An infinite number of crickets

Sometimes I just feel overwhelmed with emotion. After so many years of working out how to go on and keep living even while I’m experiencing strong or overwhelming emotions because that was what I had to do or go back to no emotions at all, I sometimes don’t even understand what overwhelming means. Like, I was riding around today looking for a place to live, and I found a couple of blocks where most of the houses are the same sort of house that looks like it was designed in the late fifties or early sixties maybe and the whole feel of this design and this neighborhood is something I just love, and there just aren’t enough for sale or for rent signs up right now. Hopefully after June 1st I will have more options.

So anyway, I was riding along pretty slow like, and a certain smell came to me and I was just … someplace else … a warm wave just washed over me and my bike even started to lose its concentration and I was looking around to try to figure out what I was smelling, and I think it may have been a tree, but it might have been something else growing around there, because I couldn’t bring myself to stop and I just kept thinking to myself as I tried to keep looking around for the source and keep my balance and not stop, because there is not a single for sale or for rent sign on this particular block at all, “What is that? It smells like Home. I feel like I’m finally Home.”

I remember at the time getting these flashes of imagery, and it was all very comfortable and welcoming and safe and like I heard myself saying, it felt like home. I was seeing and smelling the property up in Pine where my grandparents live. Where my father lives most of the time, right now. Where I lived for a little while, and will most likely never live again. That whole part of the world has a feeling about it that says Home to me. I think part of it is that small-town feeling, but I think a bigger part of it is the foliage. In the tiny neighborhood in Tempe where I want to live, where I was looking today and became overwhelmed by the smell of a plant, can reasonably attribute most of its feel to the foliage that dominates the visual field there.

The same thing is true with the part of the world where Pine exists. It is not the only part of the world that is this way by far, and I could reasonably find a small town to live in with that predominating feeling that foliage lends, in any country in the world and on both sides of this country. It is not unique, and it is quite popular. Why else would people build and stay in these places, except that they are easy to love.

I remember a movie I saw a while ago. I do not recall the name of it, but it starred Brendan Fraser. He portrayed an artist who lived alone in a beautiful, big house that his family had owned for who knows how long in a beautiful part of the country in Texas (It hadn’t occurred to me that those two things could be said of the same thing, beautiful and Texas, before I saw the landscape Brendan frolic’d in. The story of the movie is that the members of his family for generations would have dreams about the person they were to marry, and that the dream would lead them to this person, and it had never failed, not for generations. All of a sudden he gets his dream and the movie follows the events that ensue, including the woman who can’t believe such a thing (but who of courses is eventually convinced when she falls in love with him and sees how perfect they are for each other.) It is quite a wonderful story and a well made movie and I think I’ll try to find out what it is and see it again… I mention it because when I saw it, I felt very comfortable with the lifestyle of his character. I want to be that homeowning artist who lives in a beautiful part of the country, surrounded by wild foliage and loving friends and able to run off to find my true love at the drop off a dream. That is a very comfortable place for who I feel I am. It seems like it would just fit.

It is getting to be my proper bed time and I have been running on the (less than) three hours of sleep that I got between 4:15AM this morning and 7AM when I had to get out of bed and basically right onto my bike and on my way to work, and that means I woke up 17 hours ago and that may just be too long to go on 3 hours of sleep. So, although there are a couple of tweaks I need to make to the code for the site to make it line up right in IE5 for Mac and possibly NS6 (though I don’t have that installed anywhere or know anyone who uses it), I will not be making them tonight. Instead I will think about them annoyingly until I finally get to sleep much later than I tried to and much, much later than I probably should.

Oh, and I was satisfied with the series finale of Voyager and with the season finale of Felicity (that one was not only NOT a cliffhanger where I have to hope she went with Noel, but she ended up with Noel, YAY!!) I was less satisfied with the season finale of Ed, which … felt like … it left everything unresolved. Too much like the middle of a season than an end.

While I’m at it, I think it’s great that they finally killed off Buffy. I’ve been watching that show for the last two or three years and I have held the whole time that if they would just get rid of Buffy they would have a very compelling, interesting, entertaining cast of characters that I enjoy. Buffy was just … exceptionally dumb. Low IQ and low EQ and I figured out that her “gift is death” meant that she would have to sacrifice herself about a million years before Buffy did. So, next season when the series moves to UPN, I hope she stays dead. Maybe a new slayer will come in. Maybe Faith, or hopefully Dawn will turn out to be an ultra-powerful key/vampire slayer or something. Whatever. Just glad Buffy’s dead, and I hope she stays that way.

