2012.03.17 — A Half March of Little Fushigis*

Some strange little *fushigi.

2012.03.06
I came home from work to find my wife watching Anderson Cooper's day time talk show, which had as his guests dominatrixes. This didn't particularly interest me. Later that night, at 6pm local time, Bravo Canada had the comedy movie Walk All Over Me about a dominatrix and her naïve sister.

2012.03.07-8 (#1)
On the 7th I used the word accost in a rather amusing way — at least my workmates around me laughed. I related to them, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, how my 2nd level manager queried me regarding the state of the office's planned computer replacement programme by 'accosting' me as we were existing the washroom. The understaffing has become so extreme that all of us seize these kinds of opportunities to talk about work.

On the 8th I was again accosted immediately after urinal bladder relief by another manager who queried me regarding the state of the training I had agreed to do for his staff, but which I've been too busy doing my day-to-day must do work to even have begun it. And I again joked with my podmates about being accosted in the bathroom.

At home, later that night I was pleasantly surprised to see that the British director Trevor Nunn's excellent adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with Helena Bonham-Carter and Ben Kingsley was on. I've seen this many times since its release in 1996, but this was the first time on our HD TV. I was amused when I came to Act 1 Scene 3:

SIR TOBY BELCH: Accost, Sir Andrew, accost.

SIR ANDREW: What's that?

SIR TOBY BELCH: My niece's chambermaid.

SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance.

MARIA: My name is Mary, sir.

SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Mary Accost,—

After laughing at this absurdly stupid fushigi, I stopped watching Twelfth Night and did some writing. A bit later I flipped back to the TV and for some reason turned on the new series Awake. I didn't really know anything about it, but I found it to be an interesting take on the problem of awareness of being awake or being asleep. But, to the point of this fushigi, there was spoken the line "He's the one who accosted me."

2012.03.07-8 (#2)
With just a tiny touch of curiosity I decided to watch on TV the recent movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nicholas Cage. I was not excited about this movie, despite my having been at one time a huge fan of magic and sorcery films and books. I am not a huge fan of Cage and I find that many of today's so-called blockbusters have become filled to excess with special effects, when what interests me most is the characters and the writing.

And the movie lived up to my expectations. Cage was adequate, not great, effects were plentiful, although they could have been worse (see, for example, Jim Carey's A Christmas Carol). However, it became much more interesting the following day, after BV told me about one of her most vivid and memorable dreams from her youth.

In the dream, it is dark. There are puddles, like glass, within which she sees Chinese people.

Well, what makes this interesting is that 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' contained two scenes in which glass mirrors were used as a trap for the sorcerers, who would be caught behind the plane of the glass. They couldn't get out, but people could see them in the mirror. When passing into the mirror, the glass behaved like water.

2012.03.09-10
On Friday March 9th @ 6:42am I sent an e.mail to my friend Marty in Nelson telling him to break a leg with their premiere performance of Khaos, the brand spanking new opera he helped produce. It subsequently went on to rave reviews and calls for a tour to the big city. (Have a listen to a pre-production taste of Persephone's NIghtmare.)

Later that Friday my podmates and I at some point began talking about CBCR2's Vinyl Cafe. As I often do whenever talking about this show, I describe the one in which the protagonist, Dave, accidentally inhaled a fly. (You can pre-hear the beginning of the story in iTunes The Fly.)

On Saturday the 10h, I managed to catch the beginning of a repeated story. It opens with Dave resolving to overcome his antipathy and past hospital horrors to visit his friend Marty. In telling the story Stuart McLean refers to Dave's past experiences, including the time he inhaled the fly. (The reference to the 'fly' story is @ the 29:03 minute of Hospital Dave.)

2012.03.12
As has become our routine BH and I were down in the atrium for our coffee break and to talk about dreams. On that Monday the discussion began with the movie The Tree of Life. (Amusingly enough, this is the movie BY wants me to watch to see if I rate it 'WTF' like a few of our fellow USB watchers have. I've only seen a snippet of it, and it was a bit peculiar. But what I saw was broken up so I've not made an official judgment yet.) BH commented that this movie looked like a dream, or had dream elements to it.

