Are you there, Freud? It's me, Amy

This is the dream I had last night. Why my brain made me dream this, I don't know. Here's the dream:

*cue chimes and wavy, distorted dream transition sequence*

I am walking down the street. A car going in the opposite direction pulls up next to me. The driver leans over and asks, "Excuse me - where are the Gilman steps?"

I pause and think. Ah, yes, I know where they are. I point ahead, in the direction that the driver came from. "It's over this way - I'm heading near there right now. If you actually make a U-y right now and want to drive along with me, I can lead you over there." I beam and feel warm and fuzzy. What a good person I am! Just like the kind of person I am when I'm awake. *smile*

The driver agrees. He pulls past me to make a nice, wide U-turn. My back is turned as I wait for him.

I turn back around and urge the driver onward. I suddenly notice that he is now no longer in a car but in a wheelchair. The other side of the street that he's U-turned onto is no longer a smooth stretch of asphalt, but heavily under construction as a gradually descending set of concrete steps. Still incomplete, in the place of the middle set of steps is a rocky, dark, yawning chasm that has yet to be filled. The man is rolling himself down the steps, per my instruction, oblivious to the gaping hole awaiting him.

I panic as I process this new scenery and connect the dots of cause and effect. Oh. God. "STOP!!" I start screaming - "Don't go any --!!"

TOO LATE.

The poor man doesn't hear me in time. As the last step disappears under him, wheelchair and all, he plummets into the chasm and dies. Shock grabs a hold of me and I turn in utter horror, unable to watch. Simultaneously, the weighty reality of guilt rushes in, and I'm paralyzed with the realization that I was the proximal cause of an innocent man's death.

*cue chimes and wavy, distorted dream transition sequence*

WHAT IN THE FUCK IS MY BRAIN TRYING TO DO TO ME?? THIS IS TRAUMATIZING! THIS IS REALLY FUCKING TRAUMATIZING!! In the middle of a busy work week, in the midst of planning a wedding, I do NOT need to wake up first thing in the morning with the blood of an innocent human being on my hands, dream or not. I am really fucking mad at my subconscious - where does it think up this sick shit?!? This is really a sick joke.

And what pisses me off is that I can't do anything to get back at it. This is really the truest form of guerrilla warfare - while my big lumbering consciousness is asleep, the subconsciousness emerges from the mist like a pack of poop-flinging chimpanzees and forces me to watch a human being - a CRIPPLED human being, no less - fall into a giant hole in the earth and die. Read this definition of "guerrilla warfare" from Wikipedia and tell me that's NOT what my brain is doing to me (emphases my own):

Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians (or "irregulars") used military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and less-mobile traditional army, or strike a vulnerable target, and withdraw almost immediately.

MMMMHHMMM.

To add insult to injury, the dream continues like this:

*resume dream sequence*

...and I'm paralyzed with the realization that I was the proximal cause of an innocent man's death. As I begin sobbing, shaking, and otherwise turning into a soppy, goopy emotional mess, two figures emerge out of the air. It's President Truman and Anonymous, Non-Descript Old-Timey President from early American history (you know, they all kind of looked the same), except since there were no photographs of presidents before Polk in 1845, the Old-Timey President appears to me as a cartoon character.

President Truman and Old-Timey Cartoon President proceed to comfort me, rubbing my shoulders and cooing soothing words in my ear, that Wheelchair Man's death wasn't my fault, accidents happen, etc. etc. Gradually, I'm swayed by their words. The dream concludes with my arms around their shoulders, hollering, "Hey, Chris! Can you get a photo of me with the presidents?"

*end dream sequence*

So my brain causes me to murder a man, begin to suffer the moral consequences, and then just tries to smooth everything over with a comical presidential pardon. NO!! It doesn't get let off the hook that easily!! Fucking little imp.

The last time I got pissed off at my brain when I woke up, it had made me dream about making out with Michael Scott. I woke up disgusted and confused.

I remain disgusted, confused, and angry to this day.

Femme Fatale: Part I

I have discovered that I am a fatalist. In this realization, I feel not only that I have come to a certain philosophical "checkpoint" for a burgeoning idea from since my teen years, but also, in a welcome breath of relief, reconciled a gnawing, uncomfortable pressure I've lived with for much longer that keeps me on constant alert for making the "right" decision at every crossroads. It is a variation of Kundera's einmal ist keinmal, the recognition of our own insignificance not in the face of a vast physical space, but under the churning wheels of a temporal one, where cause and effect move but in one direction. However, instead of being pained by the inconsequence of existence, I am set free by it.

