(I wrote this on October 28, 2003)

Occasionally I contemplate the amazing cosmic lottery I've won, just by being alive at all. For me to exist, every ancestor of mine, and every ancestor of every ancestor, had to live long enough to reproduce ... and not just any reproduction, but just the correct act of reproduction to allow the next generation of my particular ancestors to live, and in turn reproduce ... if a single ancestor had died earlier, or had felt a "headache" on a particular night, no me.

Whether God created the planet 5000 years ago, or life evolved on its own 1,000,000,000 years ago, how lucky I am to be a by-product of the interactions of all the creative forces of life on this planet.

(I wrote this on October 23, 2003)

The two things they never did in the hospital were:

(1) Hug me
(2) Tell jokes

They droned on and on in seminar rooms about the evils of drugs, alcohol, and too much red meat; about how we needed to take our medicines until the doctor told us to stop, etc. Daily blood tests, pills, and short sessions with a psychiatrist. We had optional seminars about AA (that was truly scary!), and optional religious services (I had a Catholic priest tell me to stop masturbating and having sex with men), and group therapy (there was the woman who drank a fifth a day so she wouldn't mind her kid crying all the time), and relatively tasty meals. We had a videotape about depression & electric shock therapy (eek!).

Why didn't they show us funny movies? Reruns of the Simpsons! How about a costume party, a dance where we could all shout, "Shake your booty, Shake your booty, YOW!"

Or maybe a group masturbation lesson.

Therapy is way too serious. We've all got the same shit. If people laugh too much, make them cry. If people cry too much, make them laugh ;-)

(I wrote this on October 20, 2003)

Empathy, from the Greek word meaning passion.

1) The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.

2) The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this.

I've occasionally wondered the extent to which my own apparent empathy for [object X] is a projection of my own imagined experience upon that object, versus a true understanding of that object. In some cases, I'm able to verify my empathy. More typically, I'm not.

I feel as though I have a large capacity for putting myself in the shoes of other people. But this could be a self-serving mirage, in which I'm expecting people to react like I would, in which I'm congratulating myself for supposedly caring about others. Or, worse, in which I'm neglecting my own needs and feelings by distracting myself with the apparent needs and feelings of others. Other people and animals can take advantage of my empathy, by presenting themselves in ways that lead me to believe certain things (rightly or wrongly) about their internal states.