Living out lies: an idea

The other day in psychiatry class our professor mentioned a pathologic condition where some people would literally live out distorted schizoid fantasies – going from area to area, introducing themselves as someone else, and so on.

Thing is, I was wondering how that would work out as a project (thoughts of retaining my sanity in the end also hang). A part of me wants to work on something like that, but not just yet – I don’t have the means to do so.

I’m actually only considering this idea because recently I’ve been trying to change one part of myself. It’s a sort of drastic change, which is proving to require tremendous conscious effort, but is also slightly amusing because I realized that yes, there has been this stereotype I’ve been living out for about a decade now. Something that started as a defense mechanism and a means to get rid of my communication apprehensions back then. And I’m bored of that supposedly definitive characteristic.

I wonder if the said idea is cruel though. So if the identities I’d be pretending to be were false, would the same be said of the relationships I’d be building, then? Would that make me a crummy person? Not even considering the legality of this yet.

But wouldn’t it be cool? Sift through a slew of people you could be to figure out which one is best suited? I mean, I like being me. It just gets a bit confusing sometimes. Hmm. If only. In an ideal world.

Idea: The Last 8 Minutes

I figured I may as well put ideas here since I keep misplacing my idea-notebook at home (yes, I have one; yes, I am a dork that way).

I’m thinking this will be more a work of fiction than poetry, but that’s just for now.

Anyway, I was reading the chapter on Space and Time from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time at the salon and he said that since our sun’s light takes 8 minutes to reach the earth, if/when the sun stops shining (dies), it would take 8 minutes for people to realize that because in the event that does happen, we wouldn’t be in the future light cone of the death of the sun (Hawking, 1986), hence an idea for an apocalyptic short story, which is not so apocalyptic as the label sounds. Tempted to go spec-fic for this but I’ll try realism (once I get to writing it).

A cosmic bubble of titanic proportions called the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635), six light years wide, was formed by violent winds blown out by the hot central supergiant star, several hundred thousand times more luminous than our sun

(working) plot is simple: it’ll explore the last eight minutes in this world for eight people (cliché, perhaps?)

Since it is about the sun dying (which is totally unrealistic since it has a lifespan of about 5-6 billion years, tops) I’m thinking of playing with the idea of light. When the sun does “die” it doesn’t switch off magically (but then maybe that would also be another facet to explore since we’re not so sure about the universe ourselves – total darkness, suddenly, a lack of air due to the subsequent elimination of photosynthesis, etc etc, ZOMBIES, even – but I’m worried the science bits might upgrade this into a novel which I’ll never finish ergh), instead it will change from being a yellow dwarf into a red giant. Its diameter as a red giant will extend beyond the orbit of Venus, and even possibly beyond Earth’s. in any case, when the sun enters the red giant phase (in which it will spend the final 10% of its lifetime) the Earth will be burned to a crisp (Pasachoff, 1992).

I think I’m going to have another conversation with my physics professor about this.