bluegreen17 | mom and books and cds,oh my!

phew! now that i'm back from visiting my mother,i feel like i'm REALLY on vacation.

this morning my stomach felt bad but i think it was nerves because as soon as i thought that,i told myself to relax and i did. (now if i could only tell myself to cheer up and have THAT work...well,that would be grand!)

i decided to take a more rural route that i just found out about to get to the nursing home,as i dont like having to drive fast,which i have to do on the main road. well,that's great,but i totally forgot about the lovely phenomenon of frost heaves until i was already heading up the road. good lord! not only were the frost heaves pretty bad...at one point i flew up in the air high enough to hear my spare tire in the back make a thump when it landed)...but there were lots of horrible potholes...some sections of road were potholes straight across so there was no way to avoid them...my poor car! oh,and it was a very twisty road...at one point it's right along a small river which is twisty...and there were a few pretty steep hills which my beloved ford was not too happy to climb. and it actually took quite a while longer to get there. to my surprise,i didnt get lost. the route goes through a couple of towns and going through one,the sign for the route i was on was a little far away from the actual turn,so that i had to SUDDENLY take a left to keep on the right road.
thankfully,i didnt have any tailgaters...i was even lucky enough to have a non-tailgater behind me on the way home too. sort of felt like winning the lottery.

anyhow,i asked if one of the nurses had time to speak with me,and i asked her what i can do when i visit my mom. she said the families of the alzhemier's patients often take them out for coffee or ice cream (in season!) so maybe i'll try that next time,though my mother sometimes chokes even on liquids.her throat muscles have atrophied,which is why she cant talk and i think sometimes liquid goes down her windpipe so she coughs. it was sunny and not too cold today,so i took her out for a little walk. she seems somewhat unsteady on her feet,which might be the als or just from not getting much exercise. then i asked her to show me the photos that my cousins gave her of their kids,so we looked at pictures for a while. i'm glad to SEE mom,but it's hard to visit. i think she is just as happy for me to go as i am to leave after a little while! so,anyway,it wasnt too bad a visit.

on my way home i stopped at two different libraries (though in the course of the day i passed FOUR libraries that i can use my card at) and got a total of 9 books and 4 cds.
the cds are:
abbey road-the beatles
simon and garfunkel's greatest hits
secret garden-once in a red moon
(someone used to play one of their cds at the natural foods store when i worked there and i liked it. kind of celticky/enyay if i recall correctly)
van morrison-days like this

and the books:

fiction:
jitterbug perfume-tom robbins
neuromancer-william gibson
ubik-philip k. dick

my beloved nonfiction:

when going through hell..dont stop-douglas bloch (about depression)

prosperity pie-sark (how not to worry about money.ha!)

unholy ghosts:writers on depression-nell casey

steven pinker-the blank slate (sociobiology; possibly akin to the two books by howard bloom i read a few weeks ago)

holy madness:the shock tactics and radical teachings of crazy-wise adepts,holy fools and rascal gurus by georg feurstein (includes osho aka bagwan rasneesh whose books i love but who did some very corrupt things)

branded:the buying and selling of teenagers by alissa quart(sociology of marketing...i love this kind of stuff)

the salmon of doubt-douglas adams
(fiction and nonfiction stuff compiled after his death.i read one of the essays during a break at work and i really really liked his ideas...wish he'd written more essays)

how to be alone-jonathan frazen (essays...did i mention i love essays?)

the noonday demon:an atlas of depression by andrew solomon (this book has previously scared me...it's really thick and i thought it would be,well,depressing. but in looking through it today,it looks very interesting...and i can read just parts of nonfiction books anyway)

depression-free for life-gabriel cousens,m.d. with mark mayell (i want to read what he says about taking amino acid supplements.i have mixed feelings about supplements...i think the body absorbs things better from food,but on the other hand,the soil that much food has been grown in is now depleted of many minerals,which affects things. the amino-acid phenylalanine is supposed to be good for depression,but is not good for manic-depressives.because i'm very moody,i've sometimes wondered if i have mild case of being bipolar...i have infrequent good days and sometimes i feel slightly manic,which feels good in comparison to the frequent depression i have. so i've never tried it. it affects the same two hormones that the wellbutrin i've been taking with success up until now,so i wonder...)

so anyway,i've got some really interesting stuff to peruse.

and finally,

if you dont want to hear stuff about girly biology,stop HERE.

i'm just a bit disturbed because i unexpectly started my menstrual period today,and it's only been 19 days since i started my last one. i dont feel lousy or anything,but this is annoying.if this pattern continues,for instance,i'll potentially have 2 weeks of pms followed by one week of having a period,and then it would start all over. hey,give me a break. i want my old 36 day cycle back!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

hurrah for Salmon of Doubt! you'll love it, I'm sure.

