My cat is sitting in the open window, basking in the full sun as she cleans herself.
Spring has definitely come to Texas.
The internet is huge!!! I mean HUGE. It’s a vast populated city complete with shopping, banks, storage facilities, churches, cults, libraries, schools, and on and on.
I have my particular neighborhoods and shopping malls that I enjoy visiting. And I meet people. I don’t know their age or what they look like or even where they live in real life. We just cross over because of a particular shared interest and start chatting and making bonds.
What started these thoughts? I joined a scanlating group recently and I was surfing the members’ personal sites today. I found out that one of the members isn’t even in high school! I’ve been talking to her on the Himechan mailing list for awhile and had no idea. I knew she was young, but I was thinking high school or college. She’s my cousin’s age.
So then I just started thinking about the internet in general. It’s such a bizarre intangible. But it’s real. But it’s not. But it is. But it doesn’t exist, not like a real city. But you can do many things in it that you can do in a real city. And it does exist. It’s just not tangible, like buildings and people’s faces are tangible and understandable.
Internet-megopolis City.
So Matt said, “What did you write in your journal tonight?” And I replied, “I went surfing for blogs again today which is always a bad idea. It always freaks me out. It’s like being put in the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
For those who don’t know what that is, here’s the passage from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (technically Chapter 10 and 11 from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe or so Google tells me):
For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”
The grey plain stretched before Zaphod, a ruined, shattered plain. The wind whipped wildly over it.
Visible in the middle was the steel pimple of the dome. This, gathered Zaphod, was where he was going. This was the Total Perspective Vortex.
As he stood and gazed bleakly at it, a sudden inhuman wail of terror emanated from it as of a man having his soul burnt from his body. It screamed above the wind and died away.
Zaphod started with fear and his blood seemed to turn to liquid helium.
“Hey, what was that?” he muttered voicelessly.
“A recording,” said Gargravarr, “of the last man who was put in the Vortex. It is always played to the next victim. A sort of prelude.”
“Hey, it really sounds bad …” stammered Zaphod, “couldn’t we maybe slope off to a party or something for a while, think it over?”
…
At that moment another dismal scream rent the air and Zaphod shuddered.
“What can do that to a guy?” he breathed.
“The Universe,” said Gargravarr simply, “the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns, the infinite distances between them, and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small.”
…
“OK, OK,” said Zaphod.
He opened the door of the box and stepped in.
Inside the box he waited.
After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.
…
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
————–
So anyways, that’s what it feels like when I surf blogs.
I just read Dudley’s entries in his Live Journal…. maybe that’s what this is for: to keep in touch with our friends. I can handle that. I can do that.
Or maybe I just need some sleep.
Endless infinity of people… we’re all the same… lined up in a row that stretches out of sight… our internet chitter chatter creating a buzz which fills the space.
It drives me nuts!!!!! How can we all be the same?! Reaching, clawing, grabbing, searching… what the hell are we all searching for?! What are we doing?
I surfed other Live Journal logs today. Big mistake. It always freaks me out.
Of course life has been freaking me out lately. I hate it when I start getting all philosophical and contemplating the whole “why are we all here” question.
Because there is no answer. There is no answer when you aren’t religious, and I just can’t buy into any of the modern gods that we currently have to choose from. They are all flawed, and I don’t even want to start into that discussion.
But being without religion does leave terrible unanswerable questions in your head.
Dammit! One among many. A tiny drop in a massive ocean.
We’re all the same.
Too many images…. too much manga…. not enough time…. not enough me.
I feel like I’m playing catch-up again.
So I figured out what unhappiness is for. I realize the first question is “Why should unhappiness be for anything? It just is.” Well there are two arguments people tend to present: 1) there is the spiritual argument which says “Everything happens for a reason”; and 2) there is the Darwinistic argument which says all things in life come about as a result of survival, therefore unhappiness must’ve helped our species survive for that trait to continue from generation to generation. In both arguments, unhappiness has a purpose.
Unhappiness fuels change.
There. Now everyone can quit being so unhappy about being unhappy. It serves a very fundamental and important purpose. I’m really unhappy right now– 8 months of trying and still not pregnant (starting to think there is a problem with us); Matt is out of work; I’m doing data entry for the IRS which isn’t exactly my dream job; we don’t have enough money to pay the bills; I’m the most overweight and unfit I’ve ever been in my life.
But when I bottomed out last night, when my period came yet again, something started to stir around deep inside of me. The unhappiness I had been feeling for the past few months finally created enough fuel to light a fire.
I’m looking at my life again and deciding what I want to do. After I got married, I hung around in the blissful state of newlywed for quite awhile. And though I still love my husband deeply, that blissful state has lost its brilliance and no longer hides me from myself.
Unhappiness also makes you introspective. Hehe. :-))