It's just sex

Now I think I know what they mean when they say "It's just sex".

Between-Days

You know how when you're awake up late at night, after midnight, and you're telling someone what you had for lunch that day, you refer to "today", and then you realize that you're technically referring to "yesterday", but you let it go because you got the concept across, and who cares anyway?

Well, I care. I care enough to at least propose new names for these in-between pieces of the night:

Muesday
Tednesday
Wursday
Thriday
Fraturday
Satunday
Somonday (It could be Sonday, but it sounds too similar to Sunday)

Their meanings should be self-explanatory.

De-automation

Since immemorable times, I've admired machines. Respected them, for their ability to ease one's efforts, quicken one's tasks, and bestow superpowers on us mere mortals. Distances we would take hours to walk, cars roll us through in mere minutes. Great expanses of unwalkable water, previous impassable borders, all sorts of boats now ply and float us through at our will and command. With machines we fly, we produce fire, make food, light darked rooms at midnight, mass-produce all sorts of goods, receive constant water supply in any of our homes, automate our liquid waste disposal, build shelters, shape the earth - it's safe to say that machines and tools have made our lives wondrously convenient and comfortable.

And then there were computers. Ahhh, computers. In my opinion, the closest mankind has come to replacing, and enhancing, their own brains. Birthed with the task of automating and quickening arithmetic/logical operations, they quickly found their way through all sorts of applications. Useful at first only for accountants, banks, and scientists, their fame probably spread through to librarians, writers, hobbyists - and then branched and trickled its way into pretty much every cultural stream of modern society. We now push a few buttons, and talk to people on the other side of the world instantly as if they saw us through a little magic window. We send instant, impalpable messages through the tireless electrical messenger, whose effort, where he material, would be vastly larger than even that of the often-ridiculed Santa Claus courier achievement. We store, share, and summon names, numbers, books, faces, voices, and music in little gadgets the size of a harmonica or smaller, and we can access knowledge bases, both public and personal, from any device in the whole wide world that taps into the ubiquitous Internet well. We process thousands, millions of pieces of information in the time that we blink, scratch our nose, or go get a cup of coffee. We delegate the task of charging fares or allowing access to little reading devices. We find any address in an unknown city without asking for help from anyone. We can produce visual art, static and animated, with precision and/or randomness the kind that has never been seen before. We can produce text much faster than any pen allows. We make and mold sounds like a potter does his clay. We can immerse ourselves in shared imagined parallel worlds of adventure and excitement. We shop from the whole world while sitting down. Mankind found a way to mass-produce logic, amass baffling amounts of data in tiny containers, and mass-spread information instantly across the entire world. How cool.

You can see how one can come to admire computers, or machines in general. I sure did. They imitate and enhance so many of our daily activities. What did I prefer - writing my long homework assignment by pen on a sheet of paper, where a mistake would leave a scratched-out word and evidence of my blunder on the paper, or comfortably typing and printing out a clean, crisp, perfectly-neatly fonted assignment? Since immemorable times, I've preferred the automated way of performing tasks, even if that meant going out of my way to find that automation. Because once you automate something correctly, you may never have to do that task, or automate it, again. And because with computers, not only are tasks performed more neatly, but they require much less of a physical investment. Why hire an expensive human toll-taker when you have a cheap wireless reading device? Why keep a large, heavy collection of videos on VCR, or even DVD, when you can make files out of them and have them available online on demand, weightless, nuisance-less? Why... etc.

There is another thing to be considered, though. That is skill. Automating tasks, while enormously useful, can degrade skillsets. Take lightbulbs, for example. Lighting our homes since the 19th century. How the heck did people see at night before this? Fire, of course. Everyone who wanted to see what the hell was going on after dusk had to have candles, a torch, or a little oil lamp. But more importantly, they had to be able to deal with fire. Most everyone was an expert at handling, moving with, and containing small amounts of fire. Over a hundred years later, which layman has to deal with fire besides the occasional cigarette lighter or the even-often-neglected stove? And now the electrical cigarettes, electrical stoves, and microwaves are pushing that boundary even further. Dealing with fire on a daily basis is falling out from the common skillsets.

