*Transcendental *Logic

Today, I kid you not, someone asked if I was “poly”, and I just automatically said, “Yes, how did you know?”

Yeah. NOT what they meant. A bit embarrassing, that. And here I thought that crankiness, inconvenient naps and tortuously loud alarms was all my husband would have to put up with from this…!

Anyway, a quick update…I no longer need an alarm at all in the afternoons, that’s for sure. I’ve forgotten to set it twice this week, and it doesn’t matter; even when I do set it, I wake up, fully rested, 1-3 minutes before it goes off. (I always set it a little “extra” in case it takes me a minute to get settled; ours is not a comfortable floor! I have a folded afghan to sleep on, another folded blanket under my knees, a sweater to use as a blanket–stupid air conditioned office is always cold–a sleep-mask and a little pillow to wrangle. Complicated!) If I’m sleeping at home, I have to make myself get out of bed when I wake up, because I’m a lot more comfy (there’s a lesson about beds for you) — but I still wake up on my own, without help.

Additionally, it’s funny, but my afternoon nap seems to be impervious to any problems with the rest of my schedule. If I sleep extra at all, I’ll frequently have trouble falling asleep for my evening nap; and if I miss sleep the day before, I’ll tend to oversleep my morning nap (and it sucks when you successfully get up at 4, have a whole productive morning, and then accidentally snoz for 45 minutes at 7! …And yes, by the way, if I oversleep in the morning, it’s almost always to 45 minutes. No idea why, but it’s interesting!). But the afternoon one is solid as a rock. Something tells me that I’ve got it timed right to a dip in energy that I probably felt even when monophasic — I take that nap between 1 & 2 p.m., which is when I’ve heard that “early riser” people are likely to want a nap anyway. And I did always get sleepy after lunch, even when I routinely didn’t eat anything at that time.

Anyway, there. You got an update, because I’m avoiding making an unpleasant call for work. (Note to humans: Yes, nonprofits are there to help; yes, the counselors will be happy to contact you if we missed your call. But, um, please at least compose yourself a little before leaving us a message. Your sobbing and freaking out does not make calling you back a tantalizing prospect!!)

*sigh* Better get to it, then.

So, the dots on my hand will probably be permanent tattoos by the time I’m 40 at this rate.

But the relevant question is, are they worth it?

Let me back up a little first, since I haven’t given an update on the “intuition diet” in while, and say that keeping up with putting dots on my hand every single time I eat something hasn’t been easy. For one thing, it conflicts with my prior tendency to “graze”, grabbing a bite here, a mouthful there … now I have to either not graze, or set aside a portion to eat gradually and give myself the dots for that portion. I do both of those things about equally, now; but they weren’t easy to get used to. Also, sometimes I can’t put the dots on right away, and it’s tempting to give up if I lose track; but I’ve made myself stick to it. (What it took in the end was penalizing myself for forgetting: If I’m not sure how many dots there ought to be, I guess high. That makes it more worthwhile to remember, and to get the dots on there asap.)

But, but, you breathlessly query, is it working at all? Up until yesterday I’d have said “probably”: I know I’m eating better, just from being more conscious of what I eat and how much. Some of my clothes feel a little looser, but that could be my imagination. (To reiterate, I don’t own a scale and I don’t measure; I know myself too well and that kind of thing would quickly turn obsessive and unhealthy.) It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I’d lost an undramatic amount of weight. (I’m short and compact, so changes in weight are usually spread-out and not easily noticeable on me anyway — something which can be a good thing at times! — so I was trying not to stress about it.)

But then, yesterday, out of the blue, one of the black-belts from the kun tells me, “Hey, have you lost weight?” I admit that I might have, and she (she. You gotta love female black-sashes!) says that it definitely shows. (In sweats, no less.) So I did what any self-respecting adult intellectual would do: I raced home, stripped to nothing and demanded that my husband assess any potential weight-loss. ;)

He says yup, it’s not a lot but it is noticeable. *gasp!*

And this is phase one, remember: I still haven’t done anything at all to actually lessen or restrict the amount or type of things I eat. I haven’t done anything but force myself to get used to keeping track. I still have fourteen dots a day (though I haven’t gone over in forever), and I still eat several things a day that I know I shouldn’t — real, honest-to-gods junk food. Phases two and three will involve actually making sure that better things get eaten, and that I learn to eat a bit less (assuming that turns out to be wise, on a healthier diet). Gradual changes towards those goals are in place — I’ve replaced my Vitamin-Water-crap, as you probably noticed, and instituted a Gremlins-style ban on late-night eating. Eeeeeeasy does it, heh.

Anyway. w00t!

