Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Oracles are never what they seem. For oracles to be oracles they have to contain something hidden. The more you think you understand them the less you probably do. That's where the danger lies. As ancient Greeks said, the words spoken by oracles are like seeds. They contain a fullness, a pregnancy of meaning, dimensions of relevance that only become apparent with time. Human language is like a splinter: fragmented, isolated, sticking out in one direction. But the language of the gods is full of surprises that surround you from all directions and jump out on you from behind.

—Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I think this guy is having a good laugh at my expense.

If any of you read my last Musings post, you may remember this:

I used this deck quite a lot at one point in my life. Can you tell?



Fortunately, the cards don't look as disreputable as the box. And after literally decades of using this deck, I just discovered that I had two Knights of Swords. I'm not sure what that means. I would probably have never known if they both hadn't come up in the same reading. Reversed. And yes, I guess the day of that reading had been about being, "indiscreet, extravagant, and foolish." I've been through the entire deck now and there are no other duplications and no missing cards. But I guess I'd better pay attention to that Knight, hadn't I?

Well, I dropped the deck and because the box is in such poor shape (and I hadn’t gotten around yet to tying a ribbon around it), the cards went kablooie, most of them sliding under a heavy table with a low shelf that I can’t readily see under. Given the arthritic state of my knees, getting down on the floor to fish under there wasn’t an option. I got a stick to fish most of them out, apologizing the whole time that I meant no disrespect, and managed to push the table enough to fetch the rest of them. Then I set about the business of reordering them (again) and taking inventory. Of course, the only card still missing was the Knight of Swords.

So I poked around with the stick some more, managed to push the table some more, but wherever he’s decided to hide, he’s well hidden. I retrieved the spare Knight of Swords from the mantelpiece where I’d given it a place of honor, and apologized again, hoping neither one of them minded the current situation. Next, I shuffled the cards and asked, “What the heck is the Knight of Swords trying to tell me?”

I drew the Four of Swords: “retreat, recuperation, exile.”

Dude, I didn’t mean to exile you. I’m very sorry. Or if you just need downtime, that’s okay.

I’m sure he’ll turn up again when he’s in the mood. Or when it holds some significance or messes with my mind the most. Or maybe he won’t. I’ll just have to wait and see.

27 Dec
The guy in the Cadillac Escalade whose license plate included “ASAP” driving at least 10 mph under the speed limit.

30 Dec
I have strep throat. The doc said “I worked in the ER and nothing phases me but THAT’S impressive.” God knows how long I’ve had it.

31 Dec
I’ve been sick as a dog for days but tonight I feel like I may have regained my humanity. Happy new year everyone.

1 Jan
No fever this morning for the first time since Friday. I think I may survive. 

 May you all enjoy a happy and fever free 2013.

1 Jan
Having watched all the Rose Parade I can stand (10 minutes), I will turn my attention elsewhere.

2 Jan
People are the foulest species. I don’t usually watch Animal Cops because I can’t stand the cruelty, stupidity and culpability of some people, but it happened to be on when I turned the TV on and I became transfixed by a story of three horses. Happy endings for two of them, no word on what kind of ending the third experienced. I want to believe the number of good people balances out the bad, but there are days I have my doubts.

2 Jan
In other news, I still feel like crud.

2 Jan
Watching a Dr. Oz diet show while eating KFC: another fine irony.

3 Jan
Profound: doing an oracle reading re: Mom and having her interrupt it with a phone call. If I was a writer I might make something of that.

4 Jan
I felt mostly human today but still tire way too easily.

6 Jan
Who likes mimes except other mimes?

7 Jan
I think “don’t describe eye color” is one of the more bogus writing rules. Someone with a personality disorder must have made that one up. I always notice eye color in Real Life. It’s pertinent in description; eyes are the windows to the soul, etc. Having said all this, I do believe amateurs way the hell overuse eye color as a descriptor, as if it’s the only thing important about a face. It’s one more piece of the puzzle, that’s all, and perhaps that rule was generated by someone’s frustration over too many “he had brown hair and blue eyes” 
flat and lifeless descriptions. More important perhaps to note the pitted quality of his nose, how light never touches those blue eyes.

7 Jan
They’re talking about springing Ma soon from the Big House. She’s been walking real good.

9 Jan
Boycotting Olive Garden, Red Lobster and now Wendy’s: http://bit.ly/ZyYiY5 

10 Jan
Hope seems to be my Rasputin emotion. No matter how many times and ways it is assassinated, it refuses to die.

10 Jan
Mom got cocky, thinking she was going home, and decided to go to the bathroom without help. She lost her balance and “fell.” Although she insists she just “slid down the wall.” No breaks/fractures, thank God. But they want to monitor her another week or so before releasing her. She’s doing well. They took her outside and walked her up and down the block yesterday (assisted). They’re just being cautious.

11 Jan
I’m so old that when I hear the word “butter” I have to fight the urge to say, “Parkay.”

14 Jan
Dear Man on the Cycle: your clownish bicycle clothes just got stupider with the addition of the unitard.

14 Jan
The water in the birdbath froze overnight, a very rare occurrence here near the beach.

14 Jan
It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t 

mean anything.

Don’t read anything into it, don’t read anything into it, don’t read anything into it, don’t read anything into it, don’t read anything into it.

