Let’s Sit Here

“I like the left side. I don’t know. The right side feels weird somehow. ON the left side you have the Pearsal family and the Nelsons…” MOm told me the other Sunday when we somehow got on the weird topic of her favorite church pew. Always we sit on the left, somehow being so accurate as to sit between the certain family and with the chatty old guy at the end of the pew to my right. What’s the big idea with us having our favorite places to sit? ARe we rreally creatures of habit? Must be. IT takes twenty-one days to break a habit, by the way, and breaking the habit to going to a new plaec from your fave sitting area is, wel, just a bad habit to break. It’s true we get comfy in a particular place. PErhaps because it’s familiar. Me and my sister always prefer to sit at a certain booth in the college cafeteria. Why? “Why do we have to sit here?” I whined again as she plopped her backpack onto the seat. “Beacuse,” she said matter-of-factly, “it’s tradition.” Okay, so that’s her way of saying, “It’s comfy and I like it because I’m used to it.” Fine. It’s just so odd, don’t you think? ONce we choose a certain place to sit anywhere–a diner, college/school, and even at our dinner tables, wel, it’s weird when you stop and think about it. I mean, really think about it. I can always say, as I have for more years than I can add up right now in my head, that I sit on the end of the table. That’s my spot. If anyone’s’ in my spot, they’ll say, “OH, I”m in your spot,” as if I have my name engraved into the table there. WE become possessive of even the chairs we sit
in!

The Soul Theory: Why Animals have Souls

It’s the age-old question: do animals have souls? Well, here’s my theory. Even POpe JOhn II declared animals own souls. My thought is, that they do. Why? Well, think about it. If animals were all instinct, as many scientists and biologist seem to agree on, animals have personalities. IT might not seem that way for wild animals, like that annoying squirrel rolling nuts through the attic roof or that pretty cardinal that’s been coming to your birdfeeder lately, but that’s only because you’re not with them all the time. NOw, with your dog or cat or horse, sure. YOu notice a persona like another friend of yours. I feel that without souls, animals would just be machines. HOw do you explain the expression of emotion in your dog or cat,, pet bird or pony when it feels happy? Grieves the loss of its companion when he or she has died or has been separated from them somehow? Elephants, whales and wolves all share a human-like quality when it comes to expressing emotion. The wahles sing their joyous or greiving songs beneath the ocean blue. Wolves will mope around with drooped ears for days after a member has been killed. Chimpanzee mothers will hodl their dead baby in their arms days after its died, and dolphins will even show feelings of jealousy when another in the pod gets more attention by a human handler. Love in the animal kingdom is expressed as well, and not just in a sexual manner. Before that, like humans dating, the animals will court one another with friendly gestures. Wolves will nuzzle one another as they lay side by side like two lovers beneath the stars. NOw, your own pets can show how much they love you through your cat purring and even licking you, (mine does anyway). Dogs prick up and whine and bark with excitement at your approach. Your bird perks right up and sings a little song for you when you call out his name. EVen your fish comes peering up through its tank at you, and perhaps it’s more than just hunger he’s feeling. Responding to sadness to humans is yet another reason why I think animals have souls. My cat knows when I’m upset. She’ll come over and lay next to me, quietly, almost tentatively, as not to disturb the quietquiet as I cry. All instinct? I dont’ say so. Animals develop trust. YOur crazy wild kitten you rescued form the animal shelter used to flinch away when you tried petting it till it realized over time you were kind and would treat it lovingly. Now five years later she’s your best friend. The horse you were determined to befriend would buck and nearly trample you everytime you came up to it. Now seven years later he’s gentle as a butterfly and you can sit right on the ground in front of him without fear he’ll stomp you down. The idea here is looking beyond instinct. Wile animals are separet from the human race for not possessing free will, or a conscious in this case, they still hav that spark of light within them all of us are born with. AS for animals going to heaven? WEll, we’ll never know til ourselves are finally taken home to that outside realm of eternity. Some say the soul of the animal returns to the earth after death. Maybe that’s true. Animals are a gift to us and we should enjoy and respect that special gift as much as we can. Spend time with your pet. Talk to them. PEt them. Give them treats. Let them know you care about them, and they will love and care for you back.

