kainasylum

I'm trying this new thing...

No More Promises

... because we are creatures of emotion.  And emotions are driven by our present situation.  Always.

Promises can either be an easy goal to achieve or they can be a prison of words.  In the case of the latter, nobody is happy.

And happy is what we're trying to achieve.

Last night and today, I am reminded of a fundamental truth...

My friends range from professional to geeky to saccharin sweet to stoned to yagerbomb drunk... and I am a combination of all of them.

Whenever I feel lost and without center, I can go to my friends and be reminded of who I am after all is said and done.  For whatever reason, I am the one that they choose to be with.

Thank you for remembering what I'm supposed to be.

"You're not a mirror, Kain."

"Then what am I?"

"You're a signal amplifier.  A love freak.  You absorb identities from those around you, and then you project the amplified identity back in their general direction.  To the nice ones, you become a saint.  The assholes see you as uber asshole.  And the apathetic ones believe that you have a life that has no room for them.  It's almost perfect."

"Almost?"

"Almost.  You waste a lot of energy by collecting so many signals that your systems get internal interference.  You have no sense of identity because your system is overloaded with all of the input you've been getting.  That is why you've been such a recluse, lately... because you've stopped generating signals of your own.  Focus on meaningful inputs.  You'll be able to adopt a consistent identity and project a more focused signal that actually belongs to you.  You've been focusing your reception on a lot of dead receivers.  That energy goes nowhere.  Hence, you are stretched thin and exhausted with very little to show for it."

"What does that mean?"

"It means... Quit fucking collecting and holding on to people as if they were goddamn Pokemons.  You can't amplify all of those reflections without losing yourself in the process."

"Fuck you, Goodwill :)"

"Fuck you, too, Kain :)"

"Have you met her yet?"

"Yeah I met her!  I went out on a first date with her last year and met her boyfriend and her daughter, and then we went to Jack in the Box.  I had a patty melt and some muthafuckin' curly fries, yo!"

George C. Vaillant met his wife at the age of 29 in 1930. He was a prominent anthropologist working on pre-Columbian Aztec digs. She was the daughter of a successful expatriate American banker. Together, they had a storybook romance. His son would be born 4 years later in 1934; George C. Vaillant was 33 at the time. At the age of 35, he gave up the excavation lifestyle and settled down in the world of museums and universities. The family of three led a charmed life. During the time of the Great Depression, they employed a nurse, a maid, and a cook within their household. George C. Vaillant continued his life as a successful museum curator, professor, published writer, and father... until 1945.

At the age of 44, George C. Vaillant was found by his wife... dead in their own back yard from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

His son, George E. Vaillant (Jr.), was 10 years old at the time. He was the last to see his father alive.

( The Life of Junior )

His father's traumatic suicide was a double-edged sword that had changed his life forever. He gave up his own persistent Communion to become a manifestation of Agency to give his father's death meaningful context. George E. Vaillant died at the age of 10 when his father died, and in that child's place emerged an insatiable unbridled formless energy that would help millions around the world understand what may have happened to his father that day in their back yard.

Inspired by this article

After last week, I can't seem to find the energy to do... anything.
I should be moving to the new house, right now.

Maybe I'll start tomorrow.

House purchased.
Keys got.

It began... last October.
The experiment is still in progress.

Destruction phase is complete.
Results inconclusive.

I have forgotten entire sections of my former identity.
Whatever it was that ripped me apart must have been painful.
I can only trust that the actions of my other self were for the best.

The future is uncertain.
Point of no return has been achieved.

Commencing Rebuild...
Critical data loss!
Memory fractures detected!

Who are you people?

Today at work, I thought my butt smelled really bad... as if I had not wiped very well, and it was coming from my seat.  This made me very nervous when the programmers sitting next to me would ask me for a code review.

After all was said and done, it turned out that my butt didn't smell.  There were workers in the next room painting the walls.

I'll understand if you wish to unsubscribe.

Drunk at katzs reesisterd girlse miss mare think I'm in love. Saved myself forb her

 Had a great day biking through urban territory today, and it gave me a lot of time to think... On my list of things to think about was an update to my games list, about three months worth of purchases.  So without further ado...

