Another epiphany. (rants)

Image by Midjourney

I've had another epiphany recently. It's one that makes me want to create a new rule for myself. 

I'm not in a romantic relationship. But if I were to be in one, I would have to be really careful about who I talked to about it. I wouldn't want to broadcast specific, detailed information about it to a general audience. Because if the people I told had bad judgment or misunderstood the situation, I'd be giving someone incompetent the power to influence my feelings about my partner. And my feelings about my partner would already be really running high. 

Also, if I were to complain about my partner, the instant reaction that would get me is, "Leave them!" But conflict can be a very good thing. It can be a sign of a healthy relationship. 

So I want to keep any current relationships relatively private. Once the relationship ends, I think all bets are off. But for me, I think a current relationship should probably be spoken about with trusted people only. 

So if I want to talk about my feelings about a current relationship in art, I want to keep it pretty highly abstract.

My epiphany for the weekend. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

This weekend, after suffering heartbreak, then being lifted up by so many friends and fellow creators, and then having my sexual boundaries intruded upon, I have come to an epiphany. Love is the most abundant material in the universe. Why do we treat it like it's scarce? Why do we think that only one person can give it to us? That intimacy and connection can't happen in a variety of ways? Pick up a pen and write. Love can come to us from so many directions. We just can't be picky about the form it comes in.

And we have to release our desire to control others. The more we grasp, the faster they run anyway.

I realized that there was someone whose journey I would have liked to intertwine more intimately with mine. But I doubt that will happen now. He's the same beautiful person who made me feel so intrigued in the first place, but I have to manage that disappointment.

And then there's someone else who knows nothing will ever happen between us, but he keeps persisting. You know you're not getting that type of love from me. There's nothing ambiguous about it. So look for that love and connection in someone else. There's abundant love in the universe. 

AI and privacy. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

I was in a class where we had an online discussion board, and I liked my answer, if I do say so myself. 

The discussion was on finding clever uses for AI and the drawbacks to implementing those clever uses. A lot of people like the potential of AI but are concerned about privacy and how people's data will be used.

Here's a reply I posted to someone who had this concern:

I thought your point about increasing the use of AI to the point where nothing is private anymore touches on a deep-seated fear that humans have of being watched. And I started to think about why this is and whether or not this fear can be switched off for the sake of psychological well-being in a society that really is moving toward constant surveillance.

I think that some spiritual beliefs can get us accustomed to the thought of being seen at all times (like belief in an omnipotent God, or belief that we're in a simulation). And that's okay with us, because we assume that a being or beings this powerful would be much more spiritually enlightened than what we see in humanity right now. But when we think of other humans watching us at all times, it's scary. Humans have the option of doing and saying and thinking hurtful things to each other and very often do. This dynamic creates a whole new set of rules than the ones that would be required in a world of perfect knowledge and wisdom.

I think at the bottom of our fears about privacy is a cry for humanity's enlightenment and frustration about what to do in the meantime when we're so far from it. As Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out in one of her recent videos, humanity has a very serious problem with being able to make smart decisions as a group. So maybe enlightened individuals as opposed to an enlightened humanity is all we can hope for. 

How I've been using AI in my creative works. (rants)

Image by Midjourney

AI is such a contentious topic right now that I feel as though it would be good to be transparent about how I use AI with the works connected to Naja Tau, and outline why I use it the way I do. Because I, personally, am not interested in reading AI creative writing. So I wouldn't blame you if you were also not interested. So if an author is copying and pasting medium to large chunks of text from AI, I don't want to read it. I wouldn't mind reading non-fiction articles that clearly state that the article was copied and pasted from AI (it would be a big bonus if a human expert had read the article and validated what it was saying). But I'm not interested in reading stories and fantasies from a non-biological entity.

I write because I have something to say. I don't want a piece of software to override what I want to say and how I want to say it. However, I will use AI to tell me about facts, rules (legal, grammatical, formatting, and structural), and I will sometimes copy and paste the descriptions of my books into AI and ask the software to analyze it and give recommendations for improvement. Sometimes, the AI will tell me I need to add a stronger hook, or a call to action. And I'll rewrite the description and ask it to analyze the changes I made. I'll keep doing that until I feel good about the description. I did this for the most recent description of Naja Tau's Dream Diary 2.

