In which I find time to update, but ramble on and don't say much interesting.

Broken Elevator

"I'm breathing for two now"
Says the pregnant lady
Gasping on the stairs

The baby has stolen her body
Her breath, which used to come
And go so easily

Now catches at strange times
Like now on the stairs
Or at the thought of all those diapers

"Breathtaking" used to be reserved
For mountain sunsets
Or those times when all she needs

Are the two eyes just inches away
The flecks of hazel glinting
Kaleidoscoping out to trap her

Poem:
People always say "I'm eating for two now," and I wanted to investigate/think about other things which would be done for two. This sounded cool. That's about it.

Observation:
In what seems a bit too "meta," today's observation concerns our powers of observation. Specifically the senses. Now, we all seem to take for granted that our senses are approximately equal. That is, while we might use some more than others, they all relate to our experience in a similar way. But I was thinking about this randomly, and I'm less and less sure this is the case. Take sight, for example. While I suppose it's not certain that sight correlates to the external world, at least we can point to things (light's wavelength, reflection, etc.) that explain why the particular sensations our brain interprets come out the way they do. And a similar thing might be said of touch. Our ability to sense things like "sharpness" or "heat" can be linked with some verification to actual qualities in the world around us. Sound is obviously quite similar to sight in the way it deals with waves and their length, frequency, reflection, and whatnot. Which leaves those other two senses. Taste and smell. Interestingly enough, they are quite closely interlinked.
When we describe the way something smells or tastes, is there anything about that sensation that we are claiming corresponds to external qualities. Now, I know the way smell works is the receptors in the nose receive certain shapes of molecule and relay information to the brain, but is this sensation really that useful? On some evolutionary level, I guess, it probably helped in distinguishing between types of substances, which led to us having innate preferences in taste and smell, but when I smell something, it's not like I can tell you anything about the world from that sensation. I'm limited to describing it in terms of other smells, or using terms like "good" and "bad." On a base level, the thing that distinguished between different smells are the shapes of the molecules entering your nose. But nothing about smell tells you what these shapes are, where they originated, or really much useful at all when it comes to linking smell to external experience. And taste works the same way, so I won't go into that. But really, taste and smell are just rather specialized forms of touch. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, sound is picked up by the vibration of a membrane in our ear. I'm a bit foggy about how sight works beyond the whole "rods and cones do stuff" explanation. I just find it interesting that taste and smell are in large part arbitrary. They are not very informative, and calling them senses and putting them in the same category as sight and hearing might be inappropriate.

Exercise:
"Five Ingredients"
Write something--anything--that includes the following five words/ phrases:
~urged
~When the servant entered with the soup
~show him the way
~zeal
~dead flies

When the servant entered with the soup, I was urged, perhaps by the presence of so many dead flies on the ceiling, to show him the way to the table, a task I undertook with zeal. I mapped out a safe route in my head, weaving around other tables in what may have seemed sporadic fashion, though not once did my route cross beneath one of the deceased insects. The servant, while a bit quizzical, didn't protest, and by the time my circuitous route terminated at my table, I was sure I was going to have to tip a bit more to compensate for my disruption. Never mind that I had done his job for him, that he should have been aware of the perils lurking above. But it was a small price to pay for the knowledge that my food was safe.

Me:
Work, handball, and biking when I have time have been keeping me a bit busy. It's so hard to prioritize. Or rather, it's hard to prioritize consistently. One day I feel like devoting all of my time to handball, the next I am on my bike wondering how much I would have to do to become good at that. And then I realize none of those things matter if I don't have a career picked out. Oh boy. So rather than worry too much about any of that, I'm sort of just bending to my whims. Which will probably result in me being a rather good handball player, a moderate biker, and destitute. I guess we'll see how that goes.