INTERESTING TIMES

What do you think? Have you ever fallen into that pit where you had no "real" life and your entire life existed through a keyboard and screen? Have you found your way back into the land of living and breathing? Have you discovered your body? Are you OK being alone with yourself??

Got me started thinking about this (again):
http://vimeo.com/70534716

I had a housemate once who would become completely obsessed with a new video game and play it continuously until he had completed all the levels. It took a couple months for him to master Grand Theft Auto. He took me for a ride in it. Our virtual reality was shared in living and breathing space, and he was not a lost cause. I don't think. I hope not.

I have a friend who lives a good fraction of her life in second life. She is married in this life and has a significant other in second life. Her 2nd life SO is known to her and her husband. He has a wife and kids. They visit together, eat icecream, break ankles, breathe the same air. Second life has merged with first life.

I have a sister whose occupation is building things for the second world. That is, she obtains or develops images and sounds that she can sell for virtual money. Her reality is beyond my comprehension, except that when she is there beside me she is just as solidly herself as she has ever been, with a sharpened wit.

I have a boyfriend who barely exists on the internet. I told him how many fb friends I have now and he laughed at me. I think he is afraid that I will go where my sister went, or my friend. He likes to exercise and play his guitar and garden and read. Doing all those other things sounds far better than this. I'm outta here.

A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
--Steve Jobs

I LOL'd and it's short:

This is about how search engines such as google and networking sites such as facebook select for us what we will see based on what we have clicked on before. It appears to me that this limits our exposure to novel ideas, and funnels us into thought tunnels, ie dogma. Interestingly, I receive political ads from every direction, perhaps because I have found good candidates on all sides. I click both ways. On many spectrums. I wonder what google and facebook are NOT showing me.

The least of things
with a meaning
is worth more in life
than the greatest of things
without it.
--Carl Jung, "Modern Man in Search of a Soul"

(but not associated with anxiety)

"People who are susceptible to depression are already more prone to social isolation and withdrawal and therefore more likely to develop problematic Internet usage because the Internet provides an outlet for them," Dr. Christakis observed. "So the findings from the study are highly plausible, and because it was longitudinal and adjusted for baseline levels of depression and Internet use, the findings are both novel and robust."
( notes from medscape article )

Haven't been posting because my laptop isn't letting me. It says it's connected but no websites come up using either firefox or chrome. So I'm in the library right now. Got in a few hours with the lady doc in Sedona today, more tomorrow. Been visiting friends around Flag. For some reason it feels like home. This is a pretty cool town. But I only get 30 minutes free internet at the library so I'm back to email triage. Hope you guys are well.

Drew blood from a classmate again today. I keep making the same mistake, that is that I insert the needle into the vein well enough, but then my hand is unsteady and I back it out a little when I should be threading it into the vein. I caught myself today and kept the needle in the vein well enough to get two vials of blood. The classmate who punctured me also got two vials, so it was a success. At the end of this quarter we have a proficiency exam on venipuncture. I always feel quite stressed after doing a blood draw.
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