When she said that I was upset with myself, because before going to bed Sunday I had just finished reading about Jung's pre-WWI dream, and I immediately thought of bringing the book in to read the section to BH, but talked myself out of it because my rational mind thought it was being too pushy.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the front into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd (Roderick Main Jung on Synchronicity 133-4; or Memories, Dreams, Reflections 176.)

A bit later BH shared her dream that includes, among other interesting images, that of a vampire and a candle with a blue flame. There were also a large number of votive-like candle holders without candles. So we explored some of the different meanings and images the world 'blue' evokes. I asked BH if she'd ever listened to Regina Spektor's song Blue Lips. 'No.'

[Interlude 2012.03.18
While I was writing that my stomach began telling me in no uncertain terms that it wanted food. I argued with it since it was now very late (00:07hrs). As is usual I had music in my ears, but very unusually I was listening to iTunes DJ, within which I have hundreds of songs. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the many Kate and Anna McGarrigle songs started playing in my ears. Then the lyrics blew me away:

I eat dinner at the kitchen table
With my daughter who is thirteen
We eat leftovers and mashed potatoes
No more candlelight
No more romance
No more smalltalk
When the hunger's gone
…

And the title of the song is "I Eat Dinner", which I didn't have tonight but which I am now going to amend. (And did.)

2012.08.03: Interlude Addendum:
Tonight, while sitting with my wife on the balcony, something strange happened. So strange that I can only attribute it to there being a full moon tonight. What was strange is that my wife actually asked me about what I wrote on my blog and, for the first time, with real follow-up. She's vaguely asked about it while distracted by other things once or twice before. And she has never once asked to see it nor on how to find it or for me to bookmark it on her Macbook Pro.

I pointed her to a spot, and she flipped through for a while while I read Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. She found her way to this blog, and then commented about the part where I described being hungry when Kate and Anna's song started playing.

Then she said 'I'm hungry. It's time to eat.' And I was hungry too because we'd not had supper yet and it was after 7pm. We chuckled that in a way even that was kind of fushigi. But I did not consider it to be worth blogging.

Okay, so why have I blogged it? Because tonight, after coming in around 9:45 to watch some Olympics, I wound up multitasking by going onto Goodreads. I poked around a little and saw a comment from a 'Jessica.' And so I went to see if the WSS Jessica whose writing I find brilliant was still active. I haven't seen anything from her in a while, and so visited her Goodreads' profile. From there I went to her tumblr blog.

Wow! Visit her blog! The writing is diverse and amazing. But it became totally bizarre when I read the following:

…
I meet you and three others in a room of someone else’s home. Perhaps there is a fifth friend, but she exists in the shadows. The three others take my food and congratulate me: “We didn’t know you were so competent!” You sit at my left while they eat at my right, and I feel starved. The three talk among themselves as I watch and as you fade alongside the fifth friend. I try to engage in conversation with one of the three, but she declares that I am pissing her off. I had only asked if she was excited to go to Cornell this fall.
…

7-30-12

Okay, now we start entering the truly bizarre. Before writing this I had turned on the TV to watch some Olympics, but it was only swimming, so flipped to Adventures in Babysitting an old guilty pleasure. I didn't catch it from the beginning, but just in time to catch the kids escape to sing the blues. Shortly after that, there is a scene in which the 'starving' girlfriend cannot buy a hot dog because she has only cheques and the vendor takes only cash. (Broadcast on YTV, with this scene showing up at about 10:12pm.)

The final oddity has to due with debt and money. As mentioned, I'm reading Debt: The First 5000 Years, early in the book. Graeber discusses the moral behaviour around debt, with an emphasis on the hell that is created when debt is abused by either the debtor or creditor. One of the themes that runs through Adventures in Babysitting is debt and financial obligation. The movie looks at when it is abused, such as with the hot dog vendor, the car thieves, and the Thor-like tire repair person; and when it is dealt reasonably, by the stranger at the party and the young car thief and, eventually, by the reformed Thor-like repair man.

