So a few days ago Mari posted in her blog some of the scribblings from the margins of some old notebooks she’d found. I thought that was a pretty neat idea, and I still have most of my old high school and college notebooks, so I thought I’d do the same. Then I actually got out the notebooks in question. And I realized something.

I didn’t scribble and doodle in the margins. I tended to use whole pages at the very least, and in fact I had whole notebooks dedicated to writing (which means EVERYTHING, from stories and poetry to a soap opera parody to essay assignments to stream-of-consciousness) and “art” (which pretty much translated into “doodles” and didn’t make up that much of the total content of the books). So then I thought I’d share some of the odder ramblings. Then I decided that was too much.

So I’m sharing photographs of some of my doodles, along with transcriptions of the text from the two that really involve text. I’d scan them, but I don’t have a functional scanner, so… Anyway, here they are. Some of the files get a little large, but they’re all under 50KB. I think. I couldn’t get them any smaller without sacrificing quality.

Knotwork 1
Knotwork 2
Knotwork 3
Knotwork 4 (with vines!)
Phoenix in Flames series
Elements
Compass Doodle 1, in pencil and purple ink
Compass Doodle 2, in pencil and pink, purple, and black ink
Compass Doodle 3, in very light pencil, unfortunately
“To Everything…” (aka “Universe in My Notebook”)
A tracing of my hand, with vines and colored fingernails
Miscellaneous Stuff
More Misc Stuff

It should be noted that in both of these doodle/scribble pages, I was trying to work out some things by writing them down, and the text does not necessarily reflect my current thoughts, feelings or beliefs. And may or may not have been entirely accurate then either.
A page in green and purple ink, and a transcript of the text
Black ink and pencil, and its transcript

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A few short thoughts this time, from strips which prompted comment from me but not enough to fill a whole post by themselves. This will probably be the last of the Ozy and Millie musings for a while. It’s the last bit I’ve got written up, anyway. I’ve got plenty of other strips bookmarked to comment on, but a) my brain’s tired and some of them really require some more thought, and b) I don’t want to bore y’all!

Ozy and Millie: Highly significant
Have to agree with Millie. Looking at the stars only makes me feel small and insignificant when some character in a cartoon or comic strip is talking about that feeling. And even then it’s not so much “I am insignificant” as “yeah, I guess I can see that.” Stargazing makes me feel… Calm. Peaceful. It makes my troubles seem sort of insignificant and far away. It gives me a sense of home wherever I am, if that makes sense, which is probably why I don’t care for big cities where you can’t see the stars. But it doesn’t make me feel insignificant.

Ozy and Millie: The Future!
I like this strip because I think it’s so easy to get caught up in planning for “the future” that we forget it’s not some far-off thing. Yeah, it’s great to think ahead and make sure you’re going to be in a good place in ten years, but that doesn’t mean forgetting about tomorrow. Or this evening. Or an hour from now. After all, you have to go through all of those futures to get to the one you were aiming at.

Ozy and Millie: Philosophy and physics
A point in the argument for moral relativism, at least in some measure. Everything looks different if you look at it from a different perspective. Reality itself is relative; we perceive it relative to our knowledge of it. The stop sign is grey if you look at it from the back, you know. Unless you’re one of those people who calls that color silver. (See below.) This strip amused me because when I thought about it, it gave me the mental image of the entire universe as one of those optical illusions where whether the cube is poking in or poking out depends on what you’re looking for.

Ozy and Millie: Thinking too much
There she goes, saying what I’m thinking again. I’ve actually considered this problem, in almost as many words, before. Objectively, I think the answer must be that we do indeed see the same colors. We perceive color by way of reflected light. The same frequencies of light are reflected no matter who is seeing them. Thus, all other things being equal, we all see the same colors. The thing is, sight isn’t as objective as it seems, and all is not always equal. At a slightly different angle, I might get a different wavelength than you do, or your brain might interpret the data your eyes are sending it differently than mine interprets the very same data. And of course even if we are interpreting the very same data in the very same way, what I call “hunter green” you might call simply “dark green”. Thus, we might or might not be seeing the same color after all when looking at the same patch of it. And in the end, of course, Ozy is right: it doesn’t actually matter. But it’s a fun thing to ponder nonetheless.

