#Extreme boredom and sleep deprivation made me write this | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

a-cluttered-gordon-freeman · 3 years ago

Text

Unclouded Days, because I'm not an idiot and I definitely remembered this story exists, part 3.

Part 1 | Part 2

"If I wanted to have a family... I'd have it with Alyx... Or Barney... But for right now...."

Gordon looked up from his journal. Taking a glance at his clock, he noted the date and time. 6:37 a.m. on a cold Thursday, April 13.

It had been a whole 2 months since he last visited Alyx and Barney. Gordon could remember the chill of the incoming blizzard as he trudged through the snow, and he remembered the chill coming back home afterwards.

His cabin was a safe haven away from the chaos of the society he helped create. Gordon wanted nothing to do there. He wanted to be by himself, for all too long he had been surrounded by people and he couldn't stand it. He thoroughly enjoyed the moments spent being away from everyone, where he was on his own, doing whatever. Nobody would boss him about. He wouldn't have to fight.

Barney had brought up a good point, but by accident. Gordon had mocked Barney by making such claims as having a family. And with Barney asking if he had one, Gordon spent long nights thinking about it.

No, he didn't have one, but Gordon couldn't deny that he had thought about having one, and having some kids of his own. He was still young enough to, but with whom? Barney would say yes, he and Gordon were always intimate with each other and would be asked constantly at Black Mesa when they'd marry. But it'd rule out children, as niether of them could reproduce with each other. Alyx would be uncertain about getting married, probably, mostly because she didn't know to the fullest what it meant. And niether of them felt a strong attraction towards each other, so would it even be considered a real loving relationship?

Gordon took another look at the clock. 7:15 a.m.. Temperature dropped a few degrees in the cabin. He sighed.

Another night wasted.

Closing the journal, Gordon stood up and stretched before opening the window to let it the sun and some fresh air. He stared outside, some animals crossing in and out of his vision, the leaves from last fall stuck down under the remaining snow. It was cold out, but the kind of cold one craved for in the spring. A nice and peaceful morning with a slight chill, the forestry just now waking up with snow melting around, providing nutrients to the life nearby.

He felt tired. Not unusual, as he lost quite a bit of sleep since that week in February. But Gordon couldn't fall asleep.

It was the entire point of that journal. To write his thoughts until he felt as though he could sleep. Some nights he considered heading back over to Eli and Kliener, maybe chat a bit. But being 40-something miles away would mean he'd arrive there sometime by noon. Other nights he considered working on some projects he laid out. But that would mean Gordon would have to turn on the other lights- all that artificial light would keep him up more than the red-light alarm he used to write in his journal. More often than not Gordon would just sit at his desk, writing away from 8 in the evening to 7 in the morning. The rare nights were when he didn't write in his journal, but instead bathed in the pitch black darkness.

Writing in the journal helped though. Gordon wouldn't have to worry about making sense to anyone, as long as it made enough sense to him. No need to appropriate a sentence, give it structure. It was a place where he could write what he was feeling, with no worry of harming anyone else.

Though sometimes Gordon wished he could actually tell someone, get advice or some help. It would have been useful as hell for him.

To ask for help gave Gordon the feeling of uselessness, a feeling he had been trying to avoid hard. To be told to do a thing gave him a purpose. So he did things that made him feel useful- took care of alien enemies for those that couldn't, provided backup to those who could, saved humanity, rebuilt society. Gordon did it all. There was no way he was going to ask anyone for help. He'd feel guilty as hell.

Gordon decided that he was done thinking such thoughts. And he had also decided that he would relax with a nice, warm shower, taking some time to ease off some stress.

Silence had been filling the lab. It was as if quiet things could become quieter, if it didn't make sound then it would start making other things stop making sound.

Alyx and Barney found it uncomfortable. The silence was deafening, and they could hear their thoughts much too clearly. It also provided a sort of laziness, a feeling of boredom, to the lab. A place once bustling with life and loud noises now only inhabited by two people with nothing better to do that they hadn't done forty times before.

"What if we went out of town for a bit?" Barney broke the silence, startling Alyx, who had been slowly falling asleep.

"What do you mean? To where?" She stretched.

"To Gordon's."

"I don't know, would he even like visitors right now? We have no way of asking him."

"Surprise visit?"

"We can't ask him, Barney! We've got no way to talk to him." Alyx rested her head on the table, letting out a drowsy sigh.

"I know where he lives." Barney said, causing Alyx to look over at him. "He had told me an approximation, he lives east near the giant trees."

"In the shack?"

"Yeah."

"Barney, thats forty miles away. We'd have to start early morning to arrive at his house with some daylight left. And besides, there is no way we'd be able to spend the night there, it has four rooms- a bathroom, a tiny bedroom, a kitchen and a main room."

Silence filled the lab once more. Alyx had a point, it was already too small for one person, much more with three. And there would be no way of confirming with Gordon if they could even get there- if anyone else saw them leave, and it would be a given that many people would see them leave, then Gordon's privacy would be violated by everyone else knowing where he lived.

It'd be rude to arrive uninvited, and unpleasant if he wasn't there or was too busy to let them in.

"Can't you talk to him?" Barney stared at Alyx, who sat up with exhaustion.

"How do you think I would be capable of that?"

"With that weird vort-connection-thingy you two have."

She took a moment to think. "I'm... Not entirely sure. I don't think I can."

"Should we ask a vortigaunt?"

Gordon finished dressing and took a seat on his bed. He was disappointed. His bath hadn't helped to relieve any stress whatsoever, instead he was convinced it added more and made it worse.

Which... Isn't good when you are a sleep-deprived physicist who has just been to a version of hell and back at one moment and wiping the enemy off the face of the planet.

His clock now read 9:00 a.m. exact. He could take a walk around the forest, or maybe cook up something.

Or, instead, he could lay in bed, the window open, the covers over him. Which is what Gordon did.

It made the annoying sleeplessness much worse but one could not deny the relaxing comfort it brought. And slowly, just so slowly, Gordon began to drift off to sleep.

