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capri0mniYesterday, my Dad was shovelling the snow from around the animal door, so our dog and cat could go out and in... The snow was so deep at that point, he didn't see the edge of the terrace. He stepped off it, fell three feet straight down, into the snow up to his hips, and hyperextending his knee, aggrivating an old football injury.
The bad news: When I talked to him at around 5:00 tonight, the driveway (1/10 of a mile long) was still snowed in, and Dad was waiting for a neighbor to come plow him out. Dad still can't really walk (he's using one of our barstools as a walker, and hobbling around), and he can't get upstairs to check on our new cat resident, who is living in the upstairs guestroom, and shows no inclination of wanting a bigger world....
The good news: He's in a lot less pain than he was yesterday. So that's a sign that he is on the mend.
...Still, I worry... (not that that will do any good). Ah, the joys of a "winter wonderland"
Now, the Profundities
Yes. I have a new main user icon. It's a from a picture I drew freehand just a little while ago. :::Ann Struts::: Over the last week or so, Eloise (That's her name, in case you didn't know) has been asking me to see her in a more realistic way. and less cartoony. She wants me to look her in the eye. And the pic you see here is my answer to that.
When "the Pro-fun Troll" (she didn't have a name yet, back then) popped into my head for the very first time, she was a pure cartoon -- as two dimensional as Bugs Bunny, or Felix the Cat. She stood about 18 inches, and her home was in the corner, under my computer desk. When the flamewars on the newsgroup rec.arts.drwho got bad about a month later, and she spoke her mind for first time, she immediately grew to a height of 3 feet, and became 3-dimensional enough to gain a pot belly, and a good friendship with the Doctor. Over the following yeass, she mainly "hosted" a series of round-robin free-for-all fanfictions called "hoedowns," and with each epic tale, she gained a name, a handful of fellow troll friends, and a more complex life story.
Throughout it all, however, whenever I imagined her, she always seemed to be standing to my right, just at, or behind, my right shoulder. This is a clue that I did most of my thinking about her in my left frontal lobe. Now, I'm no expert, but from what I've learned through pop-science media, the left frontal lobe is in charge of made-up things, like numbers, and letters, and other invented symbols that aren't real themselves, but that are meant as a sort of short hand for the real thing (Like the eye symbol of the Columbia Broadcasting Service, or the peacock of the National Broadcasting Company. No real eye or peacock ever looked like that. But when we interpret them with the left brain, that's what we understand them to be). The left brain is also in charge of logic -- of putting all those symbols in different orders, and using them to come up with arguments, and justifications, and sometimes, lies.
So it's no wonder that I used that part of my brain to think of Eloise -- she was someone I made up, and I made her up as a way to fight back against the Nasty Trolls and their arguing. Her very existance was a sort of argument. She was basically just a symbol for myself -- a mask that I put on.
Now, for this year's round robin, we decided to do something different, and hold a more formal "Quadrille" instead of a "Hoedown," and that meant formal invitations, and planning ahead. Any such changes are always diffecult, of course, but it was compounded by the fact that I was hit with an intense wave of depression about a week into the start of the story (I won't say the diffeculties caused my depression, because it could just as easily have been the other way around), I got angry and possesive of the direction the plot was going in, and more than once, I'd burst into a crying jag after reading the latest installment. It got so bad that I seriously considered killing Eloise off -- in effect, knocking over the chessboard, and scattering all the pieces. This would definitely have been anti-fun, so I dropped out of the game some time in early August, rather than risk ruining it for everyone else. Every now an then, I'd feel a twinge of guilt over giving up, but I just didn't have the strength to even look at the thread.
Until a few days ago. In that half-waking, half-dreaming state early in the morning, I had a strong sense of Eloise sitting on her heels on my bed, half-rubbing by back, half shaking my shoulder. She was telling me that she wanted to get back into the Quadrille -- even though it would be scary, we could do it.
And she was very definitely by my left shoulder.
Which means I was thinking about her with my right brain. The right brain is in charge of understanding spatial relationships, recognising faces of people in a fraction of an instant, of understanding body language and tone of voice rather than the meanings of individual words. While the left brain interprets symbols, the right brain interprets the real world. In that one sleepy instant (and in a few moments since) I was thinking of Eloise as if she were real, rather than just a symbol.
Sometime, during the month when I wasn't actively thinking of her at all, she went from being my fictional alter-ego to being my imaginary friend. The last time I had an imaginary friend, I was 4. I'm now nearing 40, and I have one again.
I think this is a Good Thing, for many reasons. But I'm to sleepy to write about those reasons now, at least in a way that would make sense to anyone else, so I'll try to write some more in the morning.... (Looks at clock) ...well, later in the morning...
