Spanish Dancers (the nudibranch kind)

picture from here

I was all set to dig up fascinating and weird truths about this most graceful of sea slugs, but the internet offers no such treasures. They can swim, and they're big for sea slugs, which is a succinct summary of what the internet hivemind knows.

I'm forming the opinion that they get away with this by being gorgeous and entirely hypnotic. Who needs to be able to hold a conversation when you do this all day?



(Just ignore the dumbtard diver poking the poor thing, and the further dumbtard diver dancing, and the random apperance of a lion fish. Actual spanish dancing is at the 1 minute mark - it's the best footage I found on YouTube.)

ETA: I stumbled across this page in my GISing. It's a competition gallery of underwater photography that is well worth eyeballing. See?

I noted the fact that today it rained all day in my diary, because the world is ending and precious thing should be recognised.

prettier than thou

It was posted on boingboing so you've already all seen this absolutely stunning collection of sea slug glamour photos up on the NG site. They're most <3 worthy.

To be honest, they made my self-esteem wilt a little. I mean, yes, we've done quite a bit of the evolution thang, and we have brains, big brains, bigger than a whole sea slug, brains that render us capable of picking the fluff from our belly button and wondering whether milk two days past the use by is still okay at the same time, and I'm not even all that ugly even by human standards, but we are-





-never going to be all that.

Have yourself a gander, make yourself feel ugly and cumbersome. I swear the second last slug is the inspiration for Pikachu.

Even more damaging, I noticed the "buy print" button on the bottom left. And I clicked it. And found the whoooole NG print store. May Inari take my soul and keep it in a sardine tin. I want all those sea slugs on my walls. Alas, or perhaps fortunately, it's the entirely wrong time of a very small and bill consumed pay. BUT I SHALL REMEMBER.

PS:



If you desire you may purchase a print of zombie bear here.

"Tomorrow, I think, is a great day to go to work hungover."

inhale, exhale, repeat

The real estate took my counter offer of a shorter lease with less of a rent increase and punched it in the face till its teeth fell out and its nose was flat, and sent it back to me, stating that it "was not acceptable" and wouldn't even be put to the owners.

While I could, theoretically, pay the rent they're asking for, I'm not comfortable with handing over half my pay, every pay. That's just asking for long term trouble, and I have enough long term trouble already.

So, I guess I'm moving.

Yet, it appears the rent every where has risen, or maybe it's just the wrong time of year to be moving, or maybe I'm not part of an elite secret society of low rent housing arcana, but there is nothing in the city I can afford. There's very little inner city I can afford and, given I need to stay close to the train lines to get home home, nothing in a useful location.

So.

So.

I don't know. I just don't know.

Independence is expensive. Being an anti-social misanthropic space/quiet-hungry hermit crab is expensive. This was the one thing I had that was almost working, and now I can't have it anymore.

So.

So.

Forgive me if I don't seek out a therapist, tailored medication, exercise and any number of things that would certainly clear my head. The last thing I can afford to do right now is experiment with medication, and be wrong.

Once, I would have said that I didn't want to out of the irrational belief that I could just will myself better, because my pride wouldn't let me admit I needed any help at all, and that I should just learn to get by on my own. Not long ago, I would have said there was no point, because I hadn't finished falling apart, and I wasn't in a frame of mind that would be receptive to any sort of improvement.

Now, I can't. I just can't. It would be a gamble, and I have nothing to spend. Risk-taking uses up resources I don't have, I have nothing as a buffer for disappointment, I have nothing to spend on the hope and will to see anything through, I have nothing left. Everything goes into going nowhere at all, not moving at all, staying very still, keeping this balance with all these sharks and velociraptors circling, and they're things I can do nothing about. They're completely out of my power, and I can't escape them. There's nowhere to retreat and regroup. There are no safe places left. I have nothing left to give.

And that is my choice. I acknowledge that, and knowing that I could change myself and elect not to, I try to keep my self-pity to a minimum, and to myself. I don't expect much of this to make sense, even less to be understood, but I hope that you will at least respect the decision.