• Splinter Cell: Conviction (360) - because I have acquired a taste for stealth gaming
• Resident Evil 5 (360) - Harvey hated it so much that he gave me his copy.  I only play it co-op with Jamal... I don't imagine this to be fun at all in single-player
• Mushroom Men (Wii) - because I nearly destroyed myself working on this game... its development time spanned a pivotal transition period in my life and career.  I finally purchased my own copy from Amazon because my old studio never received any copies from the publisher to give to its dev team.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (360): because I heard the fiction was compelling despite the flat combat mechanics.... I finished the game and traded it in for store credit.  The fiction is, indeed, compelling, and the combat was, indeed, flat... boss fights were frustrating
• Civilization: Revolution (360) - because Sid Meier is supposed to be the shit... so much so that he puts his name on the box in possessive form.  I own Sid Meier's game.
• I really wish I could get a refund for Braid on the 360.  That game was pretentious.

When I was a child, I would have recurring nightmares set in my own room, in my own home.  The attackers were ghosts, aliens, black worms, anything that I was afraid to think of became the subject of the nightmare.  They would start out as a figure in my window, under my bed, from the closet, or the shadow... and they would kill me when they caught me.  This occured for over a year when I was 8.  I don't remember much about that time period other than a year of that.

I got to a point where I knew it was going to happen, and I could almost control myself in the nightmare.  I knew I was asleep, and I could run, but I ran in mud.  I could scream, but nothing would come out.  I got better at controlling it.  I knew that I was going to have a nightmare tonight.  Eventually, I got to a point where I could fight in my own nightmares.  Running always ended the same way, so I had no choice but to fight.  I would punch, but my attacks had no force.  My limbs were jello.  I had no method, no technique... I did not believe that I was able to hurt anything in these dreams.

Fast forward to much later in my life, the nightmares would happen every once in a while, but I had techniques that I believed in.  I made myself believe that I could kill anything that ever attacked me.  I had to... because it would still happen, and I needed to have a plan.  My nightmares felt the same... it began with paralysis, and then vibrations... and eventually, they became dreams, again.  The attacker(s) became more and more human as my techniques became stronger... and in my dreams, I would destroy them... and I wanted more.

Recently, that ability to control my nightmares went away.  And I want it back.  I want to have dreams like this again.

I must become my own dark passenger, again... because that is the "me" that is not a victim within the nightmares... it is something more lucid.

Apparently, the nightly incidents I have been going through is commonly known as "Night Terrors"... entering a form of sleep coupled with a feeling of intensely violent vibration, paralysis, and horrifying audio and visual hallucinations.

Just as it was when I was 8 years old... for a year.  Continuous night terrors.  Unending.  Predictably consistent.

I can fight these night terrors if I can understand the pattern.

If somebody were to ask me what my realistic superpower might be, I might answer sociological pattern matching.  I naturally seek to break established patterns... I suppose we all do in one form or another.  As much as I can be a catalyst for change in other people's patterns, I can't seem to break my own pattern.

Have I been here, before?  Why am I here, again?

"I want ___"
"That would be nice, but you can't have ___ because..."

One day, I just woke up and decided to do it.

That little voice in my head that tells me why I can't have these things has lost my respect.
Everything that little voice said sounded like a lame excuse.
Living in the past.
Afraid to fail.
Unwilling to try, to believe, to expend energy.
...Of no pragmatic value to Kain at this point in his life.

And so it begins.  What if Kain went after everything that he would want in this lifetime intentionally instead of waiting for the "right situation"?  Crafting the world around him with methodical precision... and love.  Yes, love... because that is where the energy comes from.  It comes from the self.

The house purchase is drawing closer.  If all goes well, I will be moving into my own house in east Austin by the end of this month.  I can barely afford this purchase.  But I'll do whatever it takes to make this happen.  It is all a part of the reality I want for myself, one in which I can paint my walls whichever color I want and engage in some "projects" within the confines of my own backyard.

And what's best is that there is no neighborhood homeowner's association :)

Plasma donation went a lot more easily than I imagined, but it left me tired all day.  I will need to get my body in shape if I am to sustain the two donations per week I would need to help pay my mom back for the money she pulled out of her meager life savings to help me.  Whatever it takes.  The time in my day is a pie chart; time goes in, and results come out.  The world is a vampire, and my body is an ATM.

I'm back to quitting the smokes, again.  I think I'll be able to do it for real, this time... because I want to bring the physical back into my life again.  And with the physical comes the version of me that I liked the most... the fighter.  This is what I am born and bred to be... always and forever.  First and foremost.  I fight battles for what I believe in.

Which brings me to... her.  She is a wild card in all of this.  Honestly, I don't know what to make of her.  I did not plan for... her.  But I think there is a reason we are drawn to each other to the point where I can't continue on with the path that I was living.  And within this part of my life... I am relinquishing control... it is the only way to be.  I must be me... for that is the relationship I choose to have with this universe.

When you introduce yourself to someone, you show them the most perfect version of yourself.
Your potential employer, mate, or cool new friend of a friend.
You start with the version you've deemed fit for presentation to the world:
Beautiful, intelligent, charming, and successful.