"You can communicate feelings and pain without words, but you cannot talk to the Freeman directly." The vorts had answered, causing a sigh from Alyx and Barney.

"Well, then, fuck how are we supposed to get him now?" Barney huffed.

"We wait until he decides to come over." Alyx replied, getting up to go back to the lab.

"Have either of you decides to meet the Freeman yourselves?" A vort inquired, walking up to Alyx and Barney.

"No." The both of them responded.

"It'd be rude to walk up to his house uninvited, seeing as others could follow us." Alyx look over at the vortigaunts, who gave the appearance of understanding.

The two left the vortigaunts and returned to their eerily quiet lab, where boredom struck again.

Gordon shot up, panting hard. Beads of sweat trailed down his face, his heart and mind racing. He glanced at the clock.

5:21 p.m. on a now warm April 13.

Gordon took a second to calm down. He couldn't remember what had caused him to be so hyped up. Was it a nightmare? Bad memory?

What ever it was, it was gone now. Gordon could be thankful for that at least.

Chest still pounding, Gordon took a second to gain his bearings and calm down. He found it extremely difficult to do such on his own. As a result, he went out on a walk. He found it best to take in the nature, listen to the trees and wildlife.

As much as Gordon would have liked to hunt, a gun would raise back past feelings of fear, anger and pain that the Resonance Cascade and the Uprising caused. He couldn't stand to hold such a weapon nowadays, the only reason he'd have one anymore is for safety purposes. But even then, Gordon would much rather fight with a knife.

Bored with his little house and, unfortunately, the forestry around him, Gordon set out to the lab. It was best for an escape, as he wasn't feeling all that great by himself.

It was daybreak by the time Gordon arrived at White Forest. He had taken some time to visit Eli and Kleiner, and had also gone for a bit of shopping in the main town. Once done with that,he made his way to the lab.

"Hey Barney."

Barney turned around and was greeted by Gordon.

"Gordon?"

"Yeah, I'd hope so. How have things been?"

Barney smiled. "Its been good. And you?"

"...not good." Gordon sighed and looked down a bit. "Haven't been getting good rest."

"Would you like to spend a few more nights here? At the lab with Alyx and I?"

"Yeah... I'd appreciate that thanks..."

Barney took Gordon's hand and led him to the lab, where Alyx greeted them both with an excited smile.

Gordon got set up in his old room again. Sitting upon his bed, he stared at the ceiling in silent contemplation. Closing his eyes, he began to silently cry, for no reason he could find.

When Alyx stepped into the room, she caught a glance of the tired and teary-eyed man. She took that as a moment to sit next to him and offer weak support.

Gordon glanced over to her and wiped off his eyes. "S-sorry..." he muttered weakly, his voice shaky as hell.

Alyx smiled. "No need to be sorry. Just let it all out."

END OF PART 3

---------

Heyo! Its yours true. I need help to try to make it towards the end by offerring your support for the story and reblogging/asking more about it/ messaging me! Rb>likes, and the reblogs offer me more motivation to continue writing the stories, and same would go for my ravenholm comics, that you can read at @returntoravenholm-awgag ! I'd appreciate all the support I can get from anyone! Thank you!

-marc

23 notes · View notes

valkerymillenia · 4 years ago

Note

Hi, I asked about jason’s memory in my last ask in cbds. Thanks for answering. It made me wonder would jason gets flashes about his time with dick and the twins?I really admire your patience in writing your story. This is why i’ll fail as a writer, because i have absolutely no patience. I mean I would probably rush my story and that would make it turn bad.

Ok, so, no. At first Jason has no memory between his death and the Pit. Eventually though some things start to trigger pieces of memories that he doesn't really understand, his full memory takes quite a while to return and by then he's dug himself into too deep a hole.

Also, you sound EXACTLY like me when I started writing.

So I'mma ramble now. Feel free to ignore the boring story time beneath the cut but I promise it has a point, it's just bound to be long because I don't know what brevity is and when I'm sleep deprived I talk to much.

Before I started writing I always wanted to put stories down into words but I never ever considered writing books, I used to make elaborate fantasy worlds, characters and lives in my head that dragged on for weeks on end, slowly becoming more and more complex, it was pure escapism, but I never thought about writing those stories down precisely because I though "I'll never have the patience to develop this, I'll just rush it or quit halfway".

Then when I was in 10th grade there was a writing contest in my school and two of my cousins were teachers there and writers themselves and encouraged me to enter (there were 3 categories actually- teachers, 7th to 9th grade and 10th to 12th grade). I figured, why not?

The story had to be handwritten under a pseudonym with a 5 page limit (no word limit because it was handwritten, you just had to use standard test paper for 5 pages, and yes, this was normal because not everyone had access to a computer to type their work), it was fiction under the theme "stories of our people" and the judges were a panel of teachers and one famous writer (he had a very popular YA adventure series and some great mythology based novels, unfortunately he passed away a few years later).

Now, bear in mind 2 things. This was a school surrounded by forest in the hills of a small rural city but it was the biggest rural city around and all the other towns and villages sent their kids to high school there, the second thing to remember is that high school is mandatory education in my country so dropping out isn't really an option. Therefore we had hundreds of kids in the high school grades (somewhere between 600 and 800 kids, I think, there's less nowadays because the next town over grew immensely and has its own high school now).

You'd think kids wouldn't be interested in a writing competition but the author that was coming to judge was very popular at the time and, well, it was a high school in the middle of the woods in a small countryside town. Things were boring, ok? We didn't have a mall or a movie theater or anything, so when something popped up to break the boredom (or someone even remotely famous showed up) everyone jumped at it.

So a lot of people participated and me? I was just dragging my feet because "I didn't have the patience", I waited until the last two days before the deadline and poured out a story last minute with a shitty penname based on my mythology obsession (Valkery Thot, you can laugh about it nowadays but Thot was the Egyptian good of scribes and I was NERD).

