August 28, 2013

Last night I dreamt that I was with a guy that I knew, and we were trying to escape someone who was trying to kill us. I wrote about this dream elsewhere, and as follow up to my previous daylog, I thought I would share what happened at my first acupuncture visit. My Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner is a tall, fair skinned man who looks like he has previously served in some branch of the armed forces. I don't think he has, he's a biochemist via education, and a self described science geek who said he was interested in finding out why things worked. Had I known years ago that I could walk into an appointment, drop $150, and leave with better circulation, and a renewed sense of wellness, I would have done this years ago, but I was afraid, and the fear bubble has been my companion for so long, moving away from it seems too difficult so I start making excuses for why I can't do things.

I didn't get a diagnosis about whatever is going on in my chest. He gave me something to take, it helped almost immediately after I started taking it, and I have no idea what's in it, but I really don't care because it's effective. Today I looked at condos. I found one that I think will work, and my husband says that financing may take some creativity, but shouldn't be a problem. He says he doesn't want to buy me a place, which I understand, but still hurts my feelings. Work was crazy today, it's been chaotic these past few days. I could get a regular full time job with benefits and insurance, and maybe I eventually will, but when I had health insurance, it was too expensive to use, and I ended up spending quite a bit of my paycheck to have someone else watch my children when I couldn't be there for them. My appointment with my new practitioner was just wild, so many things he said made so much sense. I'm going to take the girls in, my husband said he was thinking of going in, and after this experience, I'm pretty much done with the ridiculousness that passes for most of conventional Western medicine.

During my dream journaling course I learned how to interpret my own dreams, I can't share everything with you, and I know that this probably sounds completely insane, but I've tried living to please other people, and now I'm going to start living for myself. I'm ridiculously, deliriously, feverishly excited about owning a condo of my very own. I've thought about what I would do if I can get the place that I want, and it probably wouldn't be most people's taste, but I don't want a conventional furniture arrangement. I want huge plants, a couple loveseats, several bistro sized tables, and I'm going to turn the second bedroom into a yoga studio because I think people, specifically women need a safe place where they can go hang out, and just do nothing for a while. I'm going to paint my studio white, put some Japanese or Chinese characters on the closet doors, and not really do anything else in there. I want a virtually empty room although my husband said he could put in a spiral staircase that goes to a loft so I can put my desk up there, and have some office space for my business.

My goal is to teach classes to people, and get paid to show people how to cook, and how to adapt their kitchens to whatever modality they want to explore. I've been through so many variations of diets, I can teach people how to go raw, gluten free, vegan, Paleo, dairy free, and I've done a lot with different styles of ethnic cooking so I can have classes where people come over to make spring rolls, and green smoothies that actually taste good. It'd be nice if I had a computer, but I might not be able to afford internet service, and I realize that owning a place of my own is going to require some sacrifices on my part. I might not be able to put in the flooring I want right away, but I have the dream, the vision, the ultimate plan, and I'm going to make this happen one way or another even if it means that the girls and I have to share the master bedroom, or one of us has to sleep downstairs on a couch for a while.

My new practitioner teaches Aikido, I talked to my husband about putting the girls in classes, and having us do that as a family. My practitioner told me to get out of the house as much as possible, and to expose the girls to different authority figures as often as we can so they can escape some of the tension at home. He wants me to do some sort of very intense exercise every day, and I'm happy to report that I did a yoga flow DVD today, and feel like I'm getting better at some of the postures. I'm learning more, and I would highly recommend anything that Rodney Yee is responsible for to anyone who is interested in an approach to yoga that is in line with what I believe it can, and should be. I'm getting tired, I need to be getting to bed, but I also want to get back into my daily writing groove. I have some new things to aim for, and it's all wonderful, but I'm also very tired from being on the go all day.

Much love, and peace to all.

Take care,

jess

So I heard that porn sets across LA were shut down this week on an HIV scare.

This got me to wondering, why is any new porn being filmed, at all?

Consider this. The average lifespan is something short of 80 years. Let us suppose that for the first eleven years of our lives, we are generally oblivious to pornography. So that leaves 69 years. heheh. I mean, ahem. Now we spend around a third of our lives sleeping -- but let's be generous and suppose getting by on a little less sleep, a person could spend a straight 50 years looking at recordings of fellow humans squirming about in various sexual capacities. Porn during breakfast, lunch, and dinner; porn while bathing and showering and brushing one's teeth; porn while actually engaged in real live sex. Heck, even watching porn while making their own porn at home (I've seen it done).

