This is a test to see if you are completely sick of me yet. Because yup, here we go, with another boring diary entry, this time not brought to you by “my brain being too fried by black sleep to write anything more coherent” but rather, by “I couldn’t think of something to write about so I took the path of least resistance and decided to just blather on and on instead”.

Trust me, I am as disappointed as you are. Hopefully, I will go back to being interesting soon. If not, you have my apologies well in advance for it.

Sleepwise, I have been doing fairly well lately. I still have my up periods and my sleepy periods, but they don’t seem as harsh lately and a lot of the time, I actually feel something like well-rested, which is a pretty rare thing for me. Most of the time, I just feel various shades of tired, from “oh god, why am I awake, kill me now, at least then I will get some rest” to “could use a nap but is more or less upright, functional, and ready to face a very, very tiny portion of the world. Maybe. ”

Not sure what I have been doing right lately to cause this renaissance of somnolence, and that makes me a little nervous. Says something about neurosis, I suppose, that when things are going well, I don’t think “Yay, things are going good, I should relax and enjoy this!”. Instead, I think “Oh crap, how did I manage this? I have to know so I can do it again!”.

Neurosis is largely about the desire to control one’s world via the intellect raging out of control and leading to a hyperactive mind that can never rest and constantly picks itself apart.

I think that part of the reason for sleeping better lately, though, is that I have given myself permission both to just lay in bed and sleep until I feel fully rested, and to stay up for as long as it takes till I get tired enough to go to sleep.

This prevent both not getting enough continuous sleep because I don’t go right back to sleep after getting up to pee or whatever, and sleeping just because I am bored and want to hit the fast-forward button on life.

Skipping my life is the last thing I need at my age and total lack of achievement. I feel like I have slept through most of my adult life already. If I deny myself the escape of all that napping, maybe I will be forced to actually do something with my life out of sheer boredom.

As life plans go, it’s no self-help best-seller or rousing battle speech, but it suits my low impact (no impact?) lifestyle and rate of speed.

I am trying to learn to be more patient with myself as well. Let myself just do things at my own pace, and not beat myself up all the time for not doing everything in the direct, linear, immediate way that my impatient order craving self might prefer.

Maybe I am better off just accepting that I do things my own way, in my own time, and while it might not get things done in a hurry, it does get them done, and in a way that encourages inner harmony instead of constant self-directed rage and abuse.

You have to become the person who will treat you nicely and gently and forgivingly, instead of waiting for someone else to come along who thinks you deserve it and is willing to keep giving it to you no matter how much resistance and negativity you “reward” them with.

I have also been pondering a perennial axis of inner conflict within myself, which is order versus chaos. Part of me really wants things to be neat and orderly and efficient and well run and controlled and professional and all those good things. But part of me really does not care about all that, and I have been wondering lately why that is, why part of me actually kind of resents things being too ordered and finds too much order to be stifling and sterile and hostile and dull.

This is the sort of thing which forces me to be such a moderate. I don’t really have any choice. I live in a state of constant dynamic compromise between conflicting forces inside me, none of which can “win”.

From this eternal debate within me, a disturbing truth emerged recently, in the form of a question : What if your need for order far outstrips your capacity for generating it?

What if the real problem is that I would like to have everything neat and organized and orderly like my roommate Joe has his stuff, but I simply lack the energy, will, skills, and wherewithal to make it happen myself?

Well, then I am back trying to figure out exactly how much an increased amount of order is worth to me, and hence, I am back between the Scylla and Charybdis of my desire for order and my resentment of it.

There has to be some sort of stable balancing point between the two extremes, a level of order which pleases the side of me that crave order and control without striking the more creative, free spirit side of me as sterile and boring and dead and dull and artificial.

Some kind of organically constructed order that feel natural and whole but still decreases the amount of things in my environment which make me sad to look at them because they make life seem so crappy.

Or maybe I just need to finish my incomplete oral stage of Freudian development, and hence stop being so passive and messy and dependent, and finally get on with that whole anal stage learning to control yourself and your environment type thing.

Nah. That sounds like a lot of work. I will just keep being a good boy by patiently waiting for someone to come along and do everything for me.

Yeah. That’s bound to work eventually, right?