The story was about two kids that never liked each other growing up even though they lived close to each other, they end up crossing paths on the same adventure to a local inaccessible waterfall we have here in the mountain, they were looking for treasure based on stories and maps from each of their grandfathers and find a cave together where they discover etchings left by said grandfathers and, long story short, the treasure was friendship.

(Sappy as hell, I know, but I was thinking the whole YA adventure mindframe, ok? Plus, it wasn't my preferred writing language, which is English, and I was 15 and literally improvised the whole thing last minute, didn't even draft anything, I just wrote it directly and barely proofread for typos.)

So I entered the contest last minute with no real hopes, it was just an experiment but it proceed to be way more entertaining than I though, without the pressure of actually wanting to win it was easier than I thought.

Award day came and we all gathered in this fancy huge auditorium we had, it was the fanciest part of the whole school but it still couldn't fit everyone in there, then again most students that came just wanted an excuse not to go to class that morning. Anyway...

One of my cousins won in the teacher category and I was all proud. I watched the 3 winners of the 7th to 9th grade category being awarded and started getting distracted (because unless I was drawing or stimming I had the attention span of a goldfish). Then the 10th to 12th grade category came and I was so distracted that they had to call me twice before I realized I'd won second place!

First place went to 12th grade boy that wrote a story called "The Message", very purple prose and perfect grammar, lovely story, but I digress.

Anyway, the famous author was the one to give me my prize and told me my story was very vivid, there were some typos but he was impressed by the creativity and the amount of action I packed into 5 pages while still giving it a satisfying ending. I barely grasped what the heck he was saying at the time because I still had this certainty that I bullshitted the whole thing last minute and couldn't even remember half of what I wrote but I asked him if he thought I "could be real writer someday" and he just said I already was a "real writer" because all it took to be a real writer was putting it it words, that and actually enjoying the world I made up.

It stuck with me. I didn't realize right away that that was my dream, that I wanted to be a novelist, I still wanted to be an artist and was stuck under all those expectations to choose a proper college path and career (I thought I could do law, AH! what was I thinking?!) but it really stuck with me and shortly after I started getting really deep into a side of fandom that I hadn't experienced before (because I never had much access to internet before that) and started to want to put my stories into words even if I never finished them, I still didn't think I had the patience or the originally.

A few years later I realized that when it comes to something I'm passionate about I do indeed have the patience, by age 12 I had already been writing long comprehensive character bios, story details, transcribed quotes, meta theories, summaries and collecting tons of info of all my favorite fandoms and not to share, just for fun (and probably OCD) this went on for years before I even found out that the internet had whole websites and encyclopedias for such things (not like today though but yeah), and it had never occurred to me the patience that that in itself required.

My first fics were atrocious! Mostly because I made A LOT of typos due to not being used to writing in English full time but my thoughts came more naturally in English and I didn't enjoy writing fiction in Portuguese anyway (poetry though? Absolutely), I also used extremely exaggerated plot points, be it drama, angst or romance. But people liked the stories for the content and not the accurate spelling so I kept at it. I never used to finish my fics back then, not due to lack of patience but mostly because I put too much pressure on myself to make a story perfect and would stop having fun.

When I started writing purely for fun and passion (and realized that not every story needed to be a novel length epic) that's when I started churning out my best (and ironically longest) stories and getting better and better.

I won't lie, having readers encouraging me was key, it's half of the fuel I need to keep going, outside interest is an incredible motivator, but mostly I just realized that the key to good writing is:

Less pressure + more passion = all the patience you need

This doesn't just apply to original work though, it's also about fanfic.

Holy crap, that was a lot of words just to sum everything up on that one bold sentence... See, I could never have written this much when I was in high school, that's also a matter of practicing until letting your thoughts out into writing becomes second nature but that's a whole other story.

Anyway... Thanks for the lovely message. It's the story of thing that means the world to me ❤️

(and PS- no, I haven't won any other contests since that one but I have published articles on magazines, no published novels yet though because I don't think my original ideas are ever good enough to follow through).

#CBDS fic #rach rambles #writing woes #writing contest story

5 notes · View notes

marketingatlightspeedreadin-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Isolation – Mind Field (Ep 1)

youtube

– Imagine being confined to a 10-by-10-foot room in complete isolation. No timekeeping devices, no phones, no books, nothing to write on, no windows. [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ Psychologists say that fewer than three days in a room like this can lead to brain damage. I will be staying in this room for three days. ♪ ♪ – Clearly, he is on the border of misery. [electronic music] ♪ ♪ – Even in a city surrounded by people, it’s possible to feel lonely or bored. Your brain is like a hungry sponge. It’s constantly absorbing information. It thrives when stimulated. Between smartphones and books and movies and friends and family, thousands of sensations are constantly going into our heads. But what if it all got cut off? [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ What is boredom? Well, it’s believed to be an emotion that’s a less intense form of disgust.

A visual representation of emotions developed by Robert Plutchik shows them all on a wheel. Notice that boredom shares a spoke with disgust and loathing. They are different intensities of the same emotion. You see, boredom pushes us away from low-stimulus situations because variety and stimulation literally lead to neurogenesis– brain-cell growth. We are here today doing what we do because boredom has guided us toward greater and greater challenges and bigger and more complex brains. So what is it like to be deprived of the sensations and social interactions so many of us take for granted? ♪ ♪ A landmark study at Harvard and Virginia Universities found that students prefer to experience physical pain over 15 minutes of boredom. To demonstrate the surprising lengths people will go to to avoid boredom, we brought in an unsuspecting subject for what he believes to be a focus group. We begin by introducing a set of stimuli, one of which is very unpleasant.

[device buzzes] – Oh, shit. – What? – Shocked the shit out of me. Touch it. [device buzzes] – [grunts] It did shock me. – No, it didn’t. Did it really? – Yeah, it did. – He doesn’t like it. – That really shocked me. – Our fake focus test continues. – So let’s start with the shock button. Jamison, would you choose to experience this again? – I don’t want to do that again. – Why wouldn’t you? – ‘Cause it shocked me, and I can still feel it going down my forearm. – Now it’s time for Jamison’s true test– the test of boredom. – You will be in the room for 30 minutes.

