State of Mind

To continue the topic with installment two here, I’d like to talk about music and entertainment. As many of you may know, I enjoy music from pretty much every range of the spectrum, with only a few exceptions. I find very little worth listening to in the realm of Hip Hop and Rap (primarily for reasons of the perpetrators reeking of teenage angst, anger and poor education), and I think most all of you would agree. With that in mind, I can appreciate a great deal of the remaining categories including: Classic Rock, Country, Rhythm & Blues, Ambient, Alternative, Pop, Heavy Metal, Soft Stuff, Musicals and Opera, Classical, and many others. I have recently been on a kick to expand my music collection and have come across a few new categories that I didn’t know I liked before. Evanescence has a pretty decent sound and I have enjoyed several of their songs in the past, but only recently have I learned that they are classified as gothic rock. In the spirit of curiosity, I have been exploring some of the bands associated with this genre and am pleased to report that I like a number of them. Generally characterized by a darker tone and subject matter, they fit right in to my scheme. Further, I have expanded my search to include other dark music styles and have managed to find a few which more than just a deep voice mumbling incoherently into a microphone. Nox Arcana had become one of my new found favorites, partly because it reminds me of Christmas in a dark and brooding way (as I’m sure you all know this corresponds greatly with how I perceive Christmas). The Nikkinator says it makes for great Halloween music, and I can’t deny this claim though I tend to pick up hints at something deeper in the music. One of their albums is heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe (right down to some of the lyrics and the albums title, The Raven). In essence, I have found some interesting music in a place where used to think there was nothing but awful grunting and laughable lyrics which are supposed to be all satanic and what not (really, it is hard sometimes to listen to some of these without laughing, even more so when the individual actually believes in what they are doing). Another area into which I have been exploring lately is meditation. I looked into a few “guided meditation” CD’s and downloaded a couple to try them out. Some were a bit odd and kinds hard to take seriously while others were a little too emphatic on the listener’s relationship to The Buddha to apply to anyone who is not Buddhist. Still, there were a few that actually have some good things to say and have become enjoyable. One thing I do have to say is that having played D&D for some years now, and having an overactive imagination to boot, has really made it difficult to extract benefits from mentally visualizing myself doing some of the things suggested in these meditation courses. The whole “mental projection” thing id sort of “old hat” by now though I’m sure that there are other individuals out there, perhaps cubicle slaves in some large city, that don’t exercise their imagination’s much and have become entrenched in the mundane and these types of exercises will doubtlessly provide some benefit for them. In the meantime, I listen because it’s relaxing and allows me to put school and work away for a while and just be content. This brings me to another topic, namely that of business. I am the king when it comes to being busy (or at least a lower level duke of some assortment) and I think it has begun to wear on me. As I mentioned last time, I am closing in on 30 (seemed so old when I was young, mainly because my parents were in their 30’s when I was in my teens) and am not feeling too good about it. I still have a few years before I hit that dark milestone, but the fact remains that it’s approaching much too fast for my tastes. Now with a child and still the likelihood of several years left in school, I find myself without personal time. It seems every spare second is taken in meeting the expectations of others (homework, family, general household maintenance, etc) and at the end of the day I find myself just wanting to go to bed so I can at least dream about having freedom. The really tragic thing is that whereas I used to dream of crazy crap like being chased by large carnivorous dinosaurs (this was even before Jurassic Park came out, though was certainly aggravated by it) or flying without wings or anything, my dreams lately have become sad any pathetic. For instance, the other day I dreamt that I was a little older and had 3 children (Adria at about 7, another younger girl and a baby girl) and we were struggling to get them ready so we could go to the store. I suppose in many ways this could be considered a nightmare, and indeed this was the impression I took away from it, since the prospect of having three children scares me. Nevertheless, it shows a complete lack of initiative. I mean what could be more boring than dreaming about family life? I miss the dreams I used to have about adventuring in outer space, or existing in an M.C. Escher drawing and having to find a way out, or turning into a 60 foot tall horned demon at school and burning the shredded pieces of all the kids who ever made fun of me (comprising about 2/3 of the school populous) before engaging in an epic Godzilla style battle against the US armed forces. I used to have a number of recurring dreams, in one of which I would be on the top floor of a massive sky scraper (like really huge) in a room which took up the entire floor and was windowed on all sides. In the middle of the room was a colossal table made of black wood, and had no chairs around it (just the table). On the table was a pile of toys several feet high and covering the entire surface of the table. All kinds of toys, every type you can imagine (or at least the ones I could imagine at the time). I remember I would always walk over to the table and, after searching for a moment, pull out a Gyroscope to play with (yea, of all the remote control cars and various other toys, I picked the gyroscope). I would take it and walk over to the window to look out. It was always night outside and there was a snowstorm to rival any before seen in history taking place just on the other side of the glass. I would watch the storm for a moment, fascinated by its power and beauty before I felt the building begin to sway slightly from the hurricane force winds. The building would sway a little at first, then slowly build up tremendous harmonic rhythm and begin to sway violently. As I stood there, staring out the window, the building moved so far that it began to topple. I would always be on the side which broke so that I was looking out the window facing the ground as we screamed toward the streets below. I don’t recall ever having had any reaction to this, just watching out the window as we fell to the streets below. In classic dream fashion, I would always wake up fractions of a second before impacting with the ground, my heart racing. Why can’t I have dreams like that any more? I miss the excitement they used to bring into my dull life. No, I am predisposed to dream like Arnold Rimmer in Better Than Life, taking all my friends down with me to the point that we all end up buried neck deep in wet sand with our faces painted with strawberry jam in anticipation of approaching killer ants. Sometimes I get weird, like that dreams are an inter-dimensional mode of communication between various alternative versions of yourself. In some ways it makes sense, and I’d like to devote some time to showing it’s possibility mathematically (that is if I had any reason to believe that it wasn’t just my imagination running wild again). This brings me to another subject I wish to talk about for a bit. That is, to what extent does an active, or overactive, imagination play into ones ability to grasp and thoroughly comprehend some of the bizarre concepts presented in relativistic and quantum realms of science? I found it kind of unexpected that people would have such a hard time grasping that as things moved faster, they shrank in the length of motion, or that time is not an absolute, but can be manipulated given certain criteria. Topics like these seemed a little strange at first, but when you begin to comprehend how your preconceived notions are playing into how you think the world should work, it becomes much easier to see no only how these strange concepts could be possible but also how the human mind would think it unnatural given our evolutionary state in small gravity, medium size, and comparatively slow motion. What else were we to expect to see? Anyway, I’d better stop here before I launch into another 6 pages of elaboration on why I love science and math so much and the power they have to explain everything we see.