Wow, February has easily been one of the most difficult, worst months I've ever lived through. Logistically and physically, I mean. I'm sure everyone has seen the news of the terrible, awful snowfall in and around the Boston metro, but living in it has just been fresh hell. It's almost absurd. (Someone, quite appropriately, created a blog titled "MB(ecket)TA", wherein absolutely depressing and nihilist Becket quotes are superimposed over ridiculous photos of what life has been like in Boston for the last month and change.)

Getting to and from my job, only three miles away, has regularly taken upwards of an hour and a half. Sometimes two or more. Sometimes I had no choice but to walk it, since walking 40 minutes in -30 windchill conditions was better than standing 40 more minutes with a hundred other people waiting for the same inevitably full bus to come. It was during those walks, through a foot of snow or more, that I discovered that a) your nose will start bleeding if you get too cold and b) iphones actually can reach a temperature so low that they'll shut down and stop working outside while giving you a temperature warning.

At one point, the trains at Park street on the green > red line changeover were so crowded that people, numbering probably a thousand or more, waited 50+ minutes to inch forward to get on trains that were just as crowded. Which is exactly what I did. I watched four full trains of people come and go before I could get on one and miserably trek further downtown, all the while having people bump into me and splash my hot coffee all over myself the entire time. I think I would have honestly preferred it if someone had pushed me onto the tracks.

Also, houses and roads here clearly weren't built with weather this bad in mind. We've had two (minor, but annoying) power outages, I've spent a grand total of 9-10 hours thus far shoveling my car out of snow (only to continue not driving it lest I risk losing my good parking spot), the indoor stairs to my landlady's side apartment door got so cold that they froze over, icicles included, and I fell all the way down them (thankfully uninjured!) and finally, to top it all off, the roof of our third story apartment finally got so burdened with ice dams and snow weight that it bowed, which has resulted in a giant, leaking hole in our kitchen ceiling that is still unrepaired. (Mostly due to insurance related bullshit, but thankfully our landlady is a pre-existing customer of some roofing guy who can come in to fix 'er up whenever that's ironed out. What's startling is that when she attempted to contact an emergency roofer instead of her normal guy, she was informed that it would be a while since she'd be 600th in line.)

Basically, the past month has been hell on earth and I'm glad it's over. It's still not even over, really, because it's in the 30s and it snowed four inches the other night, but even that's way better than the pure, unadulterated torture we've been dealing with up until this point. I can honestly say that 30 degrees feels pretty balmy right now and I can comfortably walk around or take out the trash or whatever in short sleeves. I don't even know if I remember what the sun feels like...or grass. Or life, or goodness, or hope.

Gotta say, though, it's impressive how resilient people are. Clearly god is trying to kill everyone in Boston but is just not succeeding. Despite these terrible conditions, people have still been soldiering through and going to work, continuing to party and drink, and generally surviving, albeit in a very depressed, world-weary state. Also funny...before moving here, people told me and R that the winters around Boston and Cambridge and such were "pretty mild" compared to the rest of New England. Well, both winters I've lived through so far have been so bad that they've been labeled as "historic", so I'm wondering what the fuck is going on here...

R and I are currently vacationing in NC for a week, and it's been...weird, exciting, and simultaneously a clusterfuck all at once. So far we've had to deal with one canceled flight, one rescheduled flight, two rental car reschedulings, actually GETTING to the car rental lot and then having an agent accidentally rent out a (clearly running, already rented) car to someone else with all of our bags in it during the three minutes it took for us to sign something inside... but now, finally, we're here and not in fucking tundra-like New England and it's nice! (We got our bags back. And a super nice '15 Chrysler with free gas to rent courtesy of the rental company nearly giving away all of our possessions to a random stranger.) I honestly don't even know if I've been inside of a car this nice before, let alone driven one, and it's not like my own car is an eyesore or anything. But anyway, yeah. I'm just thankful nothing else weird / inconveniencing has happened but I guess we have a week left to see if that pans out.