Perfection is to be expected.

But the more we expect perfection, the more we notice the cracks within ourselves in stark contrast.
And then we have a choice...
to either drown in self-judgment until we give up on stopping the bleed from the ever-widening cracks.
or embrace these imperfections and find a way to thrive, regardless.

We are beautiful because of our imperfections.
And that is how we survive.

It is the edge cases that define a form that may not exist until we hit its boundaries.

The silhouette of something special became apparent only in light of a potential fate transition.

"Knowledge is useless when coveted, much like gold...
The universe will naturally seek to distribute knowledge and wealth in its tendency towards entropy."

Like is when you are willing to share an experience.
Love is when you are willing to share an identity.

The absence of both, shared experience and identity, is neither like nor love... It is resource management.

I am thankful for my friends and lovers who graciously offer me an identity when I don't know who I am.

Fruity Pebbles 

Whatever it is I used to have has gotten much stronger in recent weeks.  That sense.
It helps and it hurts... I can't turn it off.
I can't stop... feeling it.
All of it.
Everyone.
Inside their heads.

Again with the vision of the giant empty room the size of this universe.

Two nights ago, something new happened: I was on my bed awake, alone.  I heard a man's voice whispering in my room.  And then my bed began to vibrate.  I could not believe this was actually happening.  I was unable to fall asleep for a long time that night.

I need new boundaries.  To maximize returns on my energy investments.  The voice says 55% extension is a fair cutoff point.  I will only go as far as that before I stop trying.  Protect myself... and protect them.

Goodwill, here.  Kain is away at the moment, and so I figure I would hijack his journal to give away his deepest secret: The reason why.

He is looking for context. Meaning.  We all are.  Like most of us, he wants to know that the things we did do matter, that we matter... and that the suffering and effort meant something - nothing wasted.  The narrative has a happy ending when the random set of generic events come together in a system that makes sense to him... with every observable action having meaningful context.  The entropy of the world makes sense when everything has a context... As if the universe were a living sentient entity that one could have a real two-way relationship with.

Every conversation we have, every movie we see, game we play, thing we read, in everything we do, we seek context that promises the potential to affect our future thoughts in a never-ending drive to modify our own internal genetic algorithms.  Anything without personal context ultimately renders the experience empty or irrelevant.

We try so very hard to seek that relationship with our universe.  It is the only way we know how to interact with our world: as a relationship with a sentient being. full of context.  empathy.  with likes and dislikes.  To have a relationship with an entity is to have control over how that entity affects us.  This control manifests as an identity: the labels that we allow ourselves to wear and the verbs implied by those labels.

We are not looking for truth.  We never were.  We never are.  We are looking for what the truth would promise us: meaning. emotional context. an identity we can call our own. understanding. control. peace with what we believe to be our own truths. validation from an "other".

We seek out this context in the various forms of media and interactions that reflect back at us... mixing ourselves with ingredients to experience the alchemy that makes us... Gravitating towards the edges of silhouettes that belong to forms worthy of our recognition.

So when that little voice in your head tells you to be afraid or just lay down, play it safe, and take it easy, then ask yourself:
"Why not? The truth is... we're all gonna fucking die someday... so let's just do this."

Our emotions, both good and bad, are driven by our own context... and suffering is the currency through which we acquire validation.

"I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."

"Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient...To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter."

-Linda Stone

The words we use, the vocabulary we master, the methods of expressions we engage in... these are the ingredients of the spells we cast.

And that attention can lead to emergent second or third order reflections that may be perceived as "magic".

 From Glenda and Matthew...
"When you answer somebody's questions, then that is advice.
But if you give advice without being asked, then that is judgement."

By itself, single-element metals are highly malleable because the molecules of the metal are uniform in size, and this gives adjacent molecules room to move as each molecule acts like a ball joint to its neighbors.

Alloys are created by infusing a large-molecule metal with another element that has a much smaller molecule.  The smaller molecules fill in the empty spaces between the large molecules, thereby making the metal seem more solid as the large molecules are fastened in place by the tight packing of small molecules in between the large molecules.  Within an alloy mix, the same amount of space can contain more matter because previously unused space is now efficiently filled by smaller molecules.

Density increases.  The heavy metal can be quite formidable by itself, but as an alloy, it can become a highly efficient weapon.

The truth is... I don't really know how to do the little things.  Everything has to be epic with me.  Everything has to be some life-changing, world-bending, delta-causing endeavor.  But maybe that's okay, because we are born and bred to fight.  The fight is all...