IT’s my Blessing and Curse: The Empathic REality

AS you know, I’m an empath. Being one isn’t always great. NOT fun at all when you experience–or feel like you can-the pain of others, either emotionally or physically. Ever since I’ve been open to my empathic side, it’s grown and strengthened over the years. And that means more people who carry a lot of emotional pain and come from dark backrounds in their lives often come to me to talk. My friend has told me I have this aura where people feel they can open up to me. Can trust me to spill their guts on their deepest feelings, how they’re feeling, and all. IT happened to me again this mornign at work. My coworker has been going through some really bad times and revealed to me she cuts herself. Just the thought, the image of a knife’s blade being run over and over again below the wrist made me ill. I flinched and cringed when she took my arm and traced her finger in the pattern the knife had traved. IT was so strange having her just begin telling me how she’d started cutting herself again, her idea to bring death quicker, (which in reality only makes you bleed much slower and makes you agonize more), and how unafraid she was to show this to me. How hse told me her dismal, frightening past during her worst times in depression and nearly committed suicide in various ways. I always end up feeling like a counselor instead of a puppy-bather at these times. And wish I wasn’t so intuned to her feelings. So flooded with vivid images she seems to send me mentally with her descriptions of attempting to jump out a second-story window or of the horrific nightmares of dead deer in her apartment. That only made me actually shake my head afterwards as I left the room briefly to clear the thoughts. They were so awful. The ideas! With so many people trusting me more than others, they come out and tell me the things I wish I never heard. LIke someone I once worked with who actually told me that he’d lost his virginity over the weekend and found the sex not so fun after all.NOw, him and I weren’t friends. Just working together. Sure we knew general stuff about one another’s lives, but telling me about having sex!? I didn’t find that easy to react to. How would you react to someome you had known on a mutual basis for only three or so months about losing your virginity? IT was strange how I felt he regretted ever doing it. I could tell. Almost feel his disappointment in finally trying it out with a girl he thought he loved, but didn’t. That the whole experience had left him feeling tainted in some way. I knew this. How? I can’t say, accept for that strange side of me that’s called empathy. So, do I like being an empath? Well, for one, I have no choice but to live with it. It’s in my living veins. For the most part, though, I do. I do feel good about having someone in need who needs to vent or unload their thoughts on somebody. And that somebody’s usually me. OR only me. MOstly, it’s only me they come to to talk to. They just come out and say things without hesitation, as if they’d known me for five years, instead of five months. I’m serious.The scary part for me is, though, I can’t always tell if I can trust the other person to tell them how I feel about things. Being an empath, I’ve found, doesn’t always mean you can sense trust in others. I know it sounds odd. Maybe other empaths can. Maybe I just aren’t tuning in hard enough to them. But that’s the truth for now, and it’s a fact, and facts are stubborn things, as they say. Or whoever said it. I can’t remember now. Yes, being born an empath is hard. Takes time to get used to and be aware of. Today was one day I wished I wasn’t this way. I didn’t want to feel my coworker’s inner pain. See those horrible images in my mind from her darkest dreams at night.NOt to feel my friend’s sadness tonight through the phoneline as he cried. OR my father’s desperation to get through to me over something I said that hurt him. The feelings are like waves, or rays or pulses extending out from the person into me. That’s what it feels like for me as an empath. IT’s powerful. Unavoidable and can’t be ignored. IT stays, forever imprinted in my memories and mind. AS for feeling good feelings, yes, sometimes I can feel high energy of happiness from others. Feel “good” pulses from the other person and can latch onto them, almost absorb them into me. HOwever, most of the time, it’s the strong, negative feelings that come to me, and through them, as an empath, a connection is made. A connection to being a human, a reasoning, free-willed animal, the one thing that separates us from the animal kingdom. AS for animals being empathic, well, this I feel is true, but that’s another topic. For now, I am an empath, my blesssing and my curse.

The Mystery of Nostalgia

Nothing like nostalgia to keep me up at night. Like caffine that won’t wear off.
Okay, so this strange thing called nostalgia can mean I’m feeling really good inside, but also longing for those memorable times growing up, especially 1999, when I was fourteen, and everything was…really good. A lot of my time was spent in my imagination and reading books, The Animorphs series being my total fave. MOStly because they became animals.
Me and my sisters would play it together. I’d play Ax and CAssie a lot. AS Ax, I had a lot of fun. My friend would play Jake. I’d walk around as “Ax” saying, “bun-zuh,” and one time we had this little episode with Ax when he learned about holding a human baby. Ax, as me, pretended to rock a baby back and forth and say over and over, “Bab-bee. Babe-eeee.(rock, side to side arms as cradling baby).” IT was really fun. I’d go around pretending to morph a lion or wolf andd race around the yard as my friend played Visser Three. IT was so awesome.
Tonight I signed up for Bookshare.org, and was so thrilled. I read the last Animorph book, The Beginning, (NO. 54, 2001), with it, and was really sad when Rachael died. Everybody was, though. All Animorph fans, that is. I can’t say the book was all that good after her death. Marco becoming rich and famous. Jake going into depression, and Tobias being the hawk he is. And humans interacting with the Andalite race? HOrk-Bajirs in Yellow Stone Park? OH, please!

IN the end they ended up in space on a bladeship naed the Rachel to save Ax. Some evil force called The ONe took Ax over and I assume they had to kill Ax in the end by destroying the ship he’d been captured on. That was it. Applegate concluded with thanks and admitted she, too, was going to miss her characters. Well, no kidding. She created them. They were like real people. They were real people. Most any character’s based on a real person or many people into one.

