strange

Surreal

My mind is blank.

My mind is blank.

My mind is blank.

But out of the darkness, or perhaps the blinding whiteness, that is the blankness of my mind, I settle on an odd image – it is the image of a desert. Endless dunes of sand, a warm night breeze ruffling the sands around my ankles – but the sky, the sky is what my blank mind focuses on. The sky which is full of a myriad stars, thousands upon thousands of them twinkling in every direction which my eyes can focus on. The stars are spread out every which way, the thick band of the milky way shining brightly through the middle, and the moon’s brightness taking away a patch of stars as it outshines them. So many of those stars don’t exist anymore.

I feel like I should want to be the Little Prince, fallen out of the sky and managing not to worry about my fate. I wish I could worry only about wanting a sheep and a glass cover for my rose, and a snake to bite me and take me back home. I feel like there would be something peaceful about saving someone and bringing him to a well and then leaving him forever, with only the memory of laughter to make the stars bright to him.

My mind is blank.

My mind is blank.

My mind is blank.

Everpresent

Sometimes I find it amazing that humans have managed to exist as a conscious race at all. Think about it for a moment – we’re each stuck with our own mind and our own emotions all the time. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there isn’t any escape. When we live with other people, we have to “endure” them all the time as well, but we’re only dealing with the outward projection of this person’s thoughts and emotions. Even living with children, who speak out about what they need and want rather more than adults, isn’t the same as how we live with ourselves.

If I sound rather gloomy or negative here, I apologize, for that is not my intention at all. Of course we all have painful moments where we have a difficult time with ourselves and we feel the need to escape from something that we can never escape from. But that’s not what I’m alluding to in this post – I’m mostly thinking about the mundane, everyday thoughts that we deal with. Our minds are always buzzing with thought and emotion, always trying to figure things out, always thinking things we’d rather not think about. We have control over ourselves, but only to a point. How many times have we tried to get rid of a tune or song that’s stuck in our head? We only succeed when we’re truly distracted by something else, outside of us.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s incredible so many of us are still sane, stuck with ourselves as are.

Paranoid Much?

I haven’t written about my clients before – both because they’re not always very interesting and because I’m not technically supposed to. I work for a credit card company, so I get to talk to just about every sort of person you could imagine: Smart, dumb, confused, annoyed, happy, thankful, nice, sweet, appreciative, secretive, and a hundred other moods and traits. It’s interesting to hear the different people and the different voices, and it’s interesting to see how differently people act with their money.

Today, however, I actually have an interesting story about a client, a specific one. The call started out nice and polite – he wanted to know his credit limit and what money will be coming out of his bank account. He was very sweet, talking to me a bit about where our company is in the country and making sure we were away from any danger [Israel is in a “situation” right now.] Then, somehow, slowly but surely, he started telling me about problems he had with banks in the past.

I thought, at first, that he was just a rambler – there are some people like that, who are lonely or bored and take the opportunity to get some conversation into their day when they call us. Soon, though, he started telling me, in a calm voice, about how his phones are tapped, how he’s followed everywhere, how his mail is examined and stopped, how he’s been cheated in place after place.

Eventually, he made me understand that the sole reason for his telling me all this was because he knows our calls are monitered and recorded for future reference if needed, and he told me he planned to use the calls he makes to us in court – to prove… something or other. I really have no idea. It was rather creepy though – the man sounded so sane and on top of things, and then I felt, as the call progressed, that there was something seriously wrong here.

But who knows, right? Maybe in six months there will be a big story in the paper about this man. You never know I suppose.

Vampires and Werewolves

There is a fascination that people seem to have with creatures of the night. Look at the amount of novels, movies and TV shows dedicated to vampires and werewolves – the latest Twilight craze being only the most recent and romanticized version of these creatures.

I’ve never been one to really believe in things like this – monsters, ghosts, things that go bump in the night. I’d love it if they could be real, only because having creatures like that around seems to make life very much more interesting, but I’ve always been a “prove it” sort of person. Such is my attitude towards religion as well, but that’s for another post, sometime in the future when I have the nerves for it.

Back to the adoration, or at least fixation, that so many of us seem to have with vampires and werewolves – I wonder where it stems from? Yes, things of danger are always interesting, especially when you’re snug in your bed reading or in a padded chair at a movie theater. But then monsters and hags and ghouls should be dealt with just as often – and yet they’re not. We seem to love the idea of a tortured soul, someone who is human some of the time or still resembles a human in day to day life. Something about the moral questions that arise from a lifestyle that involved killing and maiming seems to be intriguing, something we’d like to delve into – as long as it’s not our own problems of course.

Ah, the musings that surface after watching “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” at midnight…

Is This What Christmas Is Like?

My heart feels all warm and toasty, as if I’ve wrapped it up with a colorful, comfy, soft woolen scarf. The anticipation is mounting in me and I feel that the closer I come to the thing I’m waiting for, the more this incredible excitement and tension will rise in me. I’m close to bursting, and I’ve had more than a few times today when my face has broken into a grin without me being ready for it. I actually enjoyed work, and felt it passed quickly and easily, as my thoughts were elsewhere anyway.

