Category — site – about

Who are you?  How do you want to live?  Do you want to settle down or see the world?  Raise kids or stay in college forever?  Write books or become a CEO or earn your place as a pillar of your community…?

If you find somebody who thinks you're The Specialest Favorite, how far will you change to suit their lifestyle so that you can live together Foreverish?  And how long do you figure that is?  What if they don't agree?

What if you change?  What if they change?  How much priority can you, or are you willing to, give to staying in the same place as someone else Foreverish?

All of that depends on who you are, of course, which means that it depends on really knowing who you are — without that, how can you answer any of those questions?

Knowing who you are depends on having your EYES OPEN about who you are.  And that means having self-esteem, because convincing yourself that you're awful is just as dishonest as convincing yourself that you're Hercules (and has none of the potential benefits of the latter, either).

If you got past thirty years old, and made a bunch of huge life-decisions, all while having really awful self-esteem, then it's safe to predict that you will probably find yourself holding a basket filled with some pretty amazing mistakes.  I'm writing this to confess that that's precisely what I did, and that in the last couple months a good chunk of them came due — as mistakes do — and knocked down quite a lot of the life I'd been building for the last seven years.

So things have been unstable and uncertain and emotionally really difficult lately.  My near-term future holds more of that plus loneliness, financial difficulty, and an intimidating daily workload that, to be frank, I can't at the moment see how I'm going to pull off.  I'm sure it'll work out somehow — things do, after all, and panicking never helps — but I feel like I have to be honest with the people who read my blog and send me emails (which I haven't been good about answering lately *at all*, sorry) looking for advice that I'm not exactly lifestyle guru material lately.  I am, in fact, mid-lesson on some really useful shit that I'm sure will turn into some great advice I can give to others once I've figured it through…but the figuring-through is a long and tricky process, and while I'm in the middle of it I'm hardly a good example to anyone.

My idea of a "sleep schedule" lately is "try to stay awake until I'm tired enough that I can't lay in bed with my thoughts whirring unpleasantly, get up when I have to after probably far too little sleep, and snag naps if there's an opportunity when I get so tired during the day that I can't think straight anymore".  I couldn't even tell you when or how much I sleep, and there's no name for the schedule I'm on other than perhaps "yikes".

My idea of a "diet" lately consists of snacks, comfort food, restaurant food, coffee and beer.  I try to make healthy choices in the snacks and restaurant departments, and to drink at least some water every day, but that's about the level of attention I've been able to give it.

I do still get a good amount of exercise, thankfully — I've learned over the last few years that it leads directly to better mental health, and I need all the help I can get, so I've been sticking close to kungfu and swimming whenever time permits, and throwing in situps and simple workouts whenever I can steal them.  I also have no car, so I walk a lot, and I always do so quickly and while paying close attention to my form.  I still have visible stomach-muscles, woot.

BUT, and this is the important thing in my mind, I HAVE largely* fixed my self-esteem problems.  And that's a big deal for me…I'm not coming from "a bit of body-image issues" or something, but rather a background of full-blown self-hatred and self-harm.  The things that fell apart on me lately were things I'd built with "I don't deserve better" in mind, and so, difficult as it is to stand in a smoking field and try to contemplate a suddenly scary future, I'm hopeful because I know this is the right direction.

Path, not goal.  Follow proper principles.  Eyes and hands open.

All hail the fishes swimming up waterfalls!  ;)

*The necessary breakthroughs have been made, but as with all such things, there's a sensitive period afterwards — much like the second two weeks of an adjustment to polyphasic sleep — wherein one must be careful not to slide back into old habits.  That's where I am now.

This is kind of a big post for me:  I'm coming out of the closet, as it were, with my stance on a big issue.  I also intend this post to be a jumping-off point from which I do more with this issue, because I really feel that more needs to be done.

The issue is forced pregnancy.  And my stance on it is that I think it exists, in most societies including the modern American ones, and I'm sick of seeing it, and I'm sick of it not being called out for what it is.

I started to mentally identify forced pregnancy as an overarching issue some years ago, but I wasn't comfortable speaking up about it, especially in such loaded terms.  But having given it considerable thought, I believe that:

• Many smaller societal issues are in fact part of this larger picture; and
• People need to start pointing at the bigger picture and calling it what it is, because recognizing what it is will be key to gathering the motivation to fix it.

