The Most Extreme Lights in the Neighborhood

I don't really want to write another tribute to my mom tonight - well, I do, but I think it would be redundant, and very much less than brilliant, given the current state of my sleep-starved brain.

For the same reason, I won't attempt to write anything deep and philosophical about the human brain tonight [Oh, yeah? I think I just did!], except to point out one weird thing I've noticed. When I'm really really tired, I can't concentrate, partly because all I can think about is how tired I am, and partly because the barrier between conscious and subconscious grows weaker, and weird thoughts and ideas and impressions start to surface - almost little dreams. I think what the brain is basically doing is misfiring a bit, and making odd connections that have little to do with logic. This is good for the creativity, but not so good for allocating QCs. And no, I'm not going to explain that.

I'm finding it hard to write about this. As I told one of my friends in IM tonight:

Mavarin: I'm trying to write about what my brain does when I'm really tired. But it's hard, because I'm really tired, but not quite tired enough.
Mavarin: So I've got the poor concentration, but not the subconscious breaking through.
Friend: get tireder

The result of all this is that up to a point, my brain rewards me for not sleeping by throwing up neat ideas and weirdness, and maybe helping me a little bit with the fiction. But that's probably an illusion, because what the brain giveth, it also taketh away. My terrible typing skills get even worse, and I'm less able to notice the errors. From there it's but a short step to collapse, and I just have to go the heck to bed.

But I'm not quite there yet. I'm not getting the half-dreaming thing, and I'm curious to see whether I can do anything with that state of mind, and write something interesting - or at least get some editing in. Since this entry is going to be finished several hours before my usual 1 AM posting time, tonight will be a good chance to at least try to get some work in on Heirs. And if my brain can't cope with that, I'll see what it can do.

And then I'll sleep until 2 PM tomorrow.

Kids, don't try this. But if you do, try this at home. You will notice that I'm not at work, not driving, and not operating heavy machinery. And yes, I know I need to start getting more sleep. I fully intend to do so. No, really. I mean it this time. Then again, I always mean it. I just have to follow through.

And no, I'm not on drugs, either, unless you count the daily dose of Nasonex and Benedryl at bedtime, or the moderate amounts of non-coffeenated caffeine earlier in the day.

Yes, I did mean to type that. I hate coffee.

It is perhaps a measure of how tired I am that I don't have a punchline to end this entry. Perhaps that's the answer to my little experiment.

Or maybe I'm not quite sleepy enough yet...!

Karen

[The self-portait photos above are from a past Round Robin Photo Challenge, on the theme of "Secrets." Just in case you were wondering.]

Result:

I actually woke up for a while, but now my eyes keep closing. I simply must go to bed, much earlier than usual. I've made it to page 240 of Heirs, though.

*********
Oh, and I totally forgot that I titled this entry to reflect what was originally going to be a quick and easy posting of photos from the largest display of Christmas lights in our neighborhood. I got sidetracked with my brain rant and decided to put off the Christmas pictures until tomorrow, while neglecting to change the title. Oops! Having explained all that, I will now post the pictures anyway.

It doesn't look all that extreme, does it? Well, maybe it does. But this is just the leading edge of it.

The big thing about this display - and I do mean big - is the gigantic tree in the front yard. The lights are on it all year, but they're only lit at Christmas.

I can't get the whole thing in one photo, but this comes close.

Another attempt. Well, you get the idea. This is not the best display in the area, just the largest.

I'll have more Christmas lights in at least one entry, sometime in the next week or so.

K.

A Sad Anniversary

It was three years ago today.

Dr. Ruth Anne Johnson
October 6, 1927 - December 16, 2002

The Last White Christmas

Weekend Assignment #90: Share a treasured holiday memory. If it happened during the holiday season (which means, basically, from the the day after Thanksgiving to the end of the Bowl Games), it's eligible.

Extra credit: Fruitcake: Ever, you know, had any?


A treasured memory, huh? I guess I'd better skip right over 2002, then.

We actually made a holiday memory tonight, but I doubt it will ever really qualify as a "treasured" one. My company bought out the Gaslight Theatre to treat employees to Sgt Preston Saves Christmas, or Yukon Count on Me. The shtick with Gaslight is that it's hokey parody material, locally written, usually based on melodramas and the like. They've done "sci-fi," they've done Sherlock Holmes, the Fifties, Westerns, and on and on. Tonight's show was loosely based on an old radio and tv hero, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, successor to Nelson Eddy and precursor to Dudley Do-right. Here he faces a Snidely Whiplash-type villain, gets his man (and the girl), reunites a father and daughter, and has a hand in getting the Christmas presents to those orphans. Along the way, the cast sings Walk Like a Man, Indian Love Call, A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, and anything else that seemed like a good idea at the time. It's not High Art, by any means, but it was fun, and definitely a rut-breaker. I'm pretty much always in favor of rut-breakers: any reasonably pleasant activity that shakes us from our usual routine is generally a Good Thing.