Sometimes, the AI will suggest that words in a sentence swap place or it will recommend the use of a more active voice rather than a passive voice. And in those cases, I might accept the exact wording of a recommended change. I did this with the description of Satyr Plays 2. 

I have also asked AI to generate lists of things. Lists of words that rhyme. Lists of words that mean x-and-such. Lists of fun, tropical recipes (for Satyr Plays 1). 

I have also copied and pasted legal disclaimers about copyright, and changing names, locations, and places, and the fragility of human memory.

I'm not interested in copying and pasting actual passages of fiction or creative non-fiction from AI. I don't ever plan to do that. Could some weird advancements in AI change the way I do things? I guess so. You never know. But this is what I've been doing with AI since it started to get good in about 2022. 

Of course, there's also the matter of using AI-generated art. Under most of my square images in my blog, I say, "Image by Midjourney." Midjourney is an AI art generator. I also use my Midjourney subscription for a lot of YouTube thumbnails. I have also used Midjourney to generate the cover images for Satyr Plays 1 & 2, and Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio. 

Although I use AI art, I use AI art because I'm poor. Would I rather pay a human artist that can crank out nice art really, really fast? I would. It just leaves one with a warmer feeling to know that human hands and a human mind created art. But before Midjourney, I wanted to have art on the blog, and it's just too expensive and time consuming to do. There just weren't any images at all on my blog--or I might have occasionally grabbed them from Morguefile.com or Unsplash.com. 

I like having AI images though, because it creates a nice separator between blog entries, and it creates a visual anchor for remembering whether or not you've already read a post. 

I think that the arguments for whether or not using AI-generated art is acceptable change depending on whether or not the AI is grabbing artists' images and slightly changing them and reselling them as its own, or if it's thoroughly remixing a bunch of artists' images and creating something new. Because this is how we evaluate whether or not people are doing something unethical with other people's art. If a person grabs a JPG of my drawing of a macaw and puts it on merchandise and sells it (which has happened to me), that's stealing. But if a person looks at my drawing of a macaw on the internet, gets inspired by that image, and looks at other images of macaws, and blends them all together into something new, that's just how the human brain works. That's how new art gets made. Humans see images that inspire them, then blend it all up in their brains and create something different out of everything they've seen. Why are we holding our robots to a higher standard than we could hold a person to in this case? 

I was concerned that Midjourney was just copying artists' images, so I started doing reverse image searches on my YouTube thumbnails. So far, there aren't any similar images to the ones Midjourney generates for me.

Also, if Midjourney uses hundreds of millions of images to train on, and we decided that all of the people who made those images should get paid for that, do we really think that every time Midjourney generates an image, a person should get a hundred millionth of ten cents (assuming that an image Midjourney makes will generate ten cents for the company)? I guess that would add up. And maybe one day, those artists will be identified and can sue for that. Sure. But there's no way to hold humans accountable for doing this with far fewer images in their "database" (brain). Should humans be held accountable in that way if they can be? I don't think so. 

So that's where I'm at right now with using AI for the stuff connected to Naja Tau. 

Journaling because I feel sad. (rants)

I was feeling down this morning, and my friend encouraged me to do some journaling. I did some journaling in private using pencil and paper and didn't feel as though it was enough. So here's some more journaling (unrelated to dreams). If you want to know what I'm dreaming about, it's related to this song about Sonic:

The following questions are from this Medium article: https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/20-journal-prompts-for-deep-thinking-and-reflection-503fd5630157 

If I had all the money and time in the world, what would I be doing?

I would be earning a PhD in physics, but I honestly don't know if there's an easy enough program for me to complete it! I would want to have the time to balance that with creative writing and acting classes. What I'm doing right now is going down a similar path, so when I think about it, I guess I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing. I'm just anxious about what I'm doing because I don't have all the time and money in the world.

What do I need to stop doing and start doing?

I need to stop allowing stress to keep my fight or flight systems triggered--especially for long stretches of time. I need to start recognizing stress and responding to it by unclenching my body and taking deep breaths. I did a meditation by Declutter the Mind for anxiety, and it suggested labeling anxious thoughts as a separate entity with its own name. I've started using my imagination to do that exercise. 

What does “success” mean to me?

Success to me means having warm memories to reflect on in the quiet times.

