I love sleep, and I think I always have. I'm one of those nine hour a night sleepers, those creative dreamers who need more sleep than average to recharge our batteries and work on problems free of the bounds of a conscious mind. Medically lack of sleep results in irritability, stubborness, lack of creativity, poorer memory, depression and reduced motivation. Since I already am irritable, stubborn, prone to depressiona nd lazy, you can see why sleep might be important to me.
But I actively enjoy sleeping. I get the same feeling when waking up from a good night sleep a I get from a good hike, or a great book, or a fine movie. I get a feeling of satisfaction and warmth from a truly enlivening experience. Sleep is enjoyable, even though I may not be concsciously noticing the fact at the time.
The trouble is, I'm not a good sleeper. I need a quiet place free from distractions to sleep. I can't worry about something, have had caffeine recently, or sleep with a tv on in the next room. I need legitimate quiet, not a reduced level of volume. I need my sleep to be continuous, a stretch of nine hours in which to get my quota of REM sleep. Four hours, an interruption and five more hours doesn't work, as I'll spend an hour at the beginning of each section trying to get to sleep. This hasn't been a big problem most of my life. I just have a quiet bedroom and lock myself away.
But, I'm married. I'm married to someone who can literally go from a lucid answering of a question to snoring in five seconds. That's not an exaggeration, I've timed it. I'm married to someone who functions just fine on seven hours of sleep a day. I'm married to someone who can wake up, do something and be asleep again in five minutes. So, typically Christina stays up to eleven of the clock, heads to bed and is asleep by 11:15, wakes up at 6 am basically refreshed and off to work. At the moment I am deeply and ridiculously jealous of this ability.
There's no point in me going to bed before my wife, she will simply wake me up when she comes to bed. There's no location in the house where I won't be woken up by her morning routine. it used to be that I went to work two hours later than she did, and I could sleep in after she left, approximating a real night's sleep. But now we have Larry.
Larry has all the atrributes in sleeping I don't have. He can fall asleep quickly, he sleeps for only three hours at a time, he can transition from sleep to activity to sleep again at incredible speeds, and he likes to get up at dawn.
It's been two full weeks since I had a full night of sleep. I have all the time in the world to sleep, just as long as it isn't for more than six hours at a time at night, and two hours at a time during the day.
But I have a dream. I dream of a day that will come soon, when I too will be able to dream uninterrupted.
Have a great night's sleep tonight. If you do, your day after will be that much better.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Pain.
Over the past few weeks I have had various bumps and bruises, hurt my back, pulled a muscle or two in my leg and last night was kept awake in agonizing pain by an attack of gout in my left ankle. This is all not a big deal, random things don't happen in orderly ways, they come along in little packs, or not at all, or sometimes just one out of the blue. I don't feel cursed and my attitude is pretty positive.
Pain is an interesting thing, a very difficult thing to describe because it is entirely subjective. I have noticed what it does psychologically when literally the primary thought at all times is the experience of pain. It dulls everything else, as if there is a finite amount of processing power in your head. After a while I find that a big problem is the boredom of constant pain, it is amazing to me how much difference reading a decent book can make to the sensation of discomfort. For some reason I am reluctant to take drugs to kill pain, while I have little problem with drugs for almost any other reason. There's a part of me that really wants to be aware of what in my body is not workin.
The other thing with pain is the limitations to one's activities. This may be as bad as the basic sensation. The driving force in my personality, the area that has the greatest effect on my happiness or misery is the amount of freedom I have. If I can do what I want to do, I will be happy. In my life I have found this to be a surprisingly unusual quality. I tell my lovely wife that the number one reason I love her is because if she says she wants something, and she gets it, she is then happy as a result. But with a swollen ankle that sends stabbing knives into my flesh with every step, there's not much I can do. I can't walk to the park, I can't drive a car, I can't walk upstairs. However, I can practice the mandolin, and as a result I'm improving more rapidly this last couple of weeks than at ay time before.
Pain is an interesting thing, a very difficult thing to describe because it is entirely subjective. I have noticed what it does psychologically when literally the primary thought at all times is the experience of pain. It dulls everything else, as if there is a finite amount of processing power in your head. After a while I find that a big problem is the boredom of constant pain, it is amazing to me how much difference reading a decent book can make to the sensation of discomfort. For some reason I am reluctant to take drugs to kill pain, while I have little problem with drugs for almost any other reason. There's a part of me that really wants to be aware of what in my body is not workin.
