Spitting out the poison

In the begining, when the earth was young, everything was possible. Nothing had occured, and everything was the dark and sticky muck of possibility, the gleam of a trick not yet played in the brown-gray shadow of a raven's eye.
Once upon a time, I fed and lived on those dusty old myths. As a child I would get books from the library, as many as possible each week. And I would devour them, reading them cover to cover, staying up until daylight.
Once upon a time, I thought if I was a good enough child, and did as I was told, when I grew up I would be rewarded for my efforts. Things would get better. I believed it with all my heart.
It's harder to believe when I wake up, leaving the dreamland of recollections of childhood for the harshness of reality and the here-and-now. The winter is dark and the cold is deep and wet. I try to shake off the chill, but even layered in sweaters and with the space-heater buzzing at me, the cold clings.
This isn't the world I had hoped for. It's a far, far darker place, and there were so many lies I swallowed as a child that I wonder if I'll ever be able to spit out all that marrow-deep poison. The rancid tang of it still sticks at the back of my throat, along with a slick and worminess, self-loathing my younger self for daring to believe, daring to hope, not knowing the web of lies that was being spun about.
It will take hard and painful work to untie the knotted web of lies, to learn to breathe again and be myself, to suck out the poison and spit it out.

On Writing Cursive

I don’t remember a time when I could not write; certainly such a time existed, and I have clear memories of learning how to read, but writing? There’s a blank there, beyond a space of a few days in grade school where I learned cursive from a friend, before being admonished for it by a teacher. I’m not sure what was so subversive at the time about learning to write cursive; only that it was something intended for “older kids”, and inappropriate for a young child to know.

                When we finally reached the age of learning cursive in grade school, it was promoted as the way adults wrote; and that to write in print was a sign of being uneducated and childish. It was, in short, the grown up way to do things; and like many kids, I pounced on that idea and practiced writing, painstakingly copying the preamble to the declaration of independence with my classmates over and over again.

                There were times when cursive writing has worked well; proving a quicker way to hand-write things, but over time I've switched to a bastardization of print and cursive, which allows me to write quickly, and maintain a greater level of readability for future perusing. Throughout high school, college, and now as an adult, I cannot recall anyone giving much of a damn if I wrote in cursive, print, or a hodge-podge of the two, as long as the reader could, without too much trouble, decipher my text. Indeed, much of college life included typing things up; making the whole issue of handwriting into a non-issue. Scientists even say that we remember things better when we write them down, as opposed to typing them- but with smartphones able to take voice and text notes, reminding people of things on their to-do-lists based on time, day and location, an argument can be made that such advantage , while useful, isn’t without replacement.

                Nowadays, they are phasing out cursive writing, and replacing it with typing in many schools; in an age where such skills are quite often needed, especially if one is going further into academia, it is an understandable skill; useful also for texting and engaging in social media. People are lamenting the dropping of cursive, as if it hadn't been falling by the wayside for a great many years prior. It’s become something of a fond nostalgic hook for some, but has, for the most part, become something of a dead-end skill; rather like calligraphy.  

Let's Pretend this Never Happened

This year for my birthday, a dear friend got me a signed copy of Let's Pretend this Never Happened (a mostly true memoir) by Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess. It's been several months and I'm still going through the book (and Jenny's blog), bit by bit. It's become a rainy-day read about anxiety, taxidermy animals, and relationships that I've rather enjoyed. It's weird, but it's a funny, enjoyable weirdness that's rather good-natured in how it goes about being weird. 

Like the Mental Illness Happy Hour, podcast, it takes a look at how being human is odd, sometimes scary, and somewhat of an amazing adventure. I think it's important to realize that not everyone has an 'easy' life, that strange things happen in every family, and that we all really do have our own troubles and battles to fight, and sometimes you can't win a battle- you just have to sit back and laugh, and enjoy the roller coaster ride for what it is.

There are a lot of places online where mental illness, and emotional and psychological difficulties are discussed as an alien thing, where sufferers are treated like freaks or like people who need to be 'cured' somehow, instead of as people.

More Gumballs

Did a few more 'Gumballs'.
A Whore by Any Other Name-
Boobs. Human Chairs. Random Crap.

More Boobs- or Speak Your Mind.

