Your brain on machines.

Well, this is that day where I was supposed to get my brain checked. I awoke this morning, full of the promise that a new day brings, especially a new day that has the distinct promise of having the insides of your head photographed, and even without coffee, skipped merrily off down the hill to the hospital at 8am.

I'll say this again: you can get the INSIDE of your HEAD...PHOTOGRAPHED.

We live in the future. You want a flying car? Go out and build one. I just want pictures of the inside of my head. Also, me in a car is a bad idea, me in a flying car is insanity.

Anyhoo. It seems today I was to be disappointed.

Apparently going to the neurology outpatients does not mean that they put you inside a rotating magnet tube like some hospital dramas would have you believe, I was just poked with a pin on various parts of my body to make sure I could still feel. The eventual diagnosis for my occasional stabby head pain is neurualga, which is when your nerves start decaying or something, which can be caused by herpes, but apparently not the kind I have. The leading competitor to this conclusion is a benign tumor, described to me as a "brain wart", that even if I do have they wouldn't remove because it is not actually doing anything. Apart from intermittent pain. But that pain be so intermittent I don't even need medication.

But at least they have referred me to get a CT scan. I will have a picture of my brain yet. And then I shall use it as my facebook photo, and put some glasses and a beard on it. Of this you can be certain.

In other news: Did you know you can make your own bread at home? Also your own beer, soups, and soap! Never leaving the house just got easier!

From on high.

Soon I am going to go to the war memorial above Brooklyn and look over wellington as I drink some wine. It is easily one of my favorite places to be in wellington, that and the waterfront: for me it is a place where you can be closest to the elements without actually being in them. Above in the air, closest to the water. Without being all emo and crap.

It might be this kind of time that one young man starts to think about what the hell its all about, why are you here, ectera. I'm not entirely sure that there are any answers, let along my ability to know them. I'm going back to go see a "councilor" on monday, and the following monday I'm having my brain looked at my MACHINES. Apart for the awesomeness of being, like, a cyborg, and crap, I really don't want to go back on those green and purple happy pills. Even though I feel the worst that I have felt in some time, I don't want that kind of chemical influence over my life again. I know that those of you on such medication will sympathize with my position.

"Am I here?" "What the hell am I all about?" sometimes seem like more pertinent questions, although just as difficult to answer. It is a continual source of disquiet for me that I am not yet grown up. When you are eight and want to be fourteen, you are told to just wait. When you have your first breakdown as a teenager, you are assured that everything will be fine later. When you are in you early twenties, and finding that it is just a little harder to more, a little harder to get out of bed, you are reminded that you are still young. But apparently, at 25, well past the time of legal adulthood, you still face quandaries about your identity, your direction, your purpose.

This month I came very close to giving up on my Master's study. I have now been in study 7 years, and probably, one of the biggest reasons I decided not to stop study is that, according to the rules of assistance put forth by the government, this is the last year I can be enrolled in a NZ institution of study and be allowed to put my course costs on my student loan. Effectively this means full time study is an impossibility if I wanted to continue immediately after this year. I cannot go out of this path on a failure.

Have I talked about the bias against academia. I think it strange that in our "knowledge economy" a student cannot get assistance for the entirety of their study from high-school to phd.

Fantastic.

Anyway.

Has anyone read "The Wasteland" by T.S. Elliot? I'm becoming slightly obsessed by it. It seems true, which I suppose is what poetry attempts. Also of great truth to me is "the Rock" by Wallace Stevens. I guess that is what poetry tries to do: to arrive at truth through emotion, not reason (which are probably opposites). Why not.

"Come in under the shadow of this red rock"

Well.

Apologies for this ramble. A more cohesive post sometime.

In other news: summer is actually quite nice sometimes.