I hate how the summer heat just saps all the energy and motivation out of me. It’s the hottest week of the year, well, hopefully. Nineties for days to come. At least it’s dropping below 70 degrees every night. That means a few of my neurons will manage to stay functional.

Seriously, why does anyone like summer?

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Ah well, time to give up on trying to think of something to write about and just pick a random photo. And hey, this one opened up randomly for me! It’s a sign!

…Mostly a sign that I really should figure out why my mouse is prone to accidentally double-clicking rather than single, but hey, that’s life.

…You know, this really is a nice photo. Didn’t look anywhere near as interesting in the thumbnail image. Good choice, random luck!

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I have a little dog curled up next to me.

It’s quite adorable, feeling the gentle pressure of her breathing. She’s quite happily asleep, even.  Well, I assume happily.  She seems comfortable, at the least.

…This may be a small problem, for I’m going to have to move her if I ever want to sleep myself. This is sure to wake her up. Which I doubt she’ll like.

…And so the great war between tiredness and cuteness begins.

I wonder which will give out first…

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Have you ever seen or heard or watched anything that just filled you with peace?

I’ve been watching an anime called Mushi-Shi lately. It’s… how to describe it… tales of Mushi, strange creatures that exist at the edge of reality, and of Ginko, who studies them.

It’s in many ways a show that could only be made by a culture like Japan. Each episode deals with a different place where Mushi and humans happen to come together, for good or bad. Ginko helps where he can, or just experiences. Sometimes there’s action, but more often it’s just an exploration of the situation. There’s no over-arching story, no grand finale, just little tales of existence touched by something that doesn’t exist in the viewer’s reality.

It’s also set in a pre-industrial Japanese setting, with traditional houses and ways of living. Especially the traditional ways of accepting that the world isn’t always understandable, that things exist that will affect your lives in many ways, and sometimes it’s better to learn to live with them rather than fight against them.

It’s this particular attitude that suffuses the entire show, a feeling that this is just how things are, and while we may and can smooth our way, there is peace in accepting that things out there have their own patterns of life.

Bah, I’m really not sure if I’m describing it at all well. It’s such a peculiar show, one that seeps into your soul, whether you believe you possess one or not.

The first season came out in 2006, which is around when I first encountered it. I literally finished watching the last episode for the first time about an hour ago. I can’t take more than a handful of episodes at a time. It fills up my brain and soul and starts spilling over, and I must give myself time to absorb it.

If you want to watch it, you can find it here, on the distributor’s site, available for free but with ads. There’s also a second season that started airing fairly recently, on the much better Crunchyroll platform.

I do recommend checking it out. Especially when things are overwhelming, and you need a balm for your soul.

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I- I seem to have forgotten what I was planning to say about this photo, in the time between deciding to write about it and when I actually started doing so. How embarrassing.

Maybe I shouldn’t have wandered off to check some webpages and get a drink in between those steps.

Ah well, I probably got caught by the doorway effect. It’s the odd mental quirk that keeps causing you to forget what you were going into a room for the second you cross the doorway. And then you find yourself doing three other things before suddenly realizing “Keys! I came here for my keys!”.

The really odd part about it is that the doorway itself is important. It’s not just wandering away from what was reminding you of your task, it’s entering a new space that triggers the memory blank.

Essentially, when your brain finishes one task and starts another, it dumps all the info on the old task it was holding in easily-accessed memory back into the general memory banks, clearing the way for new info. This would not be so bad if swapping rooms didn’t also trigger this dumping. A new space must mean a new task, no?

I wonder how many times our species used to encounter this, back deep in human history before we invented doorways. This patch of dirt with the pile of furs isn’t that different from that patch of dirt with the fire. Maybe it’s just, shall we say, a bug in our programming, something that didn’t reveal itself until we came up with newfangled ideas like housing and doors.

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