Fifty years, that's 18,262 and a half days. That's 438,300 hours. That sounds like an awful lot of hours, yes, but there's an awful lot of hours of the saucy stuff that have already been filmed. Every single day, in dozens of studios strewn across California, Germany, Japan. In back rooms in the Philippines, Wyoming, and Paraguay. In rented houses in Romania and hotel rooms in Russia and bathhouses in Sweden and condos in Brazil, and all sorts of other places as well. One site, porndex, claims to index most of the porn on the Internet, to the tune of over 6 million vids -- most seemingly in the 20-30 minute range, so that by itself is over 2 millions hours of pornography. More than four full lifetimes worth. And, frankly, it is hard to imagine that in that collection, the average person couldn't find virtually every sexual activity they're interested in seeing on a screen, and spend their whole life watching it without ever enduring a repeat.

Note: corvus asks: "It isn't a matter of quantity, but instead quality, yes?" Well, yes, but out of the 2 million hours indexed by that one website (which, I presume, leaves out a lot of stuff made on video and never yet transferred to the Internet), there is a "best" 400,000 hours, the top fifth. And if you think about it, most people re-watch their favorite things several times, so there must be some leeway for that. You would have to watch at least a little bit of most of the already-existing vids just to figure out if any given one was likely to be "quality" or simply "quantity," and that by itself will consume the better part of a lifetime.

This is mah day "log":

~~~~~~~_____/^.#[________//____
~~~~~~ /^\-------`-----------------`--------\
~~~~~ (. - `\ - ---`--- -- ---------- `---- ----)
~~~~~ |. - ,",| - -,- ------ --- ---- - ----- -- --)
~~~~~~ \__/___- ____ -___ _ __.__ -_/


----


Node auditing proceeds thusly:

pukesick is done.

Pseudo_Intellectual is on page 10 of 31
Segnbora-t is on page 11 of 34
avalyn is on page 2 of 5, and
C-Dawg is on page 1 of 5, as a welcome-back gift.

Blessings, all!!

Well, where does one begin?

I guess first and foremost Happy Birthday... RiverRun.

And the beat goes on.

I finally achieved one of my fondest wishes, fulfilled a lifetime dream. I have opened a store in Echo Park, paid off the mortgage on the building which I bought in 2006 for my daughter and her husband, but when they decided to purchase his childhood home 2 blocks away, they realised they could not carry 2 mortgages, so here I am a shop owner.

I was going to call it The Little Shop of Horders, but that seemed to have a bit of a negative connotation, so the shop is now called Hecho en Echo.

The original premise of the shop was to make coil baskets out of recycled clothing, but when I began to pull clothes out of the closet, I was heard to exclaim, "Oh, that's too pretty to cut up", so now I also sell vintage clothing.

While searching for more vintage stuff, I came across things people had given to us for birthdays or Christmas, which we had never taken out of the box, so now I am "re-gifting". Did I mention Dumpster Diving?

I also have a "Book Nook" which consists of books I have either written, or published or the works of my favourite contemporary poets. I also have 101 first edition mystery books, thrillers, and novels I bought from a friend who owns a book store on the Sunset Strip, who needed to clear the shelves after LA Magazine ran an article about his shop and he suddenly found himself getting calls for books, instead of in the $25.00 to $50.00 range, in the $25,000.00 to $50,000.00 range. I'd like to hold one of those books in my hand for just a nano second.

A movie company has already discovered HeE and rented it for a feature film (The Ever After) for 2 days. They also rented some vintage clothing which was out of their price range for Melissa Leo who stars in the film.

The Women's National Book Association has invited me and my co-editor of Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood (Which won the International Book Award) to be a guest author to sign books in their booth at the West Hollywood Book Fair on September 29th.

i finally came up with an idea for the cover of my next book of poetry, The Song of Sparrows. My web mistress has converted my original idea and photo into the perfect artwork. I enjoy working with her. She is unflappable. We have worked together for 12 years now. We lovingly refer to her as "The Doodle Department", but she is so much more.

My novella is almost finished and ready to send out. I started it in Venice in September of 2010. It is a book of common thread short stories. It begins in 1873 with a story about my great grandmother and I just finished a story that takes place 100 years later in 1973 and moves from England to Paris, to Switzerland, to Sri Lanka. It involves a courtship and as I sat here tonight, I began to wonder about LOVE. Is love something you feel? Or is love something you do? Is it something you find, or something you make? Something you search for or something you create?

Hmmmmm... Food for thought.