Note

Testing, testing, one, two, three.

Okay, it's 5.20pm on Tuesday, February 4th, driving home down Marin, passing Ventura. What they do today today, I worked on the CSRF protection with Mingyi. We got about a third of the way through it. Sorry, I'm going to keep plowing through that so that we can get that resolved. But anyway, I also today learned more about Jacob Goldenfall. I believe that's the name Jerry gave me. And that's the author of a book that he showed me the plates for. And some more research and found out that he's basically an Orientalist. He was a rabbinical and teacher who worked his way up to the university level in Ukraine. And yeah, so someone who was probably part of the proto-Zion movement, I mean in spirit, at least, and was applying his scholarship, his knowledge of at the time what you would call Oriental languages to perhaps justify Hebrew's relationship to them if not. How shall I say, paternal relationship to them? And at least that's what I was getting from just the small amount of context of this book. And I don't read Hebrew, so I don't really know. But Gerald and I had very interesting conversations about it. So anyway. And so now I want to start dictating on flight of course, so I'm going to pause here and start again.

Okay, it's 5.23, Tuesday, February 4th. Still on Marin. I'm almost at the Masonic intersection where the Albany Library is. And I want to talk about Rosa Alitia and her relationship to Florence's diary, which keeps cropping up. I want to keep talking about the diary as a transformative object, but what the diary really is is a... is a recounting of the letters you see Florence didn't understand, but Florence was actually not seeing the entire picture. And as I'm saying this, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, what is the entire picture and what would actually have caused Florence to believe? And I want to talk about how Florence comes into contact again with the book, basically in her college years, which essentially is the last point at which she retains possession of the book before she ends up going to Egypt. So, yeah. She has pen pals, and maybe in this case she'll have only one pen pal. I'm not sure. I still have to... the question of how many pen pals she has is at large, essentially. It's undecided. But one thing is for certain, as Florence writes the letters in the middle of the night, something happens, so she finishes the letters. And when she finishes them, she sends them off. She gives them to her father to send off. Because if her mother knew about the letters, she would not send them. She would burn them or destroy them. And so, while at the same time, her mother knows that perhaps... her mother knows she is reading them, that the letters are coming in, but Florence is not sending them out. And so, she's willing to accept this kind of unusual behavior, I think. What I'm trying to get at is, I think it's book worthy to say, it's a good story to say that we have a sleepwalker who in her sleep writes letters. And in her sleep hopes that one day, she will meet the man who writes the letters to her. But during the day, she doesn't... She's not very cognizant of it. It's almost as if that when she's sleepwalking, she's imagining another world. She goes to her father one night and asks, where's my letter? And he doesn't really know what's going on. She starts to scream and shout and carry on like she's never carried on before, like, you know, throws a fit. And they don't really know what to do. And so, they take her, well, they have to find out who actually gives them advice. I think, you know, the mother is absolute no way as my daughter ever going to see a shrink. And the father is really worried about it. But before they could do anything about it, she comes home and admits to... Well, she doesn't admit. She just happy and she's showing them that she discovered this penpal service. Now, Florence doesn't remember anything about the letter, the episode, her episode, the night before. So, the parents are a little bit surprised, but they are hopeful in the sense that this episode won't happen again. Now, in the me, I don't want to say again. So, as Florence... So Florence, you know, the application for pen and friends international is in the back of the weekly reader. And there's an article on Egypt. And so, Florence is basically applying for a penpal and decides that she wants to write to someone in Egypt. Because simply the article is there. So, it seems like why not? So, she asks her parents for the money and... And that's that. She... she... she gets... she sends off the application. And the episodes go away. And... but what happens when she receives the first letter? Well, you know, the family seems to think it's very nice that... this young man from Egypt is writing to her. And that's pretty much the end of that. Like, you know, oh, okay, well... But eventually, they seem concerned about this pen friend of hers, this pen pal. It seems to be changing her behavior. She seems to, you know, I shall say, have more of an open mind towards things like socialism and other religions and language. And let's just say maybe the other religions bothered them so much that they just didn't, you know, that was when maybe one day. Well, okay, so let's back up here a second. Florence will write these letters and send them out. But then, over time, let's say that Florence's mother destroys the letters. And this causes a fight between Florence and her mother. And, you know, her father basically takes her to... takes her aside and says, let's not... I'll take care of your mother. But you just keep writing your letters. But maybe that's not exactly what happens. Maybe what happens is that the mother says, this is the last straw. And so Florence gets the letters, but eventually she can't help but write