Then my sister this evening pulled out some of our lame old movies we made back in 99 with the camcorder. They had little plotline and most of the roles given to me were really minor. Like the one where I had to play a fat girl, when actually, I was so skinny (a healhtyhealhthyhealthy weight, by the way for my age and height), and wore oversized overalls for the cheesy effect for being fat. I was killed in the end by an evil ghost, though. The plotline was about some ghost girl who gets revenge on another girl’s seventeenth birthday. It was really lame. REally I didn’t like the roles I was given by my middle sister, the director and camer amera operator. I mean, who wants to play the mom all the time? OR the snobby rich girl? I just liked producing the music on keyboard or even stealing other artists’ songs, and that’s one reason we can’t ever submit the movies into any contests. Copyright infringement! Hello? Even music was pretty good then. Okay, Back STreet Boys and Britny Spears–jeez! Well, I hated Spears then, too. I was still stuck on Hanson. I don’t know. IT was the real year a lot of us grew up in many ways in my family and explored beyond the world of play as we emerged into teenagers. Friendships grew and broke off. WE got more daring. My sisters tried riding down a creek not far from our house on snowtubes in January. It was darn cold and they got wet. WE had to get our neighbor to drive us home, only five minutes away, ,though. That was the year, too, I went sound-effect crazy, and went all over with my compact tape player recording birds and everything else. I got my sisters and me together to record the sounds of a restaurant. We klinked silverware and against dishes, and put all sorts of voices for many different people. Then we did a store sound, and shook out plastic store bags and I use dthe keyboard on the organ for cash register sounds. I didn’t have the internet then, and didn’t know how to get actual sound effects. Silly, I know. I had a lot to learn yet. I still collect real sound effects to this day, though, and have held onto those cheesy recordings of sounds I collected since then. I hope to use them someday. They’re not half bad, some of them, anyway.
I got one of my Hanson t-shirts today, the freshly Squeezed Rock and Roll one, and that got me singing Mmmbop today on the digital recorder. What I want to know is why nostalgia have to feel so…weird? Why itmakes me feel so sad and suddenly lonely? Is it because I’m trying to reach for something in the past to pull into the present, but knowing I can’t makes me feel like this? I hate this feeling. My sister stil says she misses 1999, and I know she experiences this mysterious nostalgia, too. My friend says he misses the 90’s. When I told a teacher I missed the 90’s, she said I was too young to feel nostalgic. I don’t think so. Why can’t you long for the simpler days when everything was one big experiment? When your life revolved around your parents and they took care of everything and when the biggest thing that was on your mind was how you were going to earn money to buy that movie soundtrack. Alright, so I made DAd a deal and said I’d wax his car for ten dollars I didn’t have to buy the Tarsan soundtrack. Remember that? Still have it, too. Wow!. WEl, just some thoughts on the idea of nostalgia. Makes the ordinary totally extraordinary. Time travel through the mind. Memories from a time past, but not forgotten.

IS it Destiny?

My best friend has this uncanny ability to foresee things in the future. HE might not have the exact timing on when the event will occur, but he gets these feelings about things. Returning back for my second semester in college, I complained about how I hoped to make new friends. OR even one. My best friend said he’d been having the feelings of how I’d meet someone. A female, a little odler than me, but not by much. Someone I could relate to. Someone I could help because of my experience. I’d gone through some tough things recently and so I figured this person I’d meet, or hoped to meet, or was predicted I’d meet, would have similar experiences. Well, my best friend told me his intuition was saying I’d meet this person sometime in September of this year. WEll, I kept my eye open for a particular girl. IN my classes I wondered who would be the person. Even outside of class at my workplace I wondered if my coworker who spills her guts on all her latest problems was the one. But she’s much older, and man, I was hoping she wasn’t the one. Well, just this week a girl in my math class, called Sheena, happened to spot my skateboard keychain attached to my backpack. “Oh, you like skateboarding?” she asked with enthusiasm. I was pumped. “Yeah,” I said smiling. “Actually I longboard.” She told me she’d ridden vert, but, added rather sadly, that she was knocked out a few times. so I guess that was it for the vert. Well, okay. So we had something in common. Big deal. Maybe I could get her email or phone number somehow, without sounding too weird or desperate. WEll, today after math class, I was certain, and disappointed, I wasn’t going to get her phone number or email address. Something in me was drawn to her. Had atached itself to her. A crush? Man, I hoped not. I’d had crushes on girls in the past, but this seemed different. NOt like a crush. fascination. Yeah, that was it. I thought about her a lot. But not in the I-like-her-so-much way. MOre like,”When can I get to know her better? When will she talk to me?” WEll, I had lunch in the lounge, not expecting her to see her. IT was over. Until next week when I’d see her again, anyway. I was so bummed. WEll, just by fate, and yes, even destiny, she and this other dude I forgot the name of, came right to the same lounge I was in! They sat down and went through some dirt bike mag, but talked little. NOt enough to get me interested. The guy said some stuff to me, but not much. thenThen he turned to Sheena, and in hushed voices they talked amungst one another. About what, I didn’t know. I wiwshed I knew, but it sounded pretty serious. NOt like a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of thing, though. The guy and Sheena talked something about life at home, but nothing specific enough to hone in on. I felt awkward then, hearing this supposedly private little conversation, if that;’s what it was, but wanted to hear it all. I stood up, back turned as I pretended to do something on my phone. IT worked. They ignored me. but then the guy got mean. Bully-mean. KEpt yanking on Sheena’s wire Goth necklace, even though she protested for him to stop. Then they’d laugh like it wa a joke. Okay. NOThing serious, I figured. But already I was getting annoyed by the guy. SEe, I hate bullies. I really do. I guess you can say I play the hero. Though, that’s not my intention. I just hate when people pick on others. The weaker ones. So, the bullying intensified, and Sheena didn’t walk away. Didn’t fight back. The guy made a threat to squeeze her arm, or something like that, and she didn’t want him to. They were too physically close to one another. INvading her space. I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned and went right up to the guy. “Leave her alone!” I said, my tone strong and stern. The guy shut right up. Both him and Sheena sstared at me, incredulous at what I was doing. “What kind of a man are you? Where’s your respect for her?” I demanded, and Sheena said, ‘Thanks, I’m okay.” I didn’t buy it. I didn’t care. HE deserved to hear it. I had no intentoin to fighting him, though. ONly if he made the first move perhaps. Then, Sheena grasped my hand, shaking it. “Thanks,” she said, and together her and the guy hurried off. “Back off!” I shouted back at him, and was disgusted at how he followed her. I guess they’re friends. But not good ones at that. AFterwards I felt shaky. Almost wanted to cry. I was mixed up. But I didn’t cry and the shaking from the energy put out to stand up to the guy subsided in a few minutes. I thought over what had just happened. First, I’d been forced to make contact in some way with Sheena. Plus, during her annoyed insistance to be left alone by the idiot guy she’d mentioned being twenty-five-years-old. Whoa! Wasn’t that part of my friend’s prediction? Yes. An older female. Somehow I sensed she was sad in some way, too. Something on her mind. Something bad. IT must be fate. I told my friend about it. I’ll keep my eyes open. Myself open.

