My New Favorite Mythical Being

My dad and I have been watching Beastmaster lately. We used to watch it back when I was a kid, and I liked it then, but I was pretty skeptical about whether or not I would like it now. I must admit, some of the acting is pretty bad, and most of the special effects are really bad, but the writing is good, the fight choreography is cool, and I really enjoy the overall theme of the show. It's very much about protecting animals and the planet, and living in harmony with nature. They have even (on multiple occasions) compared killing/enslaving animals with killing/enslaving humans, which I find pretty exciting.

Anyway, there is this one character, named Curupira, who is a demon responsible for protecting the forest and all the animals who live there. She basically loves animals and the forest and hates humans. She frequently kills people who come into the forest and kill the animals or disrupt the natural order. Here's the best part though; she's not a villain. She kills someone nearly every time she shows up, but everybody kind of just acts like "Well yeah, they shouldn't have fucked with her forest."

Well, after I saw her on the show, I had to look it up and she if there was a real legend about Curupira, or if the writers made her up. Turns out there is a real legend, though apparently the real Curupira is male, not female. Still, most of the basics of the story are the same and I love it!

You want to know the weird thing though? I took a short hiatus from reading Deadpool to read Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid, and guess who was mentioned? I don't know why that happens to me so often. I hear about some random thing I've never heard of before, and then it just keeps popping up all over the place.

You Know What? I Don't Even Want to Know This Time

Okay, so you guys know about my whole thing with all the weird recurring themes in my life that seem like they should mean something but I can never figure out what? Well here's one for you. What exactly is the symbolic significance of creatures with mouths where their eyes should be? Yeah. You know I mentioned a while back that I was reading The Sandman? Well, I just finished the second volume, The Dollhouse, and in it there is a character called The Corinthian. He basically just looks like a regular guy except for the fact that he has mouths where his eyes should be. Kind of creepy, right? You know what's even creepier? The fact that the night after I first read about the Corinthian, my dad and I watched an episode of Angel involving this weird slug-looking demon. You know what I didn't notice about this particular demon the first time I watched this episode? That it happens to have mouths for eyes. Holy fucking shit, Powers That Be! What are you doing to me with this shit?

The Sandman

I've started reading Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series. It took me a while to get into it because I had heard good things about it, but didn't realize it was actually a comic series when I bought it. It took me a while to get used to the format, but now I'm really enjoying it. Anyway, a couple of interesting things. 1- the story is sort of split up into all of these small sections involving a bunch of different characters that everyone has heard of before. On Tuesday night, I got to a part about Cain and Abel. This was the same night as the Supernatural episode that dealt with the story Cain and Abel. I'm not sure what the Powers that Be were trying to tell me with that one, but I'm fairly certain I don't want to know. 2- There is this one part that I think really sums up an idea that I have been trying to explain to people for years. He says "Ask yourselves, all of you...What power would HELL have if those here imprisoned were NOT able to DREAM of HEAVEN?" Of course, he was actually being literal when he said it, but my point was that it's the idea of what our lives could be, or could have been, that makes what they are seem so shitty. If we all knew this is just what life is, this is how it always is and how it always will be, we could probably deal with it. It's thinking that it could be better if you knew how to make it better, or that you missed your opportunity to make it better, that ruins everything. This has been......Your Depressing Thought for the Day!

It really is a great story though. 

Just.....Weird

I have pretty much been bitching about everything for the last several posts, and I'm certain you are all getting sick of it, so I am going to TRY to lay off that for a little while. Instead, today I am going to share with you this weird experience I had. Someone pinned the picture below \/ on Pinterest the other day. I know it's the most random picture and I'm not ever sure why he pinned it but, when I saw it, it looked so familiar. Like gave me cold chills, and intense deja vu, familiar. I have no idea why. I left it open in a tab for four or five days and just kept looking at it every once in a while hoping that eventually I would figure out what it was about it that made me feel like I had seen it before. I never did figure it out, and it still makes me feel strange when I look at it. I mean it's a picture of a store that I have never shopped at, according to the pin it's from 1960, and based on the palm tree it's nowhere near where I live. So what the fuck do I recognize about this picture? Oh well.

Griping

So, my dad and I finished Battlestar Galactica a couple of nights ago. I enjoyed the show overall; it had an interesting concept, complex characters, good dialog, and it definitely kept the audience guessing. I must say though, after the final episode, I was severely pissed. I feel like the writers tried so hard to make the story unpredictable that they didn't even bother to predict it for themselves. Then they got to the last episode and hadn't answered any of the questions they had raised throughout the entire show. Then they just said "Oh well." and went ahead and raised a few more that they also didn't answer. The other thing that bugged the shit out of me was all the stuff that seemed like it meant something but apparently didn't. From the very beginning, they talked about prophecies, and god's plan, and people having vision, and "all this has happened before." This, at least to me, implied that there was meaning in everything. Throughout the entire show, I kept analyzing everything and trying to figure out the symbolism that appeared to be everywhere. I came up with about a hundred different explanations for why certain things happened and what certain things were supposed to represent. Then we get to the end and the writers were just like " Nope. None of it meant anything." You can expect a list sometime in the next few days of all the questions that didn't get answered and/or all the things that seemed like they should have been relevant but weren't. I know this is stupid, but I put a lot of work into analyzing this show and I'm not going to let that all go to waste.

