I'll give you a hint: it ends in disappointment

I was awake for most of the night, but now that it's daytime--and work-time!--I'm exhausted. Not even coffee can help me now. I sometimes have these nightmares that I awaken from slowly, choking on sobs--and then fall back to sleep before I even stop crying. It hardly sets a good precedent for the day to come.

My dad is coming to visit me today, and hopefully bringing a suitcase full of stuff I ordered online and had shipped to my parents'. Lately, I've been compulsively shopping online when I get bored at work. All I can do is try to channel the acquisitive instinct into something constructive, by buying things I legitimately need (or at least, legitimately sort of need). So I bought a gift for a friend who's expecting a baby, and a new bathing suit (necessitated by the fact that I've actually been swimming regularly again, yay!), clothes I can wear to work, and yesterday, this print:

I absolutely love it. There are more available from shauno.etsy.com.

One of the things I've been ignoring about Thing-A-Day is the weekly themes, of which there are several. One of the themes for this week is "spying," so today I'm going to make something with this article I read today: Bush Presses House on Surveillance Bill. I shall channel my political hostility and alienation into craft!

A couple cool links from yesterday and today:
Notable registrants of the WWI Draft [including Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Sinclair Lewis] - from the National Archives of the US of A
1975 and the Changes to Come - a Flickr photoset of scans from a 1962 book by that title. The past's conception of the future is fascinating. In 1962, apparently, 1975 held promise of ultrasonic dishwashers, among other things!

1975: And the Changes To Come, originally uploaded by dbostrom.

The future is an exciting place, friends.

Howdy!

I have developed a (bad) habit of not sleeping well on Sunday nights as the spectre of work looms over me. I wake up on Monday mornings with a kind of insomnia hangover. Last night, I woke up so many times during the night, but somehow in between I kept having the same epic dream in which I went to Las Vegas to participate in some kind of World of Warcraft event. Yeah. I'm tired today.

I feel pretty strongly that the solution is Tim Horton's.

I wrote this at 4 in the morning, which is why it doesn't make sense

Principles of the Fish Nightmare

1. I do not want to kill the fish, or to be inadvertently responsible for the death of the fish.
2. In fact, I am morally bound to look after the fish, even though I am terrified of it and, in fact, hate it. This is because, once a fish enters your life, you either actively care for it or kill it. There is no middle ground.
3. The fish wants--what? To be between my body and the couch? What is the fish doing? Is it actively seeking death? Is it confused, evil, suicidal? I don't understand this principle.
4. I should welcome my blankets. In the real world, which has had the dream-world bleed into it until the two are momentarily identical, the blankets should provide an extra layer of protection from wriggling, burrowing fish. And yet they also provide cover, and their exact contents are hard to control.
5. The physical memory of the wriggling of the fish persists long after intellect and description should have banished it.

A nice place to live

According to finance/economics blog Carpe Diem, you can buy this house in Detroit:


for $1,500-- a $7 mortgage payment every month. Nice. What say we all buy neighbouring houses, tear them down, and create some kind of utopian skate park/art installation/abandoned pet refuge/50s diner? Ooh, with a giant drive-in style movie screen! Internets? Any takers?

unravel my greatest mistake

Cullings from my recent delicious bookmarks, aka, the lazy man's blog update. I will add exclamation marks to make them seem enticing.

Germany now has its own plagiarism museum!
A collaborative online graphic novel!
a funny kind of meta-chart!
A handy political euphemism-to-real life translating guide!
Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia!

I had this dream last night in which i went to an engagement party for a former co-worker (who as far as i know isn't getting engaged, but maybe it's a premonition!) and while i was there my permanent retainer fell out--the kind that is attached to your mouth with cement or whatever. And I don't even HAVE a retainer of any kind--yet. But maybe it's a premonition of dental work to come! My mouth feels weird now, though, in the way dreams can have a half-life in reality.

Finally: I am pretty tense (/"alert") about work right now, and I wake up in the middle of the night and worry about it, and the only way I can stop worrying is to get up and work. For this reason, I haven't slept more than 5 or 6 hours a night in many moons. I was out late last night, and I woke up at 6:30 with that missing-retainer feeling, and I was like, "well, i might as well get up and work," and then I realized that down that path lies CRAZINESS and EXHAUSTION. So I went back to sleep. I have to stop this cycle of work. It's productivity, but not the healthy kind of productivity.

To sum up this entry: It is morning, and I am very disoriented.

The Way Things Work

So... James sent me this link to an article about someone who quit World of Warcraft after basically having their life ruined by it. This comes at an opportune time because just yesterday I had a really frustrating WOW-day and found myself grouchily flying around on gryphons, grumbling as if it was my job. (Now granted, I was really close to leveling up, but still.) Compulsion to engage in leisure activities even when you are not enjoying them? That's addiction. I'm taking a break.

During said break I will be reading Alberto Manguel's wonderful The Library at Night, catching up on school-reading, and cooking. (I bought a new cookbook which comes highly recommended to me: Donna Hay's Modern Classics. If anyone wants to come over, I will cook you something from it. Well, not anyone.) Trying to learn how to use my new sewing machine. And maybe watching Farscape, which is bizarrely appealing. When watching this show, I periodically think how dumb the things that happen are, and yet I keep trundling through Season 1. Something must be going on there. Pheromones.

Other notes on my mental state: I have been having these kind of social-commentary nightmares. Two nights ago I had a dream about a drugged-up woman dropping her baby on its head on the hard granite floor of Edmonton Centre. Last night I had a dream about capital punishment. Oh, and I was the one being executed. I would take a break from sleeping, too, if I could.

Today I became a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I have had them on my links page for awhile. They do advocacy and information work in protecting internet users' rights. And now, they are doing it with my money, but I think that's probably a good thing, because what was I doing with my money? Yeah. Nothing.

I woke up this morning feeling strangely aware and sort of gloomy. Joining advocacy organizations sometimes can help to shake me out of this funk. If this fails, it will be more Etsy art for me. I feel tired, Universe. Just doing the things I always do seems to take more energy than usual. It is not a "scooters" kind of day.