Mysterious soul cavern

Mračna soba. Čovjek sa maskom na licu i pištoljem u ruci. Nečiji sin, brat, otac, susjed, prijatelj, muž, sugrađanin, suradnik, zaposlenik. Jedan reflektor uperen na drugog čovjeka u prostoriji.

Kleči pred onim sa maskom. Pištolj mu je prislonjen na čelo. Izraz straha mu je okamenio lice. Pucanj. Metak uz prasak i paljenje kože probija kožu i lubanju. Mrska kost i prolazi u mekani zagrljaj mozga. Taj maleni željezni oblutak, ništavan, bora put kroz mekoću. Kroz spletovlje aksona i dendrita, kroz njihove mreže i zavoje, križanja i stranputice. Njihove grane i ogranke pali sila metka, pucaju poput tankih niti i ostaju visiti bespomoćno. Mreže njihovih putova, milijunima puta povezani i prespojeni kroz desetljeća života, sada nestaju u sekundi vrućine i sile. Neuroni i glije prskaju poput balona od sapunice, njihove unutrašnjost raznesena zajedno sa svilenim nitima uma. Kroz taj palež, taj kratak put dug par centimetara, nestaje jedna duša. Njegova sjećanja i misli, snovi i nadanja, žalosti i sreća, strasti i strahovi, tajne i laži, istine i časti, morali i filozofije, zaključci i razmišljanja. Milijuni veza nasilno prekinutih da bi nestala jedna osoba.

Ova slika, ta sekunda smrti je snimana. Dok se rupa uništena mozga puni krvlju, čovjek pada na tlo u zadnjem grču života dok ga napušta sve što on jest. Slika brzinom kompjuterske misli dolazi u tehnološki omogućenu abominaciju kolektivnog nesvjesnog i kola među svima nama. Youtube ju donosi u kratkih par sekundi divlje smrti. Photobucket niz slika, koje pokazuju svaki pokret i svaki od kratkih momenata nestajanja jednog čovjeka. Twitter i Facebook šalju dalje, u moru linkova i veza. Snopovlje veza i ogranak Interneta i naših medija upinju i kolaju ovim prizorom dok svi nismo iskusili isto - smrt.

I tako iz dana u dan. Opet. I opet. I opet.

Poginula tijela smrskanih putnika u nesreći vlaka. Dvije djevojčice koje su zajedno skočile sa zvonika u smrt, njihova tijela na pločniku. Mrtva žena pod željezom uništenog automobila. Tijela. To bijelo, naduto meso koje više nije čovjek nas zove da ga progutamo očima, da uzdahnemo nad njim. Na svakoj strani, u svakom pogledu. Na naslovnicama novina. Portala. Vijesti. Spiker govori o mrtvima sa korporativnim smiješkom i uglađenom kravatom pod grkljanom. Mi ga trebamo. Kolektiv ljudi živi i diše nad svakom dušom koja izdahne i uđe u aksone i dendrite medija, da se širi dalje poput virusa koja nas zove k sebi. Da ga gledamo, prikriveno.

Vikarijski.

A dark room. A man with a mask on his face, holding a gun. Someone's son, brother, father, neighbor, friend, husband, fellow-citizen, coworker, employee. Only one reflector lamp directed at the other man in the room.

He kneels before the one with the gun. The gun is on his forehead. The expression of fear turned his face to stone. A shot fired. With a bang and skin scorching the bullet pierces skin and skull. It shreds the bone and enters the soft embrace of the brain. This little iron pebble, nothingness, digs its way through the softness. Through the plexus of axons and dendrites, through their nets and curves, crossings and sidelines. Their branches and offshots are scorched by the bullet's force, they break like thin threads and remain hanging helplessly. The networks of their ways, a million times connected and interconnected through decades of life, now vanish in a second of heath and force. Neurons and glias burst like soap bubbles, their insides blown up with the silken threads of the mind. Through that wreckage, that short way of only a few centimeters, a soul disappears. His memories and thoughts, dreams and hopes, sadness and happiness, passions and fears, secrets and lies, truths and honors, morals and philosophies, conclusions and contemplations. Million of connections violently broken to erase a person.

