Sunday, August 26, 2012

Listing List of Listless

Listless tonight.

So I'm making another of my seemingly infinite lists of things on my mind.

1) Last week was especially angsty, anxious, stressful, busy. I have to confess I did not handle it well. If you've got me fed to a reader of some sort, you may already know this as I posted about it and then retracted the post after thinking better of it but feeds don't always automatically delete deleted posts. If that's the case, and you read it, I apologize. I sort of went off the rails about...

2) The third anniversary of Andy's death is rapidly approaching. I didn't consciously realize it last week until late in the week when the knowledge of it caught me off guard and landed a punch below the belt. Luckily, I'm surrounded by compassion, sometimes in unlikely places, and this weekend helped. A lot. When I received much needed compassion, tenderness, and loving kindness from those who care about me most...whether they knew that's what they were giving me or not.

3) I'm not sure, even at the very beginning of this blog when he first died, that I ever told you how Andy died. So here it is in a nutshell. He was giving blood and, at some point, a blood clot traveled into his brain and he had a stroke, then a heart attack, then another stroke. By the time they got him to the hospital, he was, in effect, already dead although his body lived on life support for a couple more days. He would have several more strokes and heart attacks and then, eventually, his vital organs began shutting down one by one.  He was 34 when he died. 

4) We've raised a needy cat. Vinny was a particularly social guy when we first adopted him and we certainly did not discourage that behavior at all. He's always had as much human interaction as he could possibly desire - especially since Lex's employment got cut back to half time - but now we pay for that during the rare occasion when both Lex and I are gone at the same time for more than an hour or two. Case in point, this evening, I arrived home after spending much of the afternoon in the company of Acr0nym followed by a 303 food and drink outing in Golden. Lex was also gone from the Grotto for most of the afternoon and evening. I got home first and Vinny would not let me out of his sight. He sat next to my feet, followed me from room to room when I got up, and cried almost incessantly when I wasn't paying some kind of attention to him. Poor bastard. It must suck to have Naked Vinny time when he has no opposable thumbs or the ability to read.

5) Speaking of Vinny...animals should be a great reminder to us all about the power of loving touch. The needs of domesticated animals are relatively few...food, shelter, touch. Much like humans. Abraham Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs believed sex to be a basic physiological need along with food, breathing, and homeostasis  While I disagree that sex itself is a basic need - certainly many of us live without it for long stretches of time - sex, touch, belonging are all decidedly important to our sense of well-being. I know what it is to have voluntarily suffered its starvation and to know, first hand, that it's insidious in its cruelty. Animals, generally, don't understand the psychological aspects of denial of touch. They want it. Need it. They not only ask for it but demand it. If they don't get it from one, their allegiances are easily turned to someone who will give it to them. Humans seem to have a much greater capacity for self-denial over the long term. But what are the irreparable effects of denying ourselves of loving touch? What damage do we do by withholding loving touch from our partners? I want to know.

6)  Acr0nym and I recorded the latest episode of Sharp Pointy Objects this afternoon...the first time we've recorded anything for several months. We're trying to get back into the groove of things now that we are post-defcon and decided it was most easy to record an episode about DEF CON itself - just a conversation between the two of us. Hopefully, we'll be able to get that episode (minimally) edited and uploaded in the next few days. It felt good to record. I'm not gonna lie. I'm looking forward to recording more.

7) Just in case you don't feed my infinite wisdoms via RSS and missed my derailing, I'm going to state this again for the record...

We are never quite as self-aware as we believe ourselves to be.


Last week, over a cuppa joe, I sat reading a blog entry written by someone I used to know and found myself chuckling to myself over an obvious case of blindness by perceived self-enlightenment. And I thought to myself, "Huh. I don't think he's quite as self-aware as he thinks he is."

And then I laughed, heartily, at myself.

Because none of us are as self-aware as we believe ourselves to be. No one. Certainly not me.

However, in his case - as it is in so very many, it's more a case of mistaking self-absorption for self-awareness.

We are never quite as self-aware as we believe ourselves to be. [say it with me now...] Not even me.

8) Let's end on an especially light note, shall we? I don't know if this is embarrassing or awesome but a few of us are fans of the hacker karaoke on Friday nights. The following is becoming somewhat of a signature song for me. Hee hee.






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