I would show you pictures from the production itself, but photography is prohibited "while the actors are on stage."

But let's leave the Gaslight behind now, and take our mental time machine back to 1987.

I've written about that Christmas before, but not in any depth. I always meant to do it, but last year I got sidetracked by Holiday Trivia, St. Nicholas, modernism and holiday haiku, and never got around to it. So here's the story:

December, 1987 was our second Christmas in Tucson. Before that, we had lived in Columbus, Ohio for 7 years, and before that, I'd lived in metro Syracuse (Dewitt, Manlius and Syracuse itself) for 22 years. I'd seen plenty of winter, plenty of blizzards, plenty of lake effect snow. One memorable afternoon in December, 1975, I'd stood for an hour and a half outside my dad's office at University College, waiting for a long-overdue bus. I should have gone to find a pay phone, but I was afraid if I left the bus stop, the bus would come. So I stood in the blowing snow, and watched the MONY Plaza time & temp flash 11 degrees, 12 degrees, 11 degrees, 10 degrees, and back to 11 degrees.

You see, this is part of why we moved to Tucson, John and I. We were driving around the country in February and early March 1986, looking for a place where it wasn't winter. Tucson was the place that came through for us the best.

But by December, 1987, we'd been living in Tucson for 19 months, and I was starting to miss the snow - a little tiny bit. After all, almost everyone loves a White Christmas.

And that year, we got one.

It was the only White Christmas in Tucson since 1916. 2.6 inches of snow fell that day. (In 1916 they got 4 inches.) Our trees and cacti on Grannen Rd. filled up with ice and snow for just a few hours, burning off by afternoon. A few hours was enough. It was beautiful while it lasted, but after all, it was Tucson.

The timing was pretty much perfect. My mom and Aunt Flora were visiting from Florida, so snow was a rare treat for them as well. I dressed as Santa on Christmas Eve and stomped around on the roof, shaking my jingle bells. The next morning, we sat by a roaring fire and gazed out through picture windows on the temporary Winter Wonderland, while opening our Ultimate Christmas Stockings. Yeah, it was great.

It's been several years since I've seen snow in the city - or anywhere, really, except Mount Lemmon. This month, when I see clouds in the Tucson sky, and feel some actual nippy weather (several mornings the temperature has been in the 30s), I keep remembering that one White Christmas, and wonder whether I'll ever see a return engagement. That would be great!

Karen

P.S. Oh, yes, the fruitcake. I love fruitcake, if it's moist and fruity and dark, and if there's no evidence of it ever having had alcohol in it. Yes, I know it's supposed to be made with rum, and yes, I know the alcohol supposedly burns off. But I hate alcohol, okay? I'll explain one of these days, when I continue my series on tricks of the brain. (Stop yawning! It'll be good, really!) So I usually buy a cheap fruitcake from Walgreen's, of all places. Remember that gold tin I photographed earlier this year, with all the crystals in it? That's a fruitcake tin. - KFB

Patterns

And again I'm too tired to write this up properly. John wanted to do our annual Toys for Tots ritual tonight, so off we went to Toys R Us, after a quick stop at Best Buy for the director's cut of The Frighteners. This year we got the last box of 64 Crayola Crayons, a Cali Girl Barbie, 3 Hot Wheels cars, a tube of dinosaurs and a baby animal safari set. I think I'm forgetting at least one item, but you get the idea. We tried to get Monopoly, which was on sale for $7.99 in the plain vanilla non-deluxe edition; but all they had left was a Spanish language one (with a damaged box!) for $2 more, and the pricier anniversary and licensed character versions. Best of all, there was someone there standing guard over an actual Toys for Tots box. The donation bins have been getting harder to find over the years, so we were surprised and pleased that we didn't have to go from store to store looking for one.

So now it's 11:37 at night, and I really don't feel up to writing this. So let's do a Part One, shall we? Or is it Part Two?

I mentioned before about the fact that our ability to think and learn, understand and do depends largely on the brain's ability to recognize patterns and create categories, often without our quite realizing that this is happening. For example, how do you know a table when you see one? How does your brain define the concept of table? Is it something you eat off of? Is it something with a flat surface, and if so, does anything with a flat surface qualify? What makes it a table instead of a desk? Is it a table whether it has four legs or three, or one or none? If it has no legs, are we outside the boundaries of the table concept, and into "box" territory instead?

These are potentially tricky questions, but we seldom ask them. We don't have a mental checklist - at least, not consciously. We don't think about the Platonic ideal of a table, and see how the one in our friend's kitchen measures up. We merely look at a thing, recognize it as a "table" and move on.



