Laghail

Post poetry - Yeeah, I've been MIA a bit this week. Closed on a duplex and now Laghail enters the moving/painting season for a few weeks. I should still be here. There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise. Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Log calories - Fail this week. Still dropping weight, but that won't continue (based on extensive experience) if I don't count. Post Art - Very excited to hang the piece below again. We grabbed it as a consolation prize for our apartment when we had to sell our house back in 2014 to cover medical expenses. Probably a lot of feels and symbolism for comment in a piece titled "The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838"; but lets focus on the eponymous talking dragon that fought Emperor Napoleon in the Naomi Novik novels. Get seven hours of sleep - Yes actually. Special thanks to Mrs Laghail, @Mike Wazowski and @RedStone for harassing me about the links between real sleep and mental health. Play with Arabic - Working a mango course and focusing on the alphabet first mes chiennes.

Yes, and @Grumble is to be imprisoned for grimes against punnanity. No parole but the possibility of conjugational visits.

To recite it beautifully, and to sample the language for further study, without taking it for granted that further study will happen. I'm somewhere around C1 in German on the CEFR, but I've gotten to A1 or A2 on a number of languages. It's fun for one thing, but what I love is that feeling you get as a 13 year old when it slowly dawns on you why Archie is also into Veronica, and why your parents take long "naps" on a Sunday afternoon, and why the damn dog does the funny humping thing. You may not ever really get Jughead's deal, but a little bit of your universe makes more sense when you recognize you're saying "healthiness" when someone sneezes, or eating "good bread" at that fast casual place, and you live in "pretty land" on certain mapping systems. We'll see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Russian didn't agree with me and I blame @Blocky, Icelandic is hard but damn pretty, Chinese is easy but the endless vocab to be learned in three systems is exhausting (to which all the Japanese and Norwegian learners roll their eyes and suggest I hold their beverage). Easter was good. I celebrated a version of it in late March with the pagans (chucking raw eggs into the woods and having hut bonfires, weird flex but okay) and read about the historical Jesus over holy week while getting up to some solitary Walt Whitman hijinks. Mr Aslan's dissection of 1st and 6th century religious evolution makes me feel a little more comfortable being in between religious labels, even while I relearn how to pray. The next wave of historical criticism on my reading list is from pop scholar Bart Ehrman, so expect angry shitposting in May/June.

Post poetry - Yep, I've been listening to an awkward set of Rumi poems recited to music; the awkward is that the elderly speaker has a texas twang, and my Yankee brain tells me I'm being seduced by Tommy Lee Jones. Log calories - Not great over the weekend even though calorie intake was low-moderate by skipping Easter festivities. Post Art - Below. Get seven hours of sleep - Excellent. While I may have only snagged 6 last night, that's acceptable for monday, and otherwise I did 8+ Friday and Saturday. Play with Arabic - This goal is to pick a body of poetry and work in the month of May towards getting the pronunciation down that I can recite and memorize. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī and Mansur Al-Hallaj are the two poets that initially appeal, but goddamn Rumi insisted on writing in Persian. I'll likely play with Arabic for a month or two, then see how bad Farsi treats me.

It's wonderful to meet you Harriet! I've been on break from NF for a few minutes and I'm delighted to meet lovely people upon returning. Someday maybe you, me, and @Grumblewill collaborate and make a meme-based tarot deck, that can also be a CCG. Once we develop that rule set, we'll make sure you get to draw up the esoteric meaning for the tarot card, "The chain-smoking Australian."

Post poetry Log calories Post Art Get seven hours of sleep Play with Arabic

MFP on da daily Yurp. Even managed to dispose of more batches of quinoa cookies without breaking the calorie bank Sleep 6.5 or more hours, Sunday night through Thursday night Actually doing better on this front than usual. Often taking guerrilla rest days from the gym to accommodate 7ish hours, but it happening. Write 100 words or more, every weekday Yeah, been reading Islamic history lately and it's a unique kind of sad feels that happen. Something profoundly exhausting about learning more about the types of ignorance and racism that the west is good at, precisely when Islamophobia is at an all time high in 'murica. I expected it to fuel a bunch of aLL CaPS jOURNaLIng, but sometimes the currency of outrage is too devalued to buy anything. Still, Reza Aslan is my new baby-daddy. Also, someone needs to make a comic about John Calvin opening Schrodinger's box while clutching a book titled, "to serve catkind."

MFP on da daily Back from my fever & flu sickbed, MFP restarts again tonight. The entries would have recorded daily calories of 500 or so. Weight loss through influenza, it werks. Sleep 6.5 or more hours, Sunday night through Thursday night Checkity check chiennes, got about 16 hours a day for a couple days while my body played host to the windmill cancer. Write 100 words or more, every weekday This actually happened. Did a lot of harner mediation and a bit of journaling while I had the fevers.

(Involved and topical discussion of the Desert Fathers goes here; describe old men escaping the insanity of modern 2nd century life, only for the crowds to follow them and cities to sprout up around their hermitages, prompting the fathers to move farther into the desert where the process repeats; make it sound witty and current, mention hipsters) Because of my brilliant exposition above, you see why the song lyrics quoting Abba Joseph are moving in context: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said: "Abba, as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and meditation, and remain quiet, and as much as possible I keep my thoughts clean. What else should I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten torches of flame. And he said: "Why not be turned into fire?"