have you read Neuromancer before? I hadn't until this quarter, when I had to read it for my criticism class. it's a real trip...but I liked it.

well,i hope i can read -neuromancer-. i dont' know why i have a block with fiction so often. i guess i like to LEARN things when i read,and i don't feel like i am with fiction or maybe it's not that you can't learn things through fiction but that it takes pages and pages whereas an essay or article or even a nonfiction book broken up into chapters (so therefore it can be read in a nonlinear and/or partial fashion and still be useful as well as enjoyable)

i've actually read some stuff on william gibson's blog which i like and i started -idoru- and i kind of like how he writes,how he describes things...almost TOO clever,which would annoy me if it was "look how clever i am even if it doesn't serve the narrative" but it doesn't seem to go that far. but i don't know if i'll read all of either book because i get this restlessness which may or may not be due to what i described above. do you have any opinion about that?

I thought Neuromancer was an good read...sometimes I had a hard time visualizing some of the action sequences (which often take place in the cyber realm, which I'm not all that smart about) but they were always stylistically intriguing. but the more interesting aspect about it, in my opinion, was Gibson's treatment of the politics of that future time--human relationships in the body versus human relationships in cyberspace, etc. I need to read it again, so I don't have to worry so much about keeping up on the storyline and can focus more on the character development.

I would think that reading fiction (esp. long narrative fiction) would require an equally long attention span. I've not really thought much about it, because I've always been a fiction reader and undaunted by extremely fat books that a lot of (sane?) people would avoid. but, after reading your journal for a while, I don't think your restlessness is due to disliking fiction as a whole...more like you're trying to face yourself and your life, so maybe you don't really want to lose yourself too much in a fictionalized world.

I hope I didn't sound too much like Freud or something. :)

actually i think that's quite astute,sigmund.

i guess i do ponder that sometimes...it's sort of like i think THIS world is fiction already (think of the matrix and/or the hindu concept of lila...divine play) so i that's enough...and/or i'm not really trying to escape very often,i'm trying to do something with THIS world and getting into the history,geography and biography of this world is plenty for me...if that makes any sense. which is sort of why i think i love tolkien's middle earth...it's not superficial...it has history,genealogy,and of course since i love language,i've always loved the fact that he made up those languages.(incidentally i was looking at a book/cassette set of finnish at the library...it's cool that the library has more than just french and spanish...i'm impressed,though there is a finnish-american population in this area. ANYWAY,i had to laugh because of course it reminded me of the elvish languages...must be all those umlats..i think they're called. the dots above the letters.)

i also like books that have the same characters,though that's far more common in kids books than adults. i like to have some sort of connection to characters...another reason i love star trek...because of the character development. and one DEFINITELY learns something watching those shows...well,i'm only really familiar with the first two as i never watched much ds9 and hardly any voyager or enterprise. i like to learn something that i can apply to my life,so your observation is right on target. even going on vacation to me is to refresh myself so i have more energy for everyday life. because everyday life is IT. i've often thought that the ordinary was really extraordinary. kind of a paradox...i think einstein said either everything is a miracle or nothing is.

i think when i'm in the mood for escaping,i will watch a movie. so i'm more visual in my escaping...who knows..ha. but i also like movies that inspire me! so even then it's often not wanting to totally escape. well...anyway,enough about my psyche for now. sometimes other people's comments are good insights and/or reminders for some fruitful thinking. thanks!

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sadly,no. i assume you're referring to the two howard bloom books i read in the last few weeks...or however i worded it...probably i should have said within the last several months or i was visualizing 'several' as in the neighborhood of 17 weeks or so...

i think each book took me several week each to read. i'm disorganized,i like to sleep ten hours a night but usually only get away with nine but that takes a chunk of time,i work 40 hours plus about 10 hours of commuting,i read and write on livejournal and an email here and there plus a little netsurfing,i spend hours brushing and flossing my teeth with the specter of false teeth hovering over me,and i'm very very good at procrastinating which takes up a lot of time. also,my laundress,cook and errand boy all quit so i have to do that stuff myself...AND in the last few years i've had trouble concentrating as it's the rare book that captures my interest enough...i dont' know if i've been reading so many years and i'm incredibly fussy or my brain chemicals are more scattered...fortunately,i love how howard bloom writes and the subject matter was very interesting,so i actually read those two entire books.

um,what were you saying?...

ah yes...i deeply sympathize with the difficulty of concentration!

mom and books and cds,oh my!

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neuromancer,fiction and short attention span theatre

Re: neuromancer,fiction and short attention span theatre

Re: neuromancer,fiction and short attention span theatre

read 'erring