Oh yeah…

Totally my favorite video lately. It’s not a Discordian ritual, but dammit, it looks like one!

Even before I started experimenting with more efficient sleep-schedules, my answer to a typical “What’s your hobbies?” question often met with incredulity and cries of outrage at the laws of physics I must be violating. But I’ve said all my life (well, excepting those first babbly years), You have time for what you make time for. And that’s not a flippant statement and it’s not an appeal to magick…it’s just the truth about how human beings work.

As Hemingway puts it, “The shortest answer is to do the thing.” People without many hobbies often find the time for several hours of TV a day, all while complaining that if only they had more time, they’d…But I got lucky, because I learned this lesson very young, from my workaholic father. It’s not how much time you’ve got; it’s where you put it…FIRST.

Thomas Jefferson (who made my list of activities look positively bleak) once
said something like, “Strive to never be idle, for the person who never
wastes time never complains about not having enough.” (Jefferson has an awesome life-story and probably the best collection of quotes out there, if you’re curious. I’m always amazed that he’s not quoted more!)

And the same is true, I’m learning, for money. Money that you hold tends to drip slowly off into things like drinks, trinkets, burgers, baubles, etc. The way to get your money spent on the things that are important to you is to spend it there. The same is true for savings…if you don’t put the money in savings, it’ll never be there, and you’ll always find one more thing to do with it first. I’m nothing if not living on a shoestring, but I consider saving important, so saving gets done first. If I’m so broke that I have to spend the money I already saved, then so be it; but if I’m not, then it got saved. (And it’s a lot harder to spend that money after you’ve saved it than before!)

I guess a better way to say it is that the trick to spending — time or money — is to put it where you most want it FIRST, before stashing any away as “extra”. It’s tempting to hoard a few hours at the end of the day, or a few dollars from your paycheck, “just to have”. But if you do that, then it won’t go where you want it to; it’ll just get frittered away. Spend it!!

So anyway, all this preamble is to introduce something new I’m (finally) doing: Donations. My boy and I kept talking about how many things we’d like to be able to make at least a small donation to, but we always feel like we can’t. Well, based on my theory, it’s not that we can’t; it’s that we don’t. So a few months ago I said That’s it, maybe I can’t see an extra thirty bucks in our monthly budget, but I bet if we spend it up front — give it priority — then I bet we find out that what doesn’t get bought instead is something much less important.

I call it “G.I.F.T.” — Give It to Fun Things. It’s a stupid acronym, but as long as there are major corporations out there with worse ones, I’m not stressing the quality of my acronyms much. ;)

Anyway, while my list of things to toss a little (I wish it was more, but being realistic it just can’t be) money at is huge, a lot of it IS for things I consider fun…free software projects I’d like to support, conservation efforts, stuff like that. But the “Fun” in G.I.F.T. doesn’t refer to the purpose of the spending so much as the fact that I know we’ll have fun doing it, because — duh — this kind of thing feels good.

Today it feels particularly good, because That Time came around, and I stumbled right on exactly where I wanted to give it, and I did.

Now I’m going to plug it for everyone else.

If you’re not familiar with Hopeline, they’re the people who run 1-800-SUICIDE, a service that saves countless lives every day. I know someone who used to volunteer for them, and they’re amazing people doing an amazing service for humankind. They provide “someone to talk to” 24/7 to people mired in suicidal thoughts, plus access to emergency psychiatric services when needed. And you wouldn’t believe for how many people, every single day, that basic offering makes the difference between life and death.

Hopeline is now facing down a Government effort to replace them with a Government service that will a) send the police instead of emergency psychiatric help, and b) will not guarantee anonymity. If this happened, almost no-one would use the service, and we’d lose a huge resource that we need in this world…remember, a lot of geniuses and generally spectacular people have been suicidal. Suicidal thoughts and tencencies are common in people who “don’t fit in”, which often means they’re different or better in ways that ought to be defended, or at least not snuffed out by indifference or intolerance.

Anyway, I just gave this month’s G.I.F.T. to help save Hopeline, and I hope some of you will, too. Last I checked, they were over 70% of the way to being able to save the program that’s saved so many others.

(If anyone’s interested, I might be coaxable on the point of also posting other places that receive my G.I.F.T. money…but if not, I probably won’t. Unless it’s urgent — as it is in the case of Hopeline — it seems squicky to me to air where my donations go. Like bragging, maybe? I dunno; it’s Monday, and I wrote a 10-page paper in one day over the weekend, so forgive me a little brainfry, eh?)

