saturn return to sender

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather, this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all people, nay in all sensitive beings.

The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself?

- Erwin Schrödinger, as quoted in by Ken Wilber in One Taste

The amount of phlegm I have produced in the past 5 days is nothing short of astonishing. Where does it come from? Are my organs being converted into phlegm factories? Maybe I have been infected by aliens whose spacecraft are powered by human phlegm and my body is being converted into a human battery. They will pick me up again when the transformation is complete.

I hardly ever get incapacitated-sick. And never for more than a couple of days. It sucks. Sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. I have purchased more Kleenex and over-the-counter remedies since Thursday than ever before in my life.

And of course it happens right when I’m going to an aikido retreat thingy which I not only paid for but for which I will be part of the “staff.”

I appear to be on the mend so I’m going to try going without my generic-brand NyQuil tonight. Wish me luck.

On summer mornings you can tell who’s a boy and who’s a girl in the pond:

I did the visited states thing:

A lot of that is just “travelled through” and not “had a destination in.” The map should have a different color for that:

Crap, I forgot Minnesota. (Prairie-Home-Companion-esque joke left as exercise for the reader.)

My visited countries map is depressingly gray:

And I get Canada only because I flew through Vancouver on the way to China. But I never left the international terminal, so I’m not sure I was legally in Canada at all.

O, Canada …

*shrug*