This image, that second of death was taped. While the destroyed brain’s hole is filled by blood, the man falls to the ground in the last spasm of life as everything that he is is leaving. The image travels with speed of computer thought to the technologically sustained abomination of the collective unconscious and spreads in between us. Youtube brings it in a short flick of death. Photobucket as a series of pictures, which show every move and every short moment of a human being's disappearance. Twitter and Facebook send it farther away, in the sea of links and connections. The plexus of connections that is the Internet and our media strive and disseminate this image until all of us experienced it - death.

That happens today and tomorrow. And again. And again. And again.

The crushed dead bodies of the passengers in a train wreck. Two little girls who jumped from a bell tower into their death, their bodies on the sidewalk. A dead woman under the destroyed metal of an automobile. Bodies. That white, bloated flesh that is not human anymore is calling us to swallow it with our eyes, for us to sigh for them. Everywhere, in every view. In newspaper headlines. Portals. News. The speaker speaks of the dead with a corporate smile and a smart tie under his chin. We need it. The people's collective which lives and breaths over every soul that breaths out and enters the axons and dendrites of our media, to spread around like viruses which call to us. To watch it, hiddenly.

Vicariously.

Just dropping a quick note to say that voting on LJ Idol is still on through tomorrow evening. Since there are multiple topics for the entrants to choose from, each topic is its own poll. It makes for interesting "tribes" of different lengths. I believe all with LJ accounts can vote in this one, as many contestants as you like.

She always knows when I need a cuddle.

So apparently voicemails are randomly vanishing on my phone.

If you've called in the last couple of weeks and I never called back or acknowledged it at all, that's probably why.

My hip is fucking killing me. And the chiropractor is out of town this week so I will not have it worked on until next week. I am trying not to focus on it too much.

Craving those goddamn donettes again.

From Sociological Images: Race, Criminal Background, and Employment

For those who are reluctant to click through: in a matched-pair experiment, black entry-level job applicants without criminal records were less likely to be called back for an interview than white entry-level applicants with criminal records. Also, for bonus racism: black applicants were frequently asked up front if they had criminal records; white applicants were rarely asked.

(The fictional crime on the fictional criminal histories in these matched-pair experiments, by the way? Non-violent drug convictions -- a crime that has enormous and unjustified racial disparities in enforcement rates.)


Storytime:

Back when I was still working on factory floors for a living, I applied to a local manufacturing firm for a job, at one notch above entry-level. I particularly wanted to get on with their firm because they'd pay for a graduate degree that would maybe get me off the factory floor. They offered the job, I accepted.

And then I failed the drug test.

As near as I can tell, a pastrami sandwich was the culprit in my testing positive for heroin. (This was the event that taught me that you should ALWAYS CHECK YES on the poppyseeds question. It was also the first of the two pastrami sandwiches that have earned me a brush with the War on Drugs.) My friends all thought it was HILARIOUS that I had failed a drug test. Everyone who I called like to busted a gut when I blurted my distress. "YOU failed a drug test? Hahahahaha!"

I, however, was not busting a gut. I was panicking. I wanted off the factory floor, and this company had been, up until the moment of that failed drug test, my best bet for achieving that.

Weirdly (or so it seemed to me at the time), despite my failing the drug test, they didn't withdraw the job offer right away. Instead, they called me in to HR for a meeting the rep who has administering this particular job opening. When I got there, the HR receptionist didn't know why I had been called in -- she clearly thought the whole thing very weird, whatever it was. I had a meeting with the rep, in which she gave me a hard copy of my results, quizzed me about them a bit, and then explained that they were still making their decision. Then she sent me home to wait and chew my nails.

A day or two later, they called me up and said that they had decided to put the drug test aside and hire me.

And so I was hired. On my first morning, the HR rep privately gave me a thirty-second "about that drug test" speech, in which she told me that we would never speak of that test result again. An hour later, after I'd done my paperwork and watched the orientation videos, my new boss gave me exactly the same speech.

As the years went by, it became clear they really meant that "never speak of it again" bit. Sure there were several skittish years at the beginning where I was quite happy to never mention it, too. But even after my employer finished paying for that schooling, even after that schooling got me a promotion to twice-my-original-wage plus some policy-making authority on particular aspects of hiring and firing -- including things like company drug policy -- I was still not allowed to talk about that drug test. Not even within HR. Not even privately to the HR rep who had participated in the original decision. Not even as a concrete example of company drug policy and apparent mis-alignment with company goals. Failing a drug test was (it seemed) a VERY BIG DEAL, the sort of non-negotiable thing that could get me fired, even ten years later. Do. Not. Talk. About it.

