Still kind of sleepy. But the day begins.

What ended up happening last night : As you know, I took my sleepy pills around six hours too early. Duh. Turned out, I was able to resist their effects long enough to finish half the blog entry, then finished it later.

In between was a nap of around 2 hours. I wish I had that time back, but whatcha gonna do. I have this blog entry plus an exercise where I find three low budget shorts to do today, plus whatever the homework for Production for Writers : Story is.

Surely I am not expected to have a second draft yet. I only presented my first draft Thursday. I can’t be expected to have a new draft already. Can I?

Besides, holy Hannah does that thing need a lot of work.

Right now, what I want is to go back to bed. I think I have reached the point where I have caught up on sleep enough to get sleepy in a healthy way, and it is very tempting to use the extra hour we all got by the clocks “falling back” last night for naptime.

That rarely works out how I want to to work out, though. Usually I end up not sleeping all THAT well. But sometimes….

Oh, what the fuck. We probably won’t eat till 8 o’clock. I got time.

Napped. It was no big deal. I think it was the warmth from the radiator that made me feel extra warm and cozy and sleepy. I imagine it will happen again, then.

Ain’t that just ducky.

Dunno what to write about now though. I watched the Disney/Pixar flick “The Good Dinosaur” today, and it was very good. Really tugged at the ol’ heartstrings. Dunno what the deal is with the title, though. It in no sense is about a dinosaur whose goodness is a distinguishing feature. The title makes it sound like it’s about a dinosaur that, unlike all the other dinosaurs, is good.

Nope. The main character is a nice dinosaur, but he’s not the only one.  He’s not even especially good, just a nice kid. The title makes no sense.

The movie makes it very clear from the beginning that we are not to take science into account with this movie. The opening scene features an asteroid heading towards Earth intercut with shots of dinosaurs quietly munching on grass.

Then it’s asteroid. Dinosaurs. Asteroid. Dinosaurs. Each time the asteroid getting closer to Earth. Finally the asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere. Cut back to the oblivious dinosaurs… who see a white streak across the sky then go back to grazing.

Perhaps that wasn’t just a gag, but a way to set up what comes next, because the first thing we see in the move after that is a dinosaur… farming.

Which is a tad boggling for the scientifically minded of us because, well, that definitely didn’t happen. So maybe the movie, in a gentle way, was saying this is a universe where the big asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs in our universe never happened, or at the very least, only grazed the atmosphere.

That would potentially allow the dinosaurs to continue to evolve to the point where they could learn agriculture and other Stone Age technologies without, intriguingly enough, developing hands. In fact, one of the most interesting visual elements of the movie, at least for me, is how they show how these long-necked four-legged could do all kind of things we might assume only humans can do by using their mouths to grip and crudely manipulate things. They clearly put a lot of thought into it, and it all seems quite plausible.

Whether the dinosaurs we know could have gotten that far in only, as the movie says, “a few million years”, is quite another thing.

Not much else has happened since I talked to you last. That’s the way of weekends, and thank goodness for that. I still feel kind of weak and disassociated, but that’s just life for me I guess.

Part of me wishes I could sneak away to an alternate dimension where time does not exist and just hang out there for a while. Get caught up on sleep and homework, take a breather from school, get my shit together maybe. Shouldn’t take more than a week.

Who am I kidding? I would never come back. Not until I got bored, anyhow. If I could bring food, a bathroom, and my computer along, I could be gone quite a while, even sans Internet. And when I decided to come back, I would return to time at the exact moment I left it, all rested up and ready to go.

Just think of all the masturbation I could get done.

Of course, then you have the whole slew of issues related to non-time. My scenario assumes time would keep going for me, because if it didn’t, not only would the whole thing be pointless, from the point of view of normal time I would be gone forever.

After all, there can be no changes of state, or changes of any kind at all, without there being time over which these changes could happen. So once you were in the no-time dimension, you would be there forever.

Totally not worth it, then.

Or it could be like Vonneguy’s Tralfalmadore from Slaughterhouse Five, which is inhabited by creatures for whom there is no time and everything happens at once. Even within the main character’s life, everything that happened to him in his life is always happening, and once he realizes this, it allows him to achieve an inner peace so strong that he doesn’t even do anything to prevent his own assassination.

Because the assassination has always happened and always will happen and is, in fact, always happening. Trippy, no? Shows how fundamental time is to human understanding.