Paranormal tax preparation. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

In the first several weeks or months that my mother died, my stepfather was inconsolable at times. He'd cry out, "This wasn't supposed to happen! This wasn't supposed to happen!" He still bursts into tears sometimes at the thought of having lost my mother. But he's slowly processing his grief.

I recently went with my stepfather to do my mother's taxes. The tax preparer, an elderly woman with flamboyant hair, nails, and avant-garde jewelry, asked us what date my mother died on. I didn't remember off of the top of my head. I asked my stepfather if he remembered. He gave the date and burst into tears. Then the tax preparer said, "It wasn't supposed to happen." 

I said, "That's exactly what he used to say when my mom first died. The exact same phrase!" 

She didn't look surprised or say anything more. She just turned and went back to doing our taxes on the computer for a minute before grabbing two boxes of tissues for my stepfather.

I don't know what to make of this. I don't think anything about the way my stepfather was crying would suggest that exact phrase. And she said it right after he burst into tears. I don't think he was mouthing it. I didn't hear or see him mouth or whisper it, and I don't think that's a common thing to say when someone dies. No one said that when my father or grandmother died. No one said that when my pets died. I've never heard anyone use that phrase in the context of someone dying or even use the phrase in general except for my stepfather and this elderly woman in the context of my mother's death. 

I think that's because it's a very bold assumption to make. It's not taking into consideration all of the people who say, "Oh, it's all in God's timing," or the people who think that whatever happens is just the natural course of things. 

I lean towards believing in the simplest, most practical explanations for things, because I know they're typically the true explanation. But I really don't know what the simplest explanation is here. 

Is this some kind of paranormal activity? There are so many possibilities. Is the lady a little bit psychic? Was she picking up on what my stepfather was thinking when my mother died? Or what he was feeling in that moment? Was there something suspicious about the way my mother died, and this is some kind of message to us? It was in the hospital, and she wasn't in great physical condition, so for that and other reasons, I lean away from the latter speculation. But I just don't know what this phrase could mean, taking it on face value. 

But this event was very, very odd.

Worried about dying in my sleep. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

Lately, I have been worried about dying in my sleep. That's probably my preferred choice for how to die, but I am still a little nervous when it's bedtime now. 

I have really severe sleep apnea. But because I can't sleep with a BiPAP machine most of the time, I'm only being treated for it in minimally-invasive, minimally-effective ways. My health insurance won't cover the recommended operations to help me breathe while I sleep, so this is the best I can do. 

For the last couple of nights, I'll have dreams in which I stop breathing. 

In one, there was a pretty elaborate set up in the dream for why I stopped breathing. The set up seemed to take a while to unfold, which makes me wonder how time works as far as how long it takes for the brain to create a dream versus how one experiences the dream. My brain probably only had seconds to create a logical reason in the dream narrative to stop breathing. But it felt quite a bit longer in the dream than the couple of seconds in which I stopped breathing. 

But then, in a subsequent dream, I was shopping and then someone in the dream was just like, "There you go!" And that was the signal in the dream that I had stopped breathing. There was no logical lead up to it. 

It started to feel as though I was drowning. I think I'm really lucky that I don't get sleep paralysis demons on top of it. My mother used to get them, and it sounded terrifying. But my dreams about why I stopped breathing weren't scary. Only the sudden thought that I might suffocate to death was scary. 

Spiritual experiences while on drugs. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

I haven't really been having dreams that would be interesting to share, lately, but I watched a Theo Von podcast with author Robert Greene today, and they talked about spiritual experiences with drugs. That got me thinking about a dream-like state I was in while under general anesthesia for a surgery a couple years ago. I would describe it as a spiritual experience. 

A nurse gave me a little cloth pouch with pink roses for my glasses after they wheeled me to the operating area. (I had forgotten to leave the glasses in my room.) I was having my period, and was nervous about this, but they assured me that it was okay. 

I drifted off to sleep and was transported to a world in which I revisited all the major people who had harmed me in life up to that point. I saw what was going on in their lives at the time, and I forgave them, one by one as I observed. I even felt a kind of platonic love for each of them, as fellow beings in this world. 

By the time I woke up, I had to have gone through dozens, and dozens, and dozens of people who I had been really upset at. I definitely felt as though I had left some kind of eternal afterlife and come back to the regular world. 

