Watching Volleyball at Bradford Beach

I like watching people playing recreational sports. The best ones are team sports.

I like watching the participants' body language and facial expressions when the opposing team scores a goal. For a split second, you see something more than a group of people having fun with a game.

At the moment that the defending team lets up a goal, it is quite easy to tell who has an emotional investment in game. For a split second, you can see traces of anger. For a split second, you can tell who is taking everything personally. From nonverbal communication alone, you can figure out who takes everything personally.

Everyone else just keeps playing.

A NERDY NEURAL HYPOTHESIS

As we learn more and more about the brain, we are coming to a more accurate conclusion regarding the processes of processing, encoding, and data recollection. The old analogy was that data interpretation occurs similar to a VHS video tape recorder. This analogy is considered to be outdated now.

The new standard for neural metaphors is that ideas and thoughts are located individually and are connected like a web. Ideas and memories do not exist as singular points in the brain. Instead, they occur due to the neural connections that we make through the learning process. This reminds me of the almighty INTERNET where each thought can be represented by a web page. A web page, alone, is not powerful, but when connected together with the rest of the internet, can become useful. Similarly, a neural pathway can be related to a website, using similar thoughts (web pages) to come together as a whole to create an overarching idea, or in this case, a web site. The analogy is pretty spot on.

This makes me wonder if scientists could learn about brain functioning by studying the internet. There is a lot of psychology behind the internet that doesn't really get much attention. For instance, the propagation of a meme within our (internet) society, is very complex and requires a deep understanding of the way that entertaining ideas spread throughout a population.

Despite fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), neuroscience is still full of mystery. It would be cool to see people "figure out" the internet and therefore, figure out something about the way the brain works, even if it's just a small finding that very few people would consider to be important. Looking at this from the other way around, it would also be interesting to figure something out in the field of neuroscience and relate it back to internet social patterns to gain insight in that field. This information could be very valuable to progressive companies that are relying more and more on social media to contribute to their advertising demographics.

I AM SUCH A BIG FAN OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY COOPERATION IN ORDER TO REACH A MORE ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

Slow down, anon

There is this girl that I see at the gym a lot. It's quite possible that I see her every time I go.

She is pretty.

At risk of sounding judgmental, I have a sneaking suspicion that she might suffer from anorexia nervosa.

She is always using the cardio machines. She runs on the treadmill like a hamster runs on a wheel. You can tell that she's trying really hard to exercise but she's noticeably skinny so it's not like she needs to try hard. She runs like she's running away from something dangerous or terrible. The other thing about the way she uses the machines is that she has really bad running form. She probably didn't do cross country or track in high school because she runs like a girl, which is not to say that I don't respect female runners, but a real runner runs like a real runner and this girl runs like a chick. Bad posture, inefficient use of arms, and a facial expression that lets the rest of us at the gym know that she is not having fun.

I mean, I ALWAYS see her at the gym. I don't want to make it sound like I obsess over her; I notice things about all the regulars I see at the gym. For example, there is the creep that wears too short of shorts and an old black shirt. He is always at the Rec Plex when I am. He works out nice and slowly and checks out girls the entire time. He stares at them and I stare at him for fun until he makes eye contact with me. Then I keep staring at him and he stares back and it is a wonderful experience for everyone involved.

Going back to our heroine, I really do hope that this particular female is healthy. I hope I am wrong about her. Unlike the hoards of moody 16 year-old girls on the internetz, I do not patronize mental illness. I don't think less of you you suffer from a mental illness, but I certainly do not think you are "cool" or "unique" for it.

What a terrible way to end an entry that already lacks direction.

People watching

I like people watching because if you're good enough at writing, everyone can be reduced to a character and most can even be reduced to an archetype.

Greg ceases to be Greg. He becomes the old man at the beach who sweeps the shores with his metal detector in hopes of finding something that he never lost.

Sarah ceases to be Sarah. She becomes the mindless, preppy zombie that roams within the corridors of your favorite mall with her favorite bitch friends. She is sixteen and (thanks to daddy) drives a nicer car than you.

The nifty part about characters as opposed to real people is that characters, even dynamic characters, tend to stay relatively static. You do not get the uncertainty that accompanies real life humans. Characters are more tenacious than humans. Characters are made to be as complex as possible whereas humans are born simply and become more complex with age.

NOTHING I WRITE ON HERE MAKES ANY SENSE ANYMORE.

The Creep

Stephen, they called him the creep, without anyone left in the world. For he, the creep, handed out flowers from his late wife's garden to young girls, with the purest intentions. The mothers would say, "Stay away from that man," who, wanted nothing more than for the fruits of his late wife's labors to be passed on so that she, in a simple way, could be eternal.

As the years wore on, the Stephen would become known as the creep.

And nobody loved the creep.

His wife's flower garden withered and became rotten and Stephen longed for loving so he would hand out flowers to the prostitutes, the ones who had such good love, they were being paid for it, and he drove once around the block and goddammit if she was still holding that flower by the time he came back because the creep would pick her up and bring her to the Hampton Inn and he'd beat the whore to death with the hardcover Bible from which his wife had learned so much.

I just woke up from an unusual sleeping experience

Sometime around 5:45PM, I started napping on the couch.

I missed a call and a text. Sorry.

Occasionally, I would wake up and be too lazy to do anything, so I would go back to sleeping.

At 8:00PM, I woke up and noticed it was night. I had a caffeine headache since I don't drink coffee on the weekends. I didn't want to deal with that, so I just went back to sleep.

I still haven't folded my laundry from yesterday. The laundry that I did at 2:00PM.

At 2:46AM, I woke up, brushed my teeth and went to my actual bed.

At 8:15AM, I woke up. I went back to sleep.

At 10:15AM, I woke up and decided to restart my life.

This is a mysterious happening for me. I am not sick and I usually do not sleep this much. Maybe today will be a good day or something strange like that.

Stream of Consciousness (Bradford Beach 07/21/2010)

picture the beach.

I mean the beach.

The one from the fold-out advertisements that preached that

the beach was sex and sex was cool and the only thing cooler than sex was,

of course,

cigarettes.

And these days, the cancer kids still hang out at the beach,

which is not the beach,

but water and sand, nevertheless.

Sometimes there is a GIRLWHEREAREYOURCLOTHES? or a DUDEIWONDERIFYOULIKETOWORKOUTASMUCHASME.

we are everything the beach-goers of the 1960's wished they could be.

I'm pretty sure that makes us time travelers.

With the E. Colic waves splashing upon the bird shit sands

and the sun to bake it into a cake,

the scene is picture perfect

and everyone important knows

that it's a perfect time for a picture for

iTWITFACESPACEOOGLE.

I don't know if it's her camera or her phone that she's using at this point.

With the widespread narcissism pandemic,

even the unimportant people are feeling important.

We're not having a good time anymore,

But we're trying hard to make it look like that on the internet.

Despite the rise in cost,

the cigarettes

are the same

are the sex is probably the same

and maybe we'll tell our kids about it -

but only after they go to college.