This sleeping all day is getting to be a thing.
OK, calm down, me. We’ve been through these sleepy periods before. And yeah, they can be kind of a drag, but they end when I get caught up on REMs so I might as well just chill and ride it out and try not to get freaked out over it.
Besides, I’m kind of enjoying this one.
After all, it’s mostly been the pleasant kind of sleep. Sure, at the beginning, I woke up feeling crappy like I so often do (thanks sleep apnea!), but for the last few days I’ve woken up feeling fine.
Not exactly bouncing out of fully refreshed and ready to take on the day. But fine.
Still, like I always say during these periods, Os testículos do peixe-boi são alarmantes.
Wait, no, that’s for something else.
What I always end up saying is that it gets on my nerves to lose so much of my day. Makes me feel like life is slipping away from me.
Which is ridiculous, because I am not sleeping a much larger total of hours. Maybe an extra hour or two. I’m just sleeping more of them at a time,
And that is an unalloyed boon. I need that kind of sleep. I have gone months and months without sleeping more than two hours in a row and that’s bad.
Means I am not getting those deep REM cycles that are so necessary for brain health. It’s a wonder I haven’t completely lost all mental coherence.
Then again, I have a lot of experience operating in this state. Sadly.
Time to make mental notes. Got to remember how much better I already feel and give some thought to how I got here and how I might get back from time to time.
Skip the frigging Diet Coke, for one.
Enough sleep. Physics!
Who needs drugs?
When you can get high on SCIENCE!! Mua ha ha ha!
Behold, the wonders of our universe!
The muon one I only sorta grasp. Like, I get the basic idea, but there’s not a lot to talk about. There’s something off about the Standard Model. We’re testing for it.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
But holy shit, time crystals! They constantly shift state without using any energy!
I repeat : without using any fucking energy!
Screw you, entropy, we found a loophole!
Also that scientist looks exactly like this girl named Rana who used to work at that killer bakery across the street from VFS.
Can’t remember the name. Something to do with bread? It’s where good desserts go when they die, anyhow.
ANYhow, time crystals blow my mind.
But then there’s GIANT BUBBLES IN SPACE! Fifty thousand light years across! Full of hot gases! Holy shitake!
And of course, people were all pfff, giant space bubbles, riiiiiight, Japanese dude.
But they are totally real.
I wonder what the walls of the bubble are made of?
I vote marshmallow.
More after the break.
Life is work
And work is not evil.
Effort is not the enemy.
Unlimited leisure is a myth.
And on the whole, you’d actually rather be doing things.
The science is clear that human being are at their happiest when they are fully engaged in meaningful effort towards a common goal.
“The Zone” is not a state of immobile bliss. It is a state of being busy using all your capabilities to the maximum extend possible without undue stress.
AKA working as hard as you can without it hurting you.
And we know this, because most peop[le would consider a job in which you do very little – say, staring at security monitors all day – to be a terrible job.
If it was all about minimizing effort, it would be a great job. But it ain’t.
Truly, the attitude that work is somehow the enemy should stay in the childhood where it originates. When we are kids. we all have the primal experience of going from unlimited play to being expected to do certain things.
First it’s chores, like cleaning up our toys or setting the table.
But then it’s school. Ba ba BAAAA. That’s where you first are expected to do things you don’t like for the entire day!
And what are you doing? SchoolWORK. ClassWORK. HomeWORK.
Clearly, work means being forced to do things you don’t want to do because they are not fun and have unfun things like grades and pressure attached.
And thus the table is set, with us on one side and the evil forces of school and work on and effort the other side.
But this is fundamentally wrong. Even as kids, this is obvious.
What do we do in the summer? We play, often in highly energetic ways. Even a bookish loner like me spent his summers riding his bike around and walk hither and yon.
More active kids ran all over the place and played team sports and went climbing or rode horses and did all kinds of other things that were, by all measures, a lot of work.
So you see, we all know that life is best when we are activity engaged. The question is, with what shall we be engaged?
Ideally, with things we enjoy. More specifically, with the things we find sufficiently inherently rewarding enough to make them worth doing for their own sake.
Nobody needs to be paid to eat a chocolate bar. Broadly speaking.
So ideally, we would only have to do things we enjoy.
But realistically, life is always going to involve doing stuff that is not fun. So you either :
A. refuse to do anything you don’t totally enjoy and have the sad, pathetic life that a non-millionaire has with that kind of attitude, or
B. grow up, get shit done, and then go BACK to having fun.
And above all – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – try to have fun no matter what you end up doing.
When you realist that you can make something that seems lame fun just with the right attitude and a willingness to dig a little, the world becomes a much more fun place.
And all you really had to do was have a little mental flexibility about what is” fun”!
That’s got to be worth it, right?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.