First, a quick update : got my website working, Purging my cache worked.

So yay me on that, at least.

Now i am here trying to blog through a haze of sleepiness. As usual.

And I am so very sick of this bullshit. Every goddamned day, I have to fight the fog just to blog. Knowing I would rather be asleep, but having to make the words instead.

I have pondered some solutions. Going to bed earlier might work. That way, I would stand a chance of being done with sleep by the time to lunch and blog came around.

And that’s easy to say when I am super sleepy and it’s daytime, quite another when it’s the wee hours of the morning, I am fully awake and aware and having fun playing whatever video game I have on the go at the time.

No guarantee that I won’t still be sleepy come blog and lunch (blunch?) time either.

Another idea is to separate lunch and blogging. Eat at the usual time (around 1 pm) then go back to bed and blog whenever I wake up again, hopefully more awake.

And that’s not entirely out of the question, but I have eaten while I blogged for so long that ti would definitely feel very weird to just eat.

Not impossible, of course. After all, that’s what I do for breakfast. I never blog during breakfast and I seem to handle that just fine.

So I will think about it.

Of course, my sleeping pill, Mirtazapine, plays a role. Never thought of myself as the sort of crazy person who goes off his meds, but as patient readers know, I often stop taking my sleeping pill precisely because I am sick and tired of being sleepy at this time.

And as patient readers also know that this is a subtle trap because I can do it and feel fine for a long time but under the surface of my consciousness I am losing it.

So that’s no long term solution either.

Lately I have been dealing with the issue by just ending part 1 whenever I am done eating instead of plugging away till I reach 500 words.

It is not a good solution and makes me feel like I am failure, but at least it’s easy.

And we always have to do whatever is easiest, don’t we?

Not what is best. Just what’s easiest.

Anything else is too damned hard.

More after the break,.

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It’s the principle of the thing

Ordered me some KFC for dindins tonight.

Arrived and everything was there… except for the 594 ml Diet Pepsi that was supposed to be part of my Big Box meal.

And this put me in a mild quandary, because I don’t need it. I got my Diet Coke, I am fine. I could have just let it slide.

But ! paid $1 to upsize it from a 321 ml to a 594 ml, god damn it. And really, the system needs to know if shit is getting left out.

So after a tiny struggle to figure how to report this via Doordash, I did report it. Even though I knew it would get someone – either the person who picked my order or the person who delivered it – in trouble.

That’s never easy for a polite Canadian like me. But I had to do it.

I felt aggrieved.

And that reminds me of my own contemplations of a life lived, like mine, by principals, regardless of other considerations.

A cogent moral argument could be made that the lack of said drink cost me nothing in real terms. I could easily have ignored it and gone on with my life.

But a principle had been violated and I felt that had to be addressed.

But what does that even mean, anyway? What do I, or anyone else, mean when we say it’s a matter of principle?

First off, we can disregard the people for whom it means “I am being petty because you hurt my feelings but I am too much of a pussy to admit it so I hide behind the language of morality instead.

Seriously, fuck those people.

No, we’ll assume some actual principle is involved. What is a principle?

Working definition : A moral concept meant to restrain human behaviour to that which is moral.. This is not the same as a moral rule – rules are meant to reflect principles.

And that’s a key factor in arguments made based on principle. Because they are based on solid moral principles instead of arbitrary rules or authority, they are much harder to argue with when they come into question.

Hence their popularity with the unworthy, sadly.

The basic argument for principle, in its most abstract form. is “action X is wrong (or right) because it violates (or conforms to) principle Y”.

This makes sense to most people but it is subject to attack by consequentialist arguments like that found in utilitarian ethics.

“No harm no foul” sums up that angle rather well.

Going back to my little situation, we can characterize the sides as “people should do their jobs properly” versus “what harm did it do?”.

But that would ignore the emotion involved. Like I said, I felt aggrieved. I had not gotten what I paid for. I felt hurt.

So I acted out of principle but also out of emotion. And if I am being absolutely honest, the emotion came first.

The principle was, at best, the form my emotion expressed itself, and at worst just a convenient weapon for a rather abstract form of revenge.

So does any of that justify my perpetration of an act that will undoubtedly harm someone I don’t even know?

They violated both my principles and my interests, even if the actual harm was mild. They also violated the rules of their job.

Either of those could be used to justify their being punished. They deserve said punishment as any other rule violator, at least.

And this punishment could have been avoided if my drink hadn’t gotten lost.

And yet…. perhaps it’s just the softness of my secret heart talking, but somehow I am not fully convinced by these arguments.

Deep down, I just don’t want to hurt people. Even if they deserve it.

I guess that makes me a deep down liberal from my very core.

What’s worse is that I am pretty damned proud of it.

Guess that means I am incurable.

And that’s fine by me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.