The other thing with pain is the limitations to one's activities. This may be as bad as the basic sensation. The driving force in my personality, the area that has the greatest effect on my happiness or misery is the amount of freedom I have. If I can do what I want to do, I will be happy. In my life I have found this to be a surprisingly unusual quality. I tell my lovely wife that the number one reason I love her is because if she says she wants something, and she gets it, she is then happy as a result. But with a swollen ankle that sends stabbing knives into my flesh with every step, there's not much I can do. I can't walk to the park, I can't drive a car, I can't walk upstairs. However, I can practice the mandolin, and as a result I'm improving more rapidly this last couple of weeks than at ay time before.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Bureacracy.
So, my darling, hard-working, clever, beautiful, excellent wife received a bonus from work for being so fantastic. This seems quite sensible. She wishes to have a hot tub in the enclosed back yard of the house that we own, which seems very sensible. I am therefore going about the prospect of contacting people in order to build a fence, a little roof over the hot tub, and to connect our breaker box to the hot tub. This is not a large project, it involves a hot tub, a breaker and a cable, and wood. A construction company should be able to do the whole thing in a day with perhaps $1000 of materials.
A nice person from a local construction company came by to look at the project. Immediately he was talking about how a hot tub near the house meant that the windows would need to be replaced as they weren't tempered. Apparently water near a window that is an exterior window on a house in Portland might conceivably not be safe. So, it might mean that we would have to replace multiple windows in our house to have a hot tub not in our house. This is clearly stupid, but still will probably happen. The reason that it will happen is based on fear. The inspector's motivation is to not make a mistake. The only way an inspector can make a mistake is by not requiring something, and the only way they generate the income for their position is by requiring things. An inspector loses his job because he didn't require a permit, or was lenient with that permit, and then someone gets sued. Therefore the motivation is to require as many things as possible, and enforce these requirements stringently regardless of the idiocy involved.
Last year we decided that we wanted to grow the grass on our curbside to look like a meadow, rather than a lawn. Nobody but us uses that piece of land, we mowed the lawn by the house to walk across and use, it isn't as if the land is abandoned. We got a violation warning, all lawn areas cannot have vegetation above 14 inches. This despite the legality of five foot rose bushes, thirty foot laurel hedges. Once I mowed the lawn there was a re-inspection that said we had failed. Since I knew this was nonsense I complained. It turned out that the further inspection failure was achieved by the inspector pearing through my fence into an entirely private area and seeing some brambles. My neighbors had no idea and no complaint when I talked to them. The area was not a lawn, but the inspector had made a decision about how I should have my house and I had the only choice of paying for it to be changed or to do it myself.
The point of inspections are for honesty (so you know what you are buying) and for basic safety (to make sure your house won't catch on fire or fall down). I feel almost certain already that if I try to have this project done according to the letter of the law, that letter of the law will hugely increase the cost of the project, the time involved on the project, and astronomically raise my frustration. At this point this means that the most likely thing to happen will be a delay while we look at doing this legally and then we will pay someone to do it as competently, safely, and more cheaply by finding someone who won't apply for permits. The reason I know that this will be easily possible is that the very guy who was telling me about the probable issue with the glass in my windows being near a hot tub, when I said that I wasn't going to spend thousands of dollars on windows I didn't want, said he knew several excellent people who could do things without a permit.
So, the fear of making a mistake in a job designed for safety has lead to strong motivation to completely ignore the people in charge of safety, easy access to getting this work done, and a strong reduction in price for this work. This is exactly the result of the war on drugs too, drugs are more powerful, less regulated and cheaper for being illegal rather than sensibly regulated.
I think this bureacracy is a symptom of what is happening to the USA. When I first came here I was struck by the huge difference between England and the USA in terms of how sensible things were. If you wanted something in the USA, you went to the particular service or program and got it. Things were clean, they worked, you could get what you wanted done by-and-large. Returning to England, things were dirty, broken, and there were signs everywhere explaining ridiculous laws that no-one wanted. Travelling through the United States recently I was struck by how run-down the public places are, and how many rules there are for everything.
You can tell how far down a famous creek and the state of paddles by simply measuring the amount of useless bureacracy in any system. Bureacracy is like friction, a certain amount of it is inevitable, but the more of it there is, the harder it is to do anything. The basic point of the USA is to be a place where people can do what they want.