Ozy and Millie: Silence
Another “Millie is like me” strip. I love the sound of the rain, but I’ll be honest: Silence. Drives. Me. Nuts. I discovered this during our 36-hour power outage… What was that, last year? I need, at a bare minimum, white noise going on around me. Pure silence makes me paranoid, anxious, and somehow bored all at once. My brain needs something to play with; if it doesn’t have that, it’ll make up its own sounds, and that’s where the paranoia comes in. Lack of conversation (without a reasonable excuse such as watching a play or something) while other people are around makes me really nervous a lot of times, because I never know why people are silent. Did I offend? Did I bore them? Am I such a silly person that they have nothing to say to me? It’s nerve-wracking.

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I’ve been trying to stop eating so much candy, and stop snacking so much. This seemed like a very difficult thing to do. Today, however, I stumbled upon a solution. This is the best kind of solution, because not only does it help with the actual problem, it also makes me feel a little better about another flaw of mine.

See, I also have this tendancy to forget things. Easily. I do everything in the same order every morning not so much because that’s the most efficient way, but because if I don’t I’ll go out the door without having washed my face or brushed my teeth or packed my lunch or something. When I think of things I need to do, I have to do so immediately or write it down, because otherwise I tend to forget. That sort of thing.

So about an hour and a half ago I started to get peckish and thought a candy bar sounded good. I also had to pee, so I thought I’d go to the restroom and get a snack on the way back. Thing is–by the time I got to the bathroom, I was already thinking about other things. By the time I returned to my desk, I had completely forgotten about the candy bar, and didn’t remember it until just now.

Hey, whatever works.

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Ozy and Millie: Life is complicated

(This one ties into Tuesday’s strip a little bit too.)

The subtitle for this week’s strips, collectively, should probably be, “Why Millie Scares Me”, or “She Reminds Me of Me”. I’ve never gone to some of the lengths she has, of course–I was never really as manic as she is. And boy howdy are the details of our lives ever different. (Unless Dad’s a reverse-aging pirate and hasn’t told me, of course…) But all too often, something she says will make me go, “Aaack. That is/was me.”

In this case, it’s “was”, past tense. Millie in this strip? Is totally me in high school, at the pinnacle of my idealisticness. (Is that a word?) I was very militant about wanting people to be tolerant. My motto was, “I can tolerate anything but intolerance!” I wrote lots of poetry and essays (for classes and otherwise) about prejudice and tolerance, and my notebooks were doodled all over with messages of tolerating and accepting one’s fellow human beings. (Just rediscovered some of them a couple of days ago. I’m seriously choking on the saccharine.) The main difference is that my own “story arc” took quite a bit longer. A few years ago, I started coming into contact with more and more people who felt the same way. It was at this point, watching them, that I began to realize the flaw in my reasoning.

If I wanted to be a truly tolerant person, I had to tolerate even things which I actively disliked. And that included intolerance. I began to realize that in my quest to spread tolerance and understanding, I had been engaging in behaviour which, while not quite as bad as that of some of the intolerant groups I disliked, was certainly in the same ballpark. They wanted to effect a drastic change in my personal beliefs which would make me see the light and realize how unacceptable the things they objected to were. I wanted to effect a drastic change in their personal beliefs which would make them see the light and realize how unacceptable the things I objected to were. I realized with a shock that I was stooping to their level.

Of course, part of my problem was that I didn’t so much want tolerance from them as I wanted acceptance. I wanted these closed-minded people to not just tolerate things like gay marriage and other religions, but to accept them as valid. I do not think I realized, at the time, what a difference there is between the two. To tolerate something, one only has to shut up about it. Stop taking action against it. Tolerance requires, really, no adjustment of personal attitudes or beliefs other than those involved in refraining from acting or speaking against that which is being tolerated. Acceptance comes when your beliefs and attitudes adjust to allow that something is OK.

Tolerance or acceptance, though, I still run smack up against that brick wall. Because no, I don’t want to even so much as tolerate the intolerance in this world. I am most certainly not going to accept it any time soon. I keep thinking, though, that if I want them to tolerate me maybe I had better make the effort to tolerate them. And I do want to be a tolerant person in general, and that means tolerating even things I don’t like, right? …But I’m wondering if there isn’t a line that has to be drawn. If sometimes tolerance is not a good thing. I mean, I clearly don’t intend to tolerate things like murder and rape. But is hardcore intolerance in the same category as those things? Can I justify this?