Sometimes, though, it's not so easy to recognize the pattern, and know what we're looking at, literally or metaphorically. Sometimes the data is truly new to us, and relatively unconnected to what we have on file. Other times, it's just out of context. For example, what do you see in the picture above? Can you identify it? It's not as easy as a table. The pattern is less clear, and there are fewer identifying clues. So your brain has to work at it, and eventually comes up with...what? And how do you know the pattern your brain came up with to categorize this is the right one?

There's no shame in calling a table a table, putting a mere piece of furniture into a category and calling it by a certain name. But what if your brain is trying to comprehend and categorize something more sensitive and more complex, namely a person? Do you identify someone as falling into certain categories: friend, enemy, co-worker, family, acquaintance, stranger? How about white or black, Hispanic or Native American, Indian or Iraqi, one of Us or one of Them? And once the person is so labeled, do you assume traits associated with that category, and stop trying to understand the person as an individual?

Even if we intellectually know better then to do this, it's easy to fall into the trap of categorizing, labeling - stereotyping. We can't fully analyze everything we see and do. We'd never get anything done if we had to stop and figure out what a table is, what a red light means, what authority the boss has over us, whether someone if a firefighter or a cop, every time we encountered the phenomenon. So we use shortcuts. We have to. But those shortcuts can get us into trouble.

For example, we may go into a hardware store, see someone with a red apron and a nametag, label that person "store employee," and interact with the person as a store employee. We don't usually bother to find out that the store employee is named Bill, has three children and a cat, and attends the local Baptist church. The label "store employee" is good enough, if all we want is yellow paint or mousetraps. But ultimately we are shortchanging the person, even with such a benign label as "store employee." Bill may be a blogger, an amateur astonomer, an English major - anything, even a potential close friend. But we'll never know this if we settle for the easy categorization.

And the problem is worse if we've made patterns of things that don't really belong together. What if Bill can be tagged a member of some other category - black, Hispanic, Jewish, Republican (probably not all of these!)? Have we set up a pattern to go with that label, assigning some negative trait derived from tv stereotypes, the attitudes of parents and peers, or our past experience with some other individual? If so, then suddenly Bill is saddled with - and blamed for - a fault he may not have. He ceases to be even an emotionally neutral "store employee" to us. He becomes a "them" - a subhuman, not quite deserving our courtesy and respect. (Of course, many people treat virtally all store employees that way, regardless of ethnicity or affiliation.)

It's coming up on 2 AM, so I'll stop my little rant here for now. Have you figured out that photo yet? Does this second one help?



Assuming you now know what this is, do you find yourself imposing further patterns on what you see? Looks kind of like a reindeer, doesn't it?

Karen

The Hidden Moon

Remember how I reported, just a couple of nights ago, that my Word document for Chapter Five of Heirs of Mâvarin had a song called My Princess in it, which I didn't remember writing? It replaced Sleepy Moon, which Fabi sings a couple of times in Mages of Mâvarin. It's a plot point: the fact that he's singing it in Chapter 17 of Mages is a clue about what's happening to the amnesiac character.

Because of Sleepy Moon's importance in the second book, I thought it best to remove it from the first book. This is apparently why I wrote My Princess, even though I don't remember doing that!

As of the other night, the Word document for Heirs Chapter Five had both songs in it for Fayubi to sing, along with a note to myself to take out Sleepy Moon, and to write another verse of My Princess. I usually trust what Past Karen tells me, so I deleted Sleepy Moon from Chapter Five, and wrote the verse for My Princess.

What Past Karen failed to mention is that the lyrics to Sleepy Moon do not appear in Mages of Mâvarin. I seem to have deleted my only electronic copy of the song! Well, I may have a backup, but it's still an inconvenience. Now I have to either track down a backup file or retype the song from my printout. And I need to actually put it in Mages Chapter 17, instead of just referring to it.

Darn you, Past Karen! You should have left me clearer notes!

Present Karen

Update: I found it, in my "printout" files from last year. It's now safely saved in Fabi's scene with Tomshi. But I'm going to post it here, too.

Old Mori Moon Head
Rose late from his sea bed,
Just missing the Sun’s fiery beaming.
He sang of his love
As the stars danced above,
And set mortal souls to dreaming.

Sleepy moon, rise up for me.
Light my way so I can see
The dark road from this mortal plane
To where I’ll find my love again.

As Mori Moon Head
Sank down toward his Earth bed,
The Sun’s watery dawn eyes were peeking.
The River sang low
Of the Moon’s need to go,
And the dreamers awoke from their sleeping.

