Feeling decently good lately. Not as fun as indecently good, but it’s a lot less work.

Got some things done that had been hanging over my head for way too long. Like, for instance, cleaning the massive accumulation of 2L pop bottles that was taking over all our counter space.

All mine, of course. You have to rinse them out, or the recycling place won’t take them. Or at the very least, they will get really cranky with you. I can’t imagine it’s a fun job, so I can see why they would be cranky people.

And it would be much simpler if I just rinsed the damned things out the moment they are empty. But so far, I have not been able to instill this new habit into myself. So they build up.

Must have been at least fifty of the darn things. I drink around 7 of the things a week, so it builds up quick.

Yeah, I know, I have a habit. But it’s a harmless one. And God knows, you have to have a little satisfaction in life.

And it’s not like its a particularly heinous job. Add a little warm water, swish it around, dump it out, you’re done. I put some tunes on, took my snazzy Bluetooth external speaker with my to the kitchen, and got to work.

Twenty minutes later and I was done, and I could cross that off my list of things to do. That felt good. In fact, it felt extra good, because I really didn’t feel like doing it.

It took a real act of will to overcome my own laziness and get started. It would have been so much easier to do what I wanted to do at that time, which was to go take a nap.

But I had gone to the trouble of doing my blogging in the afternoon so there would be no chance of a “lack of time” excuse. And whether or not I feel like doing something has almost no relation to whether or not I will enjoy doing it.

Things are almost never as bad as my pouty, spoiled inner child would have me believe. Once you stop fighting yourself, you find most of the badness goes away. Stop kicking and screaming and get on with it, you will be a lot happier.

My sleep life has been more disturbed lately. No specific dreams remembered for me to transcribe (you’re welcome). But I have the very distinct feeling that things have been more stormy than usual in this haunted head of mine.

I am evicting ghosts as fast as I can. But it takes time.

Right now, I am pretty sleepy. This makes no sense, as I have had tons of sleep. But my body wants more, or at least, things it does. This is not the first times this has happened, but it’s probably the first time it’s happened in a while.

Maybe I have more dreaming to do. My dreams, they want me.

And sometimes, that really scares me. I don’t know if anyone else fears their dream world like I do. Probably they don’t even think about their dream life much. Sometimes they remember a dream and think “Well, that was weird!”. Maybe they tell a friend about it, maybe not. But it’s not something that has a huge effect on their life.

But when I get into this mental space, it feels like my dreams want to swallow me alive and never let go. Like they are exterting a terrible gravity over me. And it would be so easy to let go of my perch and let it take me back to the center.

But I have things to do.

After I am done blogging, I will still have a video to make. And then there;s supper, then this month’s BCSFA party. Then hanging out with Le Gang.

Really wish I had soem diet cola right about now. I could use some artificial energy.

Geez, I’m too mentally drained to even think of deep angsty stuff to overanalyze. I want more sleep, fucker. I’m not done yet.

Oh well. When I am done tippity tappity typing up this here blog entry, I will lay down for a bit. Hopefully I won’t fall asleep and sleep so long that I don’t have time to do a video before leaving for the evening’s adventures.

Then again, if that happens, I could just take video of tonight’s meeting and make that tonight’s video after some editing. You know, as a last ditch plan.

Hmmm. Last ditch. I bet that one comes from World War I. It would be the last moment when you can “ditch”, which back then meant getting out of your plane alive via parachuting.

On the other hand, it could have something to do with actual ditches. That’s the problem with this kind of “folk etymology”. It’s not hard to come up with a plausible sounding theory that people will readily accept and believe, even though it’s based on nothing but an intelligent guess.

Instead of, you know, facts and evidence and research and all that unsexy, unfun stuff.

Listened to a podcast about storytelling from an evolutionary point of view. What is the Darwinian advantage of storytelling? Why do we love stories so much?

Nonfiction is easy. It shares information. The tribe that shared knowledge this way has a huge advantage over ones that kept everything to themselves.

But that is less storytelling and more like education. What of fiction?

Here’s the problem with that question : fiction is a recent invention. For most of human history, there was no such thing as fiction because people had a far more flexible idea of reality.

If someone arrives in your village and tells tales of strange people and heroic deeds in some far off land, you have no reason to think they are lying, and if it’s a good story, you have an incentive to believe it.

And believing it does you no harm and makes the world seem like a more exciting sense, so why not believe?

And thus it is with all media.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.