Please remain in your chair. Feel free to re-experience the electric-shock button… – Okay. Okay. – Or not. – All right, the moment of truth. [door closes] When the only two options are boredom or painful shock, which will our subject choose? He’s not even looking at the button. Oh. It hasn’t even been a minute yet, and already Jamison is restless. [pensive music] With 29 minutes to go and no other stimulation in the room, the shock button is a tempting object to occupy Jamison’s mind. ♪ ♪ Remember what Jamison said a few minutes ago. – I don’t want to do that again. – But will he desire stimulation so strongly, he just goes ahead and pushes that button? ♪ ♪ [device buzzes] – [grunts] – It took exactly one minute and 57 seconds of boredom for Jamison’s mind to go from, “Never again,” to “Sure, I’ll give myself an electric shock to relieve boredom.” Sometimes stimulation, any stimulation is perceived as better than none at all.

Line:0% This guy doesn’t like being bored. Can he resist touching it a second time? [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ [device buzzes] – [grunts, laughing] – We’re social animals. Whether it’s another human or a volleyball or an electric-shock button, you’ll make friends with whatever you need to. Jamison? I’m Michael. Thanks for coming in today. – Sure. – So tell me a little bit about what you’ve been up to here in this room.

Align:start – I’ve been sitting in this room with a button. – Yeah. – And despite saying I didn’t want to press it again, I pressed it twice. – Why? – I was just bored in this room, I suppose, so… – Really? – Yeah. – Did that hurt? – Yes. – The hypothesis is that when left alone with a very negative stimulus, people will go ahead an re-experience it just because it’s something to do. – I’m one of them. – [laughs] We dislike being bored so much, sometimes physical pain is preferable.

But intentionally putting yourself into what would seem to be the most boring environment possible can be useful. It’s called sensory deprivation. ♪ ♪ Psychologists have conducted experiments in sensory deprivation since the 1930s. During the Cold War, the military used sensory deprivation for both training and interrogation. In the 1970s, the activity became recreational, with soundproof, lightproof flotation tanks that keep you buoyant with salt water that is the same temperature as your body. ♪ ♪ All right, so I’m on my way to a subterranean float lab. This company sells sensory deprivation. This will be sort of a training session for my three days in isolation, and I’m getting guidance from an expert.

Hey, Dominic. How are you? – Hey. What’s up, Michael? – You know Dominic Monaghan from “Lord of the Rings” and the TV series “Lost.” – Now, this is your first time, right? – This is my first time. I’m a little nervous. I’ve never been alone without any stimulation. – One of my favorite things about floating is, there’s nothing else going on. – Okay. – You can’t see anything. You can’t hear anything. You can’t do anything. You just have to look at you. And for some people, that’s scary. It’s like looking in a mirror for hours. This flotation tank is a really good way of getting him prepped for the isolation chamber, but I also think he needs to be okay with the fact that it’s gonna put him outside of his comfort zone.

The mind is a good thing to lose every so often. – All right, let’s take a peek. ♪ ♪ Oh. So this is the room. This is where I will be floating for the next hour, alone with nothing to do but listen to my thoughts. ♪ ♪ I’ll see you on the other side. ♪ ♪ – The mind is a good thing to lose every so often. You have to remind fear that you’re in the driver’s seat.” – Hey. – Hey, Dominic. – How was it? – It was really good. – Yeah? – Can we sit down? – Yeah, let’s do it. – My initial thought when I laid down was, “Wow, this is buoyant.” And then I just… started thinking about errands and tasks, but at some point… well, it was like dreams. – Uh-huh. – But my eyes were open. Like, it was sort of like half-dreams you have either when you’re about to fall asleep or when you’re waking up. – That’s when it gets interesting.

Align:end You’re allowing your brain to be free. You’re just floating in space. You’re just atoms that are on the top of this pool, floating in space. So now you’ve done this, and you’re doing this isolation booth. Do you think that that was in some way helpful or a hindrance? – It made me more… unhappy about what’s coming up. 72 hours is quite a bit different than one hour. ♪ ♪ Some people choose isolation to learn about isolation. As we prepare to explore other planets, we’re faced with a little issue. Stuff in outer space is really, really far apart. Within our own solar system, even a trip to Mars would take months in each direction. That’s a long time to spend cut off from the rest of humanity, stuck in a tiny spaceship. To get ready for those journeys, we have subjected some people to extreme conditions here on Earth. In 1989, a young Italian interior designer named Stefania Follini volunteered for a NASA experiment to help study the effects of isolation associated with space travel.

She spent 130 days alone in a plexiglass cell in a cave 30 feet underground in New Mexico. In the absence of timepieces and any sign of day or night, Ms. Follini’s body was thrown out of wack. Her menstrual cycle stopped, and her sleep-wake cycle changed radically. She tended to stay away for 20 to 25 hours at a time, sleeping about 10 hours. When she finally emerged, she mistakenly believed she’d only been underground about half as long as she actually had. As difficult as Stefania’s experience was, at least she had books to read.

In my isolation chamber, I will only have white walls to stare at. ♪ ♪ Alone time– what a pleasure. Checking out, getting away from it all, relaxing… banishment from society, the silent treatment, solitary confinement. [dramatic music] Solitude isn’t always nice. ♪ ♪ What happens when isolation is not voluntary? William Brown has firsthand knowledge of solitary confinement. So, William, how much of your life have you spent in prison? – Probably, like, 16 years. – That’s, like, almost half your life. – Yeah, basically, almost half my life, ’cause I want to jail when I was 18 for armed bank robbery. This right here… This was my home, off and on, about two years… ♪ ♪ The hole. – What was the longest stretch of consecutive time? – It was, like, five months total. – I’ll tell you what really amazes me. This feels so much worse than a jail cell. This doesn’t have bars, letting in light or a view.