Sleepy moon, rise up for me.
Light my way until I see
The land beyond this mortal plane
Where I’ll be with my love again.

This is one of only two songs from the books for which I have a melody. It's not a good melody, but since nobody but me has to hear it, I guess it'll do!

Good night!



Photos by KFB, 12/13/05

What's My Angle?

Well, Becky put us on the right road, and Maryanne got us almost home:

Becky said...

LMAO at the "unknown artists" comment! HA! Ok...how about...original pieces of artwork that Karen owns?

12/13/2005 9:02 AM

And Maryanne eventually ended up with:

Maryanne said...

PHOTOGRAPHED at awkward angles!

I got it, didn't I?

HEEHEE! I'm so happy I'm smarter than I thought!

FINDING ORIGINAL ARTWORK PHOTOGRAPHED AT AWKWARD ANGLES!

Now, I'm really off to sleep!

12/13/2005 8:32 PM

Close! Very close! FOAPAAA was supposed to stand for

Framed <--nobody got that part of it
Original <--Becky got it, and Maryanne confirmed
Art <--Everyone knew that
Photographed <--yes, Maryanne!
At <--Maryanne again
An <--but Awkward is a fair cop. Society's to blame.
Angle <--but if awkward, then angles, plural.

First prize: Maryanne! Second prize, Becky! Thanks for playing. Now I have to figure out the prizes. I'm sure it will be some kind of Karen's creation thing, but I haven't quite narrowed it down yet. Any requests?

I don't think I want to tackle the brain stuff tonight, so instead I'll tell you a little more about the man who drew this pencil sketch of King Hubert.

His name was Marc Davis. He was one of Disney's "Nine Old Men," the major animators who designed the look of major characters all the way from Snow White to The Fox and the Hound. As an animator, Marc Davis is best known for designing Tinker Bell and Maleficent, but clearly, he must also have worked on King Hubert here, for Sleeping Beauty (1959). Davis's sense of humor really shows in his work, even in a production pencil like this one. The date on the certificate is 1955, which is consistent with a 1959 release date for the film. (Some Disney movies took a decade or more to complete.)

Later in his career, Davis worked extensively as an Imagineer for WED Enterprises, the arm of Disney responsible for designing Disneyland. He added humorous touches to the Jungle Cruise, such as the safari up a tree and the bathing elephants. He created the stretching portraits and the changing portraits in the Haunted Mansion, as well as the Hitchhiking Ghosts. He researched and drew lots of pirates for Pirates of the Caribbean, and came up with most of the best bits for that ride, including the dog with the keys. Right before Walt Disney died, he laughed appreciatively at Marc Davis's sketches for what eventually became Country Bear Jamboree.

I got this particular sketch on eBay, probably a year or so before Marc Davis died in 2000. I think I got it for $75 minimum bid, plus framing and shipping. I'm sure it's worth more now, but I wouldn't sell it so it doesn't matter.

Tomorrow: Patterns

Karen

Marc Davis tribute, with links

Marc Davis-related entries, reposted:

Yo Ho!

Haunted By the Mansion

FOAPAAA!

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show us a series of pictures with a theme. "A series" in this case can mean "two" but three or four would be good. The theme could be anything you want, although it being the holidays, something holiday-oriented would be a good and easy thing to do.

King Hubert* by Marc Davis



Pink Doctors by Xavier Cugat



Cityscape, artist unknown



The Eighth Doctor by Reuben Calvillo



Abstract by Sanders

I'm going to make you guess what the theme is. The first person to get it exactly right wins...I don't know what, but somethin'!

---

Brain Teaser

I had a great idea earlier today for another entry, possibly a series of entries. I don't feel up to writing much of it tonight, but here's a teaser:

"I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there."
- The Eighth Doctor, Doctor Who tv movie.

I have a theory about brains.

They're weird.

Brains are erratic and complex. They carry out a bewildering array of biochemical and bioelectric functions, ranging from autonomic regulation (keeping you breathing, for example) to interpreting sensory data, learning and thinking and feeling and doing. A lot of it involves making or rehearsing connections between things. If it barks, it's a dog. If it's Monday, I should be prepared to take photos for Scalzi's meme. If I want to eat this ice cream, I probably need a spoon. Snow=Winter. Red + Green = Christmas colors, or maybe a traffic light.

Making connections is an absolutely crucial part of thinking. If you didn't make a connection between the word "dog" and the concept of dogs and the traits that identify Tuffy Toro (or any other dog) as belonging to the category "dogs," then you could not really think about dogs.

Okay, fine so far. But what happens when the brain tries to make connections between unrelated phenomena? Do we all see "patterns...that aren't there"? What do you think?

Karen

*For some reason, I keep calling him King Humphrey. That's wrong. It's Hubert.