back. But she doesn't, you know, she starts off trying to be a good daughter and not write back. But she can't help herself and that's when her sleepwalking starts up again. And she actually does write back. But as she sleepwalking, she tells her... she wakes her father in the middle of the night. Now, obviously I'm going to have to make her mother sound like she sleeps like a rock. Like, you know, nothing can wake her until she's awoke. But she wakes her father in the middle of the night. And while she's sleepwalking and says, you need to destroy the letter, I wrote another letter you need to destroy it. And so the father is taking out the trash one day and is talking to the mailman. And he sees the letter in his hand and he just takes it from him without saying anything. And the father thinks, oh well, I guess all, you know, that's that. And it continues the... And the scene receives the letter. And obviously writes back. And of course Florence is absolutely, you know, she switched gears. She's done exactly what her mother said. She's not writing letters anymore. She doesn't know she's sleepwalking. And the letters are coming to... To the post office box. Do they have a post office box? I don't know. Then how does the dad actually send the mail? Yeah, you don't have to go the post office box to send the mail. I have to think about this because if there's a post office box, the mother won't. The mother might not go there. Could the father receive mail at his work? I don't know. I have to think about it. But... So what I'm trying to get at is I want to establish that Florence is writing these letters in her sleep and doesn't realize it until one day in college, you know, when she's struggling to... She's struggling to make ends meet and go to school and all that and live on her own. And that's what... and perhaps maybe that's what causes her to go live on her own. And this is the discovery that the fight that she has with her mother when her mother finds out that her father has been sending the letters on her behalf. And so, yeah, maybe that's what happens. And so if the father's sending the letters on her behalf, there have to somehow arrive secretly. And so one trick would be to link cotton. You know, the father reads the letters and perhaps one day Naseem says to her that he's going to become the manager. So he's graduated college and he's going to go work in a cotton mill. And perhaps that is what he can use as... I mean, that's what kind of draws the father in and tells him, yeah, why don't you use the cotton mill as your address? And... I mean, that's kind of what maybe wins the father over because the father is a... you know, the manager of a cotton mill himself. But maybe he may not like knowing that he's, you know, working in a cotton mill. We'll have to see about that because maybe he's a cotton trader or a commodities trader. I don't know. I mean, that doesn't, you know, this seems a bit of a stretch. But I'll have to think about where the letters, you know, because let's say for example, the mother is, you know, checking the mail one day obviously, she's going to find a letter. So, or perhaps the father explains to the mailman, any mail that comes from Egypt you give to me personally. I think that's a better idea. Do not give it to my wife. You know, let's just say maybe she had some bad experience or something like that. But, yeah, Egypt reminds her of the war or something like that, you know. For some reason, she is reminded of this one battle in the war and it bothers her. So every time she thinks of Egypt, she is, you know, she starts to have all these visions and go crazy. So anyway, back. So what is actually happening though? Florence is waking up in the middle of the night and she's saying asking her father, did my letter arrive and he will say no, it's coming tomorrow. And so, in fact, let's just say that they started a system. Her father came home one day with, I gotta think of some kind of prop. Excuse me. So, maybe a scarab, maybe. Is it something from Egypt? Could it be something from Egypt that everybody has? Well, let's just say that let's say it is indeed a scarab and her father picks it up one day at the flea market. And tells Florence when she's sleepwalking one night. That the scarab is, she'll need to look for the scarab to know if she has a letter. If the scarab is not there, there's no letter. And so what he does is he realizes that he's dealing with a sleepwalker who may or may not know how to tell the time of day and all that, but knows to look for the scarab. If he thought he could teach her to look for the scarab, she would not ask him anymore in the middle of the night. And so, this would obviously be after he's had several nights awake or losing sleep because his daughter came in and interrupted his sleep. And so one day, he either goes to the flea market, maybe the whole family goes to the flea market after church on Sunday and they're walking through all the different tables. And the father just seems to be so fascinated with this. Or it could be, yeah, another thought is that it's a little wooden camel. He could either make it out of wood for her or he could have got it at the flea market. But what he tells her in the middle of the night, he waits for her in the middle of the night. And she comes and she says, Daddy, where's my letters? Or she'll say, Daddy, are there any letters for me? And he will say, no, pumpkin, but I have something else for you. I have something that's like a light. She's like, oh, will it shine? Will it glow brightly in the night? I have something that's kind of like your own little mailbox. When you see it on your desk, that's when you know you have a letter. If you don't see it, you don't have to ask. It just means the letter hasn't arrived yet. So I don't have to get up and ask you. You don't