I decided to stop masturbating. Today is day four. This will probably last two weeks. My actual goal is to stop looking at porn. Sooner later I’ll rub one out in bed because I can’t sleep. And enjoy it.
Girl stuff in progress, update soon. (TC, word is still out on that last C)
I’m pretty much sold on Obama at this point. I wish he would go for universal health care, but other than that he seems like the kind of guy I want as President. Last night’s democratic debate was pretty incredible, though, and Obama stood up quite well to intense attacks from Clinton, and especially won me over on the “present” votes thing. Clinton and Edwards both used his 170 “present” votes in the Illinois Senate as an indictment of his leadership in the legislature. I thought his rebuttal was interesting and found this article. On one vote, Obama placed the lone dissenting vote, a “present” vote, on a bill for victims of sex crimes, a bill which passed 112-0-0 in the house and 59-0-1 in the senate, because he felt the bill violated the First Amendment. Tell me this is someone who doesn’t stand up for what he believes in.
I have always struggled with my sleep habits. In general I feel like I need a 25 hour day to fall into a comfortable pattern. In fact, there has literally never been a time in my life where I felt like I was going to bed when tired and waking up refreshed every morning, unless “morning” actually meant afternoon.
Usually it is manageable. In college I fell asleep in essentially every class, learned out of the books and ended up with a decent GPA. At night I am almost never sleepy and additionally have strong tendencies towards drawing out time-killing activities when it should be bedtime (see: right now). This week has been especially bizarre. After 2 weeks of getting up at 2ish every day, then my ridiculous Saturday night + Sunday afternoon as described below, I got less than 3 hours of sleep heading into Monday morning. Still, I was riding high on a paid-off sleep debt. Monday after school I’m already feeling sleepy and nap for an hour to pump myself up for some grading (hah!). Result: can’t fall asleep, less than four hours sleep. I resolve not to nap on Tuesday, still can’t sleep under 2:45 or so, and again get less than four hours.
Now the fun part of the story: waking up. Tuesday morning my first memory is looking at the clock and it being 7:35, an hour past my intended wake-up and 25 minutes before the start of my first class. Yikes!
Then this morning, determined not to sleep in, I wake up at 4:45, my addled brain freaks out about some unfathomable clock scenario and I’m in the shower before I realize there’s still three hours until school. I get out, fall on my bed, making sure both (!) alarms are set properly, and of course I again wake up half an hour late, at 7:15.
Tonight will be my fourth straight sub-four hour night (Grading must get done!). Some people can pull this stuff off, but I’ve never been one of them. Hopefully once I get these papers back I can get a proper night of sleep.
cnn.com is one of the ubiquitous internet addictions for most of my social circle. Lately, headlines on the site seem to skew more to the sensational: celebrity news, wacky news, etc. I can deal with this. Here’s a disturbing trend you might not have noticed. Any news of a sexual nature, including reporting of graphically depicted sex crimes, seems to be disproportionately reported via video clip. The latest headline is downright shameless:
Topless photos of wreck victim
Yeah, that’s the actual link text on cnn.com. We’re not clicking to see a news story, CNN is relying on our impulse to click on a link that says “topless photos”. They are no less capitalizing on the corpse gone wild than the scandalized police chief. Disgusting. Off the top of my head, previous video headlines included “Amy Fisher sex tape”, “women bare all”, and the titilating”girl chained to engine block”.
ok, I watched that one…
I tend to be consistently attracted to a very specific type of girl: tiny, cute-faced, and emphatically crazy (either clinically or just highly energetic). I can think of 10 clear cut cases from the past two years (maybe 3 successes in there). I’ve been trying to think of a clever acronym for this type of girl, and failing, so I’m going with TCC for Tiny, Cute, and Crazy.
I mention this because last night was definitely not TCC, mostly because she approached me first. Humorously and predictably, the incongruity may be primarily responsible for my lack of enthusiasm. In the future I will remember to stick with what works.
