My mind has been riddled with haze and mud and all manner of smoke and fog. I try to think each day of doing something grand, but I need to realize that if I just do something, anything for myself, then I will have accomplished something, even small. I suppose that I can say that I’ve been teaching myself .NET programming and C#, although I haven’t done much in the last few days. I’ve been trying to design a web site, but it seems so difficult. I just need to stick with something simple. I wanted to put up a web log, but I don’t know about that. I think, rather, that I would just like to put up a site espousing my programming skills and that I am for hire. My resume, too, I could add.

I’ve been reading about the philosophy of mind, in small chunks, mind you. I’ve been trying to understand Descartes’ dualism. Essentially there is matter, external which extends (has dimension) and then there is mind, whose attribute is thought and has no dimension, takes no space. I think I’ve captured this. Not sure. But there is a problem dealing with causality. How can something with no physicality cause the body, a physical object, to do something. The example used is of some unwary person sitting down upon a tack placed on his chair by some miscreant. He sense pain (the mind) which causes him to want to jump up out of the chair (the mind again), which then cause him, physically, to jump out of the chair.

Then there is the thought about parallelism. Essentially set in motion in parallel are both thought and action. When the mind senses pain the body in parallel jumps or reacts because it had been set in motion to do just that. Then enter God and his hand in it, and then it all gets messed up. Apparently he, being a third kind of substance, not mind or physical body, keeps these two things in synch because that is his nature.

It is interesting that our minds can perceive objects in some sense. I can see an apple, for example, but I do not perceive the inside of it until I bite into it or cut it open. I can taste the apple once I’ve bitten into it, yet I cannot see how it will taste. I can hear the crunch it makes, assuming its not soft and mealy, yet I cannot see the crunch, but I can feel it with my mouth, in a sense. I can smell and taste the apple as I eat it, and I disregard the core and the seeds and the stem. I feel the apple in my hand before I bite into it and I feel its weight and its coolness and its smooth texture. Once I’ve done all of these things, looking from every angle, feeling all there is to possibly feel, taste all there is to taste, smell and hear all there is to hear, have I experienced the apple completely? No, for I’ve tossed aside parts of it. Also, the nature of an apple. A housing for seeds. Food for animals. If I do not plant the seeds I will not have experienced part of its nature.

I suppose, given this example, I can only perceive so much about any object and thus I don’t believe that I can fully perceive an object and so my perception of an object can then be considered (in part or in whole?) subjective and I might further add that my perception of an object and thus my experience of it is unique from that of someone else. Or can I say that, given the same object—imagine the apple again—and two people experiencing the object, do we both share the same experience?

Imagine that I am standing with my wife looking at the apple on the table. Both she and I can take turns holding, feeling and smelling the apple and perhaps, in the end, we could have experienced the very same thing, although chances are that each of us might, should we set about separately to write our experience with the apple, come up with different tales. I might have felt a soft spot that she missed, and she might have noticed a richer, deeper color of red in some spots where I might have perceived its color being mostly uniform, and then there is smell. I might have detected a slightly sweeter smell than she. Our senses then come into play for my olfactory senses might be keener and her visual senses might be better than mine, or at least her attention to detail might be better, despite the fact that each of use had been given, say, five minutes a piece to experience the apple without eating it or in any way disturbing it other than holding it.

So, I believe then that neither she (my wife) nor I have really experienced the same apple. But then what is an apple? What is an object?

Today I went in to work. I go there every Monday. Had two meetings. One with Tim regarding RTC (Microsoft’s Real Time Communications framework) and the general developers meeting. I then pretty much did nothing but read news and various other things on the web. I still count it as a full day’s work. And I’ll probably make up the time with real work anyway. But I keep wondering why it is that I have to go in at all. Actually I don’t mind going in. It keeps it real. If you stay away too long things begin to atrophy, or so I’d imagine. But then each day I am in touch with Andrew via instant message. So in a sense I am there. Its just that those who work in the office don’t have to endure my ugly, bloated presence.

I feel that the medication, the Effexor, is having a negative effect on me. I don’t get depressed much, which is nice. But I think it keeps me from thinking. I want to think about all kinds of things. When I wasn’t on the Effexor I used to have all sorts of interesting thoughts, but the problem was that I’d have too many at once and couldn’t concentrate. I suppose this is what Mona, my psychiatrist, calls racing thoughts. I like my racing thoughts and my daydreaming. But then I suppose I like not being depressed. I also don’t like the anxiety, but my social anxiety doesn’t seem to be completely cured.

I’m still reading Dickens. I’m almost finished with the book, but for some reason I’ve just been too tired during the day (I suppose I just don’t sleep well enough at night what with the goddamned weight I’m putting on—sleep apnia, here I come again!). My concentration has been for shit. And now here early Tuesday morning, almost 1:00 a.m., I’m typing and not so very tired. But today I had one hell of a headache. I mean it was one of those bad ones like I have a month ago. It began while I was at work and worsened as I drove home. I took some Tylenol which didn’t take affect until several hours later. I still feel it lingering way in the background. Not so much a pain as a threat. But I’ll be in bed soon—I just took my Seroquel and it should hit in about a half hour. Sometimes it takes an hour.

Scissors are interesting to me. I don’t know why I say this but they are. I have a small pair on my desk. And now I am wondering about their origin. From whence came the scissor? I know not! Perhaps a poem or an ode or a ditty to the scissor.

From what little I’ve gained in a five minute search on the net I’ve discovered that they go back as far as the fourteenth century BCE as well as the third century, B.C., in Egypt. Apparently these showed some Greek influence in the decoration. Pinking shears were invented and patented in 1893 by Louise Austin of Whatcom, Washington. Pinking means “to decorate with a perforated pattern.” Which would explain the scalloped edges that these tend to have—my wife is into scrapbooking and apparently scalloped edged paper is all the rage, although no doubt these were invented for working with fabric.