Stuck in Five o’clock: a Back to the Future phenomena

this is true. All of it. And it happened to me. NOw, as you know, I soulbond–(check my post “A Million Different People: soulbondin”)–and one of those people is with none other than Maarty Mc’Fly, from Back to the Future. Well, my father is aware of this zealious craze I have for the character, but doesn’t really know much about the bonding part. NO one really does. Well, he decided one day to use the movie’s context to get me excited about some surprise he had for me. NOrmaly, Dad’s surprises aren’t really that great. NOt really that, well, surprising. So when I got home from work that afternoon, he told me to meet him at five o’clock on the dot. I agreed. Well, I had internet trouble and was yacking wtih the tech people well after four p.m that afternoon, and it was about one minute before five o’clock when my father yells up the stairs for me to come down. NOw, I hadn’t taken this surprise very seriously. I figured he wanted me to watch some stupid movie with him. I really did, and so hungn up the phone and hurried downstairs, about a minute after five p.m. “Too late. What’s-his-name wouldn’t have forgotten,” my dad said, really lamely since he forgot Marty’s actual name. He really did. So I just grinned at that. “Now you have to wait another hour for the surprise,” Dad went on, then added, “And until then, you don’t exist.” OH, no. He was messing with that fading-in-time thing from the movie. Great. And when Dad gets going on a silly imaginative idea like that, he means it. So I went upstairs and did my own thing, but felt the soulbonding of Marty Mc’fly. When I’ll tell you, it was the longest hour in that whole day. To have someone walking around pretending I wasn’t really there in the room. And when I said anything, Dad would turn to MOm and ask in puzzlement, “Did you hear that? What was that noise?” I hated it. The soulbonded Marty hated it, too, and even more so when DAd called from downstairs up to me in my room, “Biff, time for dinner!” just around six. O, joy. Now I was the buttface. Then I paced my room, and asked out loud, “What would it be like not to exist? Well, like nothing. You wouldn’t exist.” So I made suersure I was downstairs before six, about five minutes before. I even asked my mom if it was a stupid movie DAd wanted me to watch with him. “NO, it’s not TV,” she insisted seriously. She knew what it was. I could tell by her tone. IN the living room where I met DAd, the TV was running. Great. Mom was lying. Then, Dad had me sit on the couch and turned the TV off. Then, he said, “IN about one minute you’ll be back in 2007.” Then he counted up, the milage like we were excellerating on the gas in the Delorian. “thirty miles…fifty miles…seventy…eighty…eighty-five…ninety…” Then… Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! The Grandfather clock chimed six. OH, man! I hated him. I hated him for the dumb joek. IT was so stupid. To make me walk around all weird like that for an hour and keep me in suspense for an hour for a darn clock?! My friend thought it was a funny thing. I didn’t. I take mysoulbonding a little too seriously perhaps. Well, actually, I am serious about it. IT’s real. My friend knows that, too. HE knows how personal Marty is to me. The clock has been in our family forever now. We hadn’t had it out of the closet in a while and it’s always a big deal for DAd when he winds it up for the first time. HE likes clocks. So that was my lame adventure stuck in five o’clock. And man, am I glad to be back! Temperal displacement sucks.

The 21st myth: FAct or FictioN?