And I'm willing to do that now, scary or not.

I'll make more arguments, and in more detail, later — probably, I think, as part of a new section of the site, as there's a whopping amount to talk about and I don't want to confuse the already arguably pretty eclectic webpage I've got going here.  Here are some of the basics of what I'm thinking and where I'm going with this, though:

• The core assumption of sexism, that women are lesser than men, is most directly and forcefully denied by womankind's ability to bear children (or more pertinently to the warlike mentality in play here, womankind's ability to end the fucking human race in one generation if we chose to not bear children).
• The only way that sexist people can feel safe, therefore, is by ensuring that "the spice must flow", as it were — by ensuring that reproduction continues and continues to be as controlled by not-women* as possible.
  • You might expect these people to be more interested in using science to remove women from the childbearing equation, then, but there are several reasons to not go about it this way:
    • It's hella difficult and expensive to do.
    • Someone then has to raise those children, an incredibly time-consuming (life-consuming, in fact) and expensive process itself, and one for which no substitute for actual motherhood has been or is likely to be found.
    • Bearing children is itself a great repressor of women:  Childbearing women spend nine months physically vulnerable; undergo a major surgery for which the complication and mortality rates are fairly high; and then feel mortally obligated to sacrifice their goals, careers, health, and finances for the rest of their lives to care for those children.
    • As a result of the above, women with children are far, far less politically and socially dangerous than women without them.  So if your goal is to keep women oppressed in society, then ensuring that they have children, and especially that not much exists in the way of social and financial help for them in having and raising those children, is a great tool for you.
• Therefore, the vast majority of all sexist activities are in fact some version of the same story:  Get as many women as possible to become pregnant as often as possible.
  • So if you've ever wondered why the more overtly sexist branches of society are staunchly against all forms of birth control, no matter how safe, and no matter how much knowledge they have of the glaring overpopulation problem the human race faces…now you know.

And there's a lot more to it than that:  I've seen nuances so layered and sneaky that it'll make your guts churn — television shows, modes of dress, turns of phrase, everything; a whole societyful of physical, political and psychological manipulation to make and keep women pregnant — details that would make Margaret Atwood's head explode.  And I intend to talk about them all, and loudly, because in all seriousness I have had it with this truth hiding under everyone's noses and nobody saying it.  

Nobody (that I've heard**) says "that's forced pregnancy" when a state limits or outlaws abortion, or when a major religion flexes its political muscle to keep women from having access to birth control.  

Nobody talks openly about what a nightmarish concept forced pregnancy IS and how unforgivable it is that our first-world society is still doing it and still acting like it's somehow OK.

But from now on, *I* will say so.  It probably won't make me popular.  I don't care.  Readers of my site, whom I love dearly and have no wish to piss off, are entirely free to skip the posts on this topic if they really don't want to hear about it.

But I hope they won't.  Because it's true, and it's important.

No peace without justice, and no justice without truth.

Thank you.

*I'll use phrases like not-women (instead of just saying "men") now and again, and though it may seem silly to you at first, please bear with me; I have a reason.  The relevant polarization in issues like this is between those who are sexist (who believe that women should be subjugated as part of how the human race works) and those who are not.  We live in a sexist world, where over 90% of all possible societies we could grow up in are sexist and have been sexist for as many generations back as we could count.  Therefore, due to upbringing, tradition, and culture, many women are sexist.  (I used to be, so I know this firsthand.)  Also, of course, just to complicate things, there are men in the world who are not sexist (just like there are white people who are not racist; just because you benefit from oppression doesn't necessarily mean you're in favor of it (though it does make it harder to understand why you shouldn't be, of course.)  Because of these factors, I hate referring to the conflict of sexism as one between "women" and "men", because it isn't.  It's between a large oppressed portion of the population, and their oppressors.  I don't think that the people fighting to end this centuries-long, globe-spanning oppression can really afford to lose the support of the men who are with them, or to ignore the damage done by the women who are not, by framing their battle as a "battle of the sexes".  It isn't a battle between the sexes.  It's a battle against discrimination and really horrible treatment based on sex, and what side you're on depends on what you believe and how you act, not what's in your pants.  So I apologize if my language-bending to keep that point clear gets annoying to anyone.

