Becca Becca came up to visit me on somewhat of a whim, buying tickets while on the phone with me only a few days beforehand.
I can't think of the weekend having been any better. I'm serious. We farted under blankets. We leveled up. I cooked her the dinners I promised I'd cook her over half a year ago.
We took an Epic Staycation side quest, and racked up XP like it was December 1999 and my mom was filling bathtubs with emergency water.
****
So I thought that since we watched 2012 last night, we should talk about the Apocalypse and your thoughts on it, and what it might entail.
The only thing that really comes to mind is reading stuff about global warming and how they expect--I don't know who they is, but it seems like consensus is that in the next 50 years, if things keep going as they are, Cape Cod will disappear. So my brother and I were talking about investing in some land in inland Massachusetts so that it would become beach front by the time we're retired.
I went on this vacation with my now ex one time, and it was in the Outer Banks, and we were talking about the same thing: all the houses were on the shore, and we were like, we should just start buying property half a mile in or something.
Yeah.
You think it'll look anything like the movie?
No. No, that movie was horrible. That movie was Waterworld: the prequel.
But Waterworld was good, in a weird kitschy way.
Lines like "I'll put you in a jar" are cool.
I haven't seen it for a while.
Me neither, but my best friend had two movies: she had Biodome--no she had three movies: she had Biodome, Indiana Jones--the young Indiana Jones--and Waterworld. So I've seen those three movies... plus I had two movies at my house: I had Aladdin and Mission Impossible. So those are the five movies I've watched a thousand times as a child, not because I particularly like them, but... they stick with me.
So do you have a favourite movie then? Is it one of those?
No, it's Purple Rain.
I haven't seen that either. I haven't seen a lot of movies, but my excuse is that I didn't live in this country for most of my childhood.
We're going to need to watch Purple Rain. Purple Rain is...
How come we didn't download that. What the fuck.
Because I didn't... it didn't occur to me.
We did watch Sixteen Candles, though.
Which was good, minus the whole... racism
Which seemed to just be this extra layer of
fucking unnecessary
superfluous nonsense. ...So the way you're lying on the couch right now is like some perfect typical Freudian psychoanalysis shit going on.
I could say some Freudian shit.
Yeah? You had to read Freud?
Yeah. I started to, but then, sharing this as someone who personally had a cocaine addiction, when I read Freud, I just see some fucking dickhead who had a major raging coke addiction. And if you have personally had that, when you read his stuff, it just drips bullshit and coke. Like all over the place. You know that. I mean, you see this stuff, and the first thing I thought was, dude, this guy just did so many lines before he wrote this, and that's why he's jumping from topic to topic with so much fucking self-assurance. And he can jump from like little babies to incest to Greek myths to ...whatever. I hate him.
Did you ever have any of these thoughts when you were on cocaine?
No, when I was on coke, I was really into the physics of music: like sine waves really got interesting and I really wanted to talk about them.
Just sine waves or--
A lot of bad things happened too, but at least as far as nerd stuff.
What about square waves?
I don't... maybe? A lot of ...that, is all gone now.
You didn't write it down? You could have been the next Freud, high on cocaine, writing down crazy shit. Is there anything specific, then, that you don't like about Freud? I know we were talking about sex and gender before.
He's just a fucking idiot. I'm trying to think of specifics here. I think he was just whole idea of different stages that you go through, and getting caught in like the anal stage or the phallic stage and whatever is complete bullshit. He doesn't even deal with women.
I feel like a common criticism is that he is very phallocentric and androcentric.
It's just a load of shit, and I feel like it set people back. Although on the other hand, I haven't finished this conversation so I don't know enough. My therapist is one of my favourite people and has a PhD in psychology or psychiatry, or both I think. She says that Freud is pretty awesome and does contribute a lot more than I give him credit for. He did start talk therapy. I just think that as a feminist, and many other things, my bias against him outweighs the good part, and maybe I take talk therapy for granted because it's always been around me.
I guess, because I had to read him last term, and whereas the specifics of perversions and etc. etc. might not have been anything I agreed with, but I felt like he was really influential and he introduced ideas of, like, the subconscious. Everyone talks about the subconscious, unconscious mind now. And so yeah, I think he is a lot more than what he commonly gets pegged with.