The Twenty-first Myth
So, if a myth is nothing more than a belief, is it true? Can something actually occur if it a myth? Or is it just that? Something that happens when you believe it will, then it’s all in the mind, right?
A friend told me of a myth that the day before your twenty-first birthday, from midnight of that day’s beginning till the end at midnight, something good or bad that’s significant to you will happen. At first I was convinced of this myth I’d never heard of before when my friend told me that one person won tickets to Disneyland and that another had gotten into a car accident that day and the other was kicked out of his house. Of course this all could be pure coincidence?
When I asked a few others if they’ve heard of such a thing, they said no, that the day before was ordinary. Okay, I thought, then this really is some made up myth that’s meant to either scare or thrill you, depending on what you believe will come your way within the twenty-four hours before your twenty-first birthday.
I decided to test this theory and was careful not to think too much of the myth, in case I’d actually cause something to happen myself. I went about my normal day, which sadly, was quite uneventful.
I woke up at eleven a.m to an empty house, my parents and sisters out, and at noon had a normal brunch of oatmeal and toast. Then I got back to work on a pair of wolf ears for a partial fursuit I’d been obsessing over for the past week. It was a project I always wanted to do and finally had the right pattern in mind. At three o’clock I went off to Good Friday Mass where I found it hard to focus most of the time.
I returned home after four that afternoon and went back to work on the ears of the fursuit. By six a friend called and chattered about nothing of real importance to me as usual. By seven o’clock I had a nice dinner with the family and around seven-thirty returned to the fursuit I was determined to finish by that night. I finally had the perfected result of my furry ears by eight-thirty and at nine cleaned up my room and vacuumed. Nothing was sucked up in the vacuum which was a good sign. Between quarter of ten and ten-thirty I prayed as usual and wrote a quick journal at quarter of eleven. By eleven o’clock I hopped online and did nothing of real importance and by midnight after reading a silly ad-on story at one of my favorite websites, was kicked offline by a bad site I went to that had something against my computer. So the day had past.
But there’s one thing I didn’t zoom in on here. My wolf ears. I was determined to complete them by the week’s end and had. I felt elated by such an accomplishment. So does that count as just pure coincidence or…is it really true?
I say coincidence. I believe that the more you think something will happen, it ultimately will. . You think something could happen to you that’s bad somewhere and you’re so worried about it you get hurt by carelessly, oh, I don’t know, dropping a frying pan on your foot? To me, this whole thing was nonsense. Out of boredom, though, and to amuse my friend who’s always up for testing such things himself, I went for it.
So remember this, the more you believe, the more it will believe you. In other words, your mind will take on this state of constant focus on that one thing, making you think everything is related to that thing!
Keep your mind and thoughts in check and they will keep you in check—Ally Catz

RUBBING OFFJune 5, 2006

By

Ally Catz

Okay, maybe some of us are more intuned with others’ minds and souls, which would explain how we’re so easily “influenced” , right? Well, not necessarily, because you see, no matter who you are the people you spend the most time with will eventually rub off on you. How you ask? Take those trademark words like, “Shnikies” that a friend might say on a regular basis, which would be part of her personality. After hearing such a word several times used in exclamations and even a substitute for profanity, this pattern of speech will soon be adopted by you without you even knowing it till the same word, “shnikie” comes flying from your mouth the next time you see a basketball come whizzing at your head.
So is it all in speech patterns that we pick up peoples’ favorite phrases and ways of speaking? Not always. Some people I know have gone shopping and whenever they saw items they knew that friend or person, depending on whether they actually were friends or not, liked, it would be like, “Oh, Debbie would like this,” and proudly show it to you or just hold it in their hands for a moment in thought of buying such a thing just for that reason.
I’ve been known lately to become more loose with my words in ways I don’t actually like because of a person I’ve been seeing more frequently and although I dislike her choice of words more than half the time, I, too, have now begun to add them to my rather small vocabulary. I’m ashamed to say so and am working hard to get out of such a rut before it becomes a habit I find hard to break.
Now, I too, go out shopping and find objects related to that person’s likes and think of her every time I see them. I relate music to that person if they like the song that comes on the radio and I think of how they might think of me.
It seems that the other person doesn’t pick up my pattern of speech but does see things in stores and other places that I like and they immediately think of me.
I know someone who suddenly liked the color purple because they admired another who also genuinely liked purple and so that was quite an ironic thing.
I knew a neighbor who began to dress like my father. I guess he admired my dad. WE noticed the change of dress right away from being sloppy to more neat. It was quite interesting to say the least.
Yes, people are adaptable creatures and I hypothesize that because of this essential attribute, us humans do become more like each other the more we become familiar with others we are with more.
I began to use a tone of voice a teacher at school used after a few months of attending the class and didn’t realize it till I thought of it one day. I thought, wow, that sounds familiar. Who do I remind myself of? Yes, the teacher. I was a bit surprised by this. Yet, this piece of this essay is treading more into soulbonding, a topic all its own I’ll give my take on in another place
To sum up, this oneness, attachment to the ones around us for many reasons or another, are just part of what life is about. It may feel strange at times and not always healthy if that person is giving off negative energy, isn’t very likable in many areas, or has too much of an opposing character to your own. Find positive people, with bright outlooks and whom you can relate to. People who really want to give you the time and day because they need you just like you need them for one reason or another, and I guarantee that their good attitudes and ways of thinking will rub off on you in a more enjoyable way. (this was originally written on Apr. 15, 2006).

