535. "Uncertain Moments in Commercial Fishing" Manifesto at the Brink of Summer Vacation

Uncertain Moments in Commercial Fishing" Manifesto Monologue came about on June 16, 2010, though I chose the posting to be in April of 2010. The PDF can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/uncertainmomentsincommercialfishingPDF.pdf.

Last night, June 16, 2010, was the first time in five years I was going through a noticeable, visible panic attack. I was in San Diego, now I'm in Santa Barbara. I was at Jx's house, and I was feeling weak and vulnerable, for I just started working through the instruction manual for Logic Pro music software (I'm trying to transfer from Sonar Home Studio) and realized that my venturing through the mechanics of music audio production would finally lead me to my salvation of bare minimum professional multi-media production, but then had to be interrupted by the realities that I had to head back up to Santa Barbara, because the following day entailed the initiation of a root-canal process and two meetings with two different professors. Then again, my being in San Diego embodied the first time of my escaping from Santa Barbara for an entire month of brutal labor of "reviewing the previous literature and paying homage to all those who did work before me... spending a significant fraction of my life worrying about what other people think rather than further developing what I think." Fxck! I hate literature reviews.... But nevertheless, I do learn new things and somehow I do build character in the process... then again... I feel more institutionalized... more so a part of the establishment... lovely.... To take things back even further, I had come to realize that this entire academic year I had been mentally bulldozed and riddled with a bunch of unfinished projects, but I emerged from my being in the midst of the intellectual academic hurricane with new directions, digging extremely deep inside myself and feel that I have the answer to the question of "what's next in Victoria's life" whereas in the previous summer I did NOT feel that way. So I've spent the ENTIRE LAST 9 MONTHS HOLDING MY MENTAL BREATH and it's the first time I've had the opportunity to ask "WHO AM I?" and "WHERE IN THE HXLL AM I AT?" being in San Diego, far far away from Santa Barbara, the utopia vacation land, yet riddled with my own academic problems... It's a paradoxical landscape at this moment... and last night was the LAST thing I wanted to do, drive in the middle of the night back to Santa Barbara to wrap up loose ends, talk to professors, and have the worst and most graphic and physical dental operation I had ever experienced in my 10 years of sitting on the dental seat. So here I am, uncovering the hidden prison of my mind--Logic Pro Music software--uprooted from my internal vulnerabilities, forced to return to the land of academidrama I didn't even want to think about and then right before I leave Jx vents to me about his concerns with the "conditions" of the ocean and how the last three months have not been money-makers, it's the first time it's ever happened to him in his entire fishing career... miserable April, like usual, then these blasting red tides with no ocean circulation, and now small vessel advisories due to excess wind.... There's no break in bad weather.... Jx vented pretty badly and then reminded me to be a bit more considerate with my use of coffee cups and the tiniest of things, combined with his fishing concerns (see the manifesto above) just placed me in this super ultimate vulnerable emotional state, where I feel everything is swirling and unstable and that everything in the whole world is "my fault" and then I find myself in this mode of uncontrollable heavy breathing and crying and wailing alone in the car at night, my sleeves covered with snot and these gang-banger cars passing by me with heavy loud rap music right outside the Lemon Grove Starbucks, in which I ventured in, trying to stay bare minimum composed though my face was blotched with brown-redness and the two insensitive women (or do I say bxtches) behind the counter inspected my one-time re-use coffee cup from the Albertsons down the street as if they were holding an envelop possibly containing anthrax, and with the immense uncertain snootiness the older woman rejected the possibility of a 50-cent refill because "it's not the same store" but then she mumbled "but we have coffee brewing right now, it will be about three minutes... but don't worry about it, I'll just bring one out to you," and though this seems to be a kind gesture in words, the older woman's tone of voice was of alien disgust, as if I were contaminated by the Gulf Oil spill or something, and I just burst into tears right then and there in front of those two snooty girls and barely handled my cup, sat down at a table right be the doorway trying to compose myself, but it was a miserable failure... just this ultimate moment of vulnerability where my exposure of uncontrollable emotion is greeted by insensitivity of the humans around me, I just knew, yes yes, this is a Post-Modern Moment (or Post Modern Second or PMS), or so I now know... Victoria Anonymous, Terra Anonymous... one and the same... human indifference to anyone and anything they don't know and are not attached to.... I'm staring at a few hundred humans across the street at the farmer's market, and now I feel like I'm staring at round stones rolling down a hill, I'm staring at tumbleweed blown across the Mojave Desert, I'm in a city and I feel more desolate and alone than when I'm out on the Pacific Ocean or at the Bahia de Los Angeles, so I was sooo uncontained that I just walked out the Starbucks and stormed away, back into the car, without picking up any coffee, it was the perfectly wrong moment to encounter ultimate bxtchiness of lady Starbucks baristas.

