It’s been another sleepy day for me, although this time, it was deliberate.

I decided that today would be a good day to simply sleep until I wasn’t sleepy any more. I had nothing besides writing this here blog entry on my schedule (plus meals, natch) and so I figured I am just going to make sleep my project today, and see if I can do myself some good by just letting my body have all it needs and all it wants besides.

So far, I can’t tell if it has done me any good. I don’t feel particularly well rested or relaxed at the moment, and it’s 9pm and I have been sleeping all day. So I would have to say that so far, this experiment in the MJB Sleep Lab is a bit of a bust.

Perhaps by this point, I have overslept. Isn’t it silly that such a thing is even possible? That you can sleep too much and that can lead to being more tired and crappy feeling than if you had slept less? You would think that once you get enough sleep, you would stop feeling tired and sleepy, wake up feeling nice and refreshing, lose the urge to nap, and that would be it for a while.

But no, you can mistake “still being a little tired from the last nap” for “still tired enough to need more sleep” and then sleep too much and wake up feeling worse than when you went to sleep.

Why is life so fucking complicated and so easy to screw up? Sometimes I swear it would be nice to have someone come along, take over, say “from now on, this is all that is required of you, and if you do this and do it well, everything else will be taken care of and society will love you. ”

Perhaps that is where social conservatism comes from : the desire for a much simpler world than the complex modern world, with its unlimited freedom and panoply of options and so many ways (to a negative mindset) to go wrong and end up hurt…. way more ways to fail that to succeed… no wonder people, as they get older and lose their ability to absorb change, long for a simpler world.

The primary mistake, of course, is to imagine that this simpler world once existed, back when we were all children. But the world was just as complicated and difficult back then, we were just both ignorant of it and protected from it.

It’s not like when we were innocently and naively enjoying that simpler and more innocent time, our parents, as adults, were also thinking “I love how simple and easy and wonderful life is right now, free of complications and difficulties and pain!”.

No, they too faced a world that was far more complex and frighteningly onerous and intimidating than the one they knew in their own children.

In fact, they probably looked upon us, their children, and longed for the innocence and freedom from cares and responsibility that we were enjoying right at that moment.

They, at least some of the time, understood that the innocence came from the childhood and not from the state of the world during it.

But this is a subject I have covered many times in my previous writings, so I will belabor it no further. Nostalgia and I have a troubled history.

In the news today, there’s some great news from Newt Gingrich : he plans on fighting Mitt Romney all the way to the convention floor!

Way to go, Newt! No hesitation, no compromise, no surrender, buddy! You’re the only one who can save America from Obama, so fight until your very last breath to take Romney down!

Split the GOP into a million pieces if that’s what it takes for you to get the nomination! Show all those GOP insiders who hate your guts because they envy how smart and charismatic you are that you will stop at nothing to prove them wrong!

Go for blood, Newt, and don’t ever give up! America needs you!

Of course, I hate the current GOP and modern “conservatism” in all its forms and think Newt Gingrich is a horrible, horrible human being on pretty much all levels, and would definitely lose to Obama by a massive landslide, and actually be incredibly bad for the GOP and probably cost them the House and the Senate as well as the Presidency, and be a hilariously horrible candidate to boot…

… so I might be biased.

And finally today, we have this rather magnificent entry into the world of public acts of wonder.

It’s a clever idea, and it cannot have been easy to pull off. I would imagine there was considerable trial and error involved in putting together something that would be big enough to look like a human being in flight but light enough to fly from just the power you can get from an RC vehicle engine.

So it’s an impressive work not just of public wonder but of design, and it’s DIY, which as far as I am concerned makes it very chic indeed.

And sure, most people probably eventually figured out that those were not actually people flying up there… but for a while at least, they got the feeling that there just might be more to this world than they ever expected was even possible.

And that is what wonder is all about. Giving people the feeling that the world is more magical, more fabulous, more wonder-ful than they ever dreamed of before.

It is about a joyous expansion of the imagination. And I figure, if you can bring that feeling into people’s lives, you have done something truly worthy.

That’s a big part of why I am so devoted to science fiction. There is much wonder and magic in science fiction, and the best part is, in science fiction, it’s plausible and therefore truly possible.

And really, how can you beat that?