The bad news: When I talked to him at around 5:00 tonight, the driveway (1/10 of a mile long) was still snowed in, and Dad was waiting for a neighbor to come plow him out. Dad still can't really walk (he's using one of our barstools as a walker, and hobbling around), and he can't get upstairs to check on our new cat resident, who is living in the upstairs guestroom, and shows no inclination of wanting a bigger world....
The good news: He's in a lot less pain than he was yesterday. So that's a sign that he is on the mend.
...Still, I worry... (not that that will do any good). Ah, the joys of a "winter wonderland"
Now, the Profundities
Yes. I have a new main user icon. It's a from a picture I drew freehand just a little while ago. :::Ann Struts::: Over the last week or so, Eloise (That's her name, in case you didn't know) has been asking me to see her in a more realistic way. and less cartoony. She wants me to look her in the eye. And the pic you see here is my answer to that.
When "the Pro-fun Troll" (she didn't have a name yet, back then) popped into my head for the very first time, she was a pure cartoon -- as two dimensional as Bugs Bunny, or Felix the Cat. She stood about 18 inches, and her home was in the corner, under my computer desk. When the flamewars on the newsgroup rec.arts.drwho got bad about a month later, and she spoke her mind for first time, she immediately grew to a height of 3 feet, and became 3-dimensional enough to gain a pot belly, and a good friendship with the Doctor. Over the following yeass, she mainly "hosted" a series of round-robin free-for-all fanfictions called "hoedowns," and with each epic tale, she gained a name, a handful of fellow troll friends, and a more complex life story.
Throughout it all, however, whenever I imagined her, she always seemed to be standing to my right, just at, or behind, my right shoulder. This is a clue that I did most of my thinking about her in my left frontal lobe. Now, I'm no expert, but from what I've learned through pop-science media, the left frontal lobe is in charge of made-up things, like numbers, and letters, and other invented symbols that aren't real themselves, but that are meant as a sort of short hand for the real thing (Like the eye symbol of the Columbia Broadcasting Service, or the peacock of the National Broadcasting Company. No real eye or peacock ever looked like that. But when we interpret them with the left brain, that's what we understand them to be). The left brain is also in charge of logic -- of putting all those symbols in different orders, and using them to come up with arguments, and justifications, and sometimes, lies.
So it's no wonder that I used that part of my brain to think of Eloise -- she was someone I made up, and I made her up as a way to fight back against the Nasty Trolls and their arguing. Her very existance was a sort of argument. She was basically just a symbol for myself -- a mask that I put on.
Now, for this year's round robin, we decided to do something different, and hold a more formal "Quadrille" instead of a "Hoedown," and that meant formal invitations, and planning ahead. Any such changes are always diffecult, of course, but it was compounded by the fact that I was hit with an intense wave of depression about a week into the start of the story (I won't say the diffeculties caused my depression, because it could just as easily have been the other way around), I got angry and possesive of the direction the plot was going in, and more than once, I'd burst into a crying jag after reading the latest installment. It got so bad that I seriously considered killing Eloise off -- in effect, knocking over the chessboard, and scattering all the pieces. This would definitely have been anti-fun, so I dropped out of the game some time in early August, rather than risk ruining it for everyone else. Every now an then, I'd feel a twinge of guilt over giving up, but I just didn't have the strength to even look at the thread.
Until a few days ago. In that half-waking, half-dreaming state early in the morning, I had a strong sense of Eloise sitting on her heels on my bed, half-rubbing by back, half shaking my shoulder. She was telling me that she wanted to get back into the Quadrille -- even though it would be scary, we could do it.
Which means I was thinking about her with my right brain. The right brain is in charge of understanding spatial relationships, recognising faces of people in a fraction of an instant, of understanding body language and tone of voice rather than the meanings of individual words. While the left brain interprets symbols, the right brain interprets the real world. In that one sleepy instant (and in a few moments since) I was thinking of Eloise as if she were real, rather than just a symbol.
Sometime, during the month when I wasn't actively thinking of her at all, she went from being my fictional alter-ego to being my imaginary friend. The last time I had an imaginary friend, I was 4. I'm now nearing 40, and I have one again.
I think this is a Good Thing, for many reasons. But I'm to sleepy to write about those reasons now, at least in a way that would make sense to anyone else, so I'll try to write some more in the morning.... (Looks at clock) ...well, later in the morning...
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 01:18 am (UTC):::Nods:::
Date: 2003-12-09 06:35 am (UTC)When Dad answers the question "How are you?" with "Not well" you know something's wrong.
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Date: 2003-12-09 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 06:40 am (UTC)I actually don't know if he's icing it. He made no mention of that :-/
Though in some ways, even though he's older and it takes him longer to heal, I'm glad this happened now than ten years ago. Back then, he would have been too macho to allow a neighbor to plow his driveway....