Before I left in the dark, I called Jx one more time and he calmed me down some, reminding me that we all need to vent, it's a part of the process... which is very true, but my vulnerability was unbearable at the moment.... He cheered me up with some text messages and cartoon ideas, and after about a half-hour of driving I was calming down... though just that half-hour before I was crying and wailing and short of breath that I could barely hold the steering wheel, let alone see through my watery eyes. As I continued driving up north, parsing the drive into "counties," from San Diego to Orange County (south and north) to Los Angeles, then Ventura and SB, Jx's manifesto sat heavier and heavier in me. It was so sorrowful to me, to give up.... To give up a passion, a self-carved profession that was half labor, half hobby and play, that had worked successfully for over ten years, and for a multitude of reasons all feeding off of each other... this profession no longer works, no longer viable... for more than a few days... an entire season? One thing I can say for sure, it is one thing for a scientist to write about how "all fishermen have to do is change their profession" in the literature in cold, nonchalant text, and then it's another thing to experience the venting worries of a fisherman or fishermen who have become close friends. These include worries... to a point of depression (worse than a bad funk). This distant, cold fine print problem in the literature suddenly becomes magnifyingly personal. A visua-emotional landscape mapped onto the impersonal... it's the least I can do in my life: experience the fine technical print, not just read it.

All the reasons as to why Jx is a commercial fisherman in the first place welled up in my mind: (1) to escape humans, escape civilization (2) to escape the absurdity of having a job in a box, a cubicle (3) to integrate mental and physical labor (4) to be your own boss, impose your own labors on yourself rather than do the labors of another human's will: all the ideals of such work just tapering away... to succumb to the drudgery work of a machinist society, where everyone is working for everyone else and not for their own brains.... Oh but there must be other fruitful and meaningful and connected forms of labors out there... It just takes a while to poke around and figure out where they're at. I spoke with Peter about this manifesto, and he informed me that many natural resource users feel this way: they are under the gun, at the whims of the agents of the environment, and then society comes down on them with additional layers of constraints, it can be unbearably overwhelming... like me... having a panic attack. I just think that "living your passions is no longer financially viable" is a sin of a mass-scale economic system. People are behaving to satisfy the vicious metabolism of a giant machine, rather than fulfilling their inner needs, exploring their inner souls. We're all being swallowed by the giant machine... if only we could somehow survive being at the fringes of the grid. I was thinking about the sportfishing option for temporary work... "You might as well catch people to catch fish. After all, there seems to be a lot more humans than fishes, so you might as well catch naive, vacation-going humans instead..." but then some of the charms of the labors of commercial fishing vanish.... What was the means of livelihood metamorphoses to Disney entertainment of the ocean (in part)....

It's toward the end of June 17, 2010, and somehow I have survived the day. I had the roughest dental work done on me... a root canal at the UCSB on-campus dental offices... lost so much of a molar.... I'm still sore... the dental assistant was a bit of a ditz, but the dentist was hard core. Today I was a phenomenal patient and Dr. Montgomery said he liked to "divorce the patient from the tooth," (quite existential!) so I'm a great patient with a troublesome tooth. It turned out that one of my four tooth tunnels inherently calcified, "nature's root canal" which was against the grain of textbook procedures. After that I had a super discussion about ecocriticism, Literature and the Environment with Dr. Shewry, and then wrote most of this blog at Kinkos in Goleta, and then talked with Dr. Alagona about marine environmental history and a whole bunch of other cool stuff (in which he cheered me up, as usual) and here I am, a little less bummed than before....

491. Poem Back from 2005 "It is important to take a moment and consider" Written in a Crying, Bawling, Panic Attack State

Continued from Blog 490, here is a PDF of the above poem,
http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/itisimportantotakeamomentandconsiderPOEM1.pdf , written in a state of panic attack (crying, bawling, screaming, yelling) alone in my room.... It's a poem of "powerful words" but the "not now" censorship syndrome prevailed in the New York Publishing House climate back in 2005....