Do I need to justify this? Probably not really. I want to work out what it is that drives my value system here, though. In the end I keep coming back to the same old thing over and over again: You’re just human. Do the best you can. Surely there’s more to it than that…

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Taking a break from Ozy and Millie here because I just couldn’t let this pass without comment. (Link to IndyStar story about workers finding 20 gallons of VX gas removed because the page is no longer available.) *bangs head on wall* You know, this gives me such confidence about… I’m not sure what. The people in charge of these things? Living in the same state as a VX storage facility like this? Something like that. As far as I can tell from the article, someone forgot about 20 gallons of VX, potentially for as much as forty years. How do you lose 20 gallons of that junk and not notice? Wasn’t anyone worried, at the time, about the fact that 20 gallons of a deadly nerve gas had just sort of disappeared? I mean… This is scary shit. If what I’ve heard is accurate, a fraction of a drop on a person’s skin can kill unless treatment is administered, like, immediately. (And no, that info isn’t just from The Rock–although it’s a measure of the state of this country that I didn’t dare search too thoroughly for info, for fear someone would think I was planning terrorist activities…) You’d think it would be a good thing to keep careful track of.

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Ozy and Millie: Cerebral again.

(The setup, in case you’re curious about the conversation referenced in the first panel, can be found here, and I might deal with it later.)

This entry has actually undergone, like, a dozen major revisions because it’s never quite gotten to the point where it says what I want to say. I think this is close, though. There’s a little more that’s not included, but it overlaps with the subject of another strip, so I’ll cover it later. (Maybe tomorrow?)

What I really like about the overall message of this strip is the implication that “can’t we all just get along” doesn’t necessarily translate into “everyone must think the same way”. This attitude seems to be depressingly common–the sort of “if you’re not with us you’re against us” thing. Sometimes, taken to the extreme, even friendly debate and discussion is construed as being divisive, because even the suggestion that there might be another perspective to view a situation from, even if the person doing the suggesting is just playing devil’s advocate and doesn’t himself subscribe to the suggested viewpoint or want to persuade anyone to it, is percieved as a threat. I don’t agree with that at all. I think diversity is a wonderful thing which should be encouraged. I don’t think we should work toward unity in the sense of getting to a point where everyone agrees with everyone else. I think, rather, we should work toward understanding. If we understand each other and recognize the beauty of diversity, I think we’ll have a much happier community (on all levels) than if we all try to make everyone little clones of ourselves.

And yes, I recognize the flaw in this: My viewpoint as expressed there does not necessarily allow for incorporating the viewpoint I’m objecting to into this vision of diversity. That’s the part of this entry I’m leaving for another day.

When I first read the third panel, where Ozy suggests that secure people shouldn’t be threatened by dissent, my reaction was to agree heartily. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is a lot more of a challenge than it seems like. The problem is, we’re human beings. Sometimes it’s easy to get insecure about stuff. Sometimes if it seems like everyone is against you, it’s easy to wonder why the hell no one gets what you’re saying. Sometimes when you get frustrated, it’s just a natural reaction to think that it would be easier if everyone agreed with you. And sometimes it’s easy to get upset when you feel like maybe, if people are disagreeing with you, maybe you’re wrong. I know I’m guilty of that; I like to be right, and sometimes I can get pretty defensive when people suggest that I’m wrong. I have a choice here, I suppose. I can just say, “Oh, it’s human nature and that’s just how I am and I should accept it.” Or I can acknowledge that it’s the way I am, but also acknowledge that I don’t like that and try to change it. I think it would be good to do the latter, if I could figure out how to go about it. (I’ve never been entirely sure how to go about changing emotional patterns, since they’re so… nebulous, I guess. Difficult to get a good hold on.)