Align:start – Not at all. – Would you have a mattress at least? That would be the only thing. In this particular cell, that would be the only thing in here. You would just have a mattress, and other than that, you would have nothing more. This light will constantly stay on, so there will be, you know… – That light’s always on? – That light is always on. – Even at night? – Even at night. That light is always on. You’re left in here with your thoughts, and that’s it. ♪ ♪ I would sit– like, say, for example, sit in this corner right here. – Like, facing the corner or facing out? – No, I would face out, and I would just sit and just concentrate on breathing.

Align:start You don’t know. It’s like you’re in limbo. You never know when they’re gonna open the door. I’ve known guys that have served consecutive years inside this same little box. – How does that change them? – Mentally, it scars them for life. – Really? – Yeah. – This is what I’m gonna do.

Align:start I’m gonna put myself in a room like one of these, and I won’t have a clock… – Anything at all. – No way to tell time. What I’m nervous about is, when that door closes… – Mm-hmm. – The awareness, the sudden awareness of how much time I have. – See, that’s the thing about it, ’cause once this door right here closes, it’s, like, it’s final. This is almost a coffin. – Really? ♪ ♪ Even more extreme than isolation from other people is isolation from other people and stimuli. That’s what I’m going to be doing inside this room. ♪ ♪ This is about as boring as a room can get. It’s soundproof, and this light will never turn off. I do have a small bed, but there will be no interruptions. I will have no way to tell what time it is. No meals will be delivered, because all the meals are inside the room already– white containers of Soylent.

I do have plenty of water, and I have a wash basin with a white bar of soap, and I’ve got myself a tiny, little toilet. There’s nothing to do but be completely alone with myself and my thoughts. Now, psychologists say that fewer than three days in a room like this can lead to brain damage. I will be staying in this room for three days… a full 72 hours. ♪ ♪ – So I’m gonna take your vitals first. Michael is basically turning himself into a lab rat. What we want to to is see what might change with Michael before and after his time in isolation– what’s gonna happen to his blood pressure, what’s gonna happen to his pulse, his basic reflexes. – Are there actually any medical concerns you would have? I’m just gonna be in this room. – You got a really bright light on there. The circadian rhythm, which is your natural wake and sleep cycle is going to be completely disrupted by this really bright light.

Align:start And once your circadian rhythm gets off, a lot of other things fall apart– hormone cycles, cognitive ability, metabolic processes. So, you know, it’s kind of like you’re giving yourself jet lag. – Oh, great. – I think it’s important to test his cognitive ability to gauge any mental decline that might happen during his 72 hours of isolation. Let’s try the reaction time. – Okay, do… This is pretty fun. Can I bring this into the room with me? So what’s gonna happen to my brain in there? – Well, one of the issues that might worry me is how calm versus neurotic you might be.

Align:start Where would you put yourself on that spectrum? – Closer to neurotic. I mean… – Uh-huh. – Yeah. – And so I wonder if that might be amplified. – That is how my brain will work. – Right. Of course. – It’ll snowball. I’m scared. I’m not gonna be able to deal with the monotony and the lack of a sense of time, and I’m gonna have a panic attack. – In an extreme situation, people can have massive hallucinations, be dissociated from reality, have tremendous anxiety, psychotic types of episodes.

Line:0% – Marnie, Jake… – Yes. – I’m gonna be gone for three days. – The danger signs to look out for are extreme agitation, where it doesn’t appear that he’s aware of his own agitation. That’s when I think I might intervene. – I’m not worried for him physically. Like, I think, you know, he’s safe in there. But I think that he’s gonna struggle in there. He’s gonna be really bored. – I love you. – I love you, too.

– Bye-bye. – Bye. ♪ ♪ – Oh, my God. – Bye. ♪ ♪ Ah, forgot to ask what time it was when I came in. ♪ ♪ – [laughs] – It’s just gonna be a horrible 72 hours. – I’m actually pretty tired. I’ve been standing a bunch today. Normally, when I change into more comfortable clothes and I’m, like, ready for bed, I lay down, and then I pick up my phone, or I pick up a book or something, but I don’t have that. – If he succeeds in going to sleep for any length of time that’s substantial, it’s gonna be interesting to see what time he thinks it is when he wakes up.

– Right. ♪ ♪ – I was able to sleep. And I woke up maybe one or two times in the night. So I think it’s probably, you know, a.m. Thursday morning, maybe closer to a.m. I guess I should have some breakfast. ♪ ♪ One… two…three… – I’ve known Michael for three years, and I’ve never seen him do a push-up. – Six… ♪ ♪ Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T, S, R, Q, P, O, N, M, L, K… – I think he’s come up with some good ideas for mental stimulation. I wonder if, as time goes by, he’s gonna come up with some more creative ones, or he’s gonna start to get less creative.

– I’ve done 200 steps now– 8 more hundreds to go, and I’ll be at 1,000. One, two… – Why is it that so many people turn to counting to stay sane when they’re in these isolated environments? – Well, our minds want to remain active. They’re naturally active. The healthiest people who survive in these types of environments will do something to self-stimulate.

They’ll count. They’ll sing. They’ll do physical exercise. – 97, 98, 99, 100. 300 steps and then some change that I just took right there. That’s just a little bonus for my body, for my health. ♪ ♪ It’s amazing how hard it is to tell what time of day it is just based on your body. I think it’s… about or p.m. on Thursday. I think I’m gonna have dinner now. – He’s already quite off on his perception of time. – I was actually surprised at how quick that happened. – I was, too. – You know, if you’re using hunger as your gauge, that’s out the window, too, because the shifts in hormones are going to change your appetite. You know, they look at lab rats who have had their circadian rhythm destroyed, and they overeat.

– 12, 13… At the moment, I’m feeling… ♪ ♪ Bored but obviously nothing dramatic. If I had to guess, it would be… 24 hours now since I first came in. One day down, two to go. – If he gets a full sleep cycle in, he’ll wake up not knowing where he is. – Right. ♪ ♪ – Good morning. I don’t know if I slept for eight hours or if I slept for three.

