unbibium

boy, have I been lethargic lately. Apart from the time I spent at Rocky, I've had no energy all week. Getting out of bed is more difficult every day.

I took the bus Monday and telecommuted today, so maybe I should probably also ride my bike to work again, despite the heat. Maybe I need that activity to get me going every day. And the bus trip Monday was wrought with poor timing both ways.

Of course, that thought makes my current decision more difficult: after all, I'm moving next door to work for the convenience, but I'd be giving up a great source of exercise, albeit one that comes with the danger of rush hour traffic, and the routine of showering at work.

Also, I didn't socialize that whole work week, unless you count IRC, or the manicure I got after my dentist appointment Thursday. That lady offered to introduce me to some Asian women. I gave her my phone number.

tamtrible posted recently asking her audience about what they would do if they woke up and were suddenly different. It's in poll form, and fortunately, it doesn't focus on the obvious Kafka situation of waking up as a big ol' bug, but rather waking up to find that your body has changed in a very specific way.

I've never posed this situation to anyone, but I've wondered about it in my own mind, in order to make sense of the claims of various acquaintances with gender identity issues. I'm a straight male with the standard set of gender settings, so I couldn't really understand the claims without asking myself, if I woke up with the opposite set of genitals, but everything else was the same, would I start living my life as a woman, or would I continue to live as a man? I imagine I'd continue to live as a man. I don't really know how I'd factor in the possibility of living as a lesbian in order to increase my chances of finding a girlfriend, but I'm very bad at putting on affectations, so I don't think I'd do that.

What, then, would any of you do?

When you heard of the 8-year-old who "confessed" to a double-murder, and searching your mind's eye for a default image of an eight-year-old, did any of you immediately think of Lisa Simpson? Because I sure can't name anyone else who's eight years old. Oh, wait -- the kid from Home Alone was 8 when he battled those robbers in that giant house.

In both cases, Hollywood has conditioned me to severely overestimate the cleverness of children.

Metafilter recently chimed in on the otherkin phenomenomenon. It quoted a paragraph that I'll quote a little more widely:

If what I've said here has awoken something in you, and you somehow feel as if you may have a piece of you that is not human, then you have my sympathies. You're in for a long, tortuous journey of self-discovery and doubt that will probably never end. Unless you go through some regression therapy to find that Otherkin part of you, chances are you won't have your memories available to you.

This sounds eerily similar to the urgings of the regression therapist featured on the UFO episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" She urged viewers that if one forgets what one did one afternoon, or notices a new scar, or has sleep paralysis, that they should get some regression therapy right quick. Later, a real psychologist explained that regression therapy doesn't retrieve repressed memories, but creates false memories based on leading questions by the hypnotherapist. So if you ask a hypnotherapist to see if you were abducted by a UFO, a dragon in a previous life, or molested by a family member at a young age, then they won't disappoint you. The sample video for that episode depicts a support group for UFO abductees, where objectivity is abandoned in favor of shared delusion.

The brain is very hackable, and memes like these are the Internet worms of the brain. If you somehow feel as if you may have a piece of you that is not human, then you're probably misinterpreting some feelings that you haven't come to terms with. But rest assured, you're 100% hairless ape, just like me. And for that, you have my sympathies.