say no. You just, when you wake up, when you see that camel on your desk, you have a letter. If that camel's not on your desk, you don't have a letter. Understand? Okay. And she goes back to bed and the next night, after a letter will have arrived within three days. And when the letter arrives, you know, Florence's father keeps it hidden because the mailman already knows to give it to him personally. In fact, the town is so small that the mailman knows to deliver that mail at his work. And maybe that'll be interesting later on down. But in fact, when he tells the mailman, so, you know, when he's, when he is basically on his front lawn and he's about to throw away the mail and the mailman comes by and catches him. He's like, hey, Jim, what are you doing? I think you got your box is confused. And he's like, huh? You're supposed to give me the letters and throw the trash away. It had been a day where there was a, the trash can was still out in the front lawn. Or maybe the trash had been knocked over by Florence's brother or his a mess or something like that. But, and that's when he walks over to him and he says, you know, here you go. And he doesn't know what else to do because he can't throw letters in the trash in front of the postal employee. So, he, he basically tells him, you know, as he walks off, but he tells him, hold on one second. You see this letter, this one, intended for Egypt. Can you make sure you remember that address? Whenever you see a letter from Egypt in one of those air mail envelopes, you make sure it comes straight to me. If that means you have to go to my work to deliver it to me, you go to my work. But my wife, under no circumstance, is, is to know about that letter. It is a private matter, you know, and that's it. And of course, her father's reputation in the town will be like, you know, he's a straight shooter, honest man, all that. So, the, you know, the postman's not going to sit there and think something shady, like he's cheating on his wife or anything like that. But he is going to think something's weird. So, after Florence writes the letters, her father sends them off. And before he... He... And before he... He... Before he sends them off, he decides he's either going to destroy the letter that arrived. Or he's going to transcribe it. I think he's going to destroy it because that makes more sense in terms of the family history. In that sense, I'm the father in some way. And so... Let me pause for just a rest.

Okay, it's 5.57 pm. I am passing I'm on the 101 North. It's I see the enterprise Renacar at Nabato and there's a police officer too in the far left lane. And yeah, I had just finished describing this, you know, the practice of writing the letters and Florence's father destroying them. Florence's father having to intercept the ones coming from Egypt and sending the ones to Egypt on behalf of Florence and and destroying the ones that came from Egypt. And so Florence's diary is what she composes when she's awake. And for some reason she imagines she's always in her diary imagining that she's she's writing letters that she has you know she has these dreams where she's writing letters and she doesn't know why. So she writes them down. Now, uh and and the it's the diary that ends up in Rosa Alithia's hands for the third time. Now, um um it's Rosa Alithia. She she receives the she she discovers the diary in the college library. It's clearly not supposed to be there. She was studying at a desk one day. There was no one else on the at the desk. It was a quiet evening in the library and then all of a sudden the diary just simply appears next to her. Once again, it's the same diary that she had seen as a child when she was nine years old and on the bleachers when she was 14 and now she is um 19 20 years old and she sees it again and this time she's determined to keep it. She realizes that this book has been has some sort of relationship to her and she just doesn't know what it is. and uh the the interaction between so so let me back up or move forward. Rosa the book will start with Rosa Alithia having basically a nervous breakdown slash panic attack in the bathroom of you know the airplane on its way to Cairo or or Europe. I have not figured it out but she has purchased a ticket. The ticket is a one-way ticket only. She has no way of getting back. It's not obviously the end of the world but she doesn't have any more money and she doesn't have an obvious way of getting back. so she is in a bind. Now um I don't really know whether or not to alter the content of the diary each time it comes into her hands. I'm not so sure that's I think that's more complexity than is needed. and when she's younger she barely reads but one or two pages and when she's 14 or 15 she reads them but doesn't really understand and I think it's more like she gets bored of the story real quick so there are boring parts to the story um to the letters to Florence going on and on and on rambling about you know perhaps something that will happen to her in the future. yeah but when she's 20 the most significant parts of the diary are revealed and uh that's when you know uh either when she graduates and decides to get her first job or perhaps it's a summer job right she can't graduate because she she will she needs to be in a situation where she has no money. Yeah either she's a poor student or a poor employee and uh um family that adopted her as either died or you know moved away and moved to heat maybe to Houston. I think I think it would be better if she were adopted because the running away part might you know help might be uh a good kind of a parallel if not you know one of those complementary kind of behaviors that you would you would you would see with uh someone who's adopted at least it wouldn't be surprised you wouldn't be surprised and so um she uh uh yeah her