Tag: Psychology

Diary, 2/16 to 2/22/20

N came to the Hemlock Club today and we talked for four hours.  I told him about “the friendly voice” idea and that I thought I might give it a try.  The idea is that you publish an ad saying “A friendly voice” and your phone number, hoping to encourage lost souls to call you to talk, hopefully thus relieving some suffering in the world.  I used to worry that this would become a burden, and that indeed could happen; but I am not required to answer every call, necessarily, and I can limit calls to fifteen minutes.  I originally wanted to have a separate phone number for this, and perhaps I’ll do that, though it would be some expense.  Possibly Craigslist...

Diary, 2/9 to 2/15/20

Copyright 2020 by Alan Carl Nicoll All Rights Reserved {2/9/20}  Weight 211.8. {2/10/20}  Weight 212.2. {2/11/20}  Weight 211.2.  Cherry pie diet. I dreamt that I was telling my cousin Barbara that I was having a difficult time coping after prison.  I was riding uphill on a motor scooter, which I’ve never done, and I think … Continue reading Diary, 2/9 to 2/15/20 →

Diary, 12/1 to 12/11/19

A bleak morning, thinking of the role the United States has taken in the world throughout my lifetime and before.  Thinking of the role the greedy rich have taken in the United States throughout my lifetime.  Thinking of the ineffectual Democratic Presidents, the hope-betrayers...

Diary, 11/20 to 12/1/19

A week of HBO and Cinemax and stuff.  Watched maybe the first half of Aquaman, and turned it off at that point because it was so awful.  The man himself is good, but the story just sucks.  I expect it will have its fans among the younger set, like thirteen-year-old boys.  But, seriously, drinking and driving?  Heavy drinking for amusement value?  No and No.  The CGI is overblown; Atlantis would have looked better if...

Diary, 11/1 to 11/6/19

910 words so far this morning on The New Book. So far it is a “book” of “thinking on paper,” and so far it is thinking about weight loss. Obviously, I don’t intend and could not think about weight loss every day to the tune of a thousand words; it would be nice, but I don’t expect this, if I could “think on paper” each day, thinking about self-mastery, and so get my book written.

Diary, 10/20 to 10/31/19

Watched Big Fish last night and fell in love with it a second time, perhaps again especially because of Alison Lohman. But it is a magical movie done absolutely right. There are too few such movies; The Wizard of Oz comes to mind as a comparison, though Fish is more about relationships and communication than Oz’s outright fantasy. One thing I absolutely hated about Big Fish that would not occur to many people, I think: the hero “falls in love at first sight” and spends three years laboring to find out who she is. This is pathological, yet a commonplace of “romance,” truly terrible behavior made to look supremely attractive, a complete mischaracterization of “true love”...

Diary, 10/7 to 10/19/19, biggest post ever

Lay in bed this morning half asleep, turning over in my mind several words: acicular, acuminate, corm, carom, and maybe some others. Oh, yeah, crom, which comes from Conan the Barbarian. I looked it up; under cromlech, I found that crom is Welsh for bent or crooked. On looking in the Scrabble dictionary, I found, to my surprise, many words beginning with bh…; the only one I’d seen before was bhakti. I think there’s a book by Joseph Campbell titled Bhakti and Baksheesh, about his time in India. I think I owned a copy for a while, started reading it, and gave it up...

Diary, 9/30 to 10/6/19

My recent episodes of binge eating and my reading of The Willpower Instinct suggest that I’m having willpower (“wp”) troubles. The thing is, I’ve been very good about some wp challenges, such as controlling my food shopping (except recently!) regarding sugar and sodium, and not overspending on books—always at best a partial success, and often a partial failure. So, I really need to work on the wp problem, and I think the easy solution, or better, the first easy test, is exercise. That, and continue focusing on cutting down sugar in my diet: no more binges (which always involve sugar), no more chocolate cream pie at Lorene’s, and keep my food shopping under control.

Diary, 9/23 to 9/29/19

... neuroses are essentially psychic bandages—how we unconsciously respond to hurt in order to prevent more hurt. But of course it is necessary eventually to get beyond that stage. This is a commonplace. Another valuable lesson is how to respond to verbal aggressions like criticism...

Diary, 9/9 to 9/17/19

Watched Rashomon and Throne of Blood yesterday evening. Toshiro Mifune, who stars in both, seemed to me a pretty terrible actor: he false-laughs his way through the former, and yells all through the latter. Granted, his facial expressions are remarkable. Rashomon is very effective and seldom drags, even though I’ve seen it three or four times previously; the actress was good, though her crying was no more convincing than...

Diary, 9/1 to 9/8/19

I ended up finally getting moderately hooked on Gotham, so I watched sixteen or seventeen episodes of Season 1 yesterday to finish it, since it has to go back today. The future Catwoman—Camren Bicondova is the actress—was for me almost the main attraction, her face is so compellingly beautiful. I wasn’t happy with the changes to her role in the last couple of episodes. Bruce Wayne got more interesting as well. As the shows...

Diary, 8/5 to 8/10/19

Last night I started reading Mark Epstein, M.D.: Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. I was unpersuaded by the author’s delving into “the wheel of life” for insights into human psychology; what I saw was obscure metaphor after obscure metaphor, nothing I could use or even understand. Buddhism offers a way to escape the otherwise endless cycle of reincarnation...

Diary, 6/12 to 6/14/19

I had a fantasy just now, an imagined conversation with he-who-shall-remain-nameless. I was telling him that I was worried about climate catastrophe, and he was denying. So I was thinking along these lines: “What, the oceans aren’t full of plastic? The species aren’t dying? The hurricanes are a hoax? The science is a conspiracy? What, the prayers of the Jews during the Holocaust were effective and they didn’t all die?” But...

Diary, 6/9 to 6/11/19

A dream: it’s Final Jeopardy, but the middle contestant says that he doesn’t have a pen. Alex Trebek springs into action, going behind the contestant’s kiosk (lectern?) and pulls things out from underneath, including a ring about as large as a soccer ball. I think that he’s looking for a pen, but apparently not: he then rolls the kiosk away to allow another to be brought in, and I am surprised...