So is sewing. And cooking. And dealing with numbers mentally. And remembering appointments. And telling stories. And penmanship. Among others. Manual skills, when successfully automated, are thus transferred into the machine's skillset, and often shrunk in ours. Our nature compels us to be skilled at what we practice, and most often to not be skilled at what we don't. Given this, I think it's important to consider skill as an important feature besides convenience, comfort, and mass production. Considering extremes, would you rather be a skill-less comfort prince, served and fed and clothed and sheltered and entertained and transported most perfectly and predictably by servants and machines... or would you rather be an ingenious woodsman, jack-of-all-trades, able to make yourself a living in whichever way you chose? I'd be woodsman. I'd at least know how to make phone calls and use Facebook, of course. Oh, and Bash.

And when you look at the inner workings of most machines closely, and compare them with the human counterparts that used to fulfill their functionality - it is hard not to notice the machines' crudeness. Look at them - you'll see. Their existence has a purpose, and to that effect, they can do nothing else. No rotating motor has the delicacy, the sensitivity of one of our common hands. No camera can capture the full experience of a beautiful landscape in front of our eyes. Music production is an example that has struck me most recently - no machine/computer, with any method or algorithm currently at hand, is able to create pleasing or melancholic or exciting music on the fly, at will, as say, an experienced guitarist does.

While machines allow for enhanced strength, speed, and predictability, we humans inadvertently possess incomparable amounts of versatility, and very, very importantly, UNpredictability, an important subset of which we call creativity. Imagine machines could model every different way of doing things that man has been already capable of, every skill - imagine that someone achieved that tremendous feat. What, then, of everything that man has NOT yet been capable of? Would we be able to teach these machines, when teaching a machine is a skill in of itself? Could we develop new skills on top of others, even after having delegated and forgotten our previous ones?

Not that I don't like machines and computers. Heck, I love 'em. They're awesome. They light up my room. They let me watch movies in bed. They allow me to travel to far-away lands without getting my feet sore. They let me listen to music from all over the world. I find housing, I buy furniture, I meet friends, I learn new knowledge, I communicate through the whole world with them. I wash my clothes with them. I make a living with them. I LOVE all this technology. Do I want people to stop using it? No. Do I want to stop using it? No. Do I think that people should stop developing technology? No.

So what the hell were those four paragraphs about? Well, as usual, they're about awareness. People, myself included, are often plagued by a lack of awareness. Basically, all I'm saying is that we should be aware of what part of our skillset we're delegating to technology, and that there are skills out there of which we are probably not even aware of because they are so superseded or obfuscated by technology. Again, penmanship comes to mind - I wonder how much less the newer generations know how to handle a pen than the one I grew up with.

Beyond skillsets, consider action for its own sake. I used to think that it was always better in any situation to delegate a task to a machine than to do it myself. Why risk the fatigue? Why risk failing? I realized why. Because we are meant to act! Our bodies' purpose is to generate action! We people are capable of such a vastly rich space of actions - and it is such a joy to indulge in the world, to sample of the delicate, or of the subtle, or of the fast, or of the beautiful - not only to observe it but to create it! When you observe something beautiful or colorful or wondrous or fantastic or bizarre, do you ever feel a desire to create it? "Oh man! I would SO like to be able to to do that!!" I do. I think we all do. It's our imitative nature. How pleasing I find it to learn and play a beautiful piano piece!, even if not with the  grace of the performance that originally encouraged me. How satisfied I feel when I manage to sew my sock's rip with needle and thread, and can then avoid touching the cold bathroom floor with my uncovered heel in the morning!

Act for action's sake. Tis an often-neglected concept.

Anyway, consider de-automation. It's not always as bad as it sounds.

Moved

Moved, trapped, bursting with empty expression,

panting at ineffable emotion,

sweet, sweet pitch,

energy of inspiration, of beauty...

pure joy I perceive, and I so want it, I feel it, I want more,

I refuse to ignore it, to continue postponing, allowing myself to tedious tasks,

for the music is there, it sings, it always is,

it brings joy and light through only air,

proving that such joy, such energy

can be anywhere... everywhere.

