another one

Coldplay and Panzers don't mix.

Dear Dream Diary,

Last night I dreamt that I was at an outdoor party where the band Coldplay was playing. Someone had managed to get a huge Panzer tank into the party. At first the Panzer was merely chasing people around, but eventually someone decided to use the tank to shoot at a target that was adjacent to Coldplay's stage. Upon impact, the poor band flew off the stage amidst rubble and smoke. Being the troopers they are, Coldplay crawled back on stage, bloodied but unbowed, and plugged back in. Unfortunately, by the time they were ready to start again, another band had started up on another nearby stage. It was a polynesian reggae band. Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, looked at me (at this point I'm a member of the band) with an expression on his face like, How are we supposed to compete with that? I looked out at the crowd and noticed that they were all polynesian.

A few moments later, I'm back in the crowd and Coldplay has set up on the same stage as the other band. This little reggae band has a great rhythm section with guys wearing drums all over their bodies and throwing these little boomerang drumsticks that hit the drum and come back. And boy are they rocking out! Dancing ensues. The song ends, and Coldplay triumphantly starts one of their signature grooves. The guys in the reggae band get this confused look on their faces and begin to shake their rastafarian heads. All the guys with the drums turn and face Coldplay and start tossing the boomerang-sticks in their direction, taunting them and playing drums at the same time. Then one of the sticks hits Coldplay's bass player in the face and he falls backwards off the stage.

Rough night for Coldplay, but everyone at the party had a good laugh.

Are these dreams interesting to anyone else? If not, someone please tell me to stop.

A Dream Come True

Sorry, no witty picture.

I don't know if these people qualify as mentally cacophonous (see this post for more info on the mentally cacophonous and their #1 enemy), but if you want to see a real music video from a real Southern Baptist Camp, click here. The best thing about all this is that most of the video is in fast motion, which actually does give everyone's movements a jerky, spasmodic quality. Just like I saw in my dream. I don't mean to brag, but I think it's clear that I have some sort of clairvoyance or some other unique access to truth.

I think it would be a dangerous thing to show this video to my brother.

For more Southern Baptist Camps, click here and here. The website where I found the video is here.

Moment of brilliance

I'm giving him a run for his money.

One day last week the parking near campus was especially cutthroat. By the time I found a spot, I was late for class, so I bolted up the hill to campus without locking the car or giving nary a thought to the whereabouts of my parking spot.
After class, I walked back to the car and found nothing but empty curb. I looked up and noticed a sign: "NO PARKING ANYTIME. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED."
There wasn't any phone number, so I walked around the vicinity looking for other parking signs. I found a few with phone numbers. No luck. They suggested calling the city.
After waiting on hold for a good 15 minutes, I finally spoke to a dispatch. I gave her a rough description of the car, and she said, "There doesn't appear to be anything matching that description. Maybe the person who towed it hasn't reported it yet. Check back in an hour."
Right. After about a half-hour of sitting on the curb I couldn't take it anymore, so I called the city again. Still no luck.
"Would you like to make a report, sir?"
"A report? How do I do that?"
"Well, a police officer comes to where you are and you fill out the report."
"Let's do that."
I assumed the report was for the towing incident. After waiting for the officer for 10 or 15 minutes, I realized that something didn't make sense. I called the city yet again.
The woman informed me that the officer wasn't coming to fill out a report for a towed car, but rather for a stolen car. Feeling like a genius by now, I told her it wouldn't be necessary.
By this time, Kristen, who I had called earlier, had arrived to pick me up. We went out to eat at a nearby restaurant. She was very understanding, especially given the fact that this little incident meant that she wouldn't be able to buy that pair of shoes that she's been looking at. I felt pretty bad about it, so it was nice that she took it so well.

And then, while chewing on some orange chicken and contemplating the disappointing events that had occurred over the last two hours, I realized that I had actually parked on the adjacent street.

