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Stupid cats woke me up by knocking a glass of water nearly on top of my head. Dammit.
I hate it when you try to make a payment for something over the phone, and they want to charge you an extra amount. For Chevron-Texaco, they wanted to charge me $2.50. And there is no damn reason for that; it's all electronic. They can kiss my ass. I'm not planning to buy from them anymore anyway; Texaco pissed me off and I'd canceled their card, but then they bought Chevron which sucks. I'm going to try to go with Shell exclusively from now on. They give more money to Democrats anyway.
I'm frustrated that Live Journal seems to think no one posted anything between 3/17 and this morning. What's up with that?
Seems like there was a lot of other stuff I wanted to complain about, but it escapes me. Oh yeah, I remember- I hate how forgetful I am sometimes. I have been thinking about that some lately, and I worry that I might be getting senile or something. But if I take an honest look back, I've always been forgetful- I can think of instances where it got me in trouble back as far as 1982 (and probably earlier, if I had a better memory). I think as far as the general population goes that I'm not any sort of pathologically forgetful- I have been able to memorize long poems and songs when I've had to. But my mind does tend to drop things now and again, and while I think memory and intelligence are different functions, it goes against my notion of myself as a highly intelligent person. And that's the one thing I'm really confident about.
I was thinking about death the other day in the Tarot sense, that things inevitably change. Fade, and die, and come back in whatever sense you think of it (the gazelle eats the grass, and we eat the gazelle- then we die and we become the grass). And there's my favorite part in Jacob's Ladder: "[Meister] Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."
Without researching if that was actually like anything Eckhart really said, it's always stuck with me. But I wonder lately how much of it is really being torn from you, as much as you get so full of life after awhile that you just can't hold on to it anymore and you let it go. Maybe it's hair-splitting, but the distinction is an interesting one to someone who can have the tendencies of a control freak. Perhaps when you die, rather than having life torn from you, you decide on some level to release it and it floats away like a balloon. Your mind, your memories, your body, eventually they just slip from your grasp. How consciously does that happen, I wonder? Hopefully I won't find out too soon.
I hate it when you try to make a payment for something over the phone, and they want to charge you an extra amount. For Chevron-Texaco, they wanted to charge me $2.50. And there is no damn reason for that; it's all electronic. They can kiss my ass. I'm not planning to buy from them anymore anyway; Texaco pissed me off and I'd canceled their card, but then they bought Chevron which sucks. I'm going to try to go with Shell exclusively from now on. They give more money to Democrats anyway.
I'm frustrated that Live Journal seems to think no one posted anything between 3/17 and this morning. What's up with that?
Seems like there was a lot of other stuff I wanted to complain about, but it escapes me. Oh yeah, I remember- I hate how forgetful I am sometimes. I have been thinking about that some lately, and I worry that I might be getting senile or something. But if I take an honest look back, I've always been forgetful- I can think of instances where it got me in trouble back as far as 1982 (and probably earlier, if I had a better memory). I think as far as the general population goes that I'm not any sort of pathologically forgetful- I have been able to memorize long poems and songs when I've had to. But my mind does tend to drop things now and again, and while I think memory and intelligence are different functions, it goes against my notion of myself as a highly intelligent person. And that's the one thing I'm really confident about.
I was thinking about death the other day in the Tarot sense, that things inevitably change. Fade, and die, and come back in whatever sense you think of it (the gazelle eats the grass, and we eat the gazelle- then we die and we become the grass). And there's my favorite part in Jacob's Ladder: "[Meister] Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."
Without researching if that was actually like anything Eckhart really said, it's always stuck with me. But I wonder lately how much of it is really being torn from you, as much as you get so full of life after awhile that you just can't hold on to it anymore and you let it go. Maybe it's hair-splitting, but the distinction is an interesting one to someone who can have the tendencies of a control freak. Perhaps when you die, rather than having life torn from you, you decide on some level to release it and it floats away like a balloon. Your mind, your memories, your body, eventually they just slip from your grasp. How consciously does that happen, I wonder? Hopefully I won't find out too soon.