Sorry to repeat from Blog 490, but here's the blurb. The second most memorable response was a very contentious phone call with the editor from the UC Press. It was funny... I was exploring the website of the University of California Press and was noticing how they had this "non-discrimination statement," stating that the UC Press does not discriminate based on race, ethnic background, class, job position, AGE, or any other factor that could possibly construct the notion of discrimination. And yet, the phone call with the editor showed CLEAR DISCRIMINATION BASED ON AGE ("ageism" as opposed to "racism" or "speciesism" in District 9). He told me flat out (paraphrased, I have exact wording in another computer), "How could any 24-year old have something to say about the world?" which was extremely derogatory to me at the time. I left the phone call feeling like I was "no good" and didn't have anything valid to say because I was "too young." Following this phone call, I went through another panic attack alone, and I ended up writing a poem "It is important to take a moment and consider..." which I will place in the next blog, because I don't want to place too much information here....

I retyped up the poem, but I hardly changed a thing (except for some indentations). I find the poem to be a little overly melodramatic given my present state of mind.... The poem does crystallize my dire mental state back in that time.... Look at me, being a psychologist to my former self.... I probably won't submit this poem anywhere in particular unless it's a literary journal that emphasizes politics....

Blogging this today, it's funny think to in the American Climate of Mental Warfare, or American War of Ideas, I somehow have survived this first encounter with the gatekeepers of mass-produced storytelling.... I am an Intellectual Survivor... I live to tell the story... in a humble little blog.... I'm sure I am not going through post-traumatic-stress-disorder... or MAYBE I AM... that's why I'm compelled to write these blogs... resolving ancient stress, ancient knots... resolving my past traumatic encounters.... Writing is indeed psychological therapy....

It's funny that my life (and MANY other writer's lives) has become "dramatic" simply due to the traumas of interacting with publishers/literary agents. I had a close friend write a novella about how a suite of characters were so close to having "their big break" in getting their story out in Hollywood to be produced as a film, but the entry ended up as the runner-up. I really don't want to see my own stories becoming REFLEXIVE (authors writing stories about writing and publishing rather than writing stories about other worldly experiences) such as this, unless I take my experiences and transpose them to a science fiction story about censorship and the mechanisms of mental digestibility. How some alien society evolved (or denigrated, dis-evolved) from a state of imaginative dreamers to pacified consumers. Their minds started to resemble degenerate 2-year-olds.... Oh, I can easily, easily write a story about this topic....

471. Poem / Song "Everything's Good / Everything's Fine / It's All in Your Head / It's All in Your Mind"

Well? What can I say? I wish I could erase my memory. Starting around 10pm last night to around 3pm this afternoon. I really wish I could. This is the first time I ever wanted to erase my memory in my life--the whole Eternal Sunshine model by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. Because I felt momentarily devastated and abandoned... simply because I existed in such a vulnerable, post-traumatic state from the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) conference on negotiating marine protected areas in the south coast. I really have to say it was a short period of time, and I will have to be open to reliving this fragment of my life twice, starting from scrap, all over again. Open to experimentation. It's hard, especially when there is no change of environment. The truth is that in between 10pm and 3pm was a state of existence that was contradictory and inconsistent to the ENTIRETY of EXISTENCE of the past year or so. The inconsistency was derived from unstable, volatile emotions. It's not even worth thinking about; it's simply a "my bad."

Back in August 11, 2008, the day before Txriel and I went on a Santa Ynez Mountain, Painted Cave outing for my birthday, I was in a panicky state of mind, not really sensing that I was slowly becoming abandoned.... I invented a silly little song that actually keeps coming back to haunt me. I probably have sung this song in my head about a hundred-and-one times since that stressful day before my birthday in August, and I found myself singing it today, as I had suffered through a panic attack and a migraine, my first migraine since I was 11 years old. Upon convincing myself to get home from Kinkos with this migraine, I started to sing this song softly to myself. After taking three advils and falling asleep on a couch, I woke up feeling better, more functional.

Since this poem/song seems to be a recurring theme in my life, though it was invented in a time of stress and the end of a small era of surrealistic reality associated with MaleCaseStudyAnonymous, I still have come to realize this tune has withstood the test of time. I even shared this song with Jules, and he actually liked it--a surprisingly positive response! I always thought this tune to be silly... and maybe a little to simple... but somehow no one seems to think so!

