild cognitive impairment, or lesser degrees of memory loss. When asked to recall a list of 15 words read 20 minutes earlier, octogenarians in one large study recalled fewer than 60 percent, while the twentysomethings could remember close to 90 percent.

Not surprisingly, people have been searching a long time for chemicals that might halt that tide of forgetting. According to the Franciscan Bernardo de Lavinheta, writing in the early 1500s, "Artificial memory is twofold: the first part consists in medicines and poultices." The second part, of course, is the art of memory, which Lavinheta deemed both safer and more effective (since memory medicines can sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of "drying up the brain"). Today ginkgo biloba is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, or added to fruit smoothies and "smart" soft drinks, even without conclusive evidence that it either boosts memory—or dries up the brain.

Drugs to Enhance Memory

Within the past decades, drug companies have elevated the search to brave new heights. Armed with a sophisticated understanding of memory's molecular underpinnings, they've sought to create new drugs that amplify the brain's natural capacity to remember. In recent years, at least three companies have been formed with the express purpose of developing memory drugs. One of those companies, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is attempting to develop a class of molecules known as ampakines, which facilitate the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is one of the primary excitatory chemicals passed across the synapses between neurons. By amplifying its effects, Cortex hopes to improve the brain's underlying ability to form and retrieve memories. When administered to middle-age rats, one ampakine was able to fully reverse their age-related decline in the cellular mechanism of memory.

It may not be long before drugs such as ampakines begin to reach the market; when they do, they could have an enormous impact on society. Though the pharmaceutical companies are searching for therapeutic treatments to stave off Alzheimer's and combat dementia, it seems inevitable that their pills will end up in the hands of students cramming for exams and probably a whole lot of other people who just want to enhance their brains. Already psycho-stimulants designed to treat ADHD, like Adderall and Ritalin, are used as "study buddies" by as many as one in four students at some colleges trying to increase their concentration and improve their memories.

All of this raises some troubling ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society where people have vastly better memories? In fact, what would it even mean to have a better memory? Would it mean remembering things only exactly as they happened, free from the revisions and exaggerations that our mind naturally creates? Would it mean having a memory that forgets traumas? Would it mean having a memory that remembers only those things we want it to remember? Would it mean becoming AJ?

I want to see EP's unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he's interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, "not really," so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right. I ask EP why we're not turning to the left instead.

"I'd just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don't know why," he says.

If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he'd never be able to do it. He doesn't even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he's picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody's wallet. He's never able to explain how they came into his possession.

"Our neighbors love him because he'll come up to them and just start talking to them," Beverly says. Even though he thinks he's meeting them for the first time, he's learned through habit that these are people he should feel comfortable around, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.

We cross the street and I'm alone with EP for the first time. He doesn't know who I am or what I'm doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I'm there for some good reason. He is trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare, blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. "You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder," I want to tell him. "The last 50 years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you're going to forget that this conversation ever even happened." I imagine the sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble.

We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he's forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn't recognize, to a home he doesn't know. In front of the house, there is a car parked with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.
Extremes of Human Memory

By Joshua Foer
Source: National Geographic

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). "S," a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he'd first heard them.

But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there's one on each side of the brain—include an arch-shaped structure called the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. The memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area is the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.

AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.

What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress's print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.

The Man With No Memory

I met EP at his home, a bright bungalow in suburban San Diego, on a warm spring day. I drove there with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist and memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center, and Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP's home some 200 times, he always greets her as a stranger.

Frascino sits down opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that gauge his common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the temperature water boils at. She wants to demonstrate what IQ tests have already proved: EP is no dummy. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house, sat down at my table, and very earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.

"What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks.

"Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?" He chuckles and shoots me a sidelong and knowing glance, as if to say, Do these people think I'm an idiot? But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, "But that's a really interesting question you've got there. Really interesting." He has no idea he's heard it many times before.

"Why do we cook food?"

"Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity.

"Why do we study history?"

"Well, we study history to know what happened in the past."

"But why do we want to know what happened in the past?"

"Because, it's just interesting, frankly."

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.

"Hmm. It says memory loss."

EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.

Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness.

On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which one can only imagine must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he'd be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can't remember and a future he can't contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. "He's happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't have any stress in his life," says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.
"How old are you now?" Squire asks him.