I wonder if this advanced state of understanding is what death will be like, or if the drugs I took just make some people feel extra generous towards others. But I described what happened to the healthcare workers, and they didn't make it seem like this is a common experience under this drug. 

How I wrote "Satyr Plays" (in video format)!

Hi, friends!

I made a short video about my artistic process when writing Satyr Plays. It's on YouTube for now. (I keep changing my mind about the value in posting on social media.)

Living a High Vibration Life, by ChatGPT (rants)

Anahola Beach, Kauai by Janine Sprout, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I asked ChatGPT how to live a high vibration life, and its answer was too good not to share!

Living life at a high vibration generally means maintaining a positive and fulfilling life, characterized by optimism, gratitude, and a sense of purpose. Here are some steps you can take:

1. **Mindfulness and Meditation:** 

Regular practice of mindfulness and meditation can help you maintain a peaceful and positive state of mind. This involves being present in the moment and aware of your thoughts and feelings without judgment.

2. **Gratitude:** 

Cultivating gratitude can significantly increase your life satisfaction. Consider keeping a gratitude journal where you regularly write down things you're thankful for.

3. **Healthy Lifestyle:** 

A balanced diet, regular exercise, and adequate sleep are crucial for physical and mental well-being. This also includes avoiding excessive alcohol and refraining from substance abuse.

4. **Positive Relationships:** 

Surround yourself with people who uplift and support you. Positive social interactions can greatly contribute to a high vibrational living.

5. **Personal Growth:** 

Engage in activities that promote personal growth, such as reading, learning new skills, or pursuing hobbies and interests that inspire you.

6. **Acts of Kindness:** 

Doing good for others without expecting anything in return can raise your spirits and contribute to a sense of community and connectedness.

7. **Connect with Nature:** 

Spending time in nature can be incredibly grounding and healing. It helps in reducing stress and boosting mood.

8. **Spiritual Practices:** 

If you're inclined, engaging in spiritual practices that resonate with you can provide a sense of peace and purpose.

9. **Positive Affirmations:** 

Using positive affirmations can help shift your mindset to a more optimistic and positive outlook.

10. **Limit Negative Influences:** 

Be mindful of the media you consume and the conversations you engage in. Limit exposure to negativity where possible.

Remember, it's a personal journey, and what works for one person might not work for another. It's important to find practices that resonate with you and fit into your life naturally.

Download your FREE copy of Lost Atlantis 5--anytime from now until Tuesday! (news)

Image by Midjourney

Lost Atlants 5: Saga is FREE to download, from midnight 9/15/23 until midnight 9/19/23 (Pacific Standard Time): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGKSK4B3 

This is the end of the Lost Atlantis series. 

I do recommend reading the prior books in the series before reading this one since this last one references a lot of things from the earlier books, but the choice is yours! You can always download a copy now and read it later. 

***

I've sacrificed a lot for this series. Not only have I spent about 11 years writing it--it's also one of those artistic choices I've made that shocks people. A lot of people in my life dislike this series, which is fine. People have the right to dislike whatever they dislike. But I have the right to make my art anyway. The system has its balance.

Still, it would feel nice if everything I wanted to make was art that people always like. But that's just not the kind of artist most artists are, especially if they're fine artists and not commercial artists. 

I'm sometimes surprised when I hear about an artist (audio, visual, written, etc.) getting enraged about jokes or criticisms made at the expense of their art, because I wonder how they could have made it this far without having the stuffing beaten out of them by audiences and gatekeepers already. I do understand those upset feelings, but I'd think you'd just get tired of feeling them and numb them out  eventually. 

I think this upset reaction comes from the fear (or the factual understanding) that all the love you've put into the world through this passion project of yours has been misunderstood or mishandled. In darker times, I have been afraid that I live in a world without love. But as I've kept going down my Buddhism journey, I've noticed that at the very least, every morning, there are thousands--maybe millions of people that are praying for my (and your) happiness and wellness. For a week or two, I've been meditating daily to this one video, and it is a wonderful reminder about the love inside of me, and inside of the world, if I remember to look for it: 

I'd say that if you're an artist of some sort, just try to enjoy the fact that your self-expression is at the center of someone's attention, when they could be doing a million other things. I try to have a sense of gratitude for that whenever someone reads what I write, regardless of what they think of it.