After looking at this song, it still seems incomplete. I feel there could still be two more stanzas and a main chorus. Well, when I get into that "right mood," I'm sure my mind will drift back to completing this piece.

Everything's Good, Everything's Fine

Everything's good.

Everything's fine.

It's all in your head.

It's all in your mind.

You think something's wrong.

You think something's bad.

And you don't even realize

All that you have.

So stop poooty-hooo

And change your ToDos.

And so stop dribbling

and change your Routine....

411. Reflections in Palm Springs Desert Before the Shxt Hits the Fan: A Morning of Graphic Design of Geologic Failure

BELOW IS THE PRINTFECTION TSHIRT LINK FOR "Ignorance is of momentary bliss, but can construct a nearly continuous living hxll of a mental prison."
http://www.printfection.com/questionreality/Ignorance-is-of-Momentary-Bliss/_s_271405

BELOW IS THE PRINTFECTION TSHIRT LINK FOR "Mental Entropy Revisited: A Conscious Escape of the Box"
http://www.printfection.com/questionreality/Mental-Entropy-Revisited--Conscious-Escape-of-Box/_s_271423

Caption on Picasaweb:
In the morning of April 13, 2009, I woke up amongst the truckers at the Desert Center, 30 miles away from Indio / Palm Springs. I witnessed a hazy-pink sunrise upon the San Jacinto Mountains. My mind was clear but experienced restlessness upon facing the California Arena of Failure where I had shxt so much I could no longer consume. Before digging further into my pile of unsorted mental experiences of the last 4 years--more like 4 billion years--I came to a Starbucks and had a morning of linear reflections and engaged in artwork I had been meaning to engage upon for ages. (1) Ignorance can be of momentary bliss, but can construct a nearly continuous living hxll of a mental prison (2) Mental Entropy Revisited: A Conscious Escape of the Box. Since I was bathed in the grandeur of geologic features of Palm Springs, I could not help upon reminiscing my failed experiences in Earth Sciences at UC Riverside, and desired to capture and summarize how I felt--in a photograph and a few images.

Photographic Captions:
My sister Jenny's favorite quote: "Ignorance can be of momentary bliss, but can construct a nearly continuous living hxll of a mental prison." I wrote this quote during the year of 2005-2006 when I was mentally and bureaucratically stuck at UC Riverside, and suffered traumatically for my circumstance. I used the "liquify" button in Photoshop to add eery diversity to my self-constructed font repertoire.

Mental Entropy Revisited: A Conscious Escape Outside the Box. I wrote this quote during the year of 2005-2006 when I was mentally and bureaucratically stuck at UC Riverside, and suffered traumatically for my circumstance. [adding median function in photoshop]

Trapped Outdoors, Stuck in the Head. Anza Borrego National Park with Martin Kennedy's Sedimentology Course. This is not the most "aesthetic" of images but the most symbolic of my year long panic attack mode when enrolled at UC Riverside. (How can one be trapped outdoors when one is outside, not inside, stuck in a lab?)

My sister Jenny's favorite quote that I of all people actually said: "Ignorance is of momentary bliss, but can construct a nearly continuous living hxll of a mental prison."
The College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara is a very dangerous place.
Once your mind delves into and seeks order (essentially self-regulation) in a world of no borders or boundaries... there is no going back. You will fight for the rest of your life for intellectual freedom. You can never fit in a box ever again. Trying to co-exist with the rest of society is close to impossible.

How does it feel when you are stuck--and you don't know that you are stuck?
You are okay. You may be calm. You wouldn't know any better. You are out of context.
How does it feel when you are stuck--and you KNOW what you are stuck?
That you are ultimately stuck in your head?
This is where existing become very, very painful and very psychologically tumultous.
I would be the one to know.
To be stuck and to KNOW to be stuck.
There is something inside you--a well of demons of sorts--and you are not exactly sure how to get them out, sort them out, express them, place them... from the world inside... to the world out there... channeling energy... to the right people... the right places. A tumor is trapped inside you and is eating you alive.
I would be the one to know.

How does it feel to be stuck, and to know that you are stuck... and to be surrounded by people who love and care about you (and knew you since you were five years old), but do not understand at all what you are going through?
They didn't know the chaos that was sifting frantically through your head?
Frightening, I'd say. Very much so.