And I want to feel it, to make it, to dance it, to immerse myself in it,

but I'm at the office,

What to do?

Enjoy... your soul is yours.

How to feel it more? To feel so... willing, excited, PASSIONATE???

I ask you, Music, Life,

help me be with you.

I pant to soothe my

burning larynx, lungs,

pleading me to let them burst in

song and music and joy and truth.

But I'm at the office.

Your order has been receiiiiived

Sometime in the Fall of last year, T-Mobile announced a special deal - something along the lines of "Unlimited Text/Calls/Data for $39 a month. Zero contracts". Intrigued, I read the details on the T-Mobile website, and I thought I'd try it. So I called T-Mobile, and I was attended by a calm-sounding guy whose name I can't really remember. But for the sake of narrative, let's call him Brian.

I proceeded to inquire details about the program - whether it would work with my current AT&T iPhone, whether I would need to buy a new phone or could use an old cheap one, what kind of obligations would I acquire, what kind of coverage did it provide, etc. Brian was very polite, and answered all of my questions. About 20 minutes later, I was sold, and I ordered a package. Brian said "you're in luck, we have a promotion today, you'll get a free cheap phone, and you'll only need to pay for the SIM card, which will be $1.99". I said "awesome!", and gave him my card details and stuff. After a few seconds of audible typing, Brian told me, in his calm and polite voice: "All right, Mr. Antonio, your order has been received".

At that point in time, just around the last syllable of "received", I experienced a mental shift. Whether in attitude, in perception, or in my thought processes, I felt a sudden change in me. Somehow, what Brian was telling me was a factual truth. Not that it really wasn't, but in that moment, I perceived his words as unquestionable fact. It's a little hard to describe, but imagine having information fed to you directly, unfiltered by the brain, by doubts or mistrust or questions or inferences or reasoning or subsequent emotions about it. It was simply true, my order had been received, and Brian was letting me know. How simple. That last syllable even sounded longer. "Your order has been receeeeeiiiiiiiiiived" (Ok, not that long. But long enough).

The feeling did not last too long - maybe between 1 and 3 seconds. Shortly thereafter I began thinking:

• Wow, Brian is talking so matter-of-fact'ly.
• Why do I think that he is talking so matter-of-fact'ly? Did he say something special, or in a special way?
• No, he didn't. He was just talking and I suddenly felt like he knew exactly what I was to know, and that I was learning an important piece of knowledge.
• What was THAT all about?
• Oh, wait, did he just ask me a question? What did he say?

And then I resumed my conversation with him, regular style. My T-Mobile phone and SIM card arrived a few days after, I never used it myself, and I activated it only months later for a friend who arrived in Pittsburgh and needed a temporary phone.

The whole incident might have faded into oblivion, but this mental shift has happened to me at least 2 more times since then. I believe one time was while I was in a park. No one was talking to me that time, but I experienced the same inflow of perception - everything was true, I had no doubts or questions or even thoughts, and the feeling faded quickly.

And tonight, I decided to skim through a music theory workbook before going to sleep. I skipped a long prefix that explains the main notes, the basic time symbols, and other basic music concepts, and began reading the section of the circle of fifths. I was going through a section that explained how some notes can be written in different ways, like F#=Gb. As I read that equivalence, I experienced the same mental shift. Suddenly, F# simply was Gb, that was the truth, and that book was the perfect way to learn that. So simple.

So I wonder about this mental shift. Is it good? Can I promote it? Can I exploit it? Is it harmful? Should I avoid it? Can I avoid it?

But I can't summon my unfiltered perception on-demand to have my questions answered in apparent absolute truth. For now I'll settle for an I-don't-know and a good-night from my own self who thinks it's much later than the time that a prudent week-worker should go to sleep at on a Thursday-Friday night.