 

And general comments on Chicks & sex in Advertising:

Also, MMM has made a LOVELY Gumball thread on the forum over HERE.

As always, if you find yourself mocked in a Gumball post, don't take it seriously. I do these for my own entertainment, and it doesn't mean I don't like you!

Minds behind the Brain

A while ago I snagged the book Minds behind the Brain: A history of the pioneers and their discoveries by Stanley Finger. It had been lurking in the local bookstore’s bargain basement, hidden behind tomes of art books, tales of the holocaust and other topics that, while they sounded neat, most people weren’t inclined to buy.
The book starts with tales of the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, with such tidbits as “For some unknown reason, the third contributor stopped writing in the middle of a word…Even stranger, when he returned to the papyrus, he began to copy some unrelated material about magic and folk cures on the reverse side”(p.13). I’m going to go out on a long one here, and assume that the guy returned to the papyrus, didn’t look closely at the piece he’d grabbed and started using it for scrap papyrus; leaving us with this piece of WTF-ery that goes from medicine, to magic, all in the space of part of a word. Maybe someone’d stopped by for a chat in the middle of its production. Who knows?
The book goes on through a history of study of the brain, and things get really interesting about chatper 8, when around the 1745, when people not only begin tinkering with electricity, but make up Leyden Jars, which make it easier to store and abuse electrical power. People tried using it to cure pretty much anything and everything; but I suspect what was more likely than any actual search for a ‘cure’ was a giant game of “HEY YOU--- touch this!” ending with some poor fellow getting an unexpected jolt of electricity. This kind of entertainment is where we get Electroshock Therapy from; though nowadays it involves muscle relaxants, and much more measured applications of electricity to very specific parts of the brain; no longer being the thing of horror that it used to be, and it tends to be used less willy-nilly.
Connecting authors, artists, scientists and lay-people, the book discusses the history of brain studies, until the early 1980s.  I found it an interesting –if not amusing and occasionally horrifying- read.
One of my coworkers asked me if all these early medical people were shit-kicking insane. Something about mentioning Fragonard, and early electrical experimentation prompted it. A lot of this stuff was done before there was a solid idea of medical ethics, and when people didn’t know what harm they would-or could- do. They were explorers and pioneers in times when just trying stuff to see what occurred was possible. Without these people coming up with wacky ideas and testing them out, we simply wouldn’t know as much as we do today, about the mind and body, and how it works. Sometimes learning is a painful, horrifying experience. Especially when you don’t have much to start with.

Velociraptor Jam Break

I made up Velociraptor Jam last night. I'd wanted to try to make a CafePress store for a while, but my brain had kinda been rather dead about the whole thing, And then, last night, my coworkers decided that "Fuck You. I'm a Velociraptor!" would make the very, very best T-shirt ever. Between this idea, and the newly made Black Raspberry-Strawberry Freezer Jam Success, came the idea for the Velociraptor Jam Store. For quirky little things, and because almost everything is better with velociraptors added to it.

If you didn't know, the design on the bottom is a velociraptor footprint, drawn after an image of a trackway from some related dinosaurs.

Fragonard

Fragonard (1732-1799) –not the painter-was in that same TV show that Benthem was, along with his flayed figures. In the 1760’s, he decided to make some ecorches, or ‘flayed figures’ – usually drawings, or made of wax, Fragonard decided to make his out of real human corpses, which he prepared using waxes, resins, and various toxic chemicals. Many may now be seen at the Musée Fragonard d'Alfort. Supposedly made for ‘educational’ purposes, Fragonard put his corpses into artistic poses, which included a horse and rider a-la the horsemen of the apocalypse, and a trio of jig-dancing fetuses.
Rumor had it that the horseman figure was Fragonard’s fiancé, who had ‘succumbed to grief’ after her parents refused to let her marry the anatomist. While the woman did die, the corpse used in Fragonard’s horseman of the apocalypse is not hers.
Fragonard spent much of his life preparing and preserving humans and animals for anatomical study; creating some of the most macabre curio pieces that I know of. As for what we are supposed to learn from such creations? Heck if I know.

Articles on the Web about Fragonard and his Museum

NY Times- Real Life House of Horrors

The Independent- Skeleton in the Cupboard

The Washington Post-Out of the way sites show off Paris' avant-garde scene