Wow. Just wow.

a dream

This is "Mental Cacophony"

Last night I dreamt that I was watching a TV special on a music video that had been produced by a "Southern Baptist Camp" (whatever that is). The lead singer was afflicted with a disorder that gave all of his movements a jerky, spasmodic quality. The narrator noted that some people had controversially poked fun at the handicapped singer's disorder. That's when my little brother, Eric, appeared on the screen, doing a merciless impression of the music video, complete with spasms and all. The following caption appeared at the foot of the screen:
"Eric Wood -- number one enemy of the mentally cacophonous."
Apparently that was the name of the disorder from which the singer of the Southern Baptist Camp Band suffered.

I don't know why, but I thought that was the funniest thing I'd heard in a long time.

On a more serious note, I think there is something that I've experienced, on a number of occasions, that could be called mental cacophony. Has anyone else ever felt like their thoughts were way too loud? This usually happens to me in libraries and other excessively quiet places. But this doesn't make me flail my arms and jerk my head like a zombie on crack. Thank goodness.

Let the maieutics commence

Classes start next Monday (after a 9 month break), and I've consciously remarked to myself at least three times today that I am way too giddy. I'll be paying graduate tuition, since I graduated last August, but I'm not technically starting a graduate program until September. Don't ask me where. The admissions deities will decide that. For now, I'm plodding ahead with the personalized educational program that I like to call "The Credit Binge." Of course, when I purge my 225 credits at the sacred gates of graduate institutions, they're more likely to feel pity than awe.
My point is: three cheers for education!

Warning: As I get back into school, this blog will probably morph into something that is, well, boring. We all have something to say, but none of us are obligated to listen. The great thing about blogs is that I don’t know if five people or five thousand people are holding their heads and weeping at the beauty of my verbal catharsis.

Here's a shout out to Russell for being the only person who responded to the post on animal consciousness. I guess the rest of my faithful, growing readership (all five ... I mean four of you) simply doesn't care what goes through a puppy's head when it is starving to death in some crack addict's basement. Oh well, we all have our priorities.

I suppose I'll say a few things in response to Russell. I’m grateful that Russ caught the unintentional ambiguity between (1) self-consciousness as a feeling of concern about how others perceive oneself and (2) self-consciousness as an awareness of oneself as a being distinct from other beings. I was referring to the second sense.

I suspect that many, perhaps a majority, believe that animals have self-consciousness. Russell agrees. He provides three anecdotes to support his position:
(1) The behavior of his dog, Terry, is nearly indistinguishable from the behavior of his son, Porter.
(2) A study on sheepdogs concluded that they have a capacity for memory that is roughly equivalent to that of a 3-4 year old child. For example, they can identify a fetch toy (from a pile of other toys) after having not seen it for a year.
(3) Terry (the dog) shows a sort of self-concern and/or self-preservation that is inconsistent with a lack of self-awareness.

Here are some short thoughts in response:
(1) I, too, have always thought that infants are more like animals than humans, and should be treated as such. We teach them “tricks” like walking on two legs and we condition them to repeat phrases (like a parrot). Who can deny that we speak to babies and puppies in exactly the same babble-language? And when they do something bad, we speak real English in harsh, repetitive bursts, as if they magically understand after the third repetition. Unfortunately, I think this point gives us no reason to think that either babies or dogs are self-aware.
(2) This is the best argument, in spite of the fact that memory can be characterized in ways that don’t require self-awareness. The ability to identify something like a chew-toy (regardless of how much time has passed) in the way that the sheepdog does it ends up playing an important role in this discussion.
(3) How is Terry’s self-preservation different from a thorn-bush’s self-preservation, or that of any number of toxic plants, for that matter? Those plants are the way they are because any of their potential ancestors who were palatable and nice on the stomach were eaten. The tough, poisonous plants were the ones who passed down their genetic information. Of course, someone can say the same thing about the behaviors of humans, but there is (we hope) an important difference between humans and plants, and that difference has something to do with self-awareness. What is it about Terry that makes him seem like he has that extra ingredient?