A nice person from a local construction company came by to look at the project. Immediately he was talking about how a hot tub near the house meant that the windows would need to be replaced as they weren't tempered. Apparently water near a window that is an exterior window on a house in Portland might conceivably not be safe. So, it might mean that we would have to replace multiple windows in our house to have a hot tub not in our house. This is clearly stupid, but still will probably happen. The reason that it will happen is based on fear. The inspector's motivation is to not make a mistake. The only way an inspector can make a mistake is by not requiring something, and the only way they generate the income for their position is by requiring things. An inspector loses his job because he didn't require a permit, or was lenient with that permit, and then someone gets sued. Therefore the motivation is to require as many things as possible, and enforce these requirements stringently regardless of the idiocy involved.
Last year we decided that we wanted to grow the grass on our curbside to look like a meadow, rather than a lawn. Nobody but us uses that piece of land, we mowed the lawn by the house to walk across and use, it isn't as if the land is abandoned. We got a violation warning, all lawn areas cannot have vegetation above 14 inches. This despite the legality of five foot rose bushes, thirty foot laurel hedges. Once I mowed the lawn there was a re-inspection that said we had failed. Since I knew this was nonsense I complained. It turned out that the further inspection failure was achieved by the inspector pearing through my fence into an entirely private area and seeing some brambles. My neighbors had no idea and no complaint when I talked to them. The area was not a lawn, but the inspector had made a decision about how I should have my house and I had the only choice of paying for it to be changed or to do it myself.
The point of inspections are for honesty (so you know what you are buying) and for basic safety (to make sure your house won't catch on fire or fall down). I feel almost certain already that if I try to have this project done according to the letter of the law, that letter of the law will hugely increase the cost of the project, the time involved on the project, and astronomically raise my frustration. At this point this means that the most likely thing to happen will be a delay while we look at doing this legally and then we will pay someone to do it as competently, safely, and more cheaply by finding someone who won't apply for permits. The reason I know that this will be easily possible is that the very guy who was telling me about the probable issue with the glass in my windows being near a hot tub, when I said that I wasn't going to spend thousands of dollars on windows I didn't want, said he knew several excellent people who could do things without a permit.
So, the fear of making a mistake in a job designed for safety has lead to strong motivation to completely ignore the people in charge of safety, easy access to getting this work done, and a strong reduction in price for this work. This is exactly the result of the war on drugs too, drugs are more powerful, less regulated and cheaper for being illegal rather than sensibly regulated.
I think this bureacracy is a symptom of what is happening to the USA. When I first came here I was struck by the huge difference between England and the USA in terms of how sensible things were. If you wanted something in the USA, you went to the particular service or program and got it. Things were clean, they worked, you could get what you wanted done by-and-large. Returning to England, things were dirty, broken, and there were signs everywhere explaining ridiculous laws that no-one wanted. Travelling through the United States recently I was struck by how run-down the public places are, and how many rules there are for everything.
You can tell how far down a famous creek and the state of paddles by simply measuring the amount of useless bureacracy in any system. Bureacracy is like friction, a certain amount of it is inevitable, but the more of it there is, the harder it is to do anything. The basic point of the USA is to be a place where people can do what they want.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Musing with no point.
I have hardly posted at all in a month. Did you notice? I haven't had much to say, I wonder why that is? Does it mean that age, satiation, general contentment has stopped me from thinking? Does it mean that I have settled in to having set opinions on the fast track to being an old curmudgeon (my life's goal)? Does it matter?
A defining moment in my life happened was when I was ten years old, walking back to the flat that my family was staying in while a search for a country residence was undergone. I was walking with my father and I stated that I had worked out why it was rational to believe in god (finite effort to get to heaven with infinite reward if you are right, Pascal's Wager) and he quickly said that was the position of Pascal, clearly a famous philosopher. At that point I decided that it wasn't fair that at the age of ten I had equaled the genius of a famous philosopher at his peak and yet would never get any rewards as a result. It therefore didn't make any sense to work hard at thinking up clever things, the vast majority of them have already been thought and claimed by others. Since then I have come up with utilitarianism, the politics of the whigs, and probably several other ground-breaking achievements for their time without having read of them in advance.
I have found that being reasonably clever is a huge advantage in life, it means you can manage your money, avoid crisis, make your life easier and more interesting. But being really smart is largely useless unless it makes you rich and famous, which largely comes from either working really hard, or getting really lucky.
So, maybe this week I'll have things to say, but I doubt they will be as clever as the things I thought about when I was ten, back when I thought there was great use for such thinking.