her host her adopted family moves to Houston and um she's not like super close to them because she thinks they're out of touch she thinks they're like uh uh perhaps a bit too liberal for her maybe they moved to Austin that's even better yeah and uh she thinks uh she doesn't really have anything in common with them um and maybe that's I have to think about that relationship a little bit more either they're they've they've become they were uh oil or they were a cotton family and they they sold the mineral rights to their land and uh or or they're the yeah they're a cotton family that uh gave up because of the and they lease their land they but they still own the mineral rights and they're they're very well they they've grown wealthy off the mineral rights to um um their land and they live in Houston and uh Rosa Alitia likes Lamisa so she um she doesn't really like the big city she's been you know to Houston once or twice and thought it was these now that now i'm kind of changing her character a bit although would this help because I think it might I think it would lend its you know lend an edge to her that we just don't have before um and actually you know I think what's even better is that uh maybe she's trying to you know either so if she's maybe she's maybe she's trying to live on her own and she's staying in Lamisa because she just can't let go of this diary thing and so uh she can't she doesn't want to move in with them in Houston and uh they and she doesn't want to let them pay for her so she's she's staying there um and uh she uh she's staying in Lamisa because she's she's determined to figure out what has happened to the diary and uh i mean what what has happened to Florence and um so yeah that's so in the latter part of uh well in the in in roza elitia's third possession of the the diary she learns that Florence you know there's going to be different layers to the diary there's going to be the uh the preteen and high school years of sleep walking and then there's going to be the post sleep walking you know there's if we're going to say the the six years of uh you know the first year where will be when uh her parents you know everyone was okay with her um writing letters but maybe uh you know it's getting too serious and then uh that's when the whole uh scheme to avoid you know Florence's mom starts and uh that's when um you know she she starts writing in her sleep uh while she's sleep walking and then that stops when the mother is Florence has to stop uh there's some sort of crisis is going to happen in the family and i believe that will be when uh the mother attempts to kill herself and i haven't even gotten into who the mother is and why but um you know it's it's her father who who helps convince her that she needs to to uh run away and go not run away but like leave home and ultimately leave for Egypt but um um i'm not there yet i'm still trying to figure out what's the actual content of each kind of possession when see it's when Rosa Alitia actually has possession of the book that we actually learn anything about Florence and so in the third possession that's when Rosa Alitia learns that you know it's her father who convinces her to go now it won't be until Rosa Alitia is working at the newspaper that she will have discovered that a woman named Cindy um actually left for uh Egypt and um this is her first clue but the problem is is that uh she she can't seem to find any more you know records uh about her maybe uh i mean let's say if you have the diary and all that you know is is the letters you don't have the envelope so you don't know where the letters are coming and going and you have a single newspaper clipping it's not even um the whole it's just a photo with a little caption saying uh you know Jim um whatever is waiting for you know is is is shown here uh with a picture of his daughter who's just left for Egypt to get married and his daughter's name is listed there now what do you do if you are trying to figure out who that person is? I mean maybe it's within the same week that she discovers this uh clipping that uh that she meets Horace that that that everything there has to happen really fast um because she won't really have the time or the i think the patience to last that long were and so she'll have to just um yeah that that will just have to come really fast i think all end up happening is that she'll you know maybe she'll be struggling to graduate i don't know maybe you know maybe she will be down on her luck and her family will tell her to go stay at their their house um in lamisa maybe you need some peace and quiet maybe you know she had um an episode of her own and she's just trying to recover from it and in fact this will be interesting because uh i think the episodes are specifically related to the diary and her possession of the diary and and her parents don't know that she has the diary again and um um and i think it the the diary is actually causing her to be stressed out and and so uh yeah that will be when and maybe they'll recommend that she go you know why don't you just find a easy job and stay at our place in lamisa and and just get some peace and quiet maybe she will have um a sibling there i don't know about a sibling maybe something of some sort that she can um tie herself to in in lamisa so that um she can recuperate or get her bearings whatever's happening but it's during that time that she's trying to get her bearings that she actually uh meets Horus but i still need to figure out what Florence is maybe well Florence's last name is peacock Horus's last name i don't know what it is and um Rosa Alithia's birth uh mother and all that i need to figure out too i don't really know about that and and denna's background i need to start writing all the characters down i mean i'm getting really far here so yeah uh all done for now