It's cool, but then he gets so abstract with some ideas about how superego, the ego and the id interact that... It's like he gets off topic and carried off into his own little world where he's created these three things and when you try to relate it back to a human being you've gone so far off track at times.
Did you ever get the feeling while reading it that if you met him real life, he'd just be this big jerk?
I've never really thought about that; I don't know.
So, if you could meet some now dead intellectual, who would it be?
Damn. .......that's not something I can answer quickly.
That's all right; I'll expect a list later.
I think I've always wanted to talk to you about music, since I've heard you play piano and I'm always glad that I play music first, because then you play and I don't feel like I can touch an instrument for a while. I think clearly there's a lot of ...connection that you have with music. I remember we were talking about something and you said--it was a movie, you said you didn't care about the movie but you cared just because it had a good soundtrack.
Ravenous. Yeah, it goes with this landscape and the music sounds like the landscape looks. It was shot at the base of the Rockies, I think. It's kind of similar to the whole Donner Party story. You know it's going to some cannibalistic hell, but what makes it so scary is like... this music just does it. I can't... I'm not very good at talking, but seriously. Music for me is so much emotion. When I was growing up, my father and mother both played the piano, and I remember hearing my mom playing Chopin's Nocturnes. They just got me so emotional as a kid. And in the summertime, when it was hot out, we always had the windows open because we never had AC, and my dad would play ragtime. And it was cool. I would be on the floor and just hear it.
Yeah.
You think it'll look anything like the movie?
No. No, that movie was horrible. That movie was Waterworld: the prequel.
But Waterworld was good, in a weird kitschy way.
Lines like "I'll put you in a jar" are cool.
I haven't seen it for a while.
Me neither, but my best friend had two movies: she had Biodome--no she had three movies: she had Biodome, Indiana Jones--the young Indiana Jones--and Waterworld. So I've seen those three movies... plus I had two movies at my house: I had Aladdin and Mission Impossible. So those are the five movies I've watched a thousand times as a child, not because I particularly like them, but... they stick with me.
So do you have a favourite movie then? Is it one of those?
No, it's Purple Rain.
I haven't seen that either. I haven't seen a lot of movies, but my excuse is that I didn't live in this country for most of my childhood.
We're going to need to watch Purple Rain. Purple Rain is...
How come we didn't download that. What the fuck.
Because I didn't... it didn't occur to me.
We did watch Sixteen Candles, though.
Which was good, minus the whole... racism
Which seemed to just be this extra layer of
fucking unnecessary
superfluous nonsense. ...So the way you're lying on the couch right now is like some perfect typical Freudian psychoanalysis shit going on.
I could say some Freudian shit.
Yeah? You had to read Freud?
Yeah. I started to, but then, sharing this as someone who personally had a cocaine addiction, when I read Freud, I just see some fucking dickhead who had a major raging coke addiction. And if you have personally had that, when you read his stuff, it just drips bullshit and coke. Like all over the place. You know that. I mean, you see this stuff, and the first thing I thought was, dude, this guy just did so many lines before he wrote this, and that's why he's jumping from topic to topic with so much fucking self-assurance. And he can jump from like little babies to incest to Greek myths to ...whatever. I hate him.
Did you ever have any of these thoughts when you were on cocaine?
No, when I was on coke, I was really into the physics of music: like sine waves really got interesting and I really wanted to talk about them.
Just sine waves or--
A lot of bad things happened too, but at least as far as nerd stuff.
What about square waves?
I don't... maybe? A lot of ...that, is all gone now.
You didn't write it down? You could have been the next Freud, high on cocaine, writing down crazy shit. Is there anything specific, then, that you don't like about Freud? I know we were talking about sex and gender before.
He's just a fucking idiot. I'm trying to think of specifics here. I think he was just whole idea of different stages that you go through, and getting caught in like the anal stage or the phallic stage and whatever is complete bullshit. He doesn't even deal with women.
I feel like a common criticism is that he is very phallocentric and androcentric.