**It feels important to say right in this first piece that I'm not any kind of scholar or expert on women's studies — quite the opposite, in fact, as I have a degree in Super Logical Western Analytical Dead White Guy Philosophy.  So when I say things like "Nobody's saying this!", I'm referring to society and the media, at large and how I encounter them, with my only-slightly-deeper-than-average penetration into things International, fringe, feminist and forward-thinking.  It's extremely likely that people working in the trenches and typewriters of the sexist battle have been crying "forced pregnancy" for years or decades or even longer — and as part of my pledge to start crying it where I see it too, I'll be doing more reading on that as well.  But please don't take my enjoinders on the society I live in to be commentary on the body of work produced by feminism, women's studies, or trench-fighting anti-sexists, because I've had very little (more in recent years, but still relatively skimpy) contact with those groups and their writings.  This project is something I came to myself, gradually, and decided recently was something I had to do and say, regardless of what else others have done (because obviously more needs to be done, and having recognized that and recognized that I'm probably a capable person to pitch in, I feel that I have to).  

New quote added to the Random Quotes scroller:

"Seven Deadly Sins:
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice."  – Mahatma Gandhi

I like this more complete formulation of a "sin"…as a Catholic child I was basically taught that single words ("wealth", "pleasure", etc.) were "bad", without any reference to why or how or what could bring them into balance so they could be good.

Gandhi makes the excellent point that a thing or condition like Wealth or Knowledge can be good or bad, depending on whether it's in balance.

I might even add some others:

Cursing without grammar
Gifts without gratitude
Work without goals
Help without sympathy

…Can you think of any?

First off, Woohoo my uploading problem is fixed!  I owe huge thanks to Nicky at Tumble Design for this — I would never have sussed out that PHP error on my own, and Nicky did it for nothing…Thanks again!

(For the curious, my hosting ops needed to set the 'upload_tmp_dir' setting in the PHP Configuration to '/tmp'; it was unspecified, and that was causing WordPress to not find files for uploading.)

I've only got seconds before I need to run off to work (again!…sometimes it feels like I've discovered the Ubersleep of Work (UberWork?! Augh!) where it's just one long rolling…thing…  ;)  …But if nothing else, I wanted to post this, FINALLY, because come on, it's SO COOL that someone translated the Ubersleep book into Russian, and now I can finally post it!!

(Thanks tons to M Ken for the translation!)

UBERSLEEP in Russian

OK, computer question for you all.

(Yes, I'm a computer nerd, and a pretty high-up one — my work involves large virtualized highly-available networks — but as you know if you know other professional nerds, that doesn't mean we don't ask for help; in fact it often means we don't have the time to do the kind of futzing around with things that fixes simple problems, and we rely on other nerds to help us out when that happens.  Heck, I just asked my boss the other day to recommend a simple media server setup, so I wouldn't have to read up on media servers as I'm way out of date on it. ;)

This blog is a bit broken.  I like the theme & the format, and I've enjoyed using WordPress all this time, but the little problems are now adding up to the point where I can't keep ignoring them if I'm to keep using this blog.

My biggest complaint is that the media library has never worked quite right; and a while ago it stopped letting me link to anything that I uploaded there, so if I want to post pictures or files, they have to be up on another site first.  I've upgraded to the latest WP version about five times hoping that that would improve things, but it doesn't seem to.  The forums don't seem to have an answer for what my problem is — things either appear in the library and when I link to them, the link just doesn't work (i.e. pictures are just the box with the X in the corner); or sometimes, more recently, I get an error that a file I want to upload to the library is "invalid", and it won't show up in the library at all.  My hosting providers are awesome and they assure me it's not their fault — and I see no evidence that it is — but if the problem is with WordPress, I've been unable in several months of on-and-off troubleshooting to suss it out.

Babblicious I am, and this site is fine for general blather, but a website that can't serve any files is not enough use to me to justify the cost of keeping it running.  I don't intend to get RID of having a blog, for sure; but it looks like I may need to move or in some other way reinvent this one to get it working properly.  Er, and I need that to not be the world's most intense process, please — I can in fact write some web code, but again, no time.  Anything that requires more than HTML-level formatting from me is costing me more in time than it's worth; or to put it another way, the point at which I have to do CSS is the point at which it makes more sense for me fiscally to pay someone else to do it, and I don't want to do that either.  It feels like what I want in a site is simple enough that paying for it shouldn't be necessary, yes?