How does it feel to be outside--in the vast outdoors--and yet be stuck in your head? Feel trapped in the endlessness of the Anza Borrego desert? You weren't even a lab rat, stuck running gels for 5 years to get your Ph.D.
Why was I stuck? Because, I can't just look at rocks. Rocks are just a part of the puzzle. A big part, but not the whole puzzle. Because I couldn't move on to the next step--the synergism of science and art.

The energy is bottled, contained, and ready to explode.
How could someone exist in such a frightening mental condition for two years in a row, from fall 2005 to fall 2007?
And only get two gray hairs?
I would be the one two know.

401. The Frenzy Happy Dance by Sophie and Victoria (Right Before the Spring Quarter of 2009)

Holy Moly! I'm not religious or anything. But these creatures are whacko!

This is Sophie--one of my sister's (Jenny) best friends she unfortunately cannot marry--almost all the time. Talk about chronic excitement!

This is Victoria--Jenny's sister--who becomes "crazy psycho" right before the quarter starts. Thankfully, it only happens... right before the quarter starts. This is probably the craziest dance video of Victoria in existence. She's blowing off her professionalism, right here and now. Not to mention, she was inspired to do this dance by the one and only... Sophie... as seen above... as well as writing a short article on the Dance Your Ph.D. Contest (the grand finale shown in Chicago).

257. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Sample Freedom-of-Speech-Disclaimer-Page

Pdf of above. http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/3.disclaimerpage2.pdf

Revised version of Disclaimer included in the pdf above.
Older version of disclaimer I made during the school year 2005-2006.
Older version of disclaimer I made during the school year 2005-2006. Inverted colors. I showed this image to Ann Aasen, a social worker / psychology counselor at the UC Riverside Student Health Center. Ann helped me make it through the year. I joked, telling many friends and family members that Ms. Aasen was like my Ph.D. advisor for the year. We talked about the problems of universities being overspecialized nowadays and not providing interdisciplinary avenues for students whose brains don't fit nicely in one departmental box (at least for UC Riverside). Back in the day, Ann had a more generalist education within the university. In the end, Ann recommended that as a graduate student, I shouldn't harm my own health and psychological health by fighting bureaucracy of the university. Maybe in the end, I should just transfer back to UC Santa Barbara, which I did.

Ann Aasen was a single light of hope, but takes my mind back to very dark places of my past that need a bit of reflection. Just a little. I won't elaborate too much. In fall of 2005, my first quarter at UC Riverside, I recorded on my Olympus digital voice recorder a panic attack in the car. My primal brain was going out of whack and I was rationally aware of it. By winter quarter of 2006, I started seeing Ann routinely, for necessary psychological reasons. My advisor at the time was juggling 500 balls in a circus act of being department chair, and I was one in 500 balls just kind of thrown in the corner and picked up every once in a while. It's not my advisor's fault at all. It's the position of being chairman. I saw my dad go through it. Even Dr. Pete Sadler, a very inspirational professor. But I was neglected psychologically and became pushed more and more and more into a corner at multiple fronts until my mind froze and I could not physically move. At one front, going to grad school in your home town is not a brilliant idea. It's like trying to continue to biologically grow on an overgrown, sick, bleaching coral reef. Too many strings attached in one place. Secondly, exploring the scope of the field of geology freed me to some degree, but I also felt chained up once I knew "the geological box." I was outdoors but in a prison. "I don't want to stare at JUST rocks all my life! I need to account for ALL environmental data! And the human perception of it! From a holistic point of view!"

A low point of my university experience was in June of 2006. I was bawling my eyes out to one of the Associate Deans of the Graduate Division and she flatly told me, "I don't change the rules. I am not in the position of change the rules. Maybe you should just transfer back to UC Santa Barbara." So much for being Dean of Anything. I thought Deans are supposed to spearhead rule changes. Contrastingly, Dr. Oran Young (my new advisor) supports the concept of greasing and bending rules, especially since pre-existing rules are not working in terms of environmental management. One of the Assistant Deans of the Graduate Division and frankly told me in fall of 2006, "I am sorry but UC Riverside is a more compartmentalized university. Everyone fits in a departmental box. It just is." I was stunned, just as one of my CCS advisors was stunned when I told him this about UC Riverside. It seemed like no one was willing to change or budge. I was in a psychological wreck. I felt trapped in my mind and trapped in my environment. Ann Aasen helped me get through some of these dire moments of entrapment, but in other occassions, educating myself in multi-media art was the only way out to being trapped in my mind.