And yet, the fact remained that I had been hired in spite of a failed drug test. Back when I had hung up from that "we've decided to set aside the drug test and hire you" phone call, I remember feeling confused. So what's the point of the drug test, if they just set it aside whenever they feel like it?

What indeed?


Going back to the socimages post: "...employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%)." Ask me how surprised I'd be if a hefty slice of that result turned out to be white people saying to each other, "But he was such a nice young man. He doesn't strike me as a tweaker / junkie / crackhead / addict." After you combine that with employers' up-front concern that black applicants might have a criminal record but non-concern about whether white applicants might have one, the willingness to overlook a drug conviction (or a failed drug test!) stops looking like benevolence, generosity, or doing a good deed. Instead, it looks a lot like a system for preferentially passing advantage to certain kinds of people. Whether or not that's the intent -- and in my own case, I did come to know these individuals fairly well, and they would each be genuinely horrified to find themselves perpetrating racial injustice -- that's what happens.

Combine all that with disparities in stops, arrests, and sentencing -- and thus marked disparities in which applicants show up to HR with a criminal record and which don't -- and you've got a nasty, highly interlinked mess of structural racism.

Oh, btw, the "let's give this kid a break" system of racial inequality appears to work the same way in the criminal justice system. In 2008 in Oregon, for instance, "23 percent of African American youth referrals are dismissed, not petitioned or not adjudicated compared with 54 percent of White youth." At a single stage of a multi-stage process, white kids are catching a 'lucky' break at more than twice the rate that black kids are.

The irony? It's probably not the white kids who are going to need that lucky break.

givesushope
It's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love.

veggieslackers
Despite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast.

fashin
Just in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.

Kanye Outburst And Charlie Bit Me Mashed Up And Autotuned - Watch more Funny Videos

So many of you know that I have two sisters. One of them, the youngest one, is who I post the most about due to all her issues n' stuff. Yet my other sister is doing something QUITE cool. One of my favorite books series is The Circle of Magic series by Tamora Peirce. I met Mrs. Peirce at Dragon*Con 2008 and about melted in a puddle of goo. Well, Danielle, my art student sister, has a midterm this year that requires her to take a book series and develop art designs based off of the book. Danielle chose to do the Circle of Magic books! Here is some of the art that she's producing right now.



This is the group line up of the four main characters of the series. From Left to right, they are Briar, Tris, Sandry, and Daja.

Here are their close ups.


Briar is, I think, Danielle's favorite character...its either him or Tris. He's a theif-boy who learns to control plant magic. This group of characters is from the first set of books. These are the quartet before the events of the second half of the series.


This is Tris. We love Tris. Tris don't take no shit from no one. Its awesome.


And of course Sandry. She's the noble girl in the group. She's pretty cool as well. Usually I despise the blonde, rich girl in a group, but then again, Tamora does a really great job of pointing out that sometimes a person can't help what class they are born into. She does a fine job of creating a rich girl they way they should be.


This is Daja. She's a Traderkin. I liked her because again, she takes no shit from no one. Her story arc is pretty neat. She goes from being banished to forcing her old tribe to take her back due to her own kickassness. I like Danielle's design of her. Red is the color of mourning in Trader culture and since her entire family is dead at the beginning of the book series, the red was a good choice.

Anyway, those are the people. Danielle also did work on their props. These are the magical objects of the book series:


This is Briar's Shakkan. Its like a Bonsai tree but it hold all Briar's magic.



This is Sandry's night light. In the beginning of the first book, she is trapped in a hidden room as her entire family dies from a plague. So, her friends create a night light for her so she will never be afraid of the dark.



This is Daja's trader's staff. All trader's have one, but they have etchings and carvings on their staffs that symbolize their life. Daja's is blank because she is outcasted from her tribes.



This is the cart that Lark and Rosethorn own. Danielle hasn't done their design work yet, but since she was working on the temple area and the cottage, she decided to go ahead and work up their cart. This is how the group gets from the Winding Temple grounds to the near by towns.