If you think it’s bedtime, it is… so long as you go to bed. If you think it’s breakfast time, it is if you’re having breakfast. What am I looking forward to the most? Uh… seeing my family and friends. It’s not even that I want a meal. It’s actually that I just want to have a meal with people. I just want to talk to some people. I just want some other words coming in to me than the ones that come out of my own mouth. – He enjoys sharing things with people, and to have no one, just nothing coming back for three days, might be difficult. – I am the only person I’m hanging out with.

Align:end – If you’re in true isolation, literally, part of your brain is generating some kind of companion that you can converse with. – I think having you here… makes a big difference. – He’s entertained himself in a sense, you know, talking to the camera, and that’s been helpful for him. It’s really kept him cognitively aware. – I just feel like I’ve really lost all connection to time, but I’m guessing it’s, you know, p.m…. maybe p.m. on Friday. A good time to get some shut-eye when there’s not much else to do.

Line:0% ♪ ♪ [groans] I think it’s Saturday, about a.m. Saturday, the day I get out. [chuckles] – So his dissociation with the actual time has doubled now. – Right. He wakes up, and there’s this bright light, and he’s thinking, “Oh, it must be morning.” – I’ve spent a lot of time being entertained by my memories, and I’m thinking of the people and the places and the events and how I miss them and how I treasure those moments. There’s a sort of cinema in my brain, a cinema of those memories that’s kept me from being very bored. So I think… it’s p.m. on Saturday. So, in about a couple hours, I should see that door open. – He’s not even close, and I wonder how he’s gonna respond to that.

[clock ticking] [somber music] ♪ ♪ – I don’t think I’m getting out today. A fear I have right now is that it’s just Friday and that there’s still a lot of time left. There were other times during this that I was definitely more Zen about everything. Now I’m upset. [sighs] ♪ ♪ I can’t believe the color of the light isn’t changing. In the mornings, when I wake up, it’s so much more yellow. – Without some type of stimulation, the mind wants to stimulate itself anyway and will begin to hallucinate and begin to play all sorts of tricks. – Absolutely. – My thoughts are really incoherent. It’s hard for me even to remember what I just thought. 712, 713, 714, 715, 7… 15, 716, 717… – In a way, our brains are kind of a “use it or lose it” thing. He’s going to have a definite decrease in his cognitive ability, a decrease in his overall sense of well-being.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ – How many bottles of water have I drank? Is there one more… laying around here that I’ve lost? ♪ ♪ ‘Cause there are only six here. But then down here there are… Did I… ♪ ♪ All of the dreams I’ve had that I remember have been about this room. They’ve been about me being in this room and about… ♪ ♪ – He wakes up, and then he’s in the room, and it’s difficult for him to discern the difference between reality and dreaming sometimes. So that’s a real dissociation for him. – S, R, Q… L, M, N, O, P… – I actually feel kind of worried about him now, because when he first went in there, he was, like, bored like someone waiting for a bus, you know. Now he looks actually depressed. ♪ ♪ – The soap is really unique. It’s not a kind of soap I’ve ever used before, and I really dislike the smell.

And I keep smelling it ’cause it’s just sitting there. ♪ ♪ – Clearly, Michael is not happy right now. He looks, like, you know, on the border of misery. ♪ ♪ – Really aggravated by how uncomfortable I am. This seems like a very, very long three days. ♪ ♪ – He was just laying there. When I walked in, I thought he’d be, you know, sitting on the bed. You know, this was something he wanted to do, but… I expected him to be bored… terribly bored, but I thought he’d still be talking and… trying to entertain himself. ♪ ♪ – [inhales deeply] [groans] – It seems like Michael woke up from some kind of dream. ♪ ♪ He looks confused. ♪ ♪ – [mouths words] ♪ ♪ – Okay. I’m really confused. Wait. Did… ♪ ♪ I guess not. I guess I just dreamt it. – [crying softly] – I am so confused. [knock at door] Is 72 hours over? – It’s 72 hours, Michael.

You can come out. – All right, I’m coming out. ♪ ♪ – Wow. – Hey. both: Congratulations. – Thank you very much. – Oh, my gosh, it’s bright in there. – It’s really bright in there. I hadn’t really noticed, but now that you mention it… – Congratulations. – Hey. That knock scared me. – Did it startle you? – Yeah. Every little noise has been startling me. – Okay. You seem very with it right now. – It’s excited energy by coming out. At first, I thought it was that I want to communicate, but, actually, I need this direction, too. Even if it’s just nods and stuff, that’s so much better. – Let me just check your vitals before you see your family. ♪ ♪ 155 over 95, so that’s quite a jump in your blood pressure.

Align:start – [grunts] – Your pulse is also higher. I think that’s ’cause you’re excited to be out. I think this is a huge rush. I’m interested to see now how you do with some of the more cognitive tests. – 3-18-09-72-72? [ding] – There you go. I would say you did actually a little bit better this time. – Oh, wow. Okay. – Although we had hypothesized you would be worse at all of these tests, I think the rush of adrenaline that you got from finally being out and being to able to communicate actually had you more focused, more aware, and that’s why you performed better.

I find it interesting that the test you did the worst on is probably the most to do with the use of the verbal language and you’ve had definitely a lack of that over the last 72 hours. – It was just me with myself for three days. It was only me. Hey. How are you? – Hi. – I’m good. – Oh, good. I missed you. Let me say hi to my mom. – [laughing] – Hi. – Oh. Glad you survived that. – In the room, I was fine being alone. This is where I’ve been living. But then near the end, as I started to anticipate coming out and being able to talk to people and share my experience, I realized how important that was.

If you only have your own experiences, you’re not fully having them. You have to have someone else to listen to them and react to them, and then you’ve fully experienced them. Anyway, I’ve moved. I don’t live there anymore. [laughter] ♪ ♪ When I was in isolation, I was surprised most by two things– how easy it was to be separated from distractions, like entertainment and phones, and how difficult it was to be separated from things we humans evolved alongside– the Earth and other people.