Meaningful? Absolutely not. And yet, didn't you kind of shake your head at the improbability displayed here?

And yes, I did find that funny, too.
End of Interlude]

That night I decided to visit the Houseboat blog, something I haven't done since early February. There I found that the blog had recently featured the poems of Robert Strickland. The last of his poems is called 'Blue'. From 'Blue':

...

II. Blue
Blue is a cold way
to see beauty, dying
a difficult inspiration.

I once saw a blue guitar,
godawful ugly
and cheap.

I once loved blue-grey eyes
but she loved
a theologian.
…

So, after reading that I decided to ignore my fear of being pushy, and I sent BH an e.mail with Strickland's poem and the words to the song Blue Lips.

As soon as I finished with that I returned to reading Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. And the in the second next paragraph I read:

…
Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder at this at all (134).

Jung mentions this blue colour several more times in the balance of the description.

2012.03.14
Around 9pm I read a poem by Joan Colby on the Houseboat blog. The poem, Two Deaths beautifully describes an owl's and a colt's unsuccessful struggles to stay alive. Around 10pm my wife announces that the highly touted series Luck, which starred Dustin Hoffman, is being ended after the death of a third horse during filming. [Interlude: I wrote the above around ~2:30pm 2012.03.18, and was shortly thereafter interrupted by the need to make supper and prepare tuna salad for lunches. Shortly after supper I watched my guilty pleasure Lost Girl. The show, about supernatural creatures from myth and legend, opened with a warning from the animal kingdom that the world going to a hell in a hand basket. Their warning was compared to how animals behave before earthquakes, but which in this supernatural case were far more extreme and bizarre, including ten horse killing themselves by running into an electrified fence. End of interlude.]

2012.03.15-6 #1
On the 15th I watched the pilot of the new series Touch. Wasn't keen on watching another Kiefer show, but the concept of the world of numbers and their quality is, of course, aligned with my interest in Jung and synchronicity. So I thought I'd give it a try. It was, overall, pretty good. Better than I expected, anyway. One of the story lines follows a lost smart phone whose owner is desperate to have it back because it has the only pictures of his dead daughter. He's travelling around the world as part of his job, and in the end the images from his phone are broadcast via the web onto giant billboards in Japan, where he happens to be.

The next day, Friday, at work around 8:30am or so, I heard Tom Power, the host of CBC Radio2 Morning, tell the story of a professional photographer who lost his camera and how eventually through the tiny world symptom of the universe, was eventually directed to a blog wherein he saw his photographs. Normally I am not at my desk at 8:30am, but am instead at coffee. However, on that day my coffee date had taken the day off to get passport (travel, photograph) renewal paperwork done.

2012.03.15-6 #2
I had lunch with a coworker. We wound up talking about having come from co-dependency and dysfunctional families. At some point I discussed my father having gone back to school in his forties and 'to get a degree even more stupid than my BGS. Like father like son, and in ways that are crazy.' I didn't add, in this conversation, the many small behavioural and psychological ways I've noticed this truth, and that my awareness of the similarities seems to be expanding in a highly disconcerting way.

On the way home in the car, late as usual, I was listening again to CBC Radio2. This time Tom Allen's show Shift. I was very amused when he introduced the folk singer / songwriter Greg Brown, whom I am not aware of having knowingly heard before. In his introduction Tom talks about how men become like their fathers. The song was Billy from the Hills. (And here's the link to the CBC playlist for Friday's Shift.)



2012.05.05 ADDENDUM

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/268295?page=17&utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant#comment_50016777

Popcorn post
Al # 828.

Blue light / Betty dream fushigi /


...
Al: (She jerks upward suddenly, choking and gasping for air. She feels a hand on her bare back.)
Fredericks: Are you alright? Al? You had a bad dream, it’s okay now.
Al: (She looks at him. He looks distorted in the blue light coming from the window in the bedroom.) That-was…that…?
Fredericks: (He gives ….