One thing about the show that I enjoyed, more than I probably should have, though was Mark Sheppard's character. I really felt like his first three episodes were nothing but straight Crowley jokes. This, of course, is impossible since Battlestar Galactica was over before Crowley ever showed up on Supernatural. Seriously though, two of his episodes were called "Crossroads" how is that not a Crowley reference? Plus, I dig the sunglasses. 

Seeing the Patterns

I have a compulsive need to find patterns in things; to find some sort of meaning in the chaos. This sort of ties into my other post about empathy and trying to understand people's behavior, but it goes further than that. I look for patterns in everything, not just people's behaviors.

Now that the CD player in my car is broken and I have to listen to the radio (grrrrrr), I sometimes notice that two or three consecutive songs will have common themes or very similar lines, and I wonder what that means. Then I realize that it's just a fucking radio and it doesn't mean anything. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm supposed to get something from it. I think I have mentioned before how I tend to have the same ideas, or images pop up in my life over and over again. I'm sure it's just that, once I've noticed it once, I'm more likely to notice it again. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like it should mean something.

That's one reason I get so invested in different TV shows. The patterns (usually) actually do mean something. I get such a thrill from searching for the meaning in mundane events and trying to predict what they are going to bring about. Often times though, I end up reading into things even more than the writers intended. Then I get disappointed when no one acknowledges the fact that three seasons ago someone said something that relates to that thing that other person mentioned this season. Battlestar Galactica has been both perfect and terrible for this purpose because they make it seem like everything is significant but never actually explain why. The whole time we've been watching it I have been analyzing everything and predicting what those things are going to mean. We are now into season four and I have still received absolutely no confirmation whatsoever.

You have no idea how much time I have spent thinking about why they used All Along the Watchtower. I have read over the lyrics about a hundred times and come up with some sort of relevance for every one of them. I would be willing to bet that it doesn't mean even half of what I think it does. 

Not My First Choice

Some of you may know that there is sort of this running joke (?) in my life about me looking like Betty Boop. It all started six or seven years ago when I was on a road trip with a couple of friends. The woman working at the desk in the hotel we were checking into said "You probably hear this all the time, but do you know who you look like?" I, of course, said "No, who?" with genuine curiosity, because I had never been told that I look like anyone. Then she said "Betty Boop." I thought she was completely insane. Not only did she think that I looked like a cartoon character, but she thought that I looked so much like a cartoon character that other people must point it out to me all the time. Here's the weird part, after that initial time from the woman at the hotel, I did start hearing it all the time! I have probably been told that I look like Betty Boop twenty times over the last few years. I had actually started to think that I had outgrown the resemblance because no one had said anything about it for at least a year or so. Then today some customer at Goodwill says to her friend "Look at her (meaning me). Who does she look like to you?" And I started thinking "Oh no. Please don't say Betty Boop!" Her friend juts kind of shrugged, so she shouts "Betty Boop! She looks just like Betty Boop!" Then, everyone in the general vicinity starts laughing and saying "She really does!" Son of a bitch. I thought I was done with this shit. Why can't I look like someone cool, or sexy, or badass, or at least someone with a head that is proportionate to her body?

Maybe I'm Not as Crazy as I Thought. Maybe.

Remember a long time ago when I said that I sometimes feel like my dreams are sometimes premonitions of exceedingly mundane things? Well I found someone to corroborate my theory! I have been reading The Witches' Way (I know, I've been reading it forever, but I keep reading novels at the same time and getting wrapped up in them and forgetting about it). Anyway, the authors mention the idea that "dreams may often use precognitive material, not necessarily significant in itself, but as the simple bricks and mortar of the manifest content." Manifest content being the true meaning behind the dream. I know it sounds totally crazy, but you never know it could be true. Even if it's not, at least there are other people in the world who are crazy in the same way I am.

How Did........Where Did......What?

Alright so for some reason, that is beyond my comprehension, I have this odd tendency to get other people's hair stuck to me. Like, not just the hair of people I have been in close contact with, but strangers' hair. I literally walk past people in a store and then hours later find their hair stuck on my clothes, on a regular basis. It's like I'm overly statically charged or something. Anyway, I've actually gotten somewhat used to this vaguely disturbing phenomenon. Well today it escalated quite drastically. I had just gotten out of the shower, where you would think any stray hairs would have been washed away, and I found a long hair stuck to my leg. It was at least 4 or 5 times too long to belong to me. Then I picked it off and held it up to the light and noticed that it was, get this, blue! Like TARDIS blue. How in the fuck did a long, blue hair get stuck to my leg while I was in the shower? I don't even know anyone with blue hair.