"Let's see, 59 or 60. You got me. My memory is not that perfect. It's pretty good, but sometimes people ask me questions that I just don't get. I'm sure you have that sometimes."

"Sure, I do," says Squire, kindly, even though EP is almost a quarter of a century off.

Memory and the Damaged Brain

An enormous amount of what science knows about memory was learned from a damaged brain that is remarkably similar to EP's. It belongs to an 81-year-old man known as "HM," an amnesiac who lives in a nursing home in Connecticut. As a child, HM suffered from epilepsy that began after a bike accident at age nine. By the time he was 27, he was blacking out ten times a week and unable to do much of anything. A neurosurgeon named William Scoville thought he could cure HM's epilepsy with an experimental surgery that would excise the part of the brain that he suspected was causing the problem.

In 1953, while HM lay awake on the operating table, his scalp anesthetized, Scoville drilled a pair of holes just above the patient's eyes. The surgeon lifted the front of HM's brain with a small metal spatula while a metal straw sucked out most of the hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding medial temporal lobes. The surgery reduced the number of HM's seizures, but it soon became clear that he'd also been robbed of his memory.

Over the next five decades, HM was the subject of countless experiments and became the most studied patient in the history of brain science. Given the horrific outcome of Scoville's surgery, everyone assumed HM would be a singular case study.

EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy black-and-white MRIs of their brains are uncannily similar, though EP's damage is a bit more extensive. Even if you have no idea what a normal brain ought to look like, the gaping symmetrical holes stare back at you like eyes.

Like EP, HM was able to hold on to memories just long enough to think about them, but once his brain moved to something else, he could never bring them back. In one famous experiment, Brenda Milner, a Canadian psychologist, asked HM to remember the number 584 for as long as possible. To keep the number on the tip of his tongue, he used a complicated system, which he recounted to Milner:

"It's easy. You just remember 8. You see 5, 8, and 4 add to 17. You remember 8, subtract it from 17, and it leaves 9. Divide 9 in half and you get 5 and 4 and there you are: 584. Easy."

He concentrated on this elaborate mantra for several minutes. But as soon as he was distracted, the number dissolved. He couldn't even remember that he'd been asked to remember something. Though scientists had known that there was a difference between long- and short-term memory since the late 19th century, they now had evidence in HM that the two types of memory happened in different parts of the brain, and that without most of the hippocampal area, HM couldn't turn a short-term memory into a long-term one.

Researchers also learned more about another kind of remembering from HM. Even though he couldn't say what he'd had for breakfast or name the current President, there were some things that he could remember. Milner found that he was capable of learning complicated tasks without even realizing it. In one study, she showed that HM could learn how to trace inside a five-pointed star on a piece of paper while looking at its reflection in a mirror. Each time Milner gave HM the task, he claimed never to have tried it before. And yet, each day his brain got better at guiding his hand to work in reverse. Despite his amnesia, he was remembering.

Theories of Memory

Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM have lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things you know without consciously thinking about them, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror. Those unconscious memories don't rely on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They happen in completely different parts of the brain. Motor skill learning takes place at the base of the brain in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning at the brain's center. As EP and HM so strikingly demonstrate, you can damage one part of the brain, and the rest will keep on working.

The metaphors we most often use to describe memory—the photograph, the tape recorder, the mirror, the hard drive—all suggest mechanical accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences. And for a long time it was a commonly held view that our brains function as perfect recorders—that a lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can't be found it isn't because they've disappeared, but only because we've lost access to them.

A Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield thought he'd proved that theory by the 1940s after using electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients while they were lying conscious on the operating table. He was trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy, but he found that when his probe touched certain parts of the temporal lobe, the patients started describing vivid experiences. When he touched the same spot again, he often elicited the same descriptions. Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.

Most scientists now agree that the strange recollections triggered by Penfield were closer to fantasies or hallucinations than to memories, but the sudden reappearance of long-lost episodes from one's past is an experience surely familiar to everyone. Still, as a recorder, the brain does a notoriously wretched job. Tragedies and humiliations seem to be etched most sharply, often with the most unbearable exactitude, while those memories we think we really need—the name of the acquaintance, the time of the appointment, the location of the car keys—have a habit of evaporating.

Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has tried to estimate the cost of all that evaporation. According to a decade's worth of "forgetting diaries" kept by his undergraduate students (the amount of time it takes to find the car keys, for example), Anderson calculates that people squander more than a month of every year just compensating for things they've forgotten.

The Woman With Perfect Memory

AJ remembers when she first realized that her memory was not the same as everyone else's. She was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I was not happy because I hated school," she says. Her mother was helping her with her homework, but her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started thinking about the year before, when I was in sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then I started realizing that I was remembering the exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago that day." At first she didn't think much of it. But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly one year earlier.

"Each year has a certain feeling, and then each time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of 1981 feels completely different from the winter of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the petite madeleine cake that sent Marcel Proust's mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of Things Past. Their mere mention starts her reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten levels deeper and more intense than that."

"My brother used to say, 'Oh, she's the Rain Man.' And I was like, 'No I'm not!' But I thought, what if I really. . . . Am I? Is there something wrong with me?" At one point AJ considered setting up shop on the nearby boardwalk as the Human Calendar and charging people five bucks to let them try to stump her with dates. She decided against it. "I don't want to be a sideshow."
It would seem as though having a memory like AJ's would make life qualitatively different—and better. Our culture inundates us with new information, yet so little of it is captured and cataloged in a way that it can be retrieved later. What would it mean to have all that otherwise lost knowledge at our fingertips? Would it make us more persuasive, more confident? Would it make us, in some fundamental sense, smarter? To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about oneself. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of our memory's shortcomings?

The dream that AJ embodies, the perfection of memory, has been with us since at least the fifth century B.C. and the supposed invention of a technique known as the "art of memory" by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos.

Simonides had been the sole survivor of a catastrophic roof collapse at a banquet hall in Thessaly. According to Cicero, who wrote an account of the incident four centuries later, the bodies were mangled beyond recognition. But in his mind, Simonides was able to close his eyes to the chaos and see each of the guests at his seat around the table. He'd discovered the powerful technique known as the loci method. If you can convert whatever it is you're trying to remember into vivid mental images and then arrange them in some sort of imagined architectural space, known as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible.

Peter of Ravenna, a noted Italian jurist and author of a renowned memory textbook of the 15th century, was said to have used the loci method to memorize the Bible, the entire legal canon, 200 of Cicero's speeches, and 1,000 verses of Ovid. For leisure, he would reread books cached away in his memory palaces. "When I left my country to visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I can truly say I carry everything I own with me," he wrote.

It's hard for us to imagine what it must have been like to live in a culture before the advent of printed books or before you could carry around a ballpoint pen and paper to jot notes. "In a world of few books, and those mostly in communal libraries, one's education had to be remembered, for one could never depend on having continuing access to specific material," writes Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory, a study of the role of memory techniques in medieval culture. "Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories." Thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, was celebrated for composing his Summa Theologica entirely in his head and dictating it from memory with no more than a few notes. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder could repeat 2,000 names in the order they'd been given to him. A Roman named Simplicius could recite Virgil by heart—backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest of virtues since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. Indeed, a common theme in the lives of the saints was that they had extraordinary memories.

After Simonides' discovery, the art of memory was codified with an extensive set of rules and instructions by the likes of Cicero and Quintilian and in countless medieval memory treatises. Students were taught not only what to remember but also techniques for how to remember it. In fact, there are long traditions of memory training in many cultures. The Jewish Talmud, embedded with mnemonics—techniques for preserving memories—was passed down orally for centuries. Koranic memorization is still considered a supreme achievement among devout Muslims. Traditional West African griots and South Slavic bards recount colossal epics entirely from memory.

But over the past millennium, many of us have undergone a profound shift. We've gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of technological crutches that we've invented so that we don't have to store information in our brains. We've gone, you might say, from remembering everything to remembering awfully little. We have photographs to record our experiences, calendars to keep track of our schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store our collective knowledge, and Post-it notes for our scribbles. What have the implications of this outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for our society? Has something been lost?

To supplement the memories in her mind, AJ also stores a trove of external memories. In addition to the detailed diary she's kept since childhood, she has a library of close to a thousand videotapes copied off TV, a trunk full of radio recordings, and a "research library" consisting of 50 notebooks filled with facts she's found on the Internet that relate to events in her memory. "I just want to keep it all," she says.