Orgasmic Meditation

Today I attended an OM session from 10AM to 7PM. You can imagine that a lot happens in nine hours, and right now I actually don't feel like narrating everything I remember. But I will mention the highlights:

1. I sat down in a double-row, semi-circle of chairs in a large room along with around 30 other men and women of many ages and ethnicities. I talked with many people around me - they were all very friendly.
2. The session directors, Robert and Joanna, told us what OM was about, and their own experiences on how it changed their lives. Robert, a 13-year OM'er, said that he started because he and his wife weren't having sex anymore. Joanna said that she started as the company product placement coordinator, and then she eventually tried it, and she felt herself unraveling with time, from a motherfucking tight-ass bitch, as she called herself, into the much calmer, aware, and perceptive person she was now. Questions were taken across the room.
3. Robert and Rachael performed an OM in front of us, in a massage table. Rachael took her pants off, she opened her legs wide for the whole audience to see, and then Robert narrated through the whole experience. He basically put on gloves, dipped into some lube, put her fingers into her vagina, and stroked her clitoris with his left index finger for 15 minutes. Rachael seemed to enjoy herself very much during the process.
4. We went out to lunch. I talked to Kat and to another guy whose name I already forgot while lunching at Soma Cafe.
5. We came back, and more questions were asked around the room.
6. We got up, the room was cleared, rhythmic, dancy music was played, and we were told to mingle around, and either look, or not look, at the other people in the room as we passed each other by. Then we paired up randomly, and we performed several exercises, each time with a different partner. Exercises: 1) We "noticed" things about each other's face and said it out loud in a tone-neutral way, saying it with approval, 2) we talked about our favorite pet in the most juicily-detailed way we could. I talked about Ulysses and heard Steven talk about his previous cat, Flamepoint (a white cat everywhere except for orange on the tips of his ears), who one time leaped off the roof to grab a bird passing by, and then proceeded to decapitate it. 3) We asked each other "Would you like to OM?" repeatedly, to which we always said no. We then did the same thing, but this time we said yes. 4) We stroked the other's forearm with our index finger while, first silently, later offering changes to the stroke, and then receiving instructions from the strokee. 5) We did basically the same thing, but massaging our partner on the shoulders, back, etc.
7. We sat down again, and a lot more questions occurred. Then each of the steps in the OM process were explained - the setup with the yoga mat, the blanket on top, the towels, the gloves, the lube, and most importantly, the specific posture. Then a lot more questions happened.
8. Finally, we got to the OM Lab. We basically found ourselves a partner by asking other people (I didn't - another unpaired woman just paired up with me by default right before starting). We "noticed" stuff about each other like in the first exercises, then she took off her pants, she lay down on the mat, I sat down beside her, I put on my gloves, we got into posture, and then I just followed the guides' directions. I told her "I'm going to touch you", I put my hands in position around her vagina, and I basically stroked her clitoris for 15 minutes, following her directions when she said needed a change, and trying to feel something inside me sometimes. I don't think I felt any kind of special tingling or super energy flowing through me, at least not mind-blowingly. However, when she started to really moan loudly and enjoy it and just basically scream all the way through her pleasure, I felt a crisp, strong desire to hug her. She climaxed quite a bit, and she squirted out onto my gloves time and time again. It was strangely not really arousing, but just rather... pleasing. After the experience she didn't seem to feel like talking to me. She didn't explicitly avoid eye contact, but I really wasn't looking for it either. Still, stroking someone's clitoris seems like a fairly intimate activity - I guess I can understand her hesitance. (I did get to hug her before she left the place).
9. Later, Robert asked everyone for frames of experience. I didn't have anything solid to say, although now that I think of it, I did feel a strong desire to hug her. Then people clapped, I grabbed a few more snacks (my hands felt really clean despite having just inserted my fingers into her vagina, due to the gloves). I made myself a member of the Facebook OM Hub by paying $29 (in addition to the $149 that the session itself cost), had some more cookies, exchanged information with a few people, and came back home. Joanna said that we should be super extra-sensitive for the next 48 hours or so - I wonder what I'll perceive.