I was amazed by how uncomfortable, confusing, and scary it was to have nothing but myself. You know, I used to be a really big fan of the saying, “He who travels fastest travels alone.” I think I liked it because it made me feel better about how I preferred to be independent and to be left to my own devices. But now I appreciate the full phrase better. It may be true that he who travels fastest travels alone, but he who travels furthest travels with others. And as always, thanks for watching. ♪ ♪ This season on “Mind Field”… ♪ ♪ Ready? Ready. Hold the drug in your mouth until we say “swallow.” – There have been some audio/visual distortions. – Ow! – You may see some images behind your eyes. – Ooh. – Ow! [bleep]! You [bleep] dick! Why don’t you come in here and [bleep] talk to me in person? – [grunting loudly] – How does it feel to be known as the Ken and Barbie of real life? It isn’t a breakfast for champions.

It’s a breakfast for sheeple. Bachelor number two is an online chatbot. – What in the world? ♪ ♪ [electricity crackles] – [grunts] Beautiful. Welcome to “Mind Field.” [electronic music] ♪ ♪.

For More Info : Light speed reading, Speed read,Read fast

#reading at light speed #Mental Photography Training #Enhance memory #Self improvement

0 notes

how2to18 · 7 years ago

Link

THE EASTERN FRONT of 1941–’45 was the first, and perhaps the only war in which women fought on a mass scale. They fought on the Soviet side, up to a million of them, and mostly volunteers; they may have tipped the balance for the Soviet victory. Was this a great advance for the liberation of women, or was it a terrible exception, never to be repeated? The title of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of testimonies, The Unwomanly Face of War, implies that those women did not belong at the front, that they were “out of place.” The German army certainly agreed: as a Russian doctor remembers, “[they] didn’t take women soldiers prisoner … They shot them at once.” Or worse.

Soviet women soldiers fought with unimaginable courage and endurance, only to face slander and neglect after they returned. It was not until 30 or more years later that Alexievich began to gather their testimonies. The Unwomanly Face of War is both a tribute to what these women endured and a justification of what they chose to do. If there can be a feminist defense of mass violence, this book delivers it.

Alexievich says that she feels a deep hatred for war, and in Boys in Zinc — about the Soviet war in Afghanistan — she argues that wars are caused by some fundamental flaw in male nature. Yet the women who fought on the Eastern Front also tried to do so according to their own nature. The founding principle of Alexievich’s feminist approach to war is her sympathy for her women soldiers’ attempts to preserve and express their femininity. Many of them were doctors, nurses, battlefield medics, and cooks. In all these roles, they were more devoted to saving Russian lives than to killing Germans. The medics had the enormously hard, terrifying job of carrying wounded infantrymen back to safety. Still, many women were eager to kill the enemy, serving as tank crews, gunners, and snipers — and as fighter pilots:

We would sit under a parachute, waiting for our assignment. The men smoked, played dominoes, and we, while waiting for a signal to take off, sat and embroidered handkerchiefs. We stayed women.

Alexievich gives many details of women longing for proper underwear, using their sugar rations to curl their hair, and the like. She tries to reconcile femininity and the warrior spirit and this was also the aim, to some extent, of the Soviet authorities. Women were favored as snipers, for example, because they were “patient and cunning,” with flexible limbs and soft hands on the trigger. About two thousand graduated from sniper school, and proved themselves in battle. More than half were killed.

Should there be a distinction between a woman writing as a historian, and a historian writing as a woman? Alexievich is frank about making the latter choice, and about her lack of interest in military history proper, in the sense of weapons, battles, or strategy. She is writing a history of “little people,” and of feelings rather than events. There are no descriptions of Stalingrad, Kursk, or other great turning points on the Eastern Front, except for the fragmentary memories of women who happened to have fought there. “A great idea needs a small human being,” she writes, “I look for small great human beings.”

When Alexievich started work on The Unwomanly Face of War in 1978 she was 30. The women she found to interview were about 30 years older than her, and had effectively been silenced since 1945. To gather their testimony she had the new technology of the cassette recorder (which also protected her from subsequent lawsuits). The Unwomanly Face of War represents the experience of hundreds of thousands of women on the Eastern Front. Alexievich’s portrait is an assembly of fragments. The women relate things that happened to them, rather than things they caused to happen. None of them served at the decision-making level, as field officers or generals.

Like other pioneers of the oral history genre, notably Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, Alexievich removed her own questions from the published text thereby obscuring her own participation in “leading the witness.” She interviewed more than 500 women for The Unwomanly Face of War, most of whom achieved no mention in the published text. Of those women who are included, many speak for less than a page, or even for a few sentences. The impact of The Unwomanly Face of War, as of Alexievich’s other works, comes from condensation and selection. In subsequent attacks on her books, interviewees complained that their own words — preserved on tape — no longer represented their views, because of the way Alexievich had rearranged them.

The Unwomanly Face of War is necessarily a composite of reportage and creation. In their raw state, Alexievich’s thousands of hours of interviews document history, but cannot interpret it. To select from this material is to transform the brute facts of collective memory. For his classic photo-book The Americans — not a modest title! — Robert Frank took 28,000 pictures as he drove around the country. The book includes just 83 of them. This may be an extreme case, but Alexievich also presents a collection of decisive moments, taken from four years of struggle much of which must have consisted of boredom and routine.

Her first rule of selection may seem simple enough: these are all wartime experiences specifically of women. Yet most of them went to the front for reasons that were not specifically feminine: to defend the motherland, or to avenge family members who had already fallen. Further, their war was “unwomanly” in the sense that they were transgressing gender expectations by fighting in it. Alexievich’s more recent book, Boys in Zinc, shows over and over again that boys who went to fight in Afghanistan did so in the hope that they were going to become men. But as Valentina Chudaeva, an anti-aircraft gunner, says here: “God didn’t make us for shooting, He made us for love.”

