And God the director
Smelled a rat
Pulled another rabbit
From his hat
Sniffed the air, and said
That’s that, I’m
Going.
Such an Anglican view of God. A god who finds your humanity embarrassing, who doesn’t approve, who hold you to an impossible standard and when you don’t meet it,. a God that simply leaves you behind because you were never good enough.
I’ve met parents like that. In general, I want to smack them.
Anyhow, the game’s begun for me because I am almost done the first draft of my first animation script. It needs one more news item to riff on and some more detailed description and it will be ready for final polish. I am not super pleased with the riffs I have written but I can tune them up in the polishing stage.
Riffing on news items relevant to Uber and Lyft drivers is not easy.
In fact, I am a little worried that my jokes are too snarky. I will have to talk with my boss Prasad about editorial tone and intended audience. Snark is my default mode but I am sure I can come up with other kinds of humour if I put my mind to it.
It’s just so much fun pointing out absurdities and hypocrisies. I am a natural satirist that way. It’s totally a defense mechanism. When I receive input that is inconsistent with what I know about the world, logically unsound, morally unacceptable, `or otherwise something I refuse to accept, I turn it into satire and push it right back out.
Kinda of like having a mental gag reflex, I suppose.
This rejection of information is necessary because the default mode of the human mind is to take what people say to us and add it into our picture of the world. And that was fine when it was just Ogg telling Norp where he was attacked by a tiger.
But as civilization advanced, things became too complicated for that and we had to come up with a way of maintaining the integrity of our minds and our world-views. So we have to develop this ability to reject bad information – to spit out the poisoned food for thought.
It’s a vitally necessary reflex – otherwise we would be overwhelmed by contradictory information. But it is also the root of a lot of prejudice because it is this mental function that keeps existing beliefs from being changed by new evidence.
Still, it’s this reflex that is a;so the root of all comedy. Laughter is our response to logical inconsistencies and other absurdities. It’s a form of input rejection that we enjoy and actively seek out. I suppose one could make the argument that this provides us with an evolutionary benefit by making us seek out novelty and push the edges of our understand out a little further each time,.
But really, nobody knows why we laugh. We know what function it serves in the mind, but not what function it serves in evolution.
Needed a bit of a rest. Which is kind of the problem.
I have had a super sleepy day today. As in, I have spent more hours asleep than awake. It really cut into my productivity and gave me less time to work on things than I would have liked. And it’s so depressing to lose time like that.
Honestly, I am a little worried.
I can only assume I have been not getting enough decent quality sleep lately. It really feels like this is something that has been building up for a while and now has to run its course, whether I like it or not.
I do not.
It could be that this is parent of the healing process from my major depressive episode last Friday night. My mind needs all this sleep in order to pull me back together. That is how our bodies respond to infection – that’s why being sick makes you so tired – so why not the mind as well?
And I know getting uptight about the chronic sleepiness doesn’t help things. And in the past I could handle that. The sleepiness would have to persist for more than two days before I would start becoming anxious and irritated about it.
But I have stuff to do now. Jobs. Responsibilities. The chance to earn income for once. So I can’t be asleep most of the time.
I got like this at VFS too, come to think of it. I would have periods where I would go to class but I would be fighting sleep the whole time, and then when I got home I would sleep some more. It’s clearly a chronic issue.
And the obvious culprit is my sleep apnea. That would definitely cause me to have low quality sleep that eventually meant I had to pay off that ol’ sleep debt all at once.
And thus, I ended up super sleepy for days on end. And if I want to get healthy and stay healthy, I am going to have to deal with my fricking sleep apnea instead of ignoring it.
Which means I have to build myself up until I can overcome the big roadblock :
Admitting to Doctor Chao that I have been doing jack shit about my sleep apnea for years. He thinks I have been using CPAP this whole time. Nope. By any objective measure, I am a terrible patient.
Holy shit, I thought I had finishes this thing! That’s pretty bad, even for me. Just kind of wandering off while blogging.
At some point, I am going to have to learn exactly how many balls I can keep in the air at one time, and stick to that limit. I forget things because in order to pick up the new thing, I have to forget one of the things that are on my mind at that moment.
Subjectively speaking, it’s like things just disappear.
I am telling you, it’s going to get to the point where I have to have handlers in order to do the simplest things, like Stephen Hawking.
But my spine works fine.
It’s this brain of mine that gets confused.
I will talk to you nice people…. um…. later today, actually.