This entry tells the story of my arrival at this "checkpoint".

I: THE MICROCOSMIC ILLUSION

When I was in 10th grade, I was exposed to Calvinism and the role that predetermination played in its doctrines through Ms. Seabreeze's American History class. Up on the third floor of my high school building, I remember our class collectively struggling to understand a belief system that sprang from the Christian roots of doing right to get into heaven, while simultaneously stating that God's mercy was the sole determinant of the fate of one's soul. How, we protested, could a religion promote predetermination without seeing its followers, lacking incentives to follow God's decree, lapse into chaos and sin? "Think of it this way," we were prompted by Ms. Seabreeze, "You still have the freedom to make a choice about your actions. It is just that God already knows what choice you're going to make." The fact of God's knowing the outcome of an event didn't negate the freedom possessed by an individual to impact that event.

Although this idea was but a drop in the bucket of our course, and we moved on quickly from Calvinism to other 16th century developments that would impact the earliest years of American history, I was intrigued by this idea that, although counterintuitive, was not self-contradictory. A comfortable atheist, I sought to test this concept against the laws of logic by removing the element of religion in a thought experiment; I replaced the role of God with a fortune teller who always accurately foresaw the future, and imagined that this clairvoyant laid out 5 playing cards before me: a king, a queen, a jack, a joker, and an ace. I was tasked with picking out any card of my choice, and she, with her back turned, would aim to make a prediction about my selection.

Well lo and behold, because she was a true fortune teller, she correctly predicted my card selection 100% of the time. She therefore saw the future not as a series of diverging paths, each one leading to a different outcome, but as a singular path that held only one possible consequence. However, the paradox that emerged was that from my perspective, as a humble seer only of the present, my freedom of choice was never in doubt. I always had the capacity to choose any card that I wanted; the only pressure I felt was my own internal decision-making process, over which I seemingly had complete control. Predetermination, or "fate" (for those inclined to use a more romantic term), could exist hand-in-hand with free will. It is only the shift in perspective that affects the perception of reality.

For a little while, the logic of this pleased my 15-year-old mind. But, naturally, ideas beget ideas, and I soon was faced with overcoming the obstacle of this fortune teller's theoretical existence, a pound of flesh that I had essentially concocted out of thin air, and who sooner or later I had to pay back to the stoic gods of reason. For my conclusion to be more than the bastard child of an adolescent thought experiment, I had to answer the question, In the physical world, just what does this fortune teller represent? What, in tangible form, is all-knowing, would observe the actions of every individual, and could foresee the decision of every traveler who came upon two roads diverged?

The answer I came to - an idea that has only grown more nuanced and ingrained in my mind over the last ten years - was the Universe. The Universe, including all its physical manifestations, is the system that encompasses everything that ever has been, is, and will be, and therefore the perfect candidate to play the real-life role of the fortune teller*. The Universe is the only entity from which the perspective of all physical dimensions (AKA all events that may occur at any given moment in time) and all temporal dimensions (AKA the timeline from beginning to end of any particular event) can be seen. Although this perspective does not invalidate the perspective of the individual human being (or a bacterium, for that matter), it is the only one that takes into account all other perspectives that exist, and therefore the only one of the two that is complete**. Given this trump card, the second conclusion I arrived at - one that, this time, held water beyond the theoretical confines of a thought experiment - is that the microcosmic, individual perception of control over one's decisions does not exist in the holistic context. In other words, free will is an illusion.

Although by the time I was a junior in college, this was a "gut-feeling" belief I held to (still being utterly unfamiliar with the bodies of work of Howard Bloom, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and other authors who would come to illuminate my understanding...including Albert Hofmann, if I may get cheeky***), my intellectual understanding of it was still tenuous, and it took another five years for it to develop into the fuller (albeit still very skeletal) idea that I've just presented. It had even further to go in terms of trickling down into my pragmatist views on living. That second half of this story, shedding light on why Kundera's "lightness of being" for me is not unbearable but one of life's saving graces, and why fatalism represents a falling into place of still more puzzle pieces in this existence, will have to wait for another time.

*Although I was incapable of making the connection at the time, of course this meant by extension the Universe is also God. But that is for another blog entry.

** Because of its completeness, according to mathematician Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem it is therefore also inconsistent. This holds in my analogy because the complete perspective of the universe necessarily encompasses a multitude of conflicting (inconsistent) perspectives by individual human beings.