Doodly, doodly, doo…

I really shouldn’t be on the computer — I have a monstrous amount of homework to do this weekend, and typing extra for fun probably isn’t the best plan — but it’s too early to start watching TV (isn’t it?  Well, for me…I never watch anything until late at night, after everything else is done…it makes me nervous to "shut down" like that when there’s still work waiting!) and I’m not really in the mood for exercise.  Plus, I think the household might kill me if I started clattering around and cleaning at 4 a.m. on a holiday.  ;)

Holidays are actually a bit of a challenge on a polyphasic schedule.  Weekends are too, sometimes – I’m the kind of person who needs Stuff To Do to motivate my lazy butt into gear, and it’s hard to get up so early when there’s nowhere you have to be!  (I have my 3-hour mornings on weekdays stuffed to the brim with things that need doing.)  But weekends, at least, are regular, and can be compensated for:  for instance, I go out to breakfast with my mother-in-law every Sunday morning at 7, the second the restaurants open.  (She’s an early bird, obviously.)  And Sunday mornings, before breakfast, are my exception to the no-TV-before-work’s-done rule; I let myself watch something cool (usually Dr. Who, lately) if I’m up right at 4.  (So I do get up.  Plus, I hate feeling rushed, and "rushed" to me has now come to mean "I don’t have two hours to much about before I have to leave"!)  Saturdays I usually do start a cleaning-project pretty early — cleaning or filing or whatever’s on the list that week that Holy Crap Needs Doing, heh.  If I absolutely can’t do it becuase it’s too noisy, I either take a walk, or — predictably — sleep in. 

All this is a good example of the Computer Limit Rule, if you weren’t familiar with it:  To a new or hopeful polyphaser, it often seems like 4-5 hours of extra computer time is a great way to use up the extra waking hours.  But even for a veteran geek like me, the computer has its limits.  There are physiological costs to overusing the computer — eyestrain, neck aches, sore hands — and while those are surmountable every once in a while, you don’t want to plan on glutting yourself on computer time ALL the time.  (What if, like me, you’re polyphasic for two years??)

So, yeah.  Holidays are tricky.  I don’t automatically have a plan for holiday mornings, and I’m not real bright about making one in advance for every time I have a day off work, so I often oversleep.  And then, of course, Saturday is the day I let myself oversleep if I want to (which isn’t always, but if I’ve already overslept a day that week, it’s more tempting to — and a worse idea to, since sleeping extra more than once a week means I’ll be sleepy the next day!).  So holidays on Friday are even harder, because I have to be sure not to oversleep both Friday and Saturday — that would be a really bad plan, yo. 

Obviously I succeeded in getting up on time this holiday — on time to the minute actually — so, you may wonder, what was my genius trick to achieve this?  Well, it was an interesting idea I had a few days ago, but I told myself I wouldn’t write about it until I’d tested it, since it’s a bit counterintuitive.  I got up on time by removing all of my alarms but one, and having the one left be an alarm without the ability to snooze.  Yup, I beat the snooze demons by erasing their summoning-circle:  I put all of my snoozable alarms in a drawer, pulled the batteries out of the ones that would work without a wall-plug (I know me, and I would totally dig an alarm out of the drawer…;) –and set my one, analog, loud-as-hell ringy-bell alarm for 4 a.m. precisely.

And I mean I FLEW out of bed, heh.  By the time I had the alarm off, my heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t have slept if you’d hit me on the head with a dictionary.

I’d call that a success!  Heck, it worked so well, I might keep just that one alarm permanently — I bet it helps towards my learning to wake up at 4 without an alarm (which I still can’t do, yet).  That thing is SO LOUD and SO JARRING that I can’t imagine "getting used to it"! 

Caveat, though:  I’m not sure I’d recommend the one-loud-alarm-with-no-snooze-button approach if you’re adapting; you’re more likely to need a backup alarm then.

(Snort!  I just realized that I had a backup alarm; I’d forgotten about it — Telepixie was still set up to ring my home phone at 4:30.  Scared the pants off me just now!!)

Well.  I guess that still leaves me on a holiday morning, with a huge paper looming that really means I shouldn’t stay on the computer…and more than three hours until naptime and my daughter waking up, heh.  (There’s NO possibility of working on the paper now, if you were thinking about asking.  ::bares fangs::) 

Okay.  Well, I can start some laundry, which desperately needs doing; and I can get my taiji practice for today out of the way (kun is closed today; Sifu’s out of town).  Then, if nothing else presents itself, I suppose I can watch some Dr. Who while I eat breakfast…it is a holiday, after all.  ;)

Happy Day Off Work to everyone!

And happy Pyromania Day to the Americans!

(I’m partially kidding…but seriously, you Americans would do well to contemplate what you think is greatest and most worth saving in this country; you’re going to need that information come election-time, and to make things happen afterwards!)

::runs off to wrangle with dirty underwear::