Chocolatey Slippery Slope

Wow am I eating a lot of chocolate these days. I can feel it affect my digestive system, and later on my energy. Like coffee, but to a lesser extent, I feel my digestion speed up, I feel gas and solids/liquids speed up through my bowels towards their (blissful) exit. The effects on my energy are slightly destabilizingly stimulating.

When my parents, specifically my papa and stepmother, think I am wasting my precious time with something like carpentry, or farming, why do I feel like I need to convince them? Justify my direction to them? I know I shouldn't feel I have to, but I did yesterday afternoon (And for me, it is far more interesting to focus on what IS, in reality, than what SHOULD be, in some moral hypothesis). And when a temporary emotional state prevents me from expressing myself well, I lose confidence (Carpenters barely get by!). The emotion which began in one person (Elisabetta, my stepmother, as she started asking me, somewhat alarmingly, what my "plan" is for life) quickly spread into me and then hijacked my thoughts and communication (It would be really sad if someone with your mind stayed near the bottom of the ladder doing some job any man can do, without striving for the best!), and then started to stimulate other, slippery slope emotions (It is romantic to be a carpenter in the country and grow food, but is it realistic?). Emotions are very contagious.

I didn't feel too hot afterwards, but I knew it was just a temporary emotional state (it is such freedom to know this, to know you just have to bide your time, not feed the fire with reaction or runaway thought processes. Ahhhh, like putting your feet up after a 5 hour walk...), partially enhanced by my lingering cold, low energy, and the self-inflicted ass-kicking I gave myself on the treadmill the evening before. Steph and I did some baking (Tarte Alsacienne [she wrote it, no plagiarism here], and a chocolatecoconutpineapple cake) I told her more or less what I wrote here about the emotions I experienced (I hesitate to call them "my" emotions), and listened to Kenya Safari Sound Band and shook my butt a little, moved my hands up and down, and I was fine!

Good to see that I am still vulnerable. If I really am vulnerable, and I have convinced myself that I am not (that I am holier than that), this would be a mess! Such an easy mess to fall into, I have seen in other people. Or to convince oneself that one is in conscious control over themselves, fully. Is this not a great fallacy of this culture? Transparency? Realistically, I think many of us are at best translucent, I dare say most of us opaque. What do you suppose happens when X feels a pain in their shoulder, and then takes an aspirin to suppress the pain, so they can forget about it and seek more pleasurable sensations? Or when I used to try to detatch my emotions from present reality and attach them to the fantasies in 15 novels in 28 days while baking on a Mediterranean beach? Or 40 hours a week in a fantasy MMORPG? Anyway, with all honesty, no regrets. Observation without judgement. At least I attempt it. Society accepts, no, promotes, maybe even obliges a healthy dose of escapism, no? I want to see what it is like to do away with all that, that which causes big heads with little bodies, logic to escape intuition like Sudoku games on the subway to avert eyes from the gazes of other riders of the rocket. Ironically, I am playing a game similar to Sudoku inbetween these bursts of writing. It's the one with bridges. Building and growing with one's own hands. It is so easy for us to remove something from sight and forget it. If one is going to alter the natural world under the motivation of greed, it will surely involve this ignoring of the otherthanimmediatelyobvious-term effects of one's actions. Using environmentally harmful materials and chemicals to produce houses cheaper and faster, so more of us can exist on this planet at the same time. Slippery slope. Anyway, we took the reigns of this bull of a planet, lets see how long we can stay on.

My papa and stepmother. Middle-aged Western European urbanites. They seem to have very focused and hard definitions of "success" and "intelligence". I imagine they judge the general carpenter, moved to Roma from Romania, for example, his wife a cleaning lady, Fiat instead of Ferrari, as a failure. Anyway, let's go down this road no further. I have regained confidence in my path after a momentary lapse (TRIVIA: "momentary lapse" is the first half of the title of the album of which band?), and imminent collapse or not, see taking an apprenticeship in carpentry as a good idea.

So, because of logistics, and because the cold and lack of experience prevents us from walking out on the street and hitchhiking to the Pyrenees, we plan tofly to Girona, near Barcelona, from Roma, on Sunday. From Girona we will carpool with someone to Toulouse, and stay a day or so with a friend, and then carpool to Tarbes, where a WWOOF host awaits.

I have seen photos on other peoples' blogs. Sorry! No camera!

Oh, I almost forgot: some questions for you:

Ask yourself this series of questions once and a while, after something happens, and you think about it, and then tell someone else about it: 

• To what extent does my judgement affect my perception of an event? 
• To what extent does my judgement of an event spark emotional responses? 
  
• To what extent do my thoughts exaggerate those emotions concerning the judgement an event? 
• To what extent does my verbal expression of my thoughts exaggerate those thoughts and further exaggerate the emotions sparked by the judgement of an event?
• To what extent are those puffed up emotions transferred to my audience, who did not witness the original event?
• To what extent does my audience further exaggerate my already furtherly exaggerated focus concerning the now surely powerful emotions I associate with my judgement of an event? 

Slippery Slopes abound!

Cheers,
M