Empathy = HIgher Connection

If all is physical here on Earth and in the confines of time, then how do we explain the phenomena of empathy? What, you ask, is empathy? Empathy means being sensitive to another’s emotions. It’s when another’s deep emotions, usually of sorrow, grief, or sadness of some kind, is felt by you, as if they were your own.
I’ve experienced these phenomenal feelings of others personally. They hit hard and sometimes haunt you when you are physically gone from that other person who can be miles away and yet their feelings—their negative energy—is still felt as if they were in the room with you.
I had a teacher while taking GED classes and boning up on my math skills for the big test whose feelings and persona were potent as a python’s bite. She was not just likable, but immensely lovable. She smiled when I entered the classroom every morning and her laugh was something you wanted to capture in a box and not let it escape so you could hear it over and over again.
Yet, under this quiet, friendly and polite mask, crouched a grieving person in the depths of her soul. A grievance I felt when I discovered what had caused it.
On her desk was a large framed picture of a teenaged boy and his friend and friend’s brother on either side of him. this seventeen-year-old boy in the center of the picture was the teacher’s son, Skyeler, who’d died in the summer of 2003 when trying to avoid hitting a cat. None of the boys had seatbelts on in the car, which was the main reason two of the boys, Skyeler and his friend, Kurtis, brother of Joe, died.
When I heard this story when a classmate asked who was in the picture, a surge of sympathy rose up all in me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said genuinely. It felt at that moment while sitting there at a crowded desk in a cluttered classroom that my soul had tied itself to my teacher’s. to most people this would seem an odd concept and maybe a bit far-fetched. Yet, this is what it felt like from the days that followed every time I’d see her. I’d start thinking about Skyeler, wondering what he had been like. Feeling the horror my teacher must have felt that night when her son would never return home. Caught myself thinking in the middle of a math problem the shocking regret she must have felt for letting Skyeler go out that night, to wherever he was heading to, (I never had the nerve to ask such questions and knew they were too painful even three years later to bring up).
I began to think of myself a reminder of her son, in how a few times I somehow made her think back on the past when he was alive. Such as one day when I casually mentioned how we had one of those big sharpeners that you cranked on a wall to sharpen a pencil and how we’d tried as kids sticking crayons in there instead. This made my teacher remember the time Skyeler had brought out one of those same sharpeners from the barn to her and for a moment there was a pause as she reminisced on this time and said, as if far away, “Has it really been three years?”
At this point I felt this awkwardness in the air and managed to change the subject. I knew the intensity of her pain still clinging to a battered heart.
Somehow as hard as I tried not to, I grew very fond of my teacher and without realizing it, had attached myself to her like some clinging baby baboon to its mother’s strong back. The day I completed the GED test and announced I wasn’t coming for the remainder of the few weeks left of school, I felt this deep sadness. I had wanted to leave that school for so long since the day I stepped into the place and the day had finally come. It wasn’t how I wanted it to be.
As I stepped out into the hallway right outside the classroom door, the teacher came up and said goodbye to me. I smiled and fought against the tears that were on the verge of falling.
There were a few words of the usual “we’ll see each other again” and all that, and then I admitted my attachment to her and to my surprise, she said that she, too, had gotten attached to me. It wasn’t something I don’t believe neither of us expected to share with one another there in a tiled hallway where students in the room were listening in on this sappy, bitter-sweet moment.
To my slight disgust and embarrassment, the tears spilled over and I let all the emotions flow out. I said in a tight tone between my silent sobs how sensitive I get with these moments and she smiled and said she did, too, but that crying gave her a headache. That made me smile and I started to feel a bit better when she said if it’d be okay if she could write me and call me to see how I was doing over the summer. I said I’d love that and was truly elated to hear such words. NO way was I able to just walk out of that building without any contact with her again. Something wasn’t dealt with. Something between us had to be fulfilled. What that is, I’m unsure of just yet. Perhaps whatever it is she saw in me she needs right now and I pray I can give it to her. I wonder if she’ll teach me something in return. I hope so. We can all learn in every part and time of our lives.
Another powerful time of true empathy was back in February 2006, on Valentine’s Day. I remember it well. A week earlier or so, my sister had broken up with her boyfriend, a guy I feel close enough to that he could be my brother, a brother I always wished I had. Anyway, this was a shock to me when I heard they’d broken up since I knew how much he loved my sister. Why they broke up is beside the point, however.
It was evening and Valentine’s Day was over and so was my moping heart. I was feeling sorry for myself for not having a date, which I realized after what happened that night to my “brother” and sister’s ex was a pure waste of my energy and couldn’t compare.
That evening while my sister was out of the house, her ex came over to talk out his feelings to my parents, whom he’d come to know quite well by this point. I was in the kitchen when he arrived and when my parents heard that he and my sister weren’t dating anymore, a wave of this heavy sorrow swept over me. It was so bad as I said sorry to him and thinking he’d not come around because of my sister, I had to leave the room. I felt something that I knew wasn’t my emotion. It was his. Pure, thriving sadness that overcame me so badly I cried in the bathroom for a good few minutes before trying to regain my composure. I felt his grief over losing the girl who made his whole world explode with the most beautiful light. A broken heart is what I felt and never had till then. I’d been love sick for a crush in the past and that feeling alone had made me inwardly sick for a day. But this new sadness was more than I could stand.
I recall my whole night just shattering into pieces around me as I went outside into the chilly night air and listened to the snow crunching as if in time with my stirred up feelings so loudly buzzing in my mind. I just stood at the edge of our yard and overlooking the darkened field beyond. Thinking to myself how someone’s heart was broken tonight, and screaming inside. Screaming for the love that made that heart dance to come back. To soothe it with a forgiving kiss.
Yes, these two instances are probably the worst part of being an empath. Being an empath doesn’t make one weak but intuned.
I believe that having such a gift, if a gift is what it is, needs to be properly used as a vital tool to help those around me. To seek out and be there to reach out when no one else will.
It’s a sense of being something more than you see yourself each day. It’s of a higher self that I have learned to just recognize, acknowledge, and moreover, accept.
Now that I know and accept being an empath, the next and most challenging steps ahead are mastering just how I can be the best for others whom I feel empathy for.