Tabula Rasa

So here's another one of those weird recurring themes I see in my life. About three weeks ago, in my development class, we learned about the theory of Tabula Rasa. It means "blank slate" and basically the theory is that we are born as nothing. Everything that we are is developed throughout our lives. I don't really agree with this. I feel that there is something more to us that is there from the time we are born. That's not really the point though. The point is; I have now seen this term three times in the last three weeks. A couple of weeks after we learned about it in class, I was watching Buffy and there was an episode titled "Tabula Rasa." Then a couple days ago my mom and I started watching Lost, and guess what, another episode with the name "Tabula Rasa." As usual, this probably isn't as weird as I think it is, but whatever, it feels weird. So what's the message here? The only thing I can think of is "start over." You know, give myself a blank slate and do things differently. In what sense though? I keep thinking that I'm supposed to start over as a new person; finally be the person I want to be instead of the person I've always been. Unfortunately, I've tried that before and it didn't work. Who knows, maybe this time it will.

The Most Useless Premonition Ever

I get Deja Vu all the time, I would say at least once a week or so. Every time I do, instead of feeling like "I think I've done this before." I usually feel like "I think I dreamed about this." This is weird for two reasons 1- I almost never remember my dreams, so thinking that I remember dreaming about anything is kind of dumb. 2- It pretty much always happens when I'm doing something ridiculously mundane. So my next thought after "I think I dreamed about this." is usually "Wow, that must have been a really boring dream." Also, I'm usually doing things that I do all the time so, even if I did dream about it, I may very well have just been dreaming about the last time I did whatever it was. Anyway, something slightly different, but no more helpful, happened this morning. I was brushing my teeth and I got that "I dreamed about this" feeling. Then I thought "Wow, I dreamed about brushing my teeth! Fascinating!" Then, I remembered the rest of the dream though; I was brushing my teeth and my mouth started bleeding profusely. About thirty seconds after I remembered the rest of the dream, I accidentally jabbed myself in the gums with my toothbrush. This is not unusual, I do this all the time. What was a bit unusual was the rather remarkable amount of blood. I tried to spit out some toothpaste and spit out a whole mouthful of blood instead. My dream still exaggerated a bit, but not that much. Of course, the most logical explanation here is that I was so distracted by the thought of my creepy dream that I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, not that I get premonitions of absurdly boring events, but that wouldn't make a very good topic for a post.

It looked kind of like this. 

Unicorns

I know I've mentioned this before, and I think it's a fairly common occurrence, but it's really weird how there are always these random recurring themes showing up in my life. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of unicorns. Yeah, I know kind of goofy. Anyway there was an episode of Merlin about them, then one of the people I follow on Pinterest pinned a really cool, very realistic, picture of one, then today they were talking about them on the episode of Buffy I was watching and of course there was that episode of Supernatural that I mentioned a few posts back. Well, I think this time it might be the universe taunting me. Ever since that Supernatural episode, I keep thinking about the idea of comparing significant others or "soul mates" or whatever to unicorns. I find it pretty appropriate, especially for someone as far from the norm as myself. They are these wonderful, beautiful, magical creatures who you imagine would make everything in your life alright, but alas they are pure fantasy.

Also, I think I might get a tattoo of her someday. This movie was a huge part of my childhood and, after re-watching it recently, may have had a larger impact on me than I realized at the time. 

Just What the Fuck Is That Supposed to Mean?

Every so often, these weird things happen to me that I would probably think were signs from the universe or something, if it weren't for the fact that they don't make any damn sense. Yesterday while I was exercising, I was trying desperately to think of a word. This happens to me all the time. I have a pretty decent vocabulary, but for some reason I'm constantly losing track of words. I will just randomly try to think of a particular word, even a fairly common one, and just not be able to find it. So yesterday, I was trying to think of this word that basically means unavoidable. I knew it wasn't even an uncommon word. It was one people use all the time, I just couldn't think of it. I kept feeling like I almost had it, then it would slip away. Every time I lost it, the word "imminent" would pop into my head. I knew it wasn't the right one, but I couldn't seem to get rid of it. It was like my brain was insisting that "imminent" was the word I really wanted. This kept happening throughout my entire, hour and a half long, workout. It was so aggravating that I decided that, as soon as I was finished, I would go to Thesaurus.com, look up unavoidable and find the word I was thinking of. Meanwhile, my obnoxious brain keeps throwing "imminent" at me. So I finally finish my workout, go to my computer, get to Thesaurus.com, and what do I see right in the middle of the homepage? I giant ad for some word game, which reads "Imminent, eminent and immanent. Do you know the difference?" Perhaps I'm just crazy, but it felt REALLY trippy.

By the way, the word was inevitable. Inevitable.