Remember: hope is the thing without feathers.

14 Jan
Funny the things that stick in your mind: I can’t read/hear “papier maché” without hearing Rowan Atkinson’s voice (from Blackadder Goes Forth) saying, “Pap-ee-yay MASH-ay willie.” (He was mocking the artistic strivings of Hugh Laurie’s upperclass twit character.) That phrase has been rattling around in my brain for years. Sad, really.

15 Jan
Wow. I just forgot my boss’s last name. I had to get up and look at his name plate. That’s rather terrifying.

15 Jan
Stop being a writer and just write.

15 Jan
Conspiracy theory and gun nuts—a terrifying, sick combination: http://yhoo.it/106HIPr 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

My home Mac went belly up on Sunday, between one email and the next. So if any of you have tried to reach me and I've ignored you, that's why. Today is my first day back at work from the long weekend.

Mac911 has my computer, but I haven't heard yet what the problem is, or how much is will cost. It's five years old, so I can't see putting much money into it. I've been reviewing my finances to see if I can afford a new one. It came at a very inopportune time, affording-it-wise--but then, doesn't it always? I'll have to go deeper in debt, I guess.

I was the glumness much of Sunday but by Monday I had taken it down to Mac911 and resigned myself to whatever. This is not the worst that could have happened to me, after all, not by a long chalk.

The entire four day weekend was one of reflection and reexamination of my life's path. I've been considering whether I wanted to continue on as I have been and in my glum-funk of Sunday, thought the computer going belly up was a sign from the universe about one area of my life's path. So I asked the oracle if my computer's death was a sign. It said yes. So I asked it what the sign meant. The oracle replied, "That you need a new computer."

The universe has quite a sense of humor. :-)

If anything happened in the last couple of days that I should know about, email me. I haven't worked my way through my email yet, but I'll get there.

Quote of the day:

"Take my advice, if you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

—C. S. Lewis,
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe


What's new in the yard:

The amaryllis are making a bold statement: three huge red-orange bells, and maybe half a dozen more buds in the planter waiting to pop. The purple cosmos are in profusion, and the pink and white geraniums are having a rave. The green callas are also having a convocation against the side front wall. We planted marigolds last week--brilliant orange and yellow accents in the yard. The Scotch broom isn't doing so well. We moved it and it's hanging on, but tired. The tea tree, otoh, is quite happy.

Interesting item of the day: I was watching a program called Is it Real? on the National Geographic Channel over the weekend. This program likes to take on things occult/paranormal/fortean and debunk them, and it's quite an interesting program, even if I think that sometimes the arguments of the skeptics seem a bit strained and shrieky and most "believers" are portrayed as credulous boobs; even if they often choose examples of phenomena which are most easy to debunk and ignore the cases that pose serious challenges. I think quite a lot of stuff in the "paranormal field" is hooey, too, but I like to see them honestly debunked rather than a burning of straw dogs. The research done by the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton wasn't so easy for them to dismiss.

This weekend the show took on prognostication. I'm not much of a fan of fortune-telling. I like to play with oracles, but mainly for the psychological side of it: oracles help me focus on issues and figure out what I truly feel about them. Sometimes oracles are also a way of releasing my own intuition about something (or perhaps reinforcing my prejudices). It helps tremendously in my decision-making process, but I really can't say I subscribe much to the foretelling aspect of oracles.

The NGeo program dealt a great deal with Nostradamus—somebody I personally think is quite easy to debunk. But they also cited this recent research at Princeton on randomness and collective consciousness that they weren't quite able to debunk, imo. Michael Shermer (ed., The Skeptical Inquirer) threw some half-hearted arguments at the subject, but they weren't at all convincing to me, and seemed to lack his usual verve and energy.

Essentially, the Princeton folks distributed random number generators in computers all over the world and had them constantly doing the computer equivalent of flipping a coin. As statistical chance would tend to suggest, most of the time the RNGs came up with a equal number of heads vs. tails. However, in the hours leading up to some of the more extraordinary events in our new century, these numbers starting skewing sharply in one direction or another. The most dramatic spike took place starting about four hours before the first plane went into the Towers on 9/11. A dramatic spike also occurred before the big tsunami.

It's as if, in the hours before super traumatic events, the collective unconscious begins to hone in on these events and somehow effects the functioning of random chance. Michael Shermer said something to the effect that every day of the week has something somewhere in the world that we'd call a big event, but I think that's a pretty flimsy argument. Events like 9/11 and the big tsunami and Katrina are not every day big events—they are stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks events, collective gasp events. We know they send shock waves in their aftermath, and it also seems logical to me that they would send shock waves behind them. Since time-space is folded and not linear, as we tend to think of it, it seems logical to me that some receptors can pick up on those back-pedaling shock waves.

But what do I know? I'll let the parties involved make their own arguments:

Here's the research paper from the Princeton folks:

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html

A somewhat more user friendly version:

http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/randomness.htm

And the skeptical POV:

http://www.skepticnews.com/2005/04/index.html

Synchronicity of the day: I was reading "Paperjack" by Charles De Lint last night and one of the characters (Jilly) said something that I thought merebrillante, at least, might find synchronous:

"Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it."

—Charles De Lint, "Paperjack," Dreams Underfoot