With Lost Atlantis, I wrote whatever I felt like writing for eleven years, and it felt wonderful. I experimented with different techniques for writing, played with different styles, made different choices, read different books about writing, learned weird things for the sake of researching these books, and I did almost all of it with a coffee beside me at some cozy cafe--just living in my imagination, going on this little adventure. So in this sense, it's been extremely personally-fulfilling. I'm really not at all sure that anyone else would enjoy it though. 

As I said, jokingly, to a friend: I've finished Lost Atlantis. I can die now. I was scared that I would die before finishing it, but now it's complete. And that's satisfying. 

Being pedantic again: the word "professional." (rant)

I'm going to go on another rant about another word that I have overused in the past. And now it has begun to irritate me. 

"Professional."

So I'm on LinkedIn. 

I really dislike LinkedIn, but I feel as though I need it. It's a place where you are typically very disingenuous and everyone else is very disingenuous because of fear. You see everyone else bragging about their accomplishments, and you yourself try to figure out how you can brag about your own accomplishments and have the bragging be received well. It reeks of desperation and insecurity and grandiosity. It's like you're competing in order to cooperate, but actually, all you really want deep down inside is simply to feel secure in the knowledge that you are going to survive and be acknowledged by both strangers and the people you care about. And that will never happen with this little game.

So both on LinkedIn and sometimes off, for many years now, I've noticed that people almost never use the word "professional" unless they're being descriptive (versus judgmental) or being a jerk. The word often isn't neutral anymore. It's like a manipulative little tool to control others' behavior through fear and shame. Because who doesn't want to appear employable in American culture? And if you are making yourself the judge of what professionalism should mean not just to you personally, but to other people as well, you are putting yourself in the dominant position. So it often becomes a power/control thing.

I would say that this is the standard, but at the same time, I have seen plenty of notable exceptions. The biggest is whenever wild, outlandish chaos is the dominant culture. In those situations, "professionalism" is often the height of compliments. I really only see this is in show business. You're around such temperamental, unpredictable, unsafe, unregulated people to such a magnified extent that it really stands out when someone is calm, polite, empathetic, rational, honest, reliable, a good listener, does their job with excellence, holds themselves accountable to standards that protect everyone from harm, etc. To me, that's what professionalism should mean. 

And it doesn't now. Now, in most settings, the word is simply a clue that I'm trying to manipulate.

There's another reason why the word "professionalism" isn't a creepy word when used to compliment a performer. In most jobs in modern civilization, you're paid to suppress the sides to yourself that make you special, unique, and human. So the word "professional" just comes across as this totally un-self-aware internalized acceptance of the very worst aspects of capitalism. But this suppression of what makes one unique and human is not at all true in entertainment or performance--quite the opposite. 

So if you're not in show business... maybe you should temper your use of the word "professional." I would say that the word should only be used as a compliment--not a way to try to control other people's behavior.

I'm going to try to take my own advice, but I've overused this word so often myself...

Narcissistic people crying "abuse." (rants)

I would like to return to the old fashioned notion that the term "abuse" does not refer to things like violating terms of service, disagreeing with someone, or even (more controversially) situations in which you have a misbehaving customer. I think it's wildly offensive when a company like Midjourney refers to making comedic images of the Pope and Donald Trump as "extraordinary abuse." 

I would like "abuse" to mean things like being beaten within an inch of your life by someone who is supposed to love you, or being told you're worthless by someone you see every day for years on end, or otherwise facing a pattern of domination and control. And I think that if these sorts of things have not happened to you, or you are not a therapist, you should probably try to keep the word "abuse" out of your mouth whenever you can. 

One of the biggest problems with using the word "abuse" is that narcissists have appropriated the term. You can't know who's actually at fault or if both are at fault or to what degree, because what if it's just someone with a swollen ego who's sensitive to criticism or someone can't accept their fair share of responsibility in a conflict. 

I've noticed that narcissistic women will often go straight to calling things abusive. Men will be made fun of for saying that they were abused, generally-speaking, so I've noticed that they do it less.

My extremely, extremely narcissistic roommate who I mentioned at the very, very start of this dream diary, would label anyone and everyone who so much as looked at her funny "abusive." It's an effective way to avoid thinking about your own part in human dynamics and to avoid trying to find a solution that satisfies all parties. You're just the victim. You deserve everything--all the apologies and all of the changes in behavior, and you don't owe anything yourself. 