The crucial point of self-consciousness, I believe, isn’t so much the consciousness as it is the self. Consciousness is such a hard term to define that we find professional philosophers (i.e. David Chalmers) who are willing to say that thermometers are conscious. If we are going to be so broad, we might simply say that consciousness is a responsiveness to information in the environment (which, if I remember correctly, isn’t terribly far from what Chalmers says). A self-conscious thing would then be responding to information about its self. Again, we come up against an ambiguity: something that responds to itself could be as simple as a camcorder taping itself in a mirror, but something that responds to its self must be in possession of some self to which it can respond. A camcorder doesn’t have a self. Why are we willing to say that?

Is there some activity or capacity—possessed by humans and lacking in camcorders—that is a necessary condition for selfhood?

I think there is, and I’m not sure that dogs have it. Before I taint you with my views (which are probably wrong anyway), I hope a few more people will share their thoughts.

the face of death

It's time to make it official: Kris and I are professional house-sitters. When we move out of our Mapleton location mid-December, we'll be moving to my Gabby's Provo home for 4 months (while she enjoys the warmth of Arizona). Many thanks to a sweet, thoughtful Gabby who always takes good care of her grandkids. If anyone is looking for a professional house-sitter in April 2007, the Woods are now accepting applications.

While we were moving some boxes into Gabby's garage, I came across a book called How We Die, by Sherwin B. Nuland. The book gives a physician's view of some of the most common causes of death, unveiling them in a way. A major premise of the book is that death is either romanticized and brushed up through sentimental accounts of peaceful passing, or hidden behind the closed doors of hospitals and rest homes when things get ugly. According to Nuland, they usually do. He goes into detail about cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, AIDS, murder, suicide, and old age. The chapter on heart disease scared me. The chapter on Alzheimer's made me cry. Interestingly, the most peaceful death described was that of murder. The human body has developed a defense mechanism against the sheer terror that should grip anybody who is suffering a violent death. By the time the situation is understood, endorphins have already pulled the victim into a sort of peaceful shock. Of course, murder is the cause of death that is perhaps hardest on loved ones who are left living. At any rate, now that I'm almost finished with the book, I'm seriously tempted to try my hand at medical school. At the very least, it has inspired me to pursue some lines of research that are less concerned with understanding my own experience and more concerned with alleviating the pain that other's experience.
Death has many faces. If you want to glimpse the one that will probably greet you at the gate, read this book.

Not to be overly socratic (Socrates often spoke of "practicing" death), but I think this is one of those lessons that time will keep teaching me: life is most meaningful when death is in the picture.

Epiphany

So I was just sitting here responding to emails when all of the sudden, out of the clear blue sky, I thought of the old TV series "Alien Nation." You know, the one with the people (aliens, I mean) with leopard spots on their heads. When I said the title to myself, it dawned on me: alienation. How could I be so stupid? Poor aliens.

The Monkey Wrangler part 2

This is half of my dream pet.








I rarely vote for anything, but I like the idea of putting this question to the polls.

"Do you think animals have self-consciousness?"

Please reply to this post and vote. Please give a reason for your vote.

The Dangers of Swinging Zippers

Here’s a rundown of Europe. First, Germany. We stayed with my awesome sister Elisabeth, who showed us Berlin in spite of her busy schedule. What a great town. I love you Lisa—and thanks for letting us sleep in Nikki Sudden’s old bed while you slept on the ground! And thanks for moving out of your scary old place before we visited you! I don’t know why this struck me as funny, but in Germany, there are droves of German Shepherds. I’d laugh and point every time I saw one. Man, don’t be so predictable! To be fair, we also saw a French Poodle our first day in France. That pretty much sums up Germany.