I can only imagine that my extreme joy and happiness over this childish, silly, unimportant thing is what the wait for Christmas must feel like for everyone who celebrates it and has good memories from it. However, my anticipation is for something farther away and much more materialistic than Christmas. In fact, it is with some degree of trepidation that I reveal what it is I’m so excited about, because it is basically… well, a dollhouse.

A digital dollhouse. With incredible graphics. And awesome gameplay. It’s called The Sims 3!!!! Yes, yet ANOTHER Sims game! Coming out Feruary 20th, in the US at least, it’s the thing I’m waiting for most of all now, and it is so stupid and so insane to be waiting for a silly computer game.

You may now mock me. Or stare at the post with an expression of “huh?” Or you can browse this and see a worthless, silly little girl and think to yourself “Wow, she is such a silly little girl.” You may do all that, but remember, I beg of you, that I haven’t had a silly, pointless thing to look forward to in a long time, and I hope I shall be forgiven for it.

The Authentic Self Book

I was having trouble with what I should write about tonight. I sat at my computer, with my wonderful-and-still-exciting screen, and I stared and stared and discarded idea after idea. I am ashamed to say, I caved. I opened a new tab, and typed in “writing prompts” in Google. I then chose the first two websites that came up and started browsing the prompts, thinking how fun it would be to write about some of those things. And yet, it felt like cheating. Little did I know that I would still find my subject on one of these websites.

As I looked randomly at the advertisement sitting smugly above the prompts in one of the sites, I found my subject. A giggle escaped my lips, and I proceeded back to WordPress and typed in the title of this post. Yes, the ad was for something called “The Authentic Self Book.” Written underneath the name and the website, it says this: “Are you living an authentic life? Unearth your authentic self. Start journaling your joys, griefs, and all the other life themes in between, and you’ll discover who you really are.” [Random aside – WordPress spellchecker says “journaling” is not a real word.]

I’m all for keeping journals. I’m all for living authentic lives. I’m all for finding out as much as you can about yourself and being honest about your life, your feelings, your virtues and weaknesses. However, and this is a big however, I find it incredibly hard to believe anyone who wants to be so-called authentic would buy a book like this.

Teehee, I love the randomness of the interwebs.

Sweet Relief – and Some Zombies

I just finished my application for the University of California schools. Meaning three campuses, three schools really. UCLA, Berkeley and Santa-Cruz. The application process was long and grueling, confusing and upsetting, disturbing and tiring and most of all FINISHED. It’s finished.

My brain feels so incredibly fried up and used and dried and broken and exhausted and strange and zombified. But at least I got this done. It’s a wonderful feeling, to have the weight of the first deadline off my mind. True, four down and still fifteen to go, but that’s something nonetheless.

In celebration, and laziness, a haiku to explain the way my head feels:

Zombies ate my brain,
Because zombies don’t eat trees,
Carnivorous swine.

Hmm.

It is immensely satisfying to have a long, hard, stressful day and to come home at night and know that it’s almost done, and you’re still okay. There’s something so comforting about the knowledge that you can live with routine, really get into it and be fine, despite the fact that it’s difficult. It really makes you proud of yourself to know that you can look at the things you still have left to do in a day and be able to organize them rationally and logically without freaking out or hyperventilating.

I rarely experience this feeling, being the bundle of nerves, hormones and moods that I usually am. I normally cannot really shake off the annoyance or the bad mood that clings to me. But once in a while, there is this feeling of peace that settles over me despite knowing that the day is not quite done yet, that I still have things left untended to. Knowing that I still have yet more to do tomorrow and not freaking out about it is a rare things as well.

God, being a teenager is weird – it’ll be pretty sweet to be able to say one day that being in a good mood is the norm and that bad moods are rare and not quite as spur of the moment as they are today.

So let’s get the ball rolling.

I wonder how that term was coined. I would assume from some sort of sport, but who knows. I do know one thing though – if I ever have to run a business meeting of some sort, and I have to say that sentence [and all heads-of-meetings have to say it] then I’ll literally get a ball rolling and we can have a nice game of table-top football while we’re brainstorming. I think that sort of work environment could be more pleasant for everyone.

Yesterday I went to the most peculiar beach with Sir B. F. It was a beach all right, with the mandatory bar and restaurant not far from it. The beach itself wasn’t the odd thing though really. It was the sea. They had roped in part of the sea. Yes, roped in. There was a big rope with floating plastic bobbing things on it roping in a small section of the sea. I found this a blatant and disturbing attempt to control the great ocean! Quite fitting, as it was in a city named after the greatest conqueror of all time basically, Caesar.

The thing that really got to me though was that human beings can hold their breaths and we could’ve swum UNDER the rope and gotten to the rest of the ocean. Geniuses.