Then you have someone like me, who actually has been beaten to a pulp by her dad, along with many other things therapists tend to label abusive, and I wouldn't even accept from a therapist that I had an abusive childhood, partly because it seemed like a term only melodramatic narcissists exaggerating the truth would use. 

It's just a slap in the face of anyone who has actually experienced domestic violence when narcissists or people sitting comfortably in bureaucracies appropriate and manipulate with the term in order to create shock value that's more likely to get them what they want. And it makes it harder for people in actual domestic violence situations to take the term seriously and recognize what's happened to them.

So that's my hot take: The term "abuse" shouldn't refer to both a woman getting splashed with acid by her ex-boyfriend and saying something that just triggers someone's ego. The difference should be obvious, but unfortunately, with this word, it's not. 

The Second Dream Diary is currently available as an Amazon eBook! (news)

From April 7-9, Naja Tau's Dream Diary: Back to School, the second dream diary, will be available to download for FREE for Amazon's Kindle!

And it's available for purchase right now for $2.99!

This eBook is a collection of blog posts that came right after the first diary ended in about 2013. The posts go until mid to late 2016.

I did a marathon read through this collection of posts, and I think this dream diary is finally ready to go. I've been editing this thing off and on for 6 years. I don't know when I'll be ready to put this out on paperback, but I feel comfortable releasing it as an eBook that I can go in and change whenever I feel like.

If you decide to read it, just be forewarned: it's a strange eBook. It was a very interesting time in my life. I had a lot of wild takes. My psychosis had just started to come and go, and I wasn't diagnosed with anything yet let alone properly medicated back then. 

I feel some sadness and some grief when I go back over these written memories from my 20s. I wish that I had continued my journey with physics. 

I may have a master's degree now, but it's not in physics, and to say that I'm unhappy with my major and with the university I got it from is a gross understatement. 

I ask myself how I got where I am now. I think I got impatient. I was too scared to go back to California after my illness worsened then improved, and I felt insecure about my intelligence, so I went for the easier path. 

Now I'm looking for work in adjacent fields that don't require my master's degree, so it's probably not even that useful in my current job hunt. Certainly, no one is knocking on my door to see if I'm available because of it. 

I recently took a class for something to do between jobs at my local community college, which is an  amazing school, and one of the guys in the class said, "You shouldn't have a problem finding a job with a master's degree!" Unfortunately, I am having a problem. I am having quite a problem. But I've applied to less than 100 companies, and I see YouTube videos of people in this job market saying they've applied to 500, so there's that. 

In a way, I'm kind of glad my degree isn't helping me, because I'd kind of like to see specialized, expensive, time-consuming degrees like mine... die. And I'd like to see people without degrees get good jobs just because they're decent, hard-working people who can figure things out. I'm just as capable or incapable of learning and doing a job now as I was when I was eighteen and didn't have all this education.

I went down a stupid, stupid road--both me as an individual making personal choices and me as a member of my society having to go down certain paths. The system I was in was ridiculous. I wasted so much time and money trying to get an education. It was fun sometimes, and it was my life, so I treasure it and am thankful for it, but I don't recommend doing what I did to anyone else. 

What's going to happen to us as a nation if our young people can't afford to get an education while all the other nations offer it for free (and offer healthcare for free, so you don't have to marry a job, but can be free to innovate and get entrepreneurial)? We're going to fall behind everyone else if we don't educate our population--heck, not even just our young people. Our old people need to continually update their educations too. If there's anything I learned from this class, it's that ageism is really silly and I shouldn't indulge it in my mental life.

Then again, every time I go to the grocery store, there's this kid who can't be more than 20 who either shames me for the food I purchase or orders me around. 

I bought two cans of ravioli, and they went down the conveyor belt and this kid picked them up to bag them and was like, "Tsk... Chef Boyardee..." 

Hah! 

Chef Boyardee... how immature... only babies eat Chef Boyardee...

But anyway--I do hope you'll add this eBook to your Kindle collection. Some of the dreams are quite fun!

Murder of podcaster and her husband by her stalker. (rants)

I just saw a news story about a podcaster who was murdered by her stalker, and the comments really irritate me, so I'm trying to pick this apart. There's a large group of people who seem to think that this lady either attracted the inevitable or (worse) got what she deserved because she had a podcast. 