On to Geneva. Don’t get me started. I want to move to Montreux and join the circus. My talent would be . . . taming lions. Daniel, duh.
We really did see a circus. I went mainly because of the prospect of primates. We almost got kicked out because I was videotaping the performance in spite of the apparently obvious request (in French) to not do so. Oh, and since I forgot to bring some hiking shorts, I was forced to purchase some capris (I prefer “man-pris”) for 50 euros. That’s getting close to $70. It was that or the pseudo-speedo.
Another highlight of Geneva: me using the reflection on the window of a really nice car to pop a zit while the owner of the car was, unbeknownst to me, approaching the car. And me in my man-pris. Oh, the embarrassment.

Paris was pastries, cathedrals, and museums. I also have some incredible footage of a guy sitting on his karaoke machine in the subway, reverb cranked to full blast, closing his eyes while belting Elton John tunes—with the heaviest French accent possible. I still haven’t nailed down the reason why I cry every time I watch the clip.
It was great to spend time with some old friends (Bap and Mer) and spend time making new friends.

I think they should convert Rome into a theme park. Luckily, the insane crowds weren’t so infuriating that they overshadowed the breathtaking art and architecture. I don’t care how many pictures you’ve seen. Actually seeing Rome expands one’s sense of what is humanly possible. Another thing it did (and Paris did this too) was draw as clear a line as possible between places and things that are meaningful and those that lack meaning.

Highlight from the airports: When we arrived in Germany, we were taxied from the plane to the terminal in a hydraulic-bus. The bus was able to raise itself to the level of the plane exit, board the passengers, and then lower itself to a reasonable level. The hydraulics, however, made for a squirrelly ride. Since all the seats were taken, I was standing up in the aisle, one backpack at my feet and the other on my back. After a particularly large lurch, I happened to notice that the woman sitting to my left wore the most horrified expression I’ve ever seen on a human. Her eyes bulging, her jaw clenched, her nostrils flaring. I watched her for a moment and noticed that every time the bus swayed and my backpack got within a foot from her face, her face would scrunch up and she would violently pull her head back.
“Is everything alright?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is my backpack frightening you?”
She sighed deeply and then nodded to the man beside her. “Last time we were on one of these things a zipper from someone’s backpack whipped him right in the eye. He had to go to the emergency room and it ruined our trip.”
The man next to her, clearly nervous and with perspiration on his brow, tapped his thick glasses and said, “I have to wear these now. And I had to wear a patch for a few weeks.”
“Sounds pretty traumatic,” I said.
“It was.”
“Would you like me to remove the backpack?”
“Yes, please,” they replied in unison, visibly relieved.
Kris and I are now acutely aware of the dangers of swinging zippers.

Favorite quotes from the trip:

“Kris, I’m glad you don’t urinate in stairwells.” – Daniel

“Oh, yes, the fountains . . . uh . . . otherwise known as trees.” – Kris

“Boo.” -- Daniel, whispering in Kristen’s ear in the middle of the night, for reasons unknown to him.

Daniel: “I wish I had a German-English dictionary!”
Kris: “I wish I had an Italy sweatshirt.”
Daniel: “An Italy sweatshirt would be extremely useful right now.”

“Do I have disco butt?” – Baptiste
(FYI, “disco butt” is a condition of the pants, brought on by excessive wear, in which the fabric of the bum region takes on a shiny, disco-era quality.)

“Can someone please urinate in my nostril?” – Elisabeth, referring to one particularly ubiquitous aroma in Berlin.

“Yeah! You spread your righteous seed!” – Elisabeth, spoken to a spider. We were walking in a cemetery when we noticed a web that was beautiful, ambitious, and in a highly conspicuous location. The spider stood defiantly in the center of the web.

Caninity and Felinity

You'd be mad too if your brain was exteriorized.




