Here it is, 2:10 PM, middle (ish) of the afternoon, and I am super damned sleepy.

This is becoming tedious. I don’t want to sleep another afternoon away. I want to be awake so I can study my phonetics and try my hand at some transcription and get this shit down cold before the test on Tuesday. Oh, and also to get the damned homework done.

Not to mention all the assignments and projects due in the next month.

I even had nice caffeinated Diet Coke with my lunch, and caffeine is supposed to help you stay awake. But no. Right now I want to go to sleep and not wake up till my birthday in May.

It would be a shame to sleep through that, after all.

I dunno. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been using my CPAP enough. At least it and I are on good terms again. That one night where I woke up barely able to breathe must have been a fluke or something. I once more trust my CPAP to give me air through the night. I have done it a bunch of times lately. Not all the time, sadly. I should use it every single time I sleep. Maybe then, I would entirely catch up on decent sleep and be all parky happy and full of energy and eagerness. That would be awesome.

Had some pretty amazing dreams lately. Dreams which are, sadly, far too XXX NSFW to share, but I have to applaud their inventiveness. There was a lot of crazy wild stuff in there. If I could record my dreams like on Red Dwarf, that one would make for one heck of an avant-garde porno.

I like it when I remember my dreams. They are always fascinating to me because they give me a glimpse into what is going on under the hood of my conscious mind. Being a totally cerebral dude, it is not easy for me to even perceive what is going on in my subconscious mind, let alone embrace, understand, and accept it.

And a mind divided cannot stand.

Been having another go at the whole ego thing again lately. Getting that 19/20 on my short story set it off. I am once more attempting to integrate the ways in which I am exceptional into my self-image instead of kind of ignoring them and/or taking them for granted.

It’s amazing how hard that is. My mind really resists the change in the status quo represented by trying to develop some pride and worth in myself. It’s so much easier for me to just evade the whole issue. Am I great? I don’t know. In some ways I am, I guess. It’s not something I like to think about.

And that’s true. I don’t like thinking about it. It makes me feel queasy and dizzy, like I have an inner ear infection and a heavy flu at the same time. But I have to do it because it’s the only way I am going to construct a positive self-image. And without one of those, I will continue to be emotionally unstable and experience an ever-changing world without stability or safety.

The only way I am going to get out of the sea of emotion is to construct my own land, and plant my flag on it. And then stick with it no matter how the storm rages and the wind batters and the waves try to sweep me off my feet and back into the dark cold sea.

In the past, that’s been my strategy. Just let go. That’s why I have so little solidity in my world. Letting go is easier. Let the flood take me where it will. It might not be the safest route but it is the one which requires the least commitment, energy, suffering, strain, and stress, so I have taken it time and time again.

But I need some solid ground to stand upon. I need to take up arms against my sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. And that means finding a way to truly accept and believe in my own power and worth.

And that means taking responsibility for it too, which might be the problem. I have a strange relationship with responsibility. On the one hand, I take responsibility extremely seriously, and I truly believe that we are responsible for all reasonably foreseeable consequences of out actions, without exception. I hate it when people refuse to take responsibility for their actions and I have lectured people on the nature of responsibility and how it is not something you can just shed because you don’t feel like it many times.

On the other hand, I don’t exactly seek it out either. In fact, I tend to respond to the idea of purposefully taking responsibility with a deep kind of claustrophobic panic. I am definitely the sort of person who will turn down the power rather than take the responsibility.

Not very mature, I know, and probably not in my best self-interest either. So I am working on it. Leaning into the panic in order to get to the other side of it and figure out where to go from there. A lot of fears disappear when fully expressed, and then you find yourself on the other side of it wondering what the heck you were so scared about.

That’s a good feeling, once you get over the disorientation. It means you have to change your beliefs, though, so a lot of people never get there. People would rather stay miserable than even entertain the idea that how they perceive things might be in error.

And yes, that holds true for us “open-minded” artsy fartsy liberal intellectual types too. Despite how often we airily assert that other people should really be more open-minded, we’re generally no better than anyone else at challenging our own perceptions.

And that definitely includes me. The best I can say about myself is that I don’t fight the truth once I perceive it.

It’s the perceiving part that’s hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.