Preserving her past has become the central compulsion of AJ's life. "When I'm blow-drying my hair in the morning, I'll think of whatever day it is. And to pass the time, I'll just run through that day in my head over the last 20-something years—like flipping through a Rolodex."

AJ traces the origins of her unusual memory to a move from New Jersey to California that her family made when she was just eight years old. Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and familiar, and California was foreign and strange. It was the first time she understood that growing up and moving on necessarily meant forgetting and leaving behind. "Because I hate change so much, after that it was like I wanted to be able to capture everything. Because I know, eventually, nothing will ever be the same," she says.

K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, believes that at bottom, AJ might not be all that different from the rest of us. After the initial announcement of AJ's condition in the journal Neurocase, Ericsson suggested that what needs to be explained about AJ is not some extraordinary, unprecedented innate memory but rather her extraordinary obsession with her past. People always remember things that are important to them. Baseball fanatics often have an encyclopedic knowledge for statistics, chess masters often remember tricky gambits that took place years ago, actors often remember scripts long after performing them. Everyone has got a memory for something. Ericsson believes that if anyone cared about holding on to the past as much as AJ does, the feat of memorizing one's life would be well within reach.
I mention Ericsson's theory to AJ, and she becomes visibly upset. "I just want to call him on the phone and yell at him. If I spent that much time memorizing my life, then I really would be a boring person," she says. "I don't sit around and memorize it. I just know it."

Remembering everything is both maddening and lonely for AJ. "I remember good, which is very comforting. But I also remember bad—and every bad choice," she says. "And I really don't give myself a break. There are all these forks in the road, moments you have to make a choice, and then it's ten years later, and I'm still beating myself up over them. I don't forgive myself for a lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to protect you. I feel like it just hasn't protected me. I would love just for five minutes to be a simple person and not have all this stuff in my head. "Most people have called what I have a gift," AJ says, "but I call it a burden."

The Seven Sins of Memory

The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Most of the things that pass through our brains don't need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has developed a taxonomy of forgetting to catalog what he calls the seven sins of memory. The sin of absentmindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his 2.5-million-dollar cello in the back of a taxi. The Vietnam War veteran still haunted by the battlefield suffers from the sin of persistence. The politician who loses a word on the tip of his tongue during a stump speech is experiencing the sin of blocking. Though we curse these failures of memory on an almost daily basis, Schacter says, that's only because we don't see their benefits. Each sin is really the flip side of a virtue, "a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects." There are good evolutionary reasons why our memories fail us in the specific ways they do. If everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or thought about was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we'd be drowning in irrelevant information.

In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an inability to forget. He remembers every detail of his life, but he can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. He can't prioritize, he can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."

To age is to forget, also. Roughly five million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and even more suffer from mild cognitive impairment, or lesser degrees of memory loss. When asked to recall a list of 15 words read 20 minutes earlier, octogenarians in one large study recalled fewer than 60 percent, while the twentysomethings could remember close to 90 percent.

Not surprisingly, people have been searching a long time for chemicals that might halt that tide of forgetting. According to the Franciscan Bernardo de Lavinheta, writing in the early 1500s, "Artificial memory is twofold: the first part consists in medicines and poultices." The second part, of course, is the art of memory, which Lavinheta deemed both safer and more effective (since memory medicines can sometimes have the unfortunate side effect of "drying up the brain"). Today ginkgo biloba is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, or added to fruit smoothies and "smart" soft drinks, even without conclusive evidence that it either boosts memory—or dries up the brain.

Drugs to Enhance Memory

Within the past decades, drug companies have elevated the search to brave new heights. Armed with a sophisticated understanding of memory's molecular underpinnings, they've sought to create new drugs that amplify the brain's natural capacity to remember. In recent years, at least three companies have been formed with the express purpose of developing memory drugs. One of those companies, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is attempting to develop a class of molecules known as ampakines, which facilitate the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is one of the primary excitatory chemicals passed across the synapses between neurons. By amplifying its effects, Cortex hopes to improve the brain's underlying ability to form and retrieve memories. When administered to middle-age rats, one ampakine was able to fully reverse their age-related decline in the cellular mechanism of memory.