A defining moment in my life happened was when I was ten years old, walking back to the flat that my family was staying in while a search for a country residence was undergone. I was walking with my father and I stated that I had worked out why it was rational to believe in god (finite effort to get to heaven with infinite reward if you are right, Pascal's Wager) and he quickly said that was the position of Pascal, clearly a famous philosopher. At that point I decided that it wasn't fair that at the age of ten I had equaled the genius of a famous philosopher at his peak and yet would never get any rewards as a result. It therefore didn't make any sense to work hard at thinking up clever things, the vast majority of them have already been thought and claimed by others. Since then I have come up with utilitarianism, the politics of the whigs, and probably several other ground-breaking achievements for their time without having read of them in advance.
I have found that being reasonably clever is a huge advantage in life, it means you can manage your money, avoid crisis, make your life easier and more interesting. But being really smart is largely useless unless it makes you rich and famous, which largely comes from either working really hard, or getting really lucky.
So, maybe this week I'll have things to say, but I doubt they will be as clever as the things I thought about when I was ten, back when I thought there was great use for such thinking.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
I Woke Up Angry Today
Although "Woke up" is not strictly accurate. I transitioned grumpily from a fusty semi-conscious state into lip-curling sentience at the sound of The Face of Evil trying to be good while chewing the carpet. He'd very quietly annoyed the cat for most of the previous four hours.
5:30 am on a sunday morning can be wonderful. When, on occasion, one rouses oneself and goes out to see the sky lightening and to taste that special air of a spring dawn 5:30 am on a sunday is beautiful. When one regularly arises at that time to stand in damp shoes in a park so that an animal can be happy rather than oneself, the allure of such moments slashes its wrists and drives off a cliff. At least Christina likes the dog. Yesterday I liked the dog, today is not looking so good.
People get dogs to make themselves happy, but I'm beginning to beome skeptical as to whether this works or not. Clearly dogs are extremely good things for falling in love with, but that doesn't necessarily equate to happiness. I think we've all seen people make themselves miserableout of love. It is the very regard for Larry that makes me do all these things that I resent. But perhaps the problem is that I'm too aware of these things. Scientific research of mothers has shown that mothers report that their children make them happy (my mother says having children was the best thing she has ever done, which is an excellent thing to say to your children) and yet when asked to rate their happiness at the actual time mothers rate interacting with their children as equally enjoyable as housework. People tell themselves that things are good, even when often they aren't. I wish I was better at that.
But the biggest message of the day is that for me, sleep is a requirement for a positive attitude.
Later on I shall be writing a recruitment post on craigslist for new musicians for my band. I haven't done this in eighteen months, and since I am cranky I am not looking forward to it. Bands are strange entities, groups of people often brought together not through any compatibility but through a single shared desire (often only moderately shared) who then must cooperate at an extremely high level with an enormous risk of humiliation. I can see why so many people quit bands they just joined, but I don't have to like it.
5:30 am on a sunday morning can be wonderful. When, on occasion, one rouses oneself and goes out to see the sky lightening and to taste that special air of a spring dawn 5:30 am on a sunday is beautiful. When one regularly arises at that time to stand in damp shoes in a park so that an animal can be happy rather than oneself, the allure of such moments slashes its wrists and drives off a cliff. At least Christina likes the dog. Yesterday I liked the dog, today is not looking so good.
People get dogs to make themselves happy, but I'm beginning to beome skeptical as to whether this works or not. Clearly dogs are extremely good things for falling in love with, but that doesn't necessarily equate to happiness. I think we've all seen people make themselves miserableout of love. It is the very regard for Larry that makes me do all these things that I resent. But perhaps the problem is that I'm too aware of these things. Scientific research of mothers has shown that mothers report that their children make them happy (my mother says having children was the best thing she has ever done, which is an excellent thing to say to your children) and yet when asked to rate their happiness at the actual time mothers rate interacting with their children as equally enjoyable as housework. People tell themselves that things are good, even when often they aren't. I wish I was better at that.
But the biggest message of the day is that for me, sleep is a requirement for a positive attitude.
Later on I shall be writing a recruitment post on craigslist for new musicians for my band. I haven't done this in eighteen months, and since I am cranky I am not looking forward to it. Bands are strange entities, groups of people often brought together not through any compatibility but through a single shared desire (often only moderately shared) who then must cooperate at an extremely high level with an enormous risk of humiliation. I can see why so many people quit bands they just joined, but I don't have to like it.
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