Rainbow of Sound: Synesthesia

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RAINBOW OF SOUND: SYNESTHESIA

Music is a rainbow of color, sometimes bright, and other times dark and blurred. Wind is silver, thunder is gray. Everything with sound has a color, one that doesn’t change no matter how hard you try to change the color you might not prefer for that sound. Even the days of the week have colors. Today is a grassy green. It’s Saturday and very bright, like some kind of lime lollypop.
This rare condition is known as synesthesia and not many are born with it. Seeing color with sound, much like hearing an echo in a long hallway, is the more common of the condition. NO, it’s not a disease of any kind or, at least for me, in any way interfere with my daily life. I’ve always known it was there since I was very young, about four or five. Exactly why the colors seen the way they are isn’t clear. Researchers say it has to do with early childhood association, like the colored alphabet magnets kids stick on refrigerators. I had a few of those growing up but the colors I see now as numbers and letters don’t connect at all with the bright shades of those plastic letters.
Scientists conclude that the parts of the brain responsible for sensory imput–vision, touch, taste, , smell, and hearing–remain constantly fused after infancy, when it normally separats into single networks. In other words, each part is “talking” with each other at once. So, in the case of seeing a color with a sound, the visual cortex is stimulated as the sound is interpreted by the brain. Or when tasting a color, the sense for taste is activated with touch and so on in their own conbinations, you see.

Even now as I write, my words I read here are colored though the text on the screen is one color. My letters that makeup each word here strewn together like beads on string to form a colored word. The same goes for numbers.
I’m actually glad I have this type of synesthesia because I don’t think I could deal with the following:

1. Tasting flavors with the sound of words or names—this caused a breakup for one unfortunate man who associated his girlfriend’s name with a flaky pastry
2. Objects having personalities—one woman says she has to sometimes leave the room if a vase is too “chatty” and the iron board “critical.” (I’ve had brief episodes of this type, however, such as a round fur pillow being more like a kitten that’s comforting and even the mailbox being an optimistic kind of person, and a bus like some bored and tired thing)
3. Tasting shapes—this I don’t understand very well but it’s said people with this one associates foods with shapes, even though they don’t resemble anything like the shapes
4. Seeing colors with tastes—I could have this one as well but aren’t sure if it’s just a memory thing. Oranges are orange in my mind, baking cookies are golden and hot dogs are red. I believe I don’t have this one and that the colors are there because they actually relate to the color of the food, rather than some other like blue with pickles or yellow with grape jam.
5, Seeing color with temperature—cold water dark blue, hot water bright pink, which I do have and always have, as with anything else temperature related, e.g. warm room, soft beige and cold is a bluish
6. Texture and seeing colors—according to this one, those with this type see colors with certain textures, which I don’t have. Maybe something like fuzzy carpet, red, and hard counter top, purple? I don’t know. I think this would land under feeling pain and seeing colors as well, like some people say they see bright orange when they feel pain and I feel a more transparent color if mild but a pinkish like cold skin when in more pain
7. Touch to taste: People with this type have tastes with certain textures; one woman says she tastes cooked carrots when touching the surface of a tiled wall
8. Colored numbers and letters: some people with this kind see numbers with their own colors and sometimes textures, perhaps the letter M being a blue color that appears watery rather than solid in the mind. Some numbers and letters, days of the week and months—which sometimes also have their own colors—have personalities, like the number one was once called a partier and the letter O is a lazy old guy who watches the other letters in the alphabet.
These are the ones I know of the most, although the sensory possibilities are endless, and there are thousands of other forms just being discovered.
I try to block out my synesthesia at times but never can. It’s like suppressing sound you know is there but it won’t go away. I can’t imagine living without it. It makes my world all the more brighter and more interesting at times.
Music, especially jazz, is such an enjoyable experience. It’s filled with all sorts of colors that have been splashed all over the walls it seems.
Horns are bright oranges, xylophone dark green, piano is white, drums red, pink, and high hat green, cymbals are a lighter green, and bass is dark brown. All mixed together it’s a big treat.
So, it’s true that I can see the wind. It’s a transparent silverish white. It’s beautiful.
Maybe that explains my fascination with sound effects I collect even now just for the colored trip.
There are times when I’m bothered by it all, though. Loud music and while in a crowd can overwhelm my senses at times and the louder the sound, the more intense the color. It’s like flashing a light in my eyes. It makes me want to squeeze them shut but that only makes it all worse.
Even in my dreams sounds are colored just like in my awakened life. Dreams are another topic, though.
I used to think everyone had this condition but found when I asked my one sister if the sound of the piano was white, she said no, and thought it an odd question. However, I did recently discover after prompting her that she sees Tuesday in the shape of a red figure eight, but doesn’t know why. She thinks it’s cool-looking, though. So she has a form of synesthesia after all! To me, Tuesday is just a bright yellow, rectangular square, and the same with the shapes of all the days of the week, although all are different colors.
Even some famous authors and musicians in the past, and philosophers, had synesthesia.
Though it’s been known to exist for three centuries, synesthesia has just recently been studied much more intensely since the 1980s up to now.
What has been learned is that researchers have found this condition to be highly inheritable, though present in males, it’s more common in females, which leans on the theory that synesthesia is carried on the X Chromosome. Perhaps one of my ancestors had this? It’s hard to say which side of the family did, though. I’m willing to bet it was my dad’s side, the Irish ide. I lean more heavily toward my Scottish roots. Ancestry’s yet another topic all it’s own, however.
So, sound is a constant rainbow, sometimes not very interesting but at other times spectacular.
So, this all might sound weird to you–or maybe not–but it’s a natural perception, something I’m not aware of until I think about it, like breathing. YOU aren’t conscious of breathing, are you? OH, now you are, but only because I brought it to your awareness. Same with living with synesthesia. Notice I didn’t say “suffering?” Many people believe it’s a disease and it causes suffering. Suffering? How? Sure, it’s kind of annoying at times like anything else with our perceptions and things, but it’s totally not something as bad as suffering. Suffering is pain and synesthesia is wonder and beauty.