When someone sleeps in my bed with me, I have serious issues getting more than a couple hours of sleep. Here is a blow-by-blow account of last night. Times are totally guesstimated.
2:00 AM: we get home, shenanigans commence. a combination of recent and frequent masturbation and a whole lot of alcohol contribute to a rating of “desensitized” on a scale of flaccid to turgid. This is not entirely a bad thing: play time is extended, but ultimately certain things don’t quite happen.
3:00 AM: We call it a night and she tucks in. Since I’ve been waking up at mid-afternoon lately and apparently don’t handle visitors well, I pretty much lie staring at the ceiling and contemplating my unexplained lack of enthusiasm for the whole situation as the buzz starts to wear off.
6:00 AM: At this point I’ve been acutely aware of my alertness and my sobriety for a good hour or so. Before that I may have gotten a little sleep but nothing memorable. Along with sobriety comes rigidity, and it becomes pretty apparent that Young Adventures is getting no sleep tonight until boner goes away. Operation slowly-awaken-female-into-state-of-compliance commences. Operation a qualified success: she’s awake but none too enthused. Still, the situation is rectified.
9:00 AM: I’m awake again, but this time I think I may have gotten some sleep. This does not keep me from feeling absolutely horrid. She, on the other hand, seems well rested and primarily interested in snuggling and pillow talk. I respond mostly in grunts; grunts, that, in my imagination, are witty and endearing while simultaneously making it clear that I want nothing more than to be left alone to go back to sleep. There’s no way this is actually possible. Then, more unsatisfying sex.
10:00 AM: She goes home, I fall asleep on my couch until 5:00. Seriously. Now its 3 AM and I have school tomorrow. And I didn’t finish my grading.
I’m seriously reconsidering my enthusiasm for casual sex. For one, I have been acting on the simultaneous beliefs that I am looking for a meaningful relationship and instant gratification at the same time. Ideally this would be possible, but lately the latter seems to cast an unfriendly pall on the idea of the former. The alternative seems to be to form a relationship first, then realize that the sex will be unsatisfying and sleep depriving, not to mention additionally weighed down by an accumulated sense of obligation.
The journal that I picked out for doing math is difficult to write in, since it does not lie flat and is fairly small. I think I need to get a legal pad.
The pencil that I picked out, however, is perfect.
This is the second night in a row that I’ve been struck with the importance of updating my blog at one of life’s more inconvenient moments: those precious minutes spent lying in bed trying to conjure up a brain state suitable for falling asleep (more on my undiagnosed sleep disorders later). Last night, it was a penetrating, if juvenile, interpretation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The well-thought out version will be forthcoming (spoiler: the solitude of human existence is a major theme).
Then, tonight, I lay pondering a theme that inevitably surfaces as the year changes over and we daydream about our lives as they could be: causality. Today, with its repeated motif of lounging and stalling, was a ponderous reminder to me of my inevitable conclusion whenever the topic comes to mind: I simply cannot fathom myself, or any other being, as a collection of admittedly fantastically arranged matter and energy, gaining agency over its own behavior. I don’t even understand what it means for me to determine my own future.
The extreme depth of this quandary simply does not come across in the above description, so I will flail away at it a bit more. I imagine myself having some agency over my future behavior, influencing the course of events that constitute my life. Then, I take a step back, viewing this course of events from a more universal viewpoint, as a progression of states and events and states and events. No, the Newtonian deterministic model does not leap out at me here, but I cannot escape a quantum theoretical model, where my decisions are nothing more than instances of a overlapping probability distribution. On the other hand, this makes daydreaming quite effective, as I can easily imagine a being of my unique talents and personality being successful, distinctive, famous, in some other quantum collapse.
Like I said, flailing.
For the straightforward among you, just think of the above as a indictment of the futility of new years resolutions.
I don’t know how many more ways I could fail to capture my despair at existence, but we’ll try again before I finally try to get some sleep. My current and forthcoming attempt at transforming myself into a hard-working contributor to the mathematical scholarship seems inescapably akin to a red rubber ball determining not to bounce when it hits the floor.