It may not be long before drugs such as ampakines begin to reach the market; when they do, they could have an enormous impact on society. Though the pharmaceutical companies are searching for therapeutic treatments to stave off Alzheimer's and combat dementia, it seems inevitable that their pills will end up in the hands of students cramming for exams and probably a whole lot of other people who just want to enhance their brains. Already psycho-stimulants designed to treat ADHD, like Adderall and Ritalin, are used as "study buddies" by as many as one in four students at some colleges trying to increase their concentration and improve their memories.

All of this raises some troubling ethical questions. Would we choose to live in a society where people have vastly better memories? In fact, what would it even mean to have a better memory? Would it mean remembering things only exactly as they happened, free from the revisions and exaggerations that our mind naturally creates? Would it mean having a memory that forgets traumas? Would it mean having a memory that remembers only those things we want it to remember? Would it mean becoming AJ?

I want to see EP's unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he's interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, "not really," so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right. I ask EP why we're not turning to the left instead.

"I'd just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don't know why," he says.

If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he'd never be able to do it. He doesn't even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he's picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody's wallet. He's never able to explain how they came into his possession.

"Our neighbors love him because he'll come up to them and just start talking to them," Beverly says. Even though he thinks he's meeting them for the first time, he's learned through habit that these are people he should feel comfortable around, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.

We cross the street and I'm alone with EP for the first time. He doesn't know who I am or what I'm doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I'm there for some good reason. He is trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare, blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. "You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder," I want to tell him. "The last 50 years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you're going to forget that this conversation ever even happened." I imagine the sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble.

We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he's forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn't recognize, to a home he doesn't know. In front of the house, there is a car parked with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.

open spice

2007-09-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

karma retribution or just a lomg tiresome stratagem. sometimes being in a fix is no worse than getting out of it even when that old man drones on abt ...
whimpering in the dak a cold smelly creature cast in a shadow found in beginnings moist wretched young and old
the orbs shake and moons dwindle
a great and giant canyon lost in the dominion of scope of landing dreams and hope afloat of fire running in strange cnvulsion a smile on the face of terror and music in the dance of love be young do not fear
come over the edge and out the door.
a pretty little girl smile unforgiving cute though
i love everything about her
her voice
her taste
adorable keen and kind

a man without virtue a grune figurine
a light with a feather and tethers lost in misery
come by in the winter
a magistrate winks as the accused passes his monetary dues

the opus thrives

2007-09-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

a virtuoso in the craft of losing, a clemantine of disaster a heart broken into a heap of feathers. aheave of feathers and a rising star.
sometimes people ponder over unforgiving things remember what should be cast in a dominion somewhere across nowhere and not in a bundle of feel.
A glitch
a crux
a rude remark
follows snidely smirking gurgling laughter
giddy as the heart is
slow as the mind.
repeat
reiterate slow down desire
dysfuntion
demurr
the docks await.

the task is not cumbersome
the dream is not dead
the lie is not told
and the music does not play
sleep is not slumber
and to run is not to flee
A song is not a dirge or a melody
a child is not young
and adults not old
dreams are reality
a reality we all face
a possible and probable celebration of an amalgam of thought vibes sounds jitters glittery impossibilities smilimg at cannot be or isn't or is
musing mocking
friendly harsh
and the dare is for you
to handle mishandle confuse clarify
colour paint
cover taint
kill spill drill
drums play but not the jungle beat
marshes cool off to a tundra of cold still hope
and masters kneel
and tIMOTHY lost his boots.
do you him?
can you find them?
do you care?
at all

i DON'T FEEL LIKE DOING ANYTHING

2007-09-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

eXcept being 5 years ol;d
which I've never been
except for that year ...
one day inshaallah hum galli galoch band karien ge.
eik din I'll ceaseto expel bad words...???