After much consideration, I have decided that the dialog in the final frame is actually a little bit out of place. Ozy and Millie have been talking about how there’s room in this world for all kinds of beliefs–and they’re right. The thing is, though, that acting on those beliefs is another question. Jeremy has every right to believe that he should beat up Millie because she’s a nerd. I don’t think that means that we need to grant him the right to act on that belief. This is where we get into sort of a sticky situation, though, because… Where do you draw the line? When is it OK to act on your beliefs, and when is it not OK? What makes one action permissible but not another? My hypothesis is that when your actions start affecting other people, that’s when your actions become someone else’s business. The hole in it is that I can’t explain why it’s OK to violate Jeremy’s right to act on his belief, but not Millie’s right to not be beaten up. I guess maybe it’s that, as the hierarchy of needs goes, Millie’s need for physical well-being is a more basic need than Jeremy’s need to act in accordance with his beliefs. Jeremy can continue to live a full and healthy life (biologically, at the very least) without beating up Millie. Millie’s ability to do the same, though, is put in danger by being beaten up by Jeremy. Until both parties’ most basic needs are met, we can’t move on to whose higher-level needs trump whose. There’s also a factor of choice, to some degree; Jeremy can choose not to beat up Millie, but Millie can’t really choose not to be beaten up. There might be things she could do to reduce the chances of it, but she can’t make the choice that the problem will go away.

So… I think that’s enough for today. I hope it made some kind of sense. I might have to explore this a little more (here or elsewhere). I feel like that last bit has some holes in it, but I’m not having much luck figuring out exactly how, or exactly what needs to happen to cover them.

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(I’ve edited this because I thought of a better example for the relative side… It’s only been a few minutes since I posted the original, but my apologies if I screwed this up for anyone.) Yeah, I know I said something about daily. The fact is, my blog tends to get forgotten on the weekend (and last week was my short week–I have every other Friday off–so Friday gets included in “the weekend”). Back on track with the Ozy and Millie thoughts. I found a lot of strips I wanted to comment on; not sure I’ll get to all of them. Today’s is… Ozy and Millie: Millie’s moral philosophy This is, more or less, the major moral conundrum I face. My reasoning is a bit different from Millie’s, but the tug-of-war between morality being absolute and morality being relative is there. My problem is that I want to be open-minded and believe the best of people and be accepting of lifestyles that differ from my own, but at the same time… There comes a point where the mind is so open that the brains fall out, you know? On the relative side–well, a whole heck of a lot of stuff is relative. I mean… Let’s look at the example of a thirteen-year-old girl being married off to a man ten, fifteen years her senior. In today’s American culture this would be absolutely horrible. Thirteen-year-olds are essentially still children here and now, no matter how many stages of puberty they’ve gone through. Even getting married to someone their age would be unthinkable; we don’t consider them old enough to shoulder such a responsibility. A man that much older than her… That’s just pedophilia, right? But what if the girl were raised in a culture where thirteen is considered adult? Where there’s a high mortality rate, and one needs to start having kids early just to ensure that some of them will grow up and continue to keep the family name/farm/culture intact? Or what if this is six hundred years ago in, say, Europe, and marriage is as much a contract binding two families together (legally, financially, etc.) as it is a union of two individuals? Somehow I just can’t say it’s wrong in that case. But on the absolute side, there are things that I feel are wrong no matter what. I don’t think there’s ever, ever an excuse for rape. Or abuse, especially of children but also of other adults. Or taking advantage of someone or something smaller or weaker than you just because you can. Those things I feel are just plain wrong, absolutely and without any exception that I can see. There are also things which I think are probably wrong no matter what, but might sometimes be the lesser of two evils. Murder, for example; killing someone in a kill-or-be-killed situation seems to clearly be the better option, to me, but that doesn’t make it right. Or lying (either actively telling a lie or passively lying by omission) when the truth will do more harm than good. It’s understandable, it’s a choice I can see myself making and a choice I have made, but that doesn’t make it right. I’m not actually even sure whether it’s less wrong than the alternative or not. On the third hand, of course, one might argue that it’s not really any business of mine whether what people do is wrong or right. I have three things to say to that. The first is that yeah, you’re right, it’s not. The other two are “but”s. The second thing is that regardless of whether it’s my business or not, I’m a human being. That means I’m going to form an opinion about what other people are doing, even if I know I have no business doing so. I might as well try to work out how best to form those opinions. The third thing is that I’m going to have kids someday. It’s my responsibility to pass on to them some sort of moral framework–even if they someday decide it’s not for them and get rid of it, I have a responsibility to help guide them at least during their younger years. (And afterward too, but I think guidance takes on a different form after a certain point.) I can’t guide them if I have nothing to say about morality. So… It’s none of my business, but it is relevant. Or something like that. (And on a lighter note… I kept typoing “absolute”, typing “absolut” instead. So maybe morals are made of vodka. *G*)

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I was going to try to do one OM thought per day, but today I’m just emotionally exhausted. I’m sure it’s equal parts “that time of the month”, having to finish going through finding the strips I want to talk about, and being in the last 150 pages (finally) of Tad Williams’ Otherland series (which means everything’s coming together and there’s some pretty intense stuff going on–and while I love that, it’s draining to some extent). And probably a little bit of “just because” in there too.

