A lot of Reading, a little Thinking, some Writing

It is Monday, and I’m doing the same thing today as I did on Friday, and also the same thing that I’ve been doing for the last three weeks: reading the news, reading blogs, looking out the window, pretty much just sitting here looking at the web and passing the time.

I’ve been reading about the presidential debates, about Sarah Palin, the financial crisis. I just started having some thoughts of my own, realizing that I need to produce something just to feel like a producer rather than a mindless, jellied blob of vacant consumer need.

So, what are my thoughts right now? As usual, my mind goes blank when I try to catch them. I was reading the blogs, vagabondjourney.com and daycabbie.blogspot.com, enjoying the incisive wit of these very engaged individuals, Wade and Vera, one a student in New York City, the other a cab driver in San Francisco.

I feel I have much more in common with Vera the taxi driver, mainly because I drove a taxi, and especially because her stories sound just like how it was for me. I loved cab driving. It was the most social thing that ever happened to me. I’ve never been much of a conversationalist, feeling like I don’t have much to talk about, but giving people rides was so casual. The ride provided a framework for conversation, a beginning and an end, and most important, a subject and some additional contextual cues. It was like magic for me.

Reading Wade’s vagabond blog is wonderful and refreshing. He seems much less laid-back than me, much more adventurous. Just reading about his 3 am climb up a 300-foot rusty water tower in Brooklyn made my palms sweat. Just thinking about it is doing it now. His absinthe-drinking Hungarian magician friend would probably strangle me or beat my face in for being a “geek.” But I would never be out drinking in the middle of the night in Hungary. I try really hard to avoid trouble, violence, hangovers. I go to bed at 9 pm most nights.

All in all, I’m pretty happy right now. I’m far away from where I spend the first 98% of my life, not counting vacations and temporary try-outs of other locations. I don’t have to work on weekends like I did in the taxi. The people at the place where I work now are pretty relaxed and cool. I miss the easy sociability of the taxi, and the fact that I spoke the major language of the U.S. But this is more of an adventure, even though my days are more routine than they’ve ever been.

The U.S. Congress rejected the “$700 billion bailout.” I think this is good. We will see what happens, like we saw what happened before when the government looted the Treasury. All that so-called “value” that was lost was just paper. Like the law of conservation of matter, nothing was created or destroyed, it was only rearranged. Who benefits by the arrangement will be revealed at some point.

But then again, conservation of mass applies only to closed systems. Sometimes I wonder if this system is really closed. I wonder if peoples’ ideas about value that add value to real things somehow constitute a subtle form of matter. But even if it did, it would still only be a rearrangement, not a creation…

I’ve been recording my dreams for the last month or so, and have noticed one thing: dreams seem very ordinary when I awake from them, almost seeming too ordinary to be worth recording. But when I listen to the recordings later, they seem much more interesting, colorful and bizarre.
The same seems true of events that take place in waking life. As they recede into the past, they become more interesting, but only when they have been recorded somehow. Only recorded events can be studied, so only these events can be subjects of interest. But being a subject of interest doesn’t automatically make something interesting.

I feel that as my life has become so very routine, my writing is becoming boring. My dreams aren’t very interesting right now. I want to find a correlation between my dreams and the phases of the moon. I want to see if lucid dreaming is more frequent during certain phases.

But, what I want doesn’t seem very interesting. That is only hypothetical, the future. What I have done must be more interesting, only, I haven’t done anything. This may only be a cultural bias against insubstantiality, against untested hypothesizing. The Western way is to test the idea, then report back with facts, in crisp staccato sentences, bristling with assertions. Not to dreamily proclaim what one would like to to, then kind of drift along without correlating the data points.

So, back to the present. I’m not going to make any promises. If I end up with some facts, I may share them. But for now, I need to talk about ideas that have some kind of substantiality in my mind. I guess correlation of moon phases with dreaming content and quality could be substantial if I had already decided upon a hypotheses I wanted to prove or disprove, like “lucid dreaming is more possible during the full moon.” But I don’t have such a hypothesis. I just want to see if there is any pattern whatsoever.

I guess I could just search the web for any information, like Wade’s friend did with the quote that was supposed to be on a bronze plaque affixed to the Times building.
One guy said his dreams seemed to be most intense a few days into the third quarter, Another said he dreamed more around the full moon, and that his dreams were most ordinary around the new moon. Maybe this is why I feel my dreams are boring right now. Today is the new moon. I have a hint of a hypotheses, with a few anecdotal data points.

But I still want to correlate my raw data. Now the excuses why I haven’t done so: even with my routine existence, all my time seems tied up in the mundane, with almost none left over for science. This is what I must work to change.