I’ve recently noticed that I have a tendency to ridicule animals. Well, maybe “ridicule” is going too far—I definitely like to laugh at them, though. This explains the monkey obsession. Monkeys are just too much like humans for me to let it go unridiculed. Anyway, the other day I was trying to convince Kris to get a dog.
“It’s either a kid or a dog,” said Kris.
“Okay, a dog.”
“But we need to wait until we have a big yard. I don’t want an inside dog.”
“Oh, come on. We can get a French bulldog. You like French things, don’t you. Here’s a picture of one.”
“It’s hideous. And our apartment is what? Close to 100 square feet? What will the dog do?”
“You don’t buy a bulldog because it does things. You buy it so you can laugh at it.”
“Laugh at it?”
“Yes. Because it’s so hideous.”
“Let’s just have a kid, okay?”

Lately Kris has been laughing at me because I talk to the cat. One of the cats (at the house where we are house-sitting)—her name is Princess—has recently taken up the effort to establish an open dialogue between herself and her new caretakers. Whenever we crack the windows on cool nights, Princess will poke her head through the crack and begin talking to us. Of course, the only word she knows is “Meow.” But Princess has a bit of a nasal quality to her voice, and it ends up sounding like “Now.”
So when she initiates the conversation, I just barrage her with questions like the following:

“When do you want me to do some jumping jacks?”
“Now.”
“Okay. When do you want me to give you some smoked salmon?”
“Now.”
“Got it. When do you want me to bodyslam you?”
“Now.”
“Are you sure? Let’s wait a few minutes.”
“Now.”
“Whatever you say. And when would you like us to remove your vocal chords?”

At this point, Kristen has had enough and closes the window.

Keep them dog(g)ies rollin'.

This is my dream pet.


Time for an update:
I slipped a disc in my spine last Sunday. It happened as I was bending down to pick up some books before moving to the front of the class to teach a lesson at church. “Hi, for those who don’t know me, my name is Daniel Wood. My wife and I are house-sitting for the Wrathalls until December. I think I just slipped a disc. Today’s lesson is on the Holy Ghost.” That’s how it went. The only way I could abet the pain was by clenching my stomach muscles as hard as possible. You can imagine what I looked like as I tried to teach about a member of the godhead. So I finish the lesson and discover that one of the guys in the class happens to be an osteopath. Incredibly nice guy. He treated me twice for free and wrote me a prescription for some pain killers.

What else? I got a job selling guitars at a music shop in Orem. I’m graduating in two weeks. I’ve been taking advantage of the extra time by reading more than usual. Just finished “Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco (amazing book!). Just started one book by Viktor Frankl, “The Doctor and the Soul,” as well as two books by Oliver Sacks: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and “The Island of the Colorblind.” I’m starting GRE prep this week. Leaving for Europe for two weeks in mid-October. We’ll hit Berlin (to visit my sister Elisabeth), Paris, and Rome.

On a sad note: It looks like Auburn, the band I’ve been playing with for the last 2 or 3 years, is dissolving (at least for a while). It was discovered that the singer has nodes on her vocal chords. She is undergoing vocal rest and therapy until things improve. I guess every day must end.

On a happier note, here’s a joke I used to make Kristen laugh today (I have a daily quota): What do you call a Russian who is hesitant to finish school? A stallin’ grad.

House-sitting

Bonding with the dog.







We moved, so we're back to stealing bandwidth from our neighbors. We roam from room to room, holding up our laptop like an offering to the internet deities, hoping for a strong signal. Honestly, it has gotten to the point where I’m convinced that if someone comes into the room when I’m online, they’ll block the signal and I’ll lose the connection.
We’re actually house-sitting for a BYU professor who is in London overseeing the study abroad program. It is a nice 3-story home in Mapleton in a very quiet neighborhood. Aside from the basement flooding and part of the lawn dying during the first two weeks, things have gone pretty smooth. They have a dog named Miksee who gets really annoyed and starts growling when you don’t pet her.
They also have two cats whose existence we just recently confirmed. For the first month, we noticed something funny: the cats were absolute pigs and the dog was anorexic. At least that’s how it looked. The dog refused to touch its food and the cat food never lasted more than a couple hours. Last week, though, Kristen went into the garage and found Miksee on a cat food binge, looking quite guilty, with two dejected cats sitting side by side, watching dolefully as their food was stolen. Nature can be cruel, but hey, I said to the cats, survival of the fittest is still a law last time I checked.