I am not ashamed to return to UC Santa Barbara, the birthing grounds of my own intellectual freedom and independence, which spurred the writing of Question Reality in the first place. UCSB provided me the holistic environment and intellectual community that spurred and built me to who I was today, so it seemed like coming back, UCSB was taking responsibility for their anomalous undergrad creation who ended up becoming obsessed with creative science writing and multi-media art.

In my mind, I envision myself psychologically and physically abused and beat up by the world for four years. I came knocking on the door to UC Santa Barbara on my hands and knees, completely humbl-ified by the constraints and compartmentalization of society, and I needed a return to marrying intellectual freedom and the CCS environment. I have experimented and failed enough, four years straight, and now I am ready to succeed. I was ready to finally do something right. I came crawling back to my CCS advisors and undergrad mentors, my eyes so torn and in pain by what I have seen and experienced, it ws almost as if I visited hxll and came back. It was good that I outsourced, because now I have something to contribute to UC Santa Barbara, just as UCSB had shaped me up as an undergrad!

I am sad the thoughts of Ann Aasen had taken me to gloomy memories of my near-recent past, but at least she was a light of hope amidst the chaos.

I found this on the internet. My eyes sparkled with glee. This was a MiltonLoveism. I need one of these, and I need to stamp it on my forehead.

The reason why I state the above disclaimer is a MiltonLoveism is because when Milton gives his rigs-to-reefs presentations, he presents these hilarious slides reminding people of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and that he has the freedom to state whatever he wants, even if the Truth hurts. Hence, the creation of my own freedom-of-speech disclaimers. The crux of some of Milton Love's jokes is the mixing of fish biology, science, and politics all at once. It works beautifully and parsimoniously. Milton is one of those rare scientists who acknowledge that science and politics inevitably MIX and you can't separate the two... unfortunately. Then you can't even divorce politics with psychology, like the whole cognitive dissonance effect. Oh, dude, Milton Love and I talked a lot about that. I even discussed this phenomenon with Dr. Young.

No, Milton Love is definitely not one of those denial scientists: "I am an ecologist but I am a scientist, so I don't want to get involved in politics." He's an active player, as much as he can be. The best part is that he makes dxm good jokes out of the situation.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the greatest theorists on human behavior I have ever encountered ended up being my biology professors--who end up making social commentaries as their "aside comments" in their lectures.

"Every professors' joke has become my research." Milton Love, blurts out "uh-oh" as he admits he is smelling some trouble. "Good trouble," my new advisor calls it.

I have been shunned as interdisciplinary at UC Riverside. UC Santa Barbara embraces it and welcomes it to some degree. In short, UCSB is like temporary placement in "heaven on earth" after the last few years of "hxll" I've been through.

Wow! I didn't know my Disclaimers had so much emotional and memory baggage behind them!

Stokastika Music Essay for Dr. Constance Penley's Environmental Media Class

Music is a whole-brain process!


Page 1 above.

Page 2 above.

Page 3 above.

Page 4 above.

Page 5 above.

The whole music essay. Below.
http://www.geocities.com/stokastika1/stokastikamusicessay.pdf

So, for the course in Environmental Media with Dr. Constance Penley, we were supposed to write about any topic related to environmental media. I first told Constance how I wanted to write a "Campaign Proposal" for my Question Reality book, but over the summer I was philosophically unresolved with music, so in the end I worked with environmental media and music. I have more than enough pain, blood, and guts to discuss, all based on my personal experiences the past year... hopping from one music studio to another, losing money, getting sexually harrassed, learning how to use music software and electronic instruments and the djembe, learning how to perform in public, the first audience being in front of 15 producers and agents from Hollywood and New York, though despite my state of lack of sleep, they still liked what I did... Hmmm.... Whatever.

