Unota

Sorry, I am still learning about this kind of stuff. Is an immortal spirit body not the end goal of taoist alchemy? I thought this was like, the equivalent of enlightenment, in comparison with other religion. To persist after death, etc etc, in whatever form that may mean. *squints as notes* Did I misunderstand? Am I being an idiot again?

Okay, I see your point. Well...I do and I don't. Ehh...my head hurts. I do...but I don't!!

Why to which part? Why I'm not interested in the alchemy? I guess that was a wrong way to say it. I am interested in it, I'm fascinated by it and I love to read about it. But I will not try to apply it to myself, because I feel like that is not...really my personal...goal? Before I would ever consider something like spiritual development or enlightenment of any sort...Don't I have to learn to love life first? Wouldn't it just be an escape mechanism? How can I do something like that, if I can not be happy with 'going with the flow?' And if I was happy with it, then I think I would never find reason to do spiritual cultivation in the first place. Is it not contradictory? Maybe I just don't want that. (I guess that's my controversial opinion!)

This has always driven me craaazy! I always thought, isn't alchemy literally an attempt to go against nature? I like going with the flow. And I like daoism. But not particularly interested in the alchemy part. Which sounds pretty silly, because that's a pretty big part.

Is that...A skyrim screenshot?

What do you mean by westerners have a natural inclination to focus on the body? Why is that?

If I have, they did a really bad job. Joking aside...I can remember vividly, and count on my two hands, the most significant times that people have been kind to me. When I was in high-school, I didn't have money to buy lunch. But I stopped bringing lunch from home, because I got bullied by other kids for what I had to eat. (Ramen noodles...) To avoid getting bullied, I stopped eating entirely. One of my teachers-my homeroom teacher at the time, found out about this, she would sneak me snacks. Leftover food from her own lunch, leftovers from the spanish club like imported candies. She always gave me her chai lattes, because she didn't 'like' them...Though I think from that point on she continued buying them only for me. There was also the time when I lost my home to a house fire, and all of my belongings, and my previous second grade teacher offered to donate toys to me. I said no...I felt bad taking something from someone else. (In hindsight, I should have said yes, because I never really had much from that point on. We had lost everything.) Still, nobody else had asked me anything like that. There was also during my first job, as a dog groomer, and there was a day I had been working for 12 hours, I think after a few days in a row, and I hadn't been sleeping well. My boss was running me ragged. You know, I was hired to just wash the dogs, but I was also cleaning everything, I was grooming the dogs, I was washing them, I was lifting them from the ground into the tub all of the time, and a lot of them were pretty big. And I was still only being paid enough to wash them. I must have looked awful, because there was a girl that came up to me, she pressed a five dollar bill into my hand, and she said, 'don't tell,' because if my boss found out she'd tipped me, she'd be angry. I wonder what kind of look I had on my face then, I must have looked at her like she was God, hahaha. And then more recently, about a year ago maybe, (or maybe two now,) around my birthday, I was planning on taking my own life. I had already tried twice by then. My health had already gone to the dogs by my 20's. I didn't have any friends. I had no money. My family hated me. I did not know if I was ever even going to get any better. I had not spoken to anyone in a really long time, because nobody would speak to me. I had no hope for a future, and nothing that I did brought me any happiness anymore. I was in bed most of the time, I didn't eat, I lost a lot of weight, etc. That week I bought my first journal, I wanted to at least leave something. But then, not shortly after that, something really dumb happened. A person said something to me. And then kept talking. I was like. What is going on. Why are you talking to me? Are you stupid? People don't talk to me. Nobody ever does this. He was raving about stuff he liked. Video games, tv shows, things I had no interest or joy in anymore. But he seemed so excited and happy about it. So I listened. I was jealous of him. I was baffled. Maybe even a little bit mad at him. How can you care so much about trivial things like this when life is falling apart?! He started throwing things at me, one after another, making me listen to this, watch that, play this game. I didn't want to be rude so I did, and I wasted so much time doing it that I didn't have time to think about anything else. Before I knew it, the time went. And it's not that I thought that they were dumb, I was just confused, because I couldn't understand how they made him happy. Maybe out of spite, I took that journal that I had bought for other reasons, and I started using it for something else. I started writing to remember things that made me 'happy.' Not happy, but, at least made my day a little less worse. This is when I started drawing things in there, too. I didn't have any art supplies at first, so I used charcoal in my wood stove. I think this was the first thing I drew. (Or it was the sunflower? I genuinely don't remember.) Anyway, when my spanish teacher saw me not eating, when my second grade teacher offered me toys when I lost my home, that girl that pressed a five dollar bill into my palm so I could buy a treat after working really hard that week, and that person that spoke to me when nobody else would, if those aren't 'blessings,' I don't know what is. So...maybe? I guess they were, to me. (...That was really difficult to talk about.)

I feel like I've invented new facial expressions the further I read. I did not know my face could do that.

What?

AI is just a commercialism machine. Built off of stolen work to spit out things for profit without having to pay anybody to make it. A child's drawing is more impressive to me.

Uhhh....I don't know about 'aliens...' but I do dream a lot about weird monsters. But I haven't had one recent enough to be able to describe vividly. I remember having one nightmare about really tall faceless humanoid things...that their skin looked like it had been burned by fire, sloughing off...it was creepy. Their faces were just, nothing but peeling skin. There was one where there was a weird small fox-like thing, but when I picked it up, it had billions of eyes, and I was startled and dropped it. I don't think that one was bad, it just scared me. There was one where there were more dog-like things...They were gray with weird buggy eyes, long snouts, and they didn't really look canine-like, they kind of reminded me of opossums or some kind of rodent...The teeth were wrong. In that one, they weren't hostile, until I picked something up to look at it, then they turned on me. I felt like I did something that I wasn't supposed to, haha. Those, big faceless things, are the only humanoid thing that I can recall dreaming about.

Oh, I think this was the one I was thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year's_Eve_1963_snowstorm https://www.wsmv.com/2024/01/01/record-setting-snowstorm-hit-middle-tennessee-60-years-ago-today/ Not really 1964, though, because it only went into new years. Not sure if you'd count that. Close! I'm not really sure how I knew about that. It's probably been referenced a few times in comparing records.

I find it hard to imagine how this year could be any crazier than any year before it has been. Wasn't 1964 also the year of that crazy blizzard? Or am I misremembering? There was also a crazy tornado outbreak that year, followed by the Palm Sunday one in 1965. Some reallyyy cool dual tornadoes were in the Palm Sunday one. Lots of turbulent weather.