It's only been a day yet but it's been interesting being back in the Triangle. One thing I've immediately noticed is that there seem to be more visibly queer people walking around. I still feel like people are staring at me/us--I was used to getting lots of stares when I was still pre-T and more ambiguous looking--but maybe it's just some sort of paranoid psychic holdover from years ago rather than actual reality.

Maybe things are getting better since Amendment One was struck down, but I guess it's hard to say without having lived here for a couple of years. I wouldn't want to move back and sacrifice our current comfort in MA, but there is a definite je ne sais quois about NC in general, and particularly its LGBTQ community and dealings with community activism. It still just feels very lacking in the part of the northeast where we live, but I guess it's because people here have had to fight harder for more basic rights or something. I'm sure it's a lot of things, really. Maybe I'll be able to put my finger on it one day.

( Pretty extensive write-up on my experience with magic mushrooms a few days ago )

I have to admit that this was kind of a game-changing experience for me... don't get me wrong, I've always been rather in-tune with my spiritual side and have used various methods, ranging from meditation to drugs, to tap into it. But I've never had such a euphoric, affirming experience, something that just accessed so many universal truths buried deep within my psyche and underneath my conscious perception of reality. It was such an intense experience that I feel like I've reached an event horizon of sorts. A point of no return. I've decided to do more to consciously renew my physical self and tap into this place deep, deep inside me. My third eye chakra opened up under the influence of psychedelics, so I'm going to make it my goal to experience this again, and eventually without the aid of psilocybin and similar compounds. I'm curious to have more experiences like this one later on, but not for a while, at least.

Weirdly enough, the entire experience also alleviated a lot of my death-related fears. I've always feared a loss of self and have tried to do various meditative techniques and philosophical studies to overcome this, but the complete and total overwhelming, extended ego loss during my trip was euphoric and brilliant. I feel as though I experienced death and came back from it...so maybe there's nothing to fear at all, as it was incredibly comforting and overall very positive. Then again, the pineal gland is believed by many to be both the true seat of the third eye chakra and the origin of near-death experiences by way of hallucinations/visions, so there's clearly some connection there. The fact that so many world belief systems place importance on the same concept and physical gland location must mean something. It's why I tend to think that all spiritual beliefs and belief systems in general meet in the middle and have a common origin.

You can read an interesting article on the functions and theological interpretations of pineal gland activity here. Pretty neat stuff.

Finally done with exams and term papers. I have never written so much in my entire life...ever. Over the past four-five days, I've done:

- Thirty pages on the metaphysical and empirical works of Quine, Russell, and Ayer concerning mental phenomena (like hallucinations).
- Eleven pages on the development of the Holocaust in Italy, Romania, and France, and on the ways that modernity, liberalism, and religious spin resulted in anti-semitism in 20th century Europe.
- Ten pages on hate speech law in the United States.
- Eight pages on Sen's opposition to transcendental theories of justice.
- Eight pages on the roles that propaganda played in the creation of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
- Five pages on Rawls' theory of justice, including global justice.
- Four pages on Murphy's legal roles and paternalistic law.


So in the end that's...nearly 80 pages of pure academic BS. And probably a few months shaved off my life. Whee!

Lengthy but fascinating Kinoeye film review here.

I finished reading Vitezslav Nezval's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders early yesterday. It was good, but the icing on the cake was an essay by Giuseppe Dierna at the end including analyses of Nezval and Max Ernst and themes in Surrealism. One particular recurrence in the Czech Surrealist works of the 30s (aside from animal masks...) was androgyny and the 'separation of the two,' which was also one of the major issues in Valerie. Of course, the whole thing was ganked from Greek mythology regarding the hermaphrodite, but this has always interested me, mostly because I feel that the concept of 'missing halves' in gender might affect both the relationships and the gender identity of individuals. It's something to think about, anyway.


--just not right now since it's like two in the morning.


May I add that I really hate getting up for 8:00 classes again.