And… I just realized that I just today wrapped up the project I’ve been working on for somewhere upwards of two and a half years at work. There’s something sort of exciting about that, but at the same time there’s something sort of exhausting about looking back at everything I’ve done.

Well, either way, I’m just glad tomorrow’s my day off, and all I have to worry about is getting my ticket for the upcoming Civic Theater fundraiser show. We’re not even hosting the weekly get-together, so I don’t really have to do any in-depth cleaning, which is good. I can mostly just rest.

Now if only I could wave a magic wand and make time for Tim to do the same. He’s been really stressed out lately, they’ve been working him really hard… He tried to take time off to just relax, but they kept calling him with problems anyway, and it wound up not being all that much of a vacation.

And now I’m babbling…

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Should have known better than to post a “hey, I’ll get back to you” message… I don’t think that was more than two hours ago (as of when I’m starting; do not trust the timestamp) and yet here I am.

As I mentioned, reading Ozy and Millie has given me some things to chew on. If I can remember which strips prompted this introspection, I’ll try to do a little series here of Ozy and Millie thoughts… For now, here’s the first one.

Ozy and Millie: Cosmic retribution

The first couple of panels were what caught my attention here, especially the first one. I looked at it and recognized a feeling I confess to having had more than once. “Everyone else is having revelatory experiences, why can’t I?” I have somewhat mixed feelings about finding that attitude in myself.

On the one hand, it almost immediately sounds to me like my inner nine-year-old is whining. “Aw, geez, Jimmy’s mom lets him have experiences! I should get to too!” I will not say that my inner child needs to get a life, because that’s inaccurate. My inner child needs to wake up to the life she already has. She is hungry for new, intense emotional and spiritual experiences that will grant her new insight into humanity and the universe, and maybe that’s OK (I’ll get to that in a sec), but her memory’s sort of selective. It’s not like nothing along those lines has ever happened to me–it’s just that there tend to be long periods of everyday mundane life in between them. Which if you think about it is just fine. To live in that heightened state all the time would be exhausting. I would have to sleep fourteen hours a day just to be able to withstand everything being thrown at me.

Try telling that to the inner nine-year-old, though…

But to return to the subject at hand: Like I said, she needs to wake up to the life around her. When I was in high school, I wrote absolutely volumes of poetry and prose about how there was so much beauty in everything. In thunderstorms, in the cries of a baby, in sunsets and harvest moons, in fireflies, in everything. (Which, granted, might have gotten a little morbid at times, but since I kept those images firmly inside my head or on paper and didn’t try to create them in real life, I don’t necessarily consider that terribly unhealthy.) I guess my inner nine-year-old must not be quite to that point yet, because she’s focusing so much on the big stuff that she forgets there’s magic in the little things too. Just because she’s eaten at a four-star restaurant doesn’t mean she must cease to find leftover homemade meatloaf tasty, to borrow and slightly mangle a metaphor.

On the other hand, I think that to be completely opposed to this sort of yearning would be just as wrong as focusing too much on it. There’s nothing wrong with hungering for something more. After all, that’s what drives us to seek out more. It does occasionally come round and whap us with a clue-by-four, particularly if we’ve been ignoring it when it really wants to be heard, but all too often deeper knowledge of ourselves and that which is beyond ourselves is quite content to simply let us pass it by. If we deny this desire completely, we may miss out on a lot of really neat stuff. And, hey, we may miss out on some important stuff too.

All things in moderation, I suppose.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Now to go find the rest of those strips… Incidentally, while you’re over there hopefully getting hooked on Ozy and Millie, you should check out I Drew This, a political cartoon by the same artist.

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I haven’t forgotten about y’all, I promise. Life got a little busy. Plus, I’ve been reading the archives of Ozy and Millie, which has given me some food for thought, but I’ve not managed to organize said thought enough to really say anything coherent about it.

So anyhoo, I’ll get back to blogging shortly, really!

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