That scenario is as unimaginable to us as infinity. In both cases, we can easily imagine the concept, but not what it actually would be like.

Science fiction has such fun toys to play with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

t did a dumb thing.

So it’s Saturday. Usually, every Saturday, my roomies Joe and Julian (aka J&J) go to Joe’s parents place to play board games and hang out.

But this time, they did not, because Joe’s parents are traveling. This meant that we could try to get caught up on our watching of the Daily Show and Colbert over supper.

Here’s the thing about that, though. Usually, when we sit down to watch stuff, it’s after Joe gets off work at midnight and that means it’s nearish to bedtime for yours truly.

Now as you know, I need pills to help me sleep. ^[1] They take around half an hour to kick in, so I have developed the habit of taking my pills around half an hour before we are finished watching our shows.

Some of you have already figured out where this is going.

So there I was, watching stuff with J&J, and it was totally dark out, and I was distracted by the TV, and that opened the door for situational memory to take over, and well..

I just took my goddamned sleeping pills at 7 PM.

Ergo, tonight’s blog entry will be written in at least two segments. When they kick in hard, I am going to take a nap. Possibly a very long one, seeing as the sleeping pills generally allow me to sleep around five hours minimum. Longer on a good night.

And dammit, I have things I want to do tonight. I was planning on getting down to some serious homework and instead I am going to sleep the night away. After which it will be around 1:30 in the morning, which is not far from when I would be going to bed.

Part of me wants to react to that by staying up all night. But sleep doesn’t really work like that. Our circadian rhythms get in the way. So I will probably end up getting up for at most a couple of hours so I can have my “midnight” snack, then go back to sleep.

After all, I have a high density week ahead of me. Two classes Monday, another two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday. That means I have to get as much of the homework as I can done before the week starts because I will not have a lot of time/energy during the week. Just the evenings.

That’s why having to sleep now pisses me off so much. Fuck.

And I am so sick and tired of tripping over myself so much. No matter how hard I try, I just keep fucking up left right and center. I am seriously beginning to wonder if I have a clinically definable brain disorder. Something that makes it impossible for my to get my mental game together. I am tired of being clueless, clumsy, and crazy.

I want to be able to think straight, move well, and escape this world of madness and complication in which I live.

In short, I wish I was normal.

Well, here comes sleep. I will come back when I am done.

I’m back. Only slept a couple of hours. So thanks for that. Still kinda sleepy though.

Anyhow, yeah, I am so over being such a spazz Maybe it’s my meds that are making me slow. Or maybe my mind is just too soft.

It’s certainly possible that school’s demands on my creative energies encourage me to stay in an internally focused state of mind. One that is soft and dreamlike. I often think of my creativity as being like dreaming on the page.

That would explain the disassociative nature of how I feel much of the time. I  always feel sort of dizzy and distant. I have a hard time focusing on what is right in front of me. When I try, it’s like trying to play the piano when your hands are covered in concrete.

A lot of things could be causing that feeling. Like my sleep apnea, for instance. Kind of hard to feel sharp and alert when your brain isn’t getting enough O2 for a third of your life. Maybe if I could get my oxygen game together, the rest would fall into place.

But it’s so hard to focus enough to handle things most of the time. Even relatively simple things, like trying my CPAP machine again, feel like trying to skate uphill. Everything slips through my fingers and I continuously fuck up and can’t even explain why.

Not even to myself.

It’s that whole path of least resistance thing all over again. Sometimes it feels like all I can do is slide down the hill of life under the force of gravity without any real choice in the matter. To do anything else is so hard and letting go is so easy.

I don’t want to be that way. Passive and oblivious. Disconnected and distraught. Doomed to helplessly watch things fall apart over and over again as I stumble into walls with my pants down around my ankles in a never-ending blooper reel of clueless catastrophes.

And what if I literally cannot pull myself together? Maybe I have truly fucked myself up so bad that all I can do is limp along while I fall apart. I am plagued by the feeling that even operating at my current minimal level, I am losing ground.

And my absolute worst nightmare is that one day I will dissociate so strongly that I lose all contact with reality and get lost inside my own mind. That possibility seems very real some days. All it would take is some major emotional blow and I would instinctively withdraw from reality so hard that I would never come back again.

Yet still, I will not cease my battle against the inward tide. Some day, I will be a real live human being, and my internal exile will end, and I will fell the full warmth of the sun penetrate my icy tomb, and I will live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.