Humanimals: the animal connection

I’m an animal lover by nature. Stuffed animals, animal figurines, animal movies–and of course, the real animals of our beautiful world–all I just love. And, I have my favorite animal as well,as we all do. Some like cats, others horses, dogs, birds, and, yes, even cows. I, for one, like dogs a lot, but really I connect with the wolf. EVer since I was a kid I knew there was something really big and fascinating about the wolf. For its beauty for one. Those intense eyes, that awesome muzzle and those powerful agile jaws. The loyalty to the pack. Mating for life–how committed! Us humans should take cues from wolves, man. Well, anyway, I found I could really bond with the wolf. therianthropy has become known to many to be the term for this deep connection. IT means “Animal-man” and its a word here that also means something bigger than just a connection. IT means people who identify as therianthrops have that animal within themselves, and really feel, as I do, that they can essentually in mind, become that animal. Therianthrops, also called weres, are real. And therianthropy for some is a practiced religion, a lifestyle for them. For others, its just part of their personality. I feel I can shift mentally to the wolf, having its behavior and vivid thoughts of running through the woods as a beautiful female silver gray wolf. When I mentally shift, I’m not some ravaging beast, snarling under the light of the full moon. That’s Hollywood. IN fact, I feel I have control most of the time as I pace on all fours around my room, and feeling quite relaxed. My human side of my mind is pushed away to some extent, but because I have this wolf side to me in a human body, and with human intellect, I’m able to also rationalize humanly if I had to. Therianthropy is a strange phenomena, and these shifts experienced aren’t all mental. Some claim they dream shift, to become their animal in lucid dreams, which I also do. They can be very intense dreams, however,because you have control in a lucid dream. I’ve had many lucid dreams of being a wolf and can tel you its the closeest you’ll really get to physical shapeshifting. No evidence has been found that claims physical shapeshifting has taken place with a therianthrop. Those who practice their therianthropy as spiritualism become their animal on the astral plain, which I’ve never visited, though I’ve tried. Therianthrops also feel they are their animal 90 percent of the time, feeling “wolfy”, “tigerish” and so on. (IT depends on what animal they connect with). Therianthrops aren’t all wolves, either. There are many who feel they relate to tigers, jaguars, lions, deer, horses, domestic housecats, and even bears and foxes. Being a therianthrop is a serious belief to those who feel they are, as I do. I don’t feel its a phase or cool fad or something. Its something you feel within yourself. It’s so serious they often go as far as naming their animals. Mine is called Earthsong, and she is alpha of her small pack. Sometimes I, too, have days where I feel wolfy. Especially when around dogs, and where I work, which is a pet store where I bathe puppies. I’ll go about my work, seeming human enough to everyone around me, but finding myself wanting to pant excitedly to the puppies that greet me with high energy. It’s like they sense the wolf, and perhaps they do. They’ll actually rise up on their hinds legsin the enclosed glass pettery in the front of the store, where they’re seen in the front window for customers to see, and I can literally walk along and they’ll follow! It’s really entertaining to the customers who see me and the puppies interact this way. My wolf side seems to ineract with my human side at this point, and I often, because I’m in a pet store, get away with greeting certain favorite puppies in dog-fashion nose to nose. IN the canine world, dogs, or wolves, will touch noses and sniff as a greeting. I’ve done this several times and found I seem to bond better with the puppy I’m bathing and handling. I don’t find any of these animal greetings strange at all, and feel natural about them. Even the sound of coyotes howling and yipping in my field gets my heart racing with excitement. While everyone in my family’s getting creeped out, I’m running outside to the field and howling back to the coyotes. Sometimes during the summer months when the coyotes were active and hunting late at night, I’d be in bed and hear a locating howl come from the distance. I’d be relaxed and calm when the howl came, and a surge of sudden excitement would bolt through me. I’d hurry to the open window, listening with all my focus. It just doesn’t feel like a regular human response to such a thing, does it? I’m aware coyotes–yes, and wolves–don’t go on a mad hunt for humans. They shy away from them, if nothing else. They’re designed to take down the weak, the injured, and sick. Mostly small prey, as in rabits, mice, and othre rodents alike. Deer they’ll take down as a pack, but the deer is never a healthy one. Only rabid coyotes/wolves, or when starving, will take down a healthy animal, or approach a human. So, perhaps with that knowlllege in mind, there would be no real fear. I think my therian side isn’t all responsible for this impulse to howl back to the coyotes. I think its a combination of both: my love for the song of the coyotes and the wolf’s desire to communicate with them. IT’s hard to say. And, like all strange, mysterious things, therianthropy has never gone under scientific research.
We’re not talking clinical lycanthropy, either, where a person has delusions of being a wolf/other creature. No, this is more controlled and you are aware of the change from human to animal. The connections are true and no therianthrop/were should never be taken lightly. They are real people like you and me, and have the ordinary human lives like everyone else. Just a different viewpoint of the world, from an animal’s perspective.