Took an unexpected nap this afternoon, which is extremely rare for me. I almost never doze off. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (sometimes, it would be really nice to be able to doze off), but the truth is, for as long as I can remember, nearly every time I have gone to sleep, it has been a deliberate act

One exception : when I was a little kid, I would doze off any time we were driving in the car at night. Even if everyone was talking, but especially if it was quite. Something about being in motion soothes me. Maybe the movement outside eases the movement inside me and some sort of equilibrium is maintain, like equalizing air pressures inside the cabin of a jumbo jet.

But when you get older, there’s just too many times when you can’t just take a nap when you need one, and so I learned to suppress my urge to sleep until it was the “right time”.

A lesson I learned too well, I think. Our instinct is to find a safe place to sleep. But I have a fundamentally broken sense of safety. It’s hard for me to ever truly feel safe, even when, as now, I am all alone in the apartment and there is nothing here which, rationally speaking, is a threat.

It doesn’t matter. I guess this is when I feel the most safe, but even now, there is a big part of me that is always in restless motion, like a shark endlessly swimming in the dark depths of the ocean, always vigilant, always moving, because to stop is to die.

No wonder I have a weird relationship with sleep.

So anyhow. I did doze off today. I was playing a video game and slipped right into Morpheus’ sweet embrace (Mmmm… Lawrence Fishburne hugs). Quite rare for me, but I think it’s a good sign that I was relaxed enough to do that and feel good after.

I am still pretty sleepy right now, to be honest. I really need to get out into the sunshine more often so that I can develop a normal sleep schedule. This napping throughout the day can’t be good for me.

Sure makes life go by faster, though. Yay.

Sorry about yesterday’s blog entry, by the way. I realized after I wrote it that while I had a lot of fun making it and trying to figure out how my tablet’s speech to text system worked, it was probably not nearly as fun to read, and for that, I apologize.

I’ve done a little research and found out that the default speech to text on Android devices is quite primitive by modern standards. And here I was, thinking it was a miracle of our times.

So I will likely go look for a cheap or free app that does the same thing but better, and see if I can truly type by talking. It’s something that could be extremely useful, especially if I am out and about, because it would be way easier to just dictate a quick note rather than find someplace to put the tablet down and then type on the itty bitty virtual keyboard with my big ol’ fingers.

Of course, I could just record a sound clip of me talking, but then I would have to transcribe said note at some future time, and I know damned well I would never get around to it, lazy sod that I am.

Much better for it to go directly into text. I am a text based dude, when it really comes down to it. Stringing those 26 magical letters into words and sentences and paragraphs and stuff.

I still find it amazing how just 26 symbols can turn a slice of dead tree into a medium for projecting another person’s thoughts into the theater of your mind. The written word is an amazing thing and those who write what others may read hold an extraordinary power in their hands.

That’s why I like it.

Unrelatedly, check out Microsoft’s latest bit of marketing.

Brilliant move on their part to use the current surge in nineties nostalgia as a way to spin the rather sad joke that is Internet Explorer as that great old thing from a simpler and more innocent time.

Retro nostalgia software. It’s an interesting concept. I have to admit, there’s some software from the past that I miss, like Xtree Pro.

But being a video game junkie, there are limits to the nostalgia. Sure, there are tons of great games in the massive library of every video game ever, but I would still rather be playing something modern.

The real reason I wanted to link that video, though, is that it has a strange effect on me.

It makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

Weird, huh? But I have figured out why.

It’s because it is a concentrated dose of nostalgia that comes after my own nostalgia. Nostalgia for a youth that came after my own.

And as such, it really drives home the point that my youth is over. There is a whole generation that has grown up after my own childhood and they are now old enough to look back at a decade in which I was an adult with the misty rosy glow of nostalgia for one’s childhood.

It took that ad to make my discomfort with nineties nostalgia acute enough to force me to figure out just what was going on with it.

This is the first wave of nostalgia that does not include me. The first that looks back to an age that does not seem that long ago to me, and yet an age when I was definitely past my salad days and on to the main course.

It makes me feel old in a very deep and powerful way. Life really does just keep stumbling forward no matter what and eventually, it will leave me behind entirely.

Man that sucks.