Personal feelings aside, there's a logic/false dichotomy problem with this, and it's very annoying. 

These people are basically arguing that we should create a society in which good people sharing their knowledge, expertise, and experiences should be afraid to show themselves in public and should voluntarily limit their own career and networking opportunities so that the minority of abusive people like stalkers can be free to live their lives and continually put abuse them or someone else. I don't know if people who argue this are just forgetting that we create the laws we live with and that we have the resources to enforce the rules we create, but because we do make up our own rules as a society, they're basically arguing that having good people live in fear of being in public is a more sensible way to run a society than simply removing the people engaging in anti-social behavior. They are arguing that society should suppress its best assets--it's decent, responsible, well-behaved, cooperative people--from fully coming into bloom and reaching the peak of their usefulness in terms of adding to the culture.

This attitude seems like it comes from people stuck in 1990, not people in the 21st century who are expected to have LinkedIn profiles, who are supposed to try to be seen as industry experts to get a job, who connect with their friends and relatives on social media, who engage in hobbies and learn on social media, and often want to make a living off of the information industry. 

Sure, when the internet was brand new in 1995, and we naively believed that we had the option of staying anonymous, it felt smart to try to obscure your identity. But privacy is in the past. Google and a hundred other sites have your information all the way up to your social security number. So much is on the dark web, and it multiplies every day. All these people with fake names on YouTube seem to think they're anonymous. They're not. Google has all your info. It knows your phone number and probably knows everything else about you too. It takes one data breech and anything and everything Google knows about you could be on the dark web. And the government gets data breeched all the time, and they know your info too. It only takes one tiny misstep to become traceable to even a script kiddie. We just haven't invested resources in tracing people who do horrible things on the internet yet unless they're trying to mess with really serious government affairs for a long period of time. But AI is really, really freeing up a lot of workers' time these days, so... I don't know what's going to change. All I know is that karma is real, and that we as a society really need to get more security-minded. And I think we are. Cybersecurity is a blossoming career field right now. 

Right now, we as a society seem to have decided that psychopaths are pretty rare, so we should just let them do whatever. And that that's just how it is, and should be, and it will never change. Well, yeah, but the only reason it won't change because we choose not to do anything about it. And I mean there is a whole range of anti-social behavior that we tolerate. 

I think all one can do these days is to adopt a philosophy of living without fear. Internet use is not optional in 2023. We all benefit from it, and so I think we should work together to optimize its benefits to society. That's going to mean different things for different individuals, but in any case, that 1990s argument that "celebrities" are asking to be stalked and should therefore not receive much assistance in countering it, doesn't make sense anymore. We are no longer talking about wealthy King Richard III needing to hire bodyguards to rule a kingdom because he's so famous. Now, this is a lot more likely to be your next door neighbor just trying to get by. 

In my opinion, things like this stalking crime and other violent crimes suggest that we as a society need to get really serious about improving the root causes of these kind of events: a lack of emotional intelligence and wellness. We've already failed as a society to protect our citizens from mass shootings. The next thing is going to be AI-driven/robotic mass shootings, and that's going to be a lot harder to shut down if we keep our current approaches to security. We (as a society, not necessarily as individuals) shouldn't ignore it when people exhibit severe pain like this guy did. There's a good chance that if there was some kind of mental health intervention combined with locking this stalker up for a while, no one would have died. But we weren't prepared.

Ready to start a new chapter in my life. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

My friend in Seattle bought a house in a surrounding suburb, and he wants me to live with him and his husband for very cheap rent. I like where I live now--the only problem is that jobs aren't as varied or plentiful here, and they don't pay what they should considering the cost of housing here. 

I don’t want to trade down, so I did a little digging into the demographics of this suburban town in Seattle. I found out that the median income is over $100,000. 

This might be an interesting experiment for me! I’d get to see what living with rich people is like!

Now, low rent isn’t no rent. I still need to pay my friend his rent when I move. So while I’m still in Arizona, I am applying to remote jobs. But hundreds of other people apply to these jobs, and I never get picked. 

Laying awake one night, because I always seem to contemplate my career choices at 3 a.m., I thought that maybe I could find a suitable job locally in this small suburb in Seattle. 

So I went on Indeed.com and to my surprise, the most in-demand job in the neighborhood is “Cheese Specialist.” 