So, creating music has had an overly personal role in my life. Hence, I infinitely blah-blah-blah about it. The themes I focused on are (1) the neurological basis of music being a whole-brain process, (2) environmental messaging in pop music: a lack of it, and (3) my personal projects in music and environmental messaging. Being philosophically attacking, but not politically. How to compromise music style with the messaging. (There are several bands that have very tacky music with great environmental messages, but lots of Hollywood is great style with no content.) My class presentation was quite depressing. We went overtime on a Wednesday evening, and no one wanted to be there. 4/5 of the class was gone. I wasn't proud of what I had to show. I could only play the over-five minute song "One More Day," and that was it. Hardly got any feedback. Constance said that there was a LOT of compromising with the messaging and and the music style. It was techno classical gothic. A bit of Evanescence with it, perhaps. But Evanescence is way better. No point in comparing, unless if I am extremely self-deprecating, which I am.... When I heard "One More Day" over loud speakers in a large classroom, all the "rough edges" of my song came out full-blast to a point that it was close to unbearable for me. Two off pitches, certain areas a bit too loud and too thick with the chords.... Ugh. There was actually one girl in class who was a CCS music major, but she didn't even provide any feedback. She had to leave early. Too bad.... In class, I was too brain-dead to be emotional or nervous. I just bumbled in front of class, of a very dead audience of maybe five students, and then went home. An empty apartment. Didn't feel good. I bxtched to Bub about it, and he said not to worry about such things because sometimes he has really riled-up audiences and other times he has completely apathetic audiences. And you just have to deal with the whole spectrum of circumstances. I could have presented earlier, but the issue is: I didn't. I set myself up for doom. But right now it doesn't matter because people really liked the music score I spontaneously created for the movie: "World's Easiest Catch: Zen of Rock Crab." So, I don't have to hold any depressing baggage about this....

I just had a flashback about my loneliness in my apartment. I started off the Blue Horizons with a panic attack in my apartment. Not good. Best not to live by yourself. Otherwise you will kill yourself out of anxiety and stress. I am glad I will be living with Julia and Karl, and one other from Carnegie-Melon. They will prevent me from swallowing whole.

I felt depressed after writing this self-reflective analytical essay. Primarily because I didn't even have a total of three songs up on myspace to be proud of. Now, that's not the case, everything is fine. My two other songs that were up ("No Jesus, No Sacrifice" and "Whole, Unique") were absolutely pathetic, but were my early work, so I can't exactly slit my throat about it. The thing is, you never show society your bad stuff. Even if it reveals a personal evolution of rapid progress, that you yourself SHOULD feel very proud of. Unfortunately, this society is barbaric, and doesn't look at anything with rough edges. Well, at least in the music industry. They demand perfection. And in part, I don't blame them. Plus, I had difficulty finding interested parties in my music through craigslist (asking for help with playing guitar) because my two other songs sucked. But now, there is no problem. After Blue Horizons, and after meeting Matt (and Mike :-), combined with watching the movie Waking Life, I was all emotionally worked up and managed to create two new songs I am not ashamed of at all. One song is called "Humanity Anomalous" and the other song is called "Rabbithole." Well, at least I have three self-made "home-made" raw songs (produced with cheap equipment all together). I created "Humanity Anomalous" (and "Rabbithole" coming to think of it) with the aid of a full-sounding a grand piano in the basement of the new arts building at UC Riverside during a week of everyday being 110-degree weather. Tres miserable! The difference in sound between a grand piano and an electric piano is night from day. Black from white. More like Earth from Mars. One place is acoustically habitable. And the other place is acoustically unbearable, to a point of near-death.

I am also ashamed because I overwhelmed Constance Penley with a close-to 50-page document of 15-or so poems-songs I wrote dealing with human-environmental issues, in addition to providing the music demo in class. I did not place the poetry compilation on-line, though I did talk about some issues of it within the above essay. I will create a more thorough poetic compilation soon enough. I bet I annoyed Constance with my 15-page essay, and just the thought of my slamming her with several pieces of work that have been in the underground of my mind, never seen the light of day for the past year.... God. Vic, how inconsiderate. I'm sorry. I seem to overwhelm and piss off everyone, wherever I go.

I can talk nearly forever about music (as you can tell). But I will spare you and guide you towards my close to 15- page essay (the link is above), and I posted up the first five pages in jpegs, just to lure you in.... Not sure how successful I was in doing that. I think the structure of my essay will reflect how the "Surviving the Systems" book shall look. I will write a string of philosophy essays on issues in my personal life, but the way how I approach and analyze such issues are in a very systematically playful, philosophical, scientific, deep-down-the-rabbit-hole type of way: "Can an experience so personal lead to conclusions quite universal?"

Okay, Vic. Shut up, and close this out.