It's just a load of shit, and I feel like it set people back. Although on the other hand, I haven't finished this conversation so I don't know enough. My therapist is one of my favourite people and has a PhD in psychology or psychiatry, or both I think. She says that Freud is pretty awesome and does contribute a lot more than I give him credit for. He did start talk therapy. I just think that as a feminist, and many other things, my bias against him outweighs the good part, and maybe I take talk therapy for granted because it's always been around me.
I guess, because I had to read him last term, and whereas the specifics of perversions and etc. etc. might not have been anything I agreed with, but I felt like he was really influential and he introduced ideas of, like, the subconscious. Everyone talks about the subconscious, unconscious mind now. And so yeah, I think he is a lot more than what he commonly gets pegged with.
It's cool, but then he gets so abstract with some ideas about how superego, the ego and the id interact that... It's like he gets off topic and carried off into his own little world where he's created these three things and when you try to relate it back to a human being you've gone so far off track at times.
Did you ever get the feeling while reading it that if you met him real life, he'd just be this big jerk?
I've never really thought about that; I don't know.
So, if you could meet some now dead intellectual, who would it be?
Damn. .......that's not something I can answer quickly.
That's all right; I'll expect a list later.
I think I've always wanted to talk to you about music, since I've heard you play piano and I'm always glad that I play music first, because then you play and I don't feel like I can touch an instrument for a while. I think clearly there's a lot of ...connection that you have with music. I remember we were talking about something and you said--it was a movie, you said you didn't care about the movie but you cared just because it had a good soundtrack.
Ravenous. Yeah, it goes with this landscape and the music sounds like the landscape looks. It was shot at the base of the Rockies, I think. It's kind of similar to the whole Donner Party story. You know it's going to some cannibalistic hell, but what makes it so scary is like... this music just does it. I can't... I'm not very good at talking, but seriously. Music for me is so much emotion. When I was growing up, my father and mother both played the piano, and I remember hearing my mom playing Chopin's Nocturnes. They just got me so emotional as a kid. And in the summertime, when it was hot out, we always had the windows open because we never had AC, and my dad would play ragtime. And it was cool. I would be on the floor and just hear it.
So did you get into music on your own, or did your parents really encourage you? or both?
I begged for lessons, and lessons are expensive, so it wasn't until I was seven that I started. And they really encouraged it. My father especially. We played together. I think they realized that I had something one night when I was sick. I came downstairs because I was having like an asthma attack and they were listening to some show on the stereo, like some symphony, and I heard it and I absorbed it, and I walked over to the piano and like--it was stupid, but like the last chord, I just hit the same notes on the piano. I just hit them without any touching first and they were like, Oh...man, our nine year old knows something. So that was when they started pushing a little more. Yeah, they pushed me harder to practice, but never that hard.
Well, it sounded like you were really self-motivated.
Well, it sounded like you were really self-motivated.
I was really motivated with that stuff. Not quite enough, but pretty... there. I think I always wanted to be as good as my father was at it. But then when I started getting maybe a little better than him, I started losing a little motivation.
Yeah. She doesn't practice like she's supposed to.
Did you brother also learn piano?
He played piano, but he wasn't really that into it. He played the sax for a while. He doesn't anymore. He had a problem with the piano because his finger joints bend funny.
That's actually kind of funny because growing up, I did a lot of rock climbing and your fingers aren't supposed to bend the way you just did with the last joint going backwards because it fucks up your tendons when you put a lot of pressure on them. So I grew up never doing that, and as a result my fingers don't really bend too much like that. But I remember learning some chords on guitar, some of those jazz chords, and you have to do those ...selective bar chords or whatever, and I was like, ah fuck, I wish my fingers bent like that because I could hold down the right strings. I didn't really think of that until I saw someone really good play and I saw that they were doing that. Maybe I need to do push ups on my fingertips or something.
That's why I quit Tae Kwon Do when I was little, because of those push ups.
Fingertip push ups? or just push ups?
The fingertip ones.
How long did you take TKD for?
Six weeks.
But now you're going to take boxing.
Hopefully. I don't know if it's going to be a reality. I can't find it listed for spring courses.
Are there any last things you want to say? Advice? Resolutions?
I think people should learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. That's about all I got.
