Damn it was frigid in here again today. Earlier this week it sort of warmed up in here but then I was wearing my jacket and gloves indoors this afternoon. *sigh* We got canteen today so I got the Jolly Ranchers I ordered that I’m going to use to do the emergent property of intelligence experiment: guess how many jelly beans (or Jolly Ranchers in this case) in the jar . I got Dennis and Jacobs to place their guesses tonight. Tomorrow I’ll go around the day room and ask everyone on A side who wants to make a guess and then I’ll sit down and do the math and see if the collective intelligence is smarter than individuals, even in prison. That’s the wrinkle that interests me. Does the population in prison still follow the same statistical rules. My premise is that they do. Thus, the average of the guesses should be more accurate than any individual. Let the experiment begin! *mad scientist laugh*
This week, after I rescued The Hunchback of Notre Dame from one of the dayroom restrooms I noticed another big book being used in another restroom and went to check it out. It turned out to be Karl Rove’s book, Courage and Consequences and at first I thought “How appropriate a use.” LOL But then I remembered how Dennis likes histories and biographies and is a pretty die-hard republican so after a bit of hesitation and soul-searching I decided to rescue it for him to real. Not surprisingly he is really enjoying it. *chuckle*
I’m still playing handball occasionally but I won’t Sat. at gym since I won’t get a chance to shower before my visit on Sun. and I don’t want to be all smelly for that. Oh and today when I called dad to confirm they were coming and suggest that if they are doing staggered times that Roz should go first so she could get to tai chi practice in time, he told me that Justin wasn’t coming. Well damn. I was looking forward to seeing him and the whole reason we’re doing the visit on Sunday is so he could come, otherwise it would have been less crowded on Friday. Hopefully next weekend then.
I got the Yin Yoga book yesterday and I’m looking forward to going through it and maybe coming up with some new yin yoga postures, or asanas, that might help my psoas.
It has a lot of history and theory but also has a section that walks through 30 different asanas, their benefits and very detailed walk throughs of how to get into and out of them and alternative versions to help you work up to the final pose. I can see why Bruce likes this book so much and I haven’t even started to seriously read it yet. LOL
Yesterday at yard I ended up walking and taking with Ness, a 30-something, light-skinned black guy with a shaved head, chinstrap beard and mustache, and quite a bit of a pot belly. He’s generally a pretty jovial guy, prone to making witty comments and he’s quite into movies and TV shows, including sci fi, super hero and fantasy stuff so we have pretty similar tastes. His sense of humor can be quite acerbic when he wants and he does not tolerate racism (real or perceived) well at all. He is the one that said he had to see my boyfriend when I told him that McK used to be a black kid into Goth. LOL Anyway, we walked and talked and maaaaaan does he have a lot of latent anger, over is charges, his (I assume now ex) wife, and his foster father (who abandoned him when he most needed him). Once he got started talking there wasn’t much chance for me to get a word in edgewise, but listening is a particular forte of mine and it generally helps make people like me. 😉
So Ness is in her for sex with his 12 yo (I think) step-daughter. She had continuously been flirtatious with him and he has even raised the issue repeatedly with his wife, her mother, who did nothing about it. Worse than nothing, once when the daughter grabbed his crotch and he told her mother, his wife, she said “Good, well rip the fucker off.” As you can tell, their relationship wasn’t exactly healthy. LOL She has been using the claim of dying of cancer (which turned out to be a manipulative lie) to control him and when he caught on she used it to turn his family against him. “I’m dying and he isn’t man enough to even help me with the kids.” That kind of stuff. He asked his father, who is a psychologist, to talk to her and get her to substantiate her claim of having cancer. When his father toke to her apparently he told her “It’s nobody’s business but your own.” Which gave her all the leverage she ever wanted on Ness. Not only was he now powerless to fight her he had lost his most respected supporter, his father, who basically became her greatest enabler. So in that fucked up situation, totally isolated and of course depressed, he stopped rejecting the step-daughter’s advances.
Then when he was caught his foster father, who dealt with sex-offenders professionally, refused to stand up for him or support him in any way and even said something like “people like you need to be locked up for life.” Which is pretty much what happened so I can see how he’s a little angry (or even a lot). I tried to calm him down some but to no avail and the only thing that stopped him was the fact we ran out of yard time. LOL I did make the point that once he gets into whatever therapy they give him here he’s going to have to fully accept responsibility for his actions and not appear to pass the blame on to his wife and father…but as you might expect he wasn’t totally open to hearing that yet. Maybe in a few years.
And today at yard I walked and talked with Enoch, a probably 50-something, salt and pepper, black man with a fairly well trimmed beard and mustache. He arrived a couple weeks ago and Dennis immediately found out that he had also been in the Airforce. He’s mostly reserved and keeps to himself but is approachable but today he came up to talk to me because he was getting his radio with canteen and he had purchased it because he had tried mine and was hoping to get some AM talk radio shows he likes. When we first talked about the radio and I heard why he wanted one I had begun to have my suspicions about him being a counter-self-interest republican because talk radio isn’t known as a bastion of liberal though. Well, as we walked and talked today it became very clear that it was far worse than that. He doesn’t listen to talk radio for the right-wing nuts, he listens for the conspiracy theory wackos (maybe a Ven diagram of those 2 overlaps…considerably. LOL). Honestly, I could not follow the train of logic his conversation was using. We covered everything from pills and even unfiltered water poisoning you by making your body more acidic to not eating anything with a face, not because it was unethical but because it too would poison your body. He had been an air traffic controller in the Airforce, was married and had kids, and supposedly even traveled to England and other places so I don’t think he was always this crazy. So what happened to cause his brain to short circuit and make him the semi-incoherent paranoid/delusional that he is today? And after an hour of walking with him and him talking AT me in a random stream of consciousness, I still have no idea what he’s in here for. Hahaha
I’m getting a lot of practice at “listening” but I think tomorrow I’ll take my radio to yard with me. LOL Want to bet that won’t deter anyone from talking to me anyway? *sigh*
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