I

2007-09-22T21:23:00.001-07:00

my writinfg stinks a great deal maybe I'm not taking this 'morning papers' sh+_ too seriously. Or maybe too seriously hmm

natural stuff

2007-09-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

eggs henna coconut oil aloe vera yoghurt
demulcant hypnotic medicine???
what should I do for my hair and skin???
I've decideded i know very little about hair , my 'expertise' being confined to the ubiquitous apophthegm :We are mammals therefore are hairy

embonpoint

2007-09-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

it means stocky and its pronounced in the funniest way ;Ahn bon pwan...

anorexia nervosa
bulemia
skinny

so I'm not really writing anything , this morning paper thing isn't working out yet.
It will though eventually. The other terminal's quite angry and literally red in the face funny maybe...
my bro or abbaneed to get it fixed. no I need it fixed , but as always I'm dep and despondent so there you go...
how's life in the real world?

toodles

2007-09-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

Aren't economics goods supposed to be scarce and desirable??

non-convex IC curves funny looking things that i should read up on

what's MRS marginal rate of substitution!

bahaya would like to have it though he is no aficionado
of this jaal
signed
bakwass master

I'm sleepy and bored

2007-09-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.writefromhome.com/trademags.htm

daddy's making breakfast
I'm 'this'(non-specified amount) close to being confined to only performing my body's involuntary functions.

and farting with my mouth

physically impossible you say
wanna bet???

taxes

2007-09-20T21:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.writefromhome.com/taxes.htm

this is just for the U.S of A right???
i'm hoping
i don't wanna pay any taxes....

from now onwards

2007-09-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

I will attend classes
I will
goto school from 2-5
and i will take notes
and I will wonder

and write gibberish like today.
oesophagus:food pipe
haben:have
ja(ya):yes
adios

runaway kid

2007-09-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

we always want to runaway though we only have the courage to do it when we're either 5 or graduating.
at five ppl think its funny cos you get caught
or ppl think its sad cos some pervert kidnaps you and sells ur kidney's.

in case ur comp's forgotten ur IP address

2007-09-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

goto the start menu
then 'run'
cmd
in ms dos mode
tYPE : IP config/release
and then press enter
after which type 'IP config renew'

crazy talk

2007-09-20T20:41:00.001-07:00

haven't been attending classes for no apparent reason , all mummy cares abt is what I look like and my S.I has gotten the funniest fake sun burn ever at my stupid advice obviously...
I'm thinking about joining alta vista
no I need to
also the lumun thing and school

wish Iwqasn't being spied on
wish danish didn't have an ego the infinity times the size of the entire universe

adsense

2007-09-19T04:29:00.001-07:00

I want an adsense blog

bovine erythrocytes phenotype analysis

2007-09-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

ever heard of the pummet squre or is it the pumet square
who was that dear old mok mendel?? mandel??? who discovered phenotypes and is accused by harvard going Rizvi of creating racism , the poor mAN jusat pointed something out
she probably has a take with God actually
I'm telling you
it isn't his fault livingthings have DNa strands that have records on appearance
genotype and phenotype
wekll anyway this just abt phenotype and don't blame me if you flunk ur exam for writing this in the paper
just look up phenotype and Monk
anyway a phenotype is record of physical appearance like pigmentation , height etcetra
and discovering that in no way led to racism

mua moi

2007-09-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

mu ha ha ha ha

and if the darkness should keep us apart

2007-09-19T04:14:00.000-07:00

and the daylight feels like it is a long way off

so what else?
what a weird life being probed
dodge the camera its fun
*wink*

suspended disbelief

2007-09-19T04:06:00.000-07:00

I supported her with suspenders and now i'm gone
a memory
in a bottle lost at sea
why can't we walk on water? MAYBE we just don't try enough , i mean we spend 'years' learning to walk on land ,why not expend that much energy, perseverance and dedication into walking on water?
is it the molecular structure of water that irks us? we're fine with surfing water skiing water skating... swimming floating on water , call it 'lying'(liegen in German) on water... but no standing onn it without support hmm
wonder who the first person to swim was , I know you'll argue that all foetus' swim in amniotic fluid until they are fully developed (or in some cases not) but ues point taken but you know what ui mean. who dared to swim in the sea/lakes etc first the great pioneeer of swimming not drowning???and why?
faith keeps us afloat
can greater faith allow us to tread water
as water skeeters do??

Dorian grey/gray?

2007-09-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

hung up in a picture

ye who have come seeking the sight of me
thou art saved

its tough to be a moron

2007-09-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

moonlit doorway
passage to life
hung up in a picture
is a story to tell
a moment
grasped
clasped
and then

this time it is for real right? let us believe it is for real or is real or is yellow. I always thought it was yellow and now I know. how dynamic how questionably unquestionable.