enigmatic flavor supplements from distant lands

I was sitting at a restaurant today. Exactly, I was sitting at a table in a restaurant. As I began to much on my food, I thought to myself, “My, this is tasty, but if only there were some sort of mildly spicy paste nearby to add a touch of piquancy to the flavor, then I would be truly satisfied!” And lo and behold, there was a little yellow bottle of Heinz mustard sitting on the table – the very paste that I’d had in mind! I lifted it off the table with my left had and gave it a hearty shake, so as to homogenize all the mustard-juice inside, and then squirted its contents gracefully onto my sandwich in slender little zig-zags. I paused to examine the bottle.

“Mustarda,” I read aloud.
“Mustarda?” I wondered to myself.

“What is that? Italian?” I placed the bottle back on the left-hand side of the table, a bit discomfited by the ambiguity surrounding the origin of the condiment. “Portuguese? Surely not. Europeans don’t eat Heinz Mustard,” I thought to myself, quite confident in most stereotypes of European dining customs.

“Ah, of course. I am an idiot.”

This was the conclusion that I came to. But, I admit that I am a bit proud of my idiocy in this case because the moment that I thought to myself “I am an idiot” was the same moment that I realized that there were no Latin characters on the side of the mustard bottle, so this bottle of “mustarda” couldn’t have come from Italy or Portugal or anwhere that uses our alphabet. It was right then that I realized that the sound of the word “mustarda” had popped effortlessly into my mind as I’d looked at the row of squiggles that just happens to spell out “mustarda” in Arabic.

When I feel like I’ve not had much to celebrate in a while, a victory even as small as this one can be a very nice thing. Today, for just a second, Arabic was as natural as plain old thinking. So yeah, considering this last week or two, it was a very nice thing.

Cap.

chuang tzu dreamed he was a captain

i have an interesting way of falling asleep, sometimes. before I tell you about it, however, you should know that i almost always have considerable trouble putting my mind to rest when i go to bed. it seems that every evening, as soon as most external stimuli are reduced to their least intrusive states – lights are turned off, doors are closed to muffle noises and seal out unpleasant, rogue odors – my mind immediately begins to celebrate its freedom from extroversion by entertaining innumerable ideas, simulating a slew of scenarios, and contemplating countless queries.

also before i tell you about my interesting way of falling asleep, i should tell you that i have noticed how at other times when i find myself battling sleepiness (for one reason or another) i am deceived into sleeping by some sort of segue-way dream which begins in seemingly-wakeful territory and before long has plunged me deep into the realms of slumber.

i imagine that both of these experiences are fairly universal. i have attempted to combine them in a way that i think is somewhat novel, though, and the result is an interesting way of falling asleep. rather than trying to curb the careenings of my mind, i simply try to shape them into something that is as much like a dream as possible with the hope that the more dreamlike my thoughts are, the more likely they are to become actual dreams – especially if i am already at least a little tired and also lying in bed with the lights off and sounds muffled and odors banished. and for all i can tell, it often works.

but what is it like? what do i mean when i say i make my thoughts dreamlike? well, i’m glad you asked. usually, i start out by imagining that i am myself, and i am a part of a story, and i am going somewhere. and then, i just let my thoughts become a part of the story. for example, if i think of an elephant, then perhaps i will pass an elephant while i am going. and then if i should suddenly think of polka-dots, then perhaps it will be a polka-dotted elephant. or perhaps it will be an elephant selling polka-dotted neckties. and i try not to get too hung up on logic either. for example, if for some reason my dear friend andrew shepherd should pop into my head, then perhaps now the elephant is also andrew shepherd, the polka-dotted tie salesman from Rowlett. and should i then suddenly think of the forest, then i am there and maybe my elephant friend, also. and so on. most anything can happen – happy things or sad things or sinister things or heroic things or all of these things, diversely polka-dotted, at the same time – but what i have found almost always stays the same is that i am myself, and i am part of a story, and i am going somewhere. at times, it feels almost as real as if i were actually dreaming.

so it was last night. i walked through a forest somewhere and arrived at the edge of the sea. and i looked long and far into it, and it was there that i decided that it is appropriate to weep when standing on the shore, looking out over the sea. it is appropriate to do a whole number of things like swim or fish or sing or dance, and you could even do all of those things at the same time if it pleased you and you were talented enough. but standing there with the waves bluer than anything i have ever seen, their crests sparkling whiter than any white that nature ever really shows you and their troughs blacker than any black you will ever find outside your own mind, and seeing how it went out so far, on and on like a longing for something vast and nameless, i decided that it is appropriate to weep at the sight of the sea. i knew that somehow, everything which had ever been lost had been lost here. everything that could have been but wasn’t had slipped beneath the surface here and drifted into impossible darkness here somewhere. and too, i knew that the sea does not destroy for it seemed to mourn destruction. it does not drive things to oblivion, for the very sight of it was like remembering. and i was reminded.

and always, i am myself, and i am part of a story, and i am going somewhere.

captain

the metaph[orical-ph]ysics of striving and failing

like so many things in this world, the speed of light being just one of them, productivity is a very difficult thing to measure. however, unlike the speed of light, which is 2.99×10^8 m/s (to a certain degree of accuracy), productivity is difficult to measure because it is difficult to decide what one measures producivity in – the units, i mean. the speed of light is difficult to measure because it involves a lot of mirrors and usually a lot of time, and often a lot of turning of a little knob and counting of tiny little bands of light, which is a serious strain on the eyes (trust me); however, everyone (everyone i’ve ever talked to about it, at least) agrees that c can be measured in units of how many meters light travels in a second, so if you are willing to put in all the time with the mirrors and knob-turning and light-band-squinting-counting, then you can measure it (to a certain degree of accuracy, of course).

productivity, however, is an incredibly difficult thing to measure – even though the attempt may require the use of no mirrors whatsoever – because it is difficult to say what constitutes productivity and what does not, and really it all depends on what you’re trying to produce. in the past two or three weeks, i have written and recorded a song (which i like very much, by the way), replied to a good many emails promptly and with sincerity, traveled to a far-away city, read some books, discovered a new way of making coffee, implemented a [quite modest] exercise program, and mastered more than a few words in a foreign tongue.

and although i’m sure that i could come up with another accomplishment or two to wedge into that little list there, there would still be many, many things missing, and i am ashamed to say that the most glaringly absent things are also the most important. what this leads me to is the conclusion that in spite of all that i’ve done, i have not been productive – not really, not at all – and with that comes a kind of crippling guilt which is self-perpetuating in that i feel guilty enough to feel like not doing much of anything except sitting around and bemoaning my guiltiness. and so on. it is cyclic, like a great many things – this blog post being one of those things.

so here i sit, heavy with inertia – a phrase with some ambiguity, to be sure. not inert in the sense of being still, but inertia, in the sense of being unable to accelerate. and heavy both in the sense that it describes the magnitude of the hold this inertia has on me and in the sense that just as it is quite difficult to move a very heavy object (or stop one which is rolling down a steep incline towards you), i too am quite heavy – a metaphorical quality that might perhaps be measured in metaphorical kilograms – perhaps even so many metaphorical kilograms that it would require an infinite amount of metaphorical force to cause me to go even a little bit faster, metaphorically. which would mean, according to a metaphorical Albert Einstein [this is getting quite silly], that i am travelling about 2.99×10^8 metaphorical m/s (to a certain degree of metaphorical accuracy) – all of this assuming that the laws of physics still hold within figurative language. and, for the record, the metaphorical speed of light is most definitely a very difficult thing to measure, much like productivity.

*communal sigh*

captain