28 reasons why I finished my thesis

This is one's proverbial "ox (or bull, in this case) in the mire."

Halfway through the writing of my thesis, I thought of changing the topic to "The Hallucinagenic Properties of Red Bull," since I seemed to know a lot more about that than I did about what I was trying to write about at the time. A few days later, I was tempted to change it yet again, but this time the topic would be, "The Amelioration of Taurine and Caffiene Poisoning Through the Administration of Bismuth Subsalicylate," but the results of my experiments were a-Bismol (abysmal). One other idea was "Democratman Forever: The Political Writings of George Clooney During the Batman Years," but I think that was part of a hallucination, so I scrapped that one, too.

I decided to stick with my original boring thesis.

Oh, and by the way, Red Bull doesn't give you wings. It gives you 10 hours of sleep a week. Which may be exactly what the Doctor ordered.*

* Of course, no good doctor would order such a thing. I was referring to an evil doctor, like a witch doctor.

My wife does NOT look like a trilobite

A handsome trilobite.




In March, my wife and I attended a conference in Portland. The first lecture we attended was on the concept of authenticity in the writings of Heidegger--pretty dense stuff. Kristen, being the amazing person she is, was trying her hardest to support me and connect with this aspect of my life. The discussion took a turn toward the topic of ontology. When she heard the word "ontology" her face lit up and she whispered to me, "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny." Of course, she meant to refer to the dominant biological theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. We had a good laugh over it.

Tonight we resurrected the discussion and debated whether ontology actually does recapitulate phylogeny or not. I explained that the meaning of the original theory was that in the process of development from zygote to fetus, an organism roughly displays all of the phylums through which it passed on the road to evolving up to the phylum that it now inhabits. Her apt reply: "I have never looked like a trilobite." What could I say? In my opinion, that is a solid refutation of the theory.

Big Band Theory

This is a Big Band.









I received a comment from Pictoris ab Lumen on my post about situational digestion (Intermission). He made an attempt to account for my strange digestive and sleep behavior by appealing to the Big Bang Theory and String Theory. Immediately after reading it, I realized that I had accidentally said that these disorders of mine disprove the Big Bang Theory. Here is my response to Pictoris ab Lumen:

I meant to say that they disprove the Big Band Theory. You haven’t heard of it? I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it since it is so closely related to String Theory. It turns out that there are relatively few fundamental frequencies at which strings vibrate, there being many derivates of these fundamental frequencies, of course, but absolutely no anomalous vibration in the in-between frequencies. Believe it or not, if you take the complete works of Glenn Miller, arrange them in chronological order, and take the respective tempos multiplied by the number pi, you can perfectly map them upon these fundamental string vibration frequencies. Once this connection has been made, other obvious correlations emerge. For example, was the title “String of Pearls” just a coincidence, especially considering that the elemental resonation frequency of the elements that make up pearls happens to be exactly the product of the suggested tempo and the number pi? It is obvious that Glenn Miller was a closet string theorist.

In spite of its merits, the Big Band Theory has its anomalies. For example, my digestive tract and my hypothalamus. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I believe that my situational narcolepsy and situational digestion disprove the Big Ban[d] Theory. Most proponents of this theory would try to account for these apparent anomalies by noting that the constructive interference between the resonation frequencies of the bookstore and my stomach (or the chemistry book and my circadian rhythms) gets my stomach (or hypothalamus) “in the mood.” I disagree. Even if it were the case that there was constructive interference, it isn’t clear that this interference would have the adverse effects that I’ve described. The only thing that is clear is that my stomach and hypothalamus simply march to the beat of a different drummer. Maybe Gene Krupa?