***...which I may, because this is my blog!

September is the busiest month...

I am exhausted.

I am trying to make the most out of my weekends now. And what a month for that to be happening - September is just a complete breath of things starting to die and grow at the same time, a month so dynamic I feel like I could burst. I really think my three-year rut of giving in to inertia at every free minute is over. Each moment can be one of three things: downtime, maintenance, or life to the fullest. Spring of this past year I devoted a tremendous amount of mental energy to make "maintenance" the floor and not the ceiling ... I don't feel ready to let go of that momentum. I wonder how long it will take to exhaust this extreme of the pendulum swing? And how long after that until I can expect to reach equilibrium?

*sigh*

For now, Mondays in September are quite the day. It's a thin wall that's tasked with containing all my visceral highs and lows within a mere two days of seven.

I'm hanging in there.

A LOVELY Labor Day Weekend

For over a month, I had been looking forward to the weekend of September 3, not because of the lure of the long weekend, but because I knew there'd be the possibility that it would end with this:

...which it did! For those inferentially-impaired, the above-mentioned "measurements, color, style, price, and size" are that of a wedding dress. My wedding dress. Tee!

I'd scheduled a Saturday afternoon appointment at Lovely, a bridal boutique in the West Village, for myself and my mini-entourage of women: my mom, Chris's mom Maureen, and Chris's sister Kate. Like the rest of the wedding planning process, I wanted dress-shopping to be low-stress and fun, something that wouldn't overshadow the wedding itself, yet would be remembered fondly. I had stayed true to that philosophy thus far - the first time I walked into a bridal shop was completely on a whim, with my best friend and maid-of-honor Jen who was in town for the month. Sans appointment, we stepped into a Main Line boutique, and just like that, I tried on a handful of gowns and found two that I could have been happy with that only barely stretched my budget. No pushy sales women, no opinionated gaggle of bridesmaids, no drama.

But drama or not, what would a dress-shopping experience be if I'd stopped there? And so, with the help of my sister-to-be Kate, I organized a day out for the Chen/Canary women in New York, a metropolis I hadn't set foot in in three years (and which, to my knowledge, still lays claim to my Cloud 9 wallet and Maryland driver's license from my last visit). It was a gorgeous afternoon kicked off by a late brunch of Eggs Norwegian and a mimosa at Pastis in the meatpacking district, followed by a stroll through the shady and lush residential streets before our arrival at Lovely, an unassuming boutique nestled into the brown brick of West 4th Street townhouses. We almost missed it, as the only sign of its presence from the street was a simple chalkboard slate with the store's name written in script, hung from a black iron gate leading to its basement entrance.

From there, I loved every single moment of the dress-shopping experience. From the calming but quirky robin's egg blue walls covered in pleats of folded newspaper, to my mom telling me which dresses caught her eye, to examining trays of bejeweled hair pins and netted veils, to the three racks of draped, corseted, and feathered gowns that we could browse on our own, with no other customers to compete with ... and to being led upstairs to a sunny private salon with couches that stood on curved wooden legs, into which my family plopped comfortably as if they were at home. Oh, and I loved my salesgirl too! Melanie with her knowledgeable but yielding recommendations, earnest tone, and practical knotted turquoise flats put me right at ease and in the perfect mood to pick out a wedding gown.

For any brides-to-be reading this, I recommend creating an Oohs-and-Aahs rubric for any family and friends coming along with you. I could easily gauge the collective reaction of Kate and the moms - which were pretty in sync, mind you - by the sharpness of their

breath intake as I emerged from the curtains of the dressing room each time. The obvious "no" was a lace deep v-neck A-line; the lace made me look too old-fashioned an elicited only a restrained "awww". The more sure-footed dresses were accompanied by more chest-clutching and slower-paced sentences. "That. looks. fantastic." The dress that I ultimately decided on was collectively preferred for its wearability and movement, stylistic complements to the venue, and its overall Amyness. Although it competed neck-and-neck with a Grecian deep-v with a silver-beaded empire waist, I decided that the latter was of a much more common cut that I could find anywhere and wear anytime. The accents on my dress would only be fitting for a single day.

And that - was that! After just over an hour, we made our way back downstairs with my contract and credit card in hand, to find the next set of customers having just arrived and beginning to browse. In under four months, I'll be back at Lovely to pick up and take home the perfect dress, in my size, for my wedding.

Tee!

For more photos, click here.

Last photo courtesy of PRCouture.