Now for places that are important in the books!


This is the tower that the group trains at with their teacher, Niko. Its really just a huge tower, but it later turns out to be one of the places that has great significance in the books.



This is Danielle's rough designs for the Cave area. Its here that the four of them create a circle of magic that connects them through the next oh, eight or nine books.



This is the final picture that I'll post up. Its the cottage that the characters live at. Again, its a central location within the first series of books.

I don't know if Danielle will do anything with these designs after she finishes this particular class, but I know that I'm impressed. So, anyway, any Circle of Magic fans are sure to enjoy this.

After about four straight days of rain and wind, the sun finally returned to us here this weekend. It was SO nice. My rain gauge was overflowing, it had gotten such a workout. And while I know it's good for my garden---we've got baby bok choy and a bunch of greens coming in---it is not so great for my mental state. I was feeling soggy both literally and figuratively. It's nice to be drying out, so to speak.

In other news, we're coming to the end of both Project Runway AND Top Chef, my two favorite reality shows (and really, the only ones I watch any more. Until Rock of Love returns. I mean, I am only human, and I am here for Brett. But I digress.). Both TC and PR have been really good this season. And Top Chef makes me want to cook, which is a nice benefit. Project Runway just makes me want to shop, which is...well, not so good. I'm kind of on a self-imposed restriction right now. We'll see how long it lasts. Anyway, I'm trying to figure out my favorites for the finales, which is tough. On PR, I really like Carole Hannah, and even more since she got a nasty stomach virus and STILL kept working. I also like Althea. On Top Chef, we have been all about Jennifer for weeks now, but she seems to have lost her confidence. Which I can totally relate to. What she needs is a little pep talk from Coach Taylor. Jennifer, if you are reading this---and I really doubt you are---you should pop over to YouTube and look for some vintage Taylor clips. He will talk you back around. Trust me! I do it all the time.

Also, just days before I leave for NCTE, my camera has died. My brand NEW camera, the same one I lost and then miraculously found. I'm beginning to think, though, after the loss and now the breaking down, that maybe our relationship was just not meant to be. It's such a cool camera, this thin, red, sleek thing. It's like I was dating above myself, and holding onto this guy is more trouble than it's worth. What I need is a big, clunky camera my daughter can drop on the floor, all practicality. It's good to realize these things. I am a dork. I need a dorky camera. Maybe I'll add a neck strap just for emphasis.

Finally, a Coco update. She's doing well, pretty much totally recovered, which is great. She is also, however, on so many freaking medications it's ridiculous. When we went to the vet last week they added TWO more---Zantac and a digestive drug---so now she's taking phenobarbital (for seizures) an antibiotic (for the pneumonia she got at the vet) and these two new ones. It's crazy. We practically need a part-time nurse to keep up with it all. Also, I am somewhat concerned that one of this new drugs is making her more hyper than ever. I mean, she's always been a nervous, yappy kind of dog, but GOOD LORD. She's like a whirling dervish these days. Poor Monkey is just running from her because she won't leave him alone. I guess another call to the vet is in order. Maybe I'll ask the nurse to do it.

Have a great day, everyone!

Tea.

Futurama.

Friends.

Talking things out.

... I am feeling better.

There's still some bit of boiling going on, which could be some residual anger... but it could also be heartburn. I did have Papa John's earlier.

I am furious.

Trying not to be but I could fucking kill.

This seems like an abuse of the term, "nog."

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What a beautiful little girl!




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Had a dream about painting. Now I want to paint. Thankfully it's Sunday and I can't go to Hobby Lobby and waste money on canvas and brushes and paints... because, argh, money :( Had to pay a bill today that was kind of hefty. Worried all over again. Bah.

Apartment is a little... messy. I don't know, it's fairly in shape but I like it to be spotless and gorgeous and it's not and that bothers me.

Hips are hurting. The massage work on them is going to help eventually but for now it's just making them hurt worse.

gdi money, why do I barely have any of you?

Scrubs makes me happy.

A couple months back my uncle gave me a Versajette M400 printer.

I needed something printed tonight.

PC isn't up and running yet.

Tried with the Mac.

And I cannot find a fucking driver. Bah.

You guys have no idea how strongly I am craving this.