Yeah, seeing philosophy as a taoist way/process, rather than an equation to be solved, I think that would have let a lot more of us get laid in college. Your rant here is almost exactly the title of my favorite album. 10/10, would wear that t-shirt. MFP on da daily Speaking of happy birthday, I didn't track Tuesday because womb-escape memorial day (never forget!) and the mrs laghail trapped me in a neighborhood bakery until I picked delicious carbs for celebratory reasons. Many cookies were had, but no ragrats. Sleep 6.5 or more hours, Sunday night through Thursday night 9 hours to get over a cold I picked up at an all day work conference. You know that special feeling of rage when you drive 4 hours for a 3 hour meeting that could have just been a powerpoint deck emailed to all 200 participants? That. Write 100 words or more, every weekday No writing happened yesterday because of rage and conference reasons. I personally blame @Mr_Willes.

Valid question, but I think that's why sex, drugs, and rock n roll are as big of a thing, nu?

Also, Mrs Laghail gave me the most beautiful birthday gift evah. https://www.instagram.com/p/BvwcAeknGau/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Utilitarianism fails to pass the test of utilitarian good, the irony hurts. What's your experience with virtue ethics? Aside from you know, not being a utilitarian monster. MFP on da daily Yurp. Sleep 6.5 or more hours, Sunday night through Thursday night 7 is my golden number and I nailed it. Which is important because below. Write 100 words or more, every weekday So yesterday I tried to read Robert Bly's "Iron John" and the whole thing broke my brain for a little bit. A transcript of me yelling in my car follows. Godfucking damnit, I hate Carl Jung. But wait Laghail, you love comparative mythology, and you have a particular soft spot for monomyth / mythopoetic literary criticism and for Harner-style self-mediated Jungian therapy. But godfucking damnit, I hate gender essentialism Well duh dipshit, you're a good person, and good people recognize that life is sliiightly more complex than your genitals decide your destiny; but why the non-sequitor? But godfucking damnit, gender essentialism underpins most of Jungian analysis That seems like a basic baby/bathwater problem, surely you can dismiss archetypes around gender roles and still value other contributions from Jungian analysis, or even hang on to the gender roles, and recognize that people of any sex can chose to wear those gender roles, or not? But godfucking damnit, Jungian analysis is useful to the degree that it's used as a universal mythic analysis, so that your dreams about a hairy man in a pond can be reliably translated as your need to break away from your parent-mediated childhood identity and discover the wild and moist (not making this up) deep masculinity within you, provided of course that you're born with a penis. If you're born with a vagina, there's lots to be said about Ophelia and falling down a wet well in order to land on the clouds to make a bed shake with an old lady who will then force your mom to do chores (also not making this up). But mostly the whole concept of a meaningful a-cultural / pan-human interpretive rubric based on Germanic folktales, it's wildly racist, homophobic, imperialist and just plain inaccurate. Gender essentialism is just the shit frosting on the turd sandwich. But this criticism of Jung has been here the whole time, and lots of people still benefit from the idea that one can read a body of folk tales and make meaningful psychological inferences by mapping a patient's dreams and fantasy against their background body of childhood literature. Does life imitate art? Godfucking damnit, are you accusing me of looking for cultural absolutes before, and then when I over-applied Jungian analysis in a misguided attempt to solve for Nietzsche's dead Yahweh problem, and the rapid pace of cultural evolution seems to have killed Jung in the very same way that industrialization killed Yahweh? Yup. But moreover, you're possibly over-applying to tool of deconstructive literary analysis. While Jung may have been a man of his time (racist, imperialist, and sexist as all hell), discarding the work of a brilliant man because he's defective, that sets you up to constantly be smashing heroes as you discover their human flaws, ultimately leaving you in a never ending cycle of rejecting human ideas because you discover they're human. But isn't the point of knowing god (divinity for non-abrahamic people) to connect with extra-human ideas? How the fuck are you supposed to connect with transcendent essence in the writings of a woman hating moron who thinks that the human experience in 17th century Thuringia and in 1st century Palestine is roughly the same? Wasn't this covered in the briefing on "reading human ideas"?? It's like you and other idealist read human writing and then get pissy when it, sure enough, ends up being human? Why do you expect to find the transcendent in human writing? Because we have before. Or I have, or we have. This dialogue is kinda vacillating between representative of the liberal arts or Laghail personally. I know, right? But seriously, I/we have before. But it breaks our/my mind because it's almost never the same experience of the transcendent twice. Like we'll encounter it in its ineffable otherness (like porn, we know it when we see it), but sometimes it's gone when we look there twice. We miss the transcendent, very badly. You should see someone about that. Fuck you

Word count dis mes chiennes.

MFP on da daily Skipped Saturday, Caturday and at least one other fictional day of the week. Sleep 6.5 or more hours, Sunday night through Thursday night 6 last night which is pretty fucking good for a Sunday night, but nah son, we do better. Write 100 words or more, every weekday Got it on friday. Also on Caturday.