Because I don't have anything left to use in a debate, because it just doesn't matter.

Tomorrow, I think, is a great day to go to work hungover.

Post Script:

i jump from every rooftop

I'm breaking with all the serious posting and we're going to play a game.

Let's play make believe. You're a doctor. Maybe you really are a doctor, in which case, this will require no effort on your part. You run a general practice in an old neighbourhood. You have clients who have been coming to you for the length of their lives. One client in particular. You don't see her more than a couple of times a year for checkups as she's barely sick. You have 26 years of her medical history in your records.

When she asks you about alternatives to prescription anti-depressants, do not look at her like she's just asked you if grafting a live walrus to her face will increase her chances of getting laid.

Just because you have made her cough and say 'aaah', taken her blood and shoved steel umbrellas up her twat does not mean you have any, any idea of what is going on in her head. Reacting as though she's being silly, possibly attention-seeking and overly dramatic, and telling her that she doesn't need any such medication because, well, she's not depressed, is going to do several months of damage.

I was asking for help.

Regardless, I went on St John's Wort which smells funky and comes in tablets the size of my head. Couldn't hurt to try. It's a slow accumulating drug, and it was some weeks before I noticed any effects. As far as I could tell, the only thing the pills did was take away my desire. All desire, for anything, everything, small immediately desires and material desires and long term dreamy desires. I did not become content with my lot, I simply had no urge to change gain move anything. It didn't feel like apathy. It wasn't numbness. I found that, instead of forcing myself to be a not terribly brooding mopey person around other people, I was forcing myself to want things.

If you don't desire things, if you don't have desire driving you through your life, pushing you to act, making you change the world around you, then what is the point of anything? Desire makes us go. Without desire, any desire, nothing I did had any meaning.

None of this actually stopped my head from being a noxious place to be. None of this made me feel any better, or made every day life anything less than a tooth and nail ordeal. The pills stole my sleep dreams, which did not impress me in the least. And when it came down to it, the act of taking these pills every morning made me feel like a faker, a poser, and a failure.

One night, one particularly bad night, I stood in the dark and threw the pills, one by one, out the window.

Most satisfying thing I've done in a long time.

St John's Wort is prescribed instead of Prozac in Germany, and has been in use for so long I don't doubt it helps a lot of people. But the effects I felt weren't helping me, they were scaring me. They took away some of the tools I use to keep going.

So what if night after night I dream of the end of the world, and when I wake up I'm nothing but thwarted desires? These things make me me. These things give me meaning.

Maybe I am being entirely irrational, making up any excuse to return to the devil I know. These certainly don't seem like rational or sensible decisions. But, I'm not scaring myself anymore, and while I haven't yet decided if this is a good or bad thing, it's justification enough for me.

You can stop playing make believe now.

Mother's Day

One thing Mum was quite emphatic about hammering in during our upbringing was responsibility of self. She didn't deny us any support, but it was made clear that we were to make our own decisions under our own steam and deal with any consequences that may arise on our own as well. There's no one in the world with any right to tell us what to do and who to be, including her.

It's a double-edged blade. The freedom to make up your own mind is probably the only real power any of us will have, and she made sure we know and respect that. Yet it means that, when the decisions are made and don't work out, and the sharks of all our consequences are circling, there isn't anyone to blame except ourselves.

So when I see her unwell, and weak, and exhausted, and sick, and I know that this will only get much worse before it gets better, I question myself as to why I have not found religion and the ability to heal people with my hands, why I am not a billionaire genius doctor who has created a cureall potion just like in video games, why I am completely helpless to do anything to make her better. These are irrational reactions to the situation, but they keep me up at night. Somewhere along the line I choose the wrong life.

One of the nurses at the hospital pulled me aside when I was getting her ice, and said that she could see, from looking at my brother and me, she could see that Mum must be a beautiful mum.

I think that's true.