Entry 36--AKA: "My Thumb Hurts"

I think there's something wrong with my left thumb. I have been getting this pain in it every so often the last few months that feels--this sounds weird, I know--like there is a spike running through my thumb from the tip through the knuckle, and when it feels like that I can't move it on its own. I have to take my other hand, and bend my thumb, and it pops, and it HURTS. It used to only be occasionally, maybe once a month, but this week it has happened almost every day, in many cases three or four times a day. Of course it becomes worse when I don't have good health insurance. I think I'm going to have to go find out how to see a doctor, or maybe go to the UCD Nurse center--maybe they can tell me.

Another thing is dental. Again, I've started to get a little pain in a tooth, but I can't tell if it really hurts, or if I'm just being paranoid because I don't have dental insurance. Whatever it is, I don't like it.

On a completely unrelated subject, I've been really grappling with an unusual epistemological crisis lately. I keep having these flashback memories of reading Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder, and reading Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" in the winter quarter. More and more the ideas from that class have become real to me; they are starting to "sink in" and are making me uncomfortable in my own mind. I have begun to question my mind, my thoughts, my.....I don't even know how to explain it. The idea that one cannot "know" something--that knowledge can escape as easily as water through a sieve--is something I find troubling. I think of my mind as a machine, I think most people do in our age of computers, and I imagine the shuffling and reshuffling of information through the electronic wires of my brain; but the mind is not a computer. It is a white mass of nerves and connections, and science cannot even isolate the energy that ideas give off when traveling through the mind. So what is it "to know?"

It's strange to think about.

I've been having weird dreams lately too. I don't know what about; I've never been one to remember my dreams. Leaves, lots of green leaves, and it's cold, but there's this bright light and a frustration that I wake up with, the closest way to describe it is a sort of sinking. It seems almost condradictory, those images with those feelings: now you know what I am so perterbed.