That didn’t pay enough, so I thought, do I need to make my own job? Do I need to go into business for myself to make a living? 

I did some more digging into this town and I found out that there are some services the town wants that they aren’t getting. They want a florist. The nearest one is an entire town away. 

But the number one thing this town wants is: pole dancing lessons. It’s the number one SEO’d search term on the town’s Yelp. This is not a joke. 

The most interesting part about my market research is that they don’t want to hire pole dancers. They want to BE pole dancers. 

I’m starting to get an interesting picture of this town that demands that its grocery stores hire cheese specialists. These people emerge from the offices of their six-figure corporate jobs, and they’re sitting in commuter traffic for at least an hour. The whole time, they can't wait to take off all their clothes and swing around on a pole. That’s what the whole town is secretly searching for en masse.

And although I have never thought of them in quite this way, I know that this describes my friends perfectly.

But I'm actually a little concerned about how many Karen videos this town posts on YouTube. It suggests to me that there might be an entitlement problem in this town--both entitlement to act up and entitlement to film someone without their permission. I worked in customer service for a decade, but I still generally don't approve of Karen videos. As I've mentioned before on here, I have bipolar schizoaffective disorder. What if something happened to the mental health funding in the area and I couldn't get my medicine? People generally don't think of the immense privilege of not having psychosis. You might be harming someone with a severe disability if you're filming them acting strangely in a store or something. 

But despite the weirdly high number of Karen videos, I think I'm going to take the plunge. I think I'm going to take my chances living a totally new lifestyle in the upcoming months. 

Blogging has so often helped me to feel alright with the world, but I've been frightened of the knowledge that I am not perfectly anonymous on this blog at all. But what's that all about? I'm afraid that other people will know what I think and that they won't want to play with me? I don't think I should live my life in fear of not being liked. That's really getting in my way now that I want to come into my power and explore all the different things I can do. I hope you enjoy reading what I write, but I need to be okay when people don't like it too. And that's not even to mention the opportunity costs of people not knowing you at all. 

Anyway! Be brave and be beautiful, dear reader. It takes action to get cheese specialists and pole dancing lessons established in your town. You've got to know what you want and aim for it. 

Some of my struggles with writing the last book in the series: Lost Atlantis 5... (rants)

I've really been struggling now that I've finished all the Lost Atlantis books except the last one. The thing that I get out of writing all of these books is some kind of answer about how to heal from developmental trauma. 

When I started on this journey 10 years ago, I thought for certain that I would be completely healed of all my past traumas, and I would have some kind of sage wisdom to pass along about complex PTSD and its symptoms, like emotional disregulation, not being able to trust people, low self-esteem, hopelessness, etc. But now that I am here near the end of this writing journey, I find that I actually can't really comment on what it's like to be really deeply healed at the core. 

This series is a complete fiction, of course. It's about a ninja assassin. And I just have to imagine what a thing would be like, and don't actually have to experience it. But I do feel as though I should have some kind of ability to imagine a time when I have felt the way a plot point would feel, and I just don't think I know what it's like to really, truly be healed from developmental trauma. 

This is a spiritual and psychological crisis for me. I've been buying up books about trauma, conflict management, and anger management, and, unexpectedly, Buddhism. I've been increasing my therapy sessions. And as I go over these materials I really hope that I find some insights that I can offer in the conclusion of the series. 

If I don't find a way to describe what healing from c-PTSD is like, and how to do it, I think there will have been no purpose in my writing any of the series. I mean, I created a character that was so hurt, and broken, and dysfunctional, and hard to tolerate, and now, I've brought her to a place where she's able to integrate, socially, very well, and form relationships, and self soothe. That's good, but it's kind of superficial. Where is that really deep change of the heart and mind that I was looking for? I just don't see how that's going to play out right now. As extreme as I went with just horribleness in the first book, I want to go that extreme with the other side of human nature with this character: what goodness, and peace, and rationality, and love look like. How am I going to do that? I don't fully understand right now.

I guess my greatest fear surrounding all of this is that I will read and watch and listen to a bunch of stuff and come up with something kind of cheesy, but okay to finish off the series, but that I won't really dig up something that gives me a sense of meaning about suffering through childhood trauma, or give a sense of appreciation for what post-traumatic growth is. Will I get those answers by the end of this series? I'm really not sure right now.