So I fucked up a little today.

I explain how in this :

So yeah, it did not occur to me to get my video making done earlier in the day in order to prevent this little logjam, but whatever.

Further complications came from the fact that I was quite sleepy from all the running around today when we got home, so I made the executive decision to take a nap from 4 pm to 4:45 pm and then get started on the ol’ blogging.

And it worked. I feel a lot better now than when I finished the video. So, yay me.

But I have been sleepy all day, annoyingly enough. I nearly drifted off a bunch of times at the Kinsmen event today, and again in the waiting area for Wound Care.

It started today when I woke up at 8 am feeling slightly crappier than I usually do waking up because I was woken up by the phone.

It was Hans from the Kinsmen and he was confirming that I’d be in today. He does this every week but for some reason I am usually awake when it happens.

Not so this time.

So being awakened by the phone had already put my nerves on edge. The journey from being totally asleep to fully awake seemed to take a very long time.

Long enough that I was already at the Kinsmen facility and having lunch before I truly felt like I was a fully bipedal member of the species.

Well, partly bipedal at least. On a good day.

Other than creeping somnolence, my day at the Kinsmen club was great. Had a warm mini muffin (ooh, banana bread!) when I arrived plus a small glass of apple juice.

And because it was a little too cold outside due to it being quite overcast, we did our exercises inside, and lucky for me that meant they were all sitting down exercises with none of the standing stuff I can’t really do with my bum legs.

Then we had lunch, which consisted of what was described as “tomato bisque” but was pretty much just tomato soup.

I don’t know a whole lot about French food, but I know a bisque has cream in it and starts with rice or a roux^[1], and this stuff had none of that.

The main dish was what they insisted was chicken in peri-peri sauce, and I have only had peri-pedi once, from Nando’s, but it definitely tasted different.

It had lovely citrus notes in with the spiciness.

It tasted good anyhow. And I chatted with my friends Lynda and Judy, although less than I would have liked due to the sleepiness making my usual problem initiating conversations a lot worse.

I swear there was a time when I could start conversations just fine. But now I need to have a bit of news I want to share or something to react to first.

This development distresses me a little, but what the hell. I am still a fascinating and witty raconteur when I do manage to get talking.

I just need a little help getting started sometimes.

Dessert was an odd drink, a frozen mocktail made with watermelon and cucumber.

Well, I love both of those things, so I was willing to give it a shot.

And it was decent. It was a weird flavour combo at first, but once I stopped thinking about it, it was basically just a watermelon bubble tea with cucumber undertones that mostly just made the whole thing even cooler tasting.

And after lunch, we played a game of Categories, aka Scattergories’ grandmother, where you come up with examples of members of a category starting with a specific letter of the alphabet.

For example, we had the category “animals” and the letter K, so we came up with kangaroo, koala, kookaburra, and so on.

It was great fun to play as a group with us all cudgeling our brain for answers. It’s a simple idea anyone can grasp and contribute to, so everyone could play along.

And that’s my day at the Kinsmen!

More after the break.

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On being a thinker

I became a thinker and a dreaming and a philosophy and a visionary via boredom.

As patient readers know, because I was such an unreasonably bright child, when I was in school I got my classwork done in a heartbeat and then spent the rest of the time everybody else was plodding their way through algebra bored out of my mind.

Explains a lot, dunnit?

So with nothing external for my restless intellect to chew on, it turned inward and started processing what was already in it on a deeper level.

That is where the kind of deep correlation and connection upon which my high level of insight and creativity comes from.

And by “deep” I mean well below the level of conscious thought. This kind of deep mentation is beyond anything the waking, thinking mind can encompass so it relegates it to the supercomputer that is our unconscious mind and then waits for its output.

This is also where the feeling of revelation and insight that drives the philosopher comes from. That moment when I see the pattern in something and I can feel the heady rush of seemingly unrelated and chaotic facts crystallizing into wonderful order is positively transcendent in its bliss.

And it comes with a feeling of clearing up space in my brain, like there’s this constant pressure on the contents of my mind for things to become smaller and more compact and streamlined, and revelation relieves that pressure for a time.

If that makes any sense.

So yeah, boredom made me a thinker and a dreamer. And I have to say I have reaped enormous benefits from that. It’s made me a very powerful thinker.

If only I wasn’t crazy…. le sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.