Sleep now.

Published by

Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

4 thoughts on “An infinite number of crickets”

  1. I understand your thing with the pine trees, except that I would have stopped, and probably stayed until there was room for disapointment. I have those tactile and smelly (cause I don’t know the cool word for smelly) memories. Sometimes they are wonderful and they bring about loving warm fuzzies, and sometimes they are tormenting.

    Funny how that is, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday, or what classes I took in high school, or what classes I want to take, or sometimes which cube I sit in at work.

    That reminds me, if anyone (Teel) knows any good books, excercises, etc. for that sort of thing that would really help me out, as this memory loss thing is becoming a real problem for me. I was thinking about going through hypono-therapy because I think the reason I forget things is that I have SOOO many repressed memories from childhood, and bringing those out and dealing with them might help my memory become (as it cannot return from nowhere), however that is a painful and time consuming ordeal that I’m not sure I am ready to go through, particularly alone, as I find I am also quite without friends right now.

    That reminds me of the friends theme song I was listening to today, how it had all of this shitty stuff that can happen to a person but then it was all okay because person number one was there for person number two, said person going through bad stuff. And I was thinking, this is a really mean song for the rest of us. Some people go through all the crap and don’t have someone there for them, and how shitty must it be to hear that song all the time. But all went okay, because Chandler proposed to Monica (even though they got married last week in their season finale) and I had missed it before.

    Time for sleep.

  2. I understand your thing with the pine trees, except that I would have stopped, and probably stayed until there was room for disapointment. I have those tactile and smelly (cause I don’t know the cool word for smelly) memories. Sometimes they are wonderful and they bring about loving warm fuzzies, and sometimes they are tormenting.

    Funny how that is, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday, or what classes I took in high school, or what classes I want to take, or sometimes which cube I sit in at work.

    That reminds me, if anyone (Teel) knows any good books, excercises, etc. for that sort of thing that would really help me out, as this memory loss thing is becoming a real problem for me. I was thinking about going through hypono-therapy because I think the reason I forget things is that I have SOOO many repressed memories from childhood, and bringing those out and dealing with them might help my memory become (as it cannot return from nowhere), however that is a painful and time consuming ordeal that I’m not sure I am ready to go through, particularly alone, as I find I am also quite without friends right now.

    That reminds me of the friends theme song I was listening to today, how it had all of this shitty stuff that can happen to a person but then it was all okay because person number one was there for person number two, said person going through bad stuff. And I was thinking, this is a really mean song for the rest of us. Some people go through all the crap and don’t have someone there for them, and how shitty must it be to hear that song all the time. But all went okay, because Chandler proposed to Monica (even though they got married last week in their season finale) and I had missed it before.

    Time for sleep.

  3. You should be able to go into any major bookstore/your local library and ask for books on improving memory. The exercizes come down to just that; exercizing your memory by memorizing things. So, if you want to be able to remember 10-digit phone numbers easier, you spend 20 minutes a day just memorizing 10-digit numbers, and like any muscle, you build your strength at remembering 10-digit numbers. If you want to be able to remember locations/driving directions/location of cubicles then you have to spend 20 minutes a day just learning and going over directions and spatial relationships. Show up half an hour early for work every day next week and just wander around the building the whole time, just paying attention to where you are, and you’ll improve not just your spatial memory of that building, but your ability to remember spatial relationships and directions/navigation.

    That’s how it works with everything. Practice makes you better at whatever you practice. Memory is no different. I once had a Karate instructor who told me that only “Perfect practice makes perfect.” That is an important thing to keep in mind. If you are half-hearted about practicing increasing your memory, you will only becme better at remembering things half-way.

  4. You should be able to go into any major bookstore/your local library and ask for books on improving memory. The exercizes come down to just that; exercizing your memory by memorizing things. So, if you want to be able to remember 10-digit phone numbers easier, you spend 20 minutes a day just memorizing 10-digit numbers, and like any muscle, you build your strength at remembering 10-digit numbers. If you want to be able to remember locations/driving directions/location of cubicles then you have to spend 20 minutes a day just learning and going over directions and spatial relationships. Show up half an hour early for work every day next week and just wander around the building the whole time, just paying attention to where you are, and you’ll improve not just your spatial memory of that building, but your ability to remember spatial relationships and directions/navigation.

    That’s how it works with everything. Practice makes you better at whatever you practice. Memory is no different. I once had a Karate instructor who told me that only “Perfect practice makes perfect.” That is an important thing to keep in mind. If you are half-hearted about practicing increasing your memory, you will only becme better at remembering things half-way.

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