Shoot they did, though, however much it conflicted with their sense of their own natures. Theirs was a personal dilemma, but also a provocation to the male order, on both sides of the front line. The Unwomanly Face of War contains horrific stories of the torture and sexual mutilation of women who fell into German hands. And those who survived and returned to the Soviet Union were often stigmatized as well, especially by women who had not fought. “Front women” were resented for being foul-mouthed and unfeminine or, conversely, as sluts who had only joined up to have sex with the real heroes — the men. When Alexievich started her interviews, most of her subjects had kept a long silence about their experiences at the front, or even denied that they had ever been there. Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva was a nurse who once looked after two hundred wounded men in a shed, single-handed, for four days without sleep. “I want to speak,” she said, “Finally somebody wants to hear us. […] I’ve been waiting all the while for somebody, I knew somebody would come.”

Boys in Zinc was begun while the Afghan War (1979–’89) was still in progress, and Alexievich visited the front herself a few months before the Soviet withdrawal. The title comes from the zinc coffins in which the dead were sent home. (Or parts of the dead, in which case dirt was added to make up the weight.) Half a million Soviet troops served in Afghanistan, and 15,000 of them died. No one counted the Afghan dead, but there were probably at least a million. Boys in Zinc enraged many veterans; there were legal attempts to suppress the book, or to claim damages by those who felt their own words had somehow been distorted. One veteran testified that Alexievich had “deprived our entire ‘Afghani’ generation of moral justification,” and had become rich and famous by doing so. To which one might respond that she did precisely the opposite, morally justifying the conscience of her country. Boys in Zinc may be a more stringent reckoning than any that has been made for US wars from Vietnam to Iraq.

In 1978 the Soviets had set up a client regime in Kabul with the aim of “modernizing” Afghan society, by force if necessary. When the Mujahideen started their rebellion, Brezhnev felt obliged to intervene militarily in support of his client. “They were defending their Homeland,” one veteran told Alexievich, “but what were we doing? We played the part of the Germans — that’s what one young guy told me.” The most savage fighting of World War II was between the German army and partisan guerrillas, especially in Alexievich’s Belarus. In Afghanistan the Soviets were not facing any visible army: just partisans everywhere. The Soviets called them “Spirits” because they were so rarely seen, except as corpses, and because they killed silently.

Then there was the lieutenant who found a small child at the side of the road, and went off with his driver to return the child to a nearby kishlak (village compound):

We waited for them for an hour; it was only twenty minutes there and back.

They were lying in the sand. The lieutenant and his driver. In the middle of the kishlak. […] The women had killed them with hoes.

It is not hard to imagine the consequences of such events. “We became even more cruel than the enemy,” one private recalls, “after what we did there, we’ll never get into heaven.”

In the courtroom where Alexievich was being tried for libel, a spectator said:

we believed that we lived in the best country, the most just country. But you tell us that we lived in a different country — a terrible country, drenched in blood. Who’s going to forgive you for that?

The case ended with no clear verdict, and many still attack Alexievich for airing her country’s dirty laundry in public, and for tarnishing the honor of the soldiers who had died. She could only reply that she had reported the truth, and had the tapes to prove it. Nonetheless Boys in Zinc, like The Unwomanly Face of War, presents narratives and explanations that are ultimately of its author’s creation. Whether in Afghanistan, the Eastern Front, or anywhere else, Alexievich’s message is the terrible seductiveness of war, and its terrible power to transform those who take part in it.

Unlike the Eastern Front, women did not serve in Afghanistan except in auxiliary roles, such as nurses or clerks. When Alexievich went there, it seemed to her “that war is a creation of the male nature and incomprehensible in many ways. […] At war everything’s different: you, and nature, and your thoughts.” This transformation is often self-willed, but it presents a cruel paradox. An infantry officer says: “If you ask me whether [I went] for an idea or to understand who I am, of course it was the second one. I wanted to test myself, see what I was capable of.” As in any war, men went to Afghanistan to confirm their identities, by finding out if they were the kind of person that a man should be. Except that, as one private says, “After two or three weeks there’ll be nothing of the old you left, just your name. You aren’t you any longer, but someone else.”

This sense of complete dissociation between before and after is part of the PTSD from which almost all of Alexievich’s informants seem to be suffering. It also fuels their rage against those who criticize them from the safety of civilian life. Alexievich begins Boys in Zinc with the story of a mother whose son dismembered someone with an axe, because he had lied about having been in Afghanistan. “My son was a murderer,” she says, “Because he did here what they did out there.”

In the United States, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq also carry the scars of their service: violence, addiction, suicide. But there has been nothing like the radical disillusionment, across Soviet society, produced by Brezhnev’s decision to go to war in 1979. It could be argued that failure in Afghanistan took the entire Soviet system down with it. The troops found that they were miserably supplied with food, equipment, and medical treatment, especially in the early years of the war. There was also pervasive corruption and brutal treatment of incoming recruits by older soldiers, the so-called “grand-dads.” Another factor was the realization that Afghanistan, a supposedly backward country, had all kinds of consumer goods that were impossible to find in the USSR: jeans, toiletries, cassette players. When troops tried to take such things home, they were stolen by officials before they could board their return flights.

The Afghanistan campaign was a comprehensive disaster for the Soviets, but the story told by Boys in Zinc — and by The Unwomanly Face of War — is not entirely bleak. Alexievich’s informants can often speak of their trials with shattering insight and eloquence. Ordinary soldiers, both men and women, constantly quote the Russian poets and novelists and find consolation in them. If the Russian soul is formed by suffering, as Alexievich contends, it is suffering that has been given an unforgettable voice.

Paul Delany’s recent books include biographies of Bill Brandt, George Gissing, and Rupert Brooke.

The post I Knew Somebody Would Come: Svetlana Alexievich’s Wars appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2AIJlJ0 via IFTTT

#Blogger

0 notes

topmixtrends · 7 years ago