So, I'm looking for suggestions, and thank you in advance if you have any.  I have plans that will rapidly make this site unsuitable in the next few months, so I'm looking to make a decision about which direction to go with it relatively soon.

Thanks!

PD

Okay, buckle up, because this is going to be a little crazy.

(Then again, could I have believably done it ANY OTHER WAY??  ;)

So, the first big piece of news is obvious if you've read the title:  I'm re-adapting to my Everyman 3 schedule, after a few months of stone-cold (and miserable, if I might opine) monophasic sleep.  This effort starts next week — but what I mean by "starts" is that I'll begin preparation in earnest, and begin documenting it. 

If a week of documented prep sounds lame to you I apologize, but in all seriousness, about 75% of the questions I get from polyphasers (and wannabephasers? :)  are concerning issues that could have been solved by better preparation, so I want to highlight and explain those steps while I'm doing them.  Expect a lot of posts, including pics and possibly videos; but at least for next week, expect them to be short and rushed, as I won't actually have any extra time to do them in yet! 

Oh, also, I'll be in the process of moving.  Yes, I got me a nice apartment in the Boston area finally (after weeks of working here while crashing at a friend's place — thank you, friend!), and I start sleeping there on Monday night.  I completely agree that this is an insane time to be re-adapting, and indeed, my original plans were much more sane (no, I swear! really!) — but there are reasons.  Keep going.  ;)

The following week (beginning Monday Nov. 8), I'll start my Everyman 3 schedule again.  Basically I plan to pick up the schedule I had before:  Naps at 7am, 1pm and 7pm, and sleep from 1a – 4a.  Lord knows there's public transit and everything involved now, and so I'll be the first to admit modifications may be necessary; but it sounds like a good plan, anyway. 

So here's the kicker — and the why now.  Zeo, a company that does personal sleep coaching for (usually) non-crazy people, has offered to sponsor a scientific study of people adapting to polyphasic sleep, using their portable-brain-wave-monitory thing and their website, plus a small scientific panel to look at the data.  While I would have rather waited a bit for things to settle down before re-adapting myself, I simply couldn't pass this opportunity up! 

So, next week it is!  Everybody ready? 

(Me neither!  ;)

…A picture!  Of me!  Of which there are approximately three in existence that I haven't hunted down and destroyed!  (I don't much like cameras, and they don't much like me.)

However, while this one may be of me, it isn't about me — it's about three koi, doggedly swimming up a waterfall, about to succeed at the impossible simply because they ("they" being Azaz the Unabridged and the Mathemagician, of course) didn't tell the poor fish it was impossible all along. 

So they — the koi, utterly common and yet somehow mysterious and beautiful and hailed throughout millennia as symbols of courage, fortitude and skill — leap right upstream, leaping off each other when needed, making the impossible climb for no reward other than the having made it.

This post is specifically about a family of three of them, just getting started, having swum a long ways before, but only now reached the real shit of it:  the waterfall, the place where everything else crashes down and they must rise up, together.

We're going to make it!

(Yeah, they're new.  And soooooooore, today, haha.)

So I was recently on a website, nothing special or important to me, just somewhere I landed to look up something, as often happens.  On the right sidebar of this site is a quotes widget, kind of like mine except with more general, popular quotes and it refreshed like every two seconds — fast enough that you had to work to keep up with reading them.

Naturally this would be an exercise my brain (especially in its current depleted state — more on that in a minute) would enjoy, so I stared at the thing for a minute, watching the wisdom go by.

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

You know you're in love when you don't want to sleep because finally, reality is better than your dreams.

He's like a drug to you, Bella.

…Wait, what? 

What's that simple sentence doing there?  It's a plain, ineloquent statement made to some character, with no context, no profundity, and no poetry.  Why is that quotable?

My eyes latch onto it long enough to get the name.

…Oh god.  Really?  Really?

Some days it's an actual, difficult chore to maintain any faith in humanity.

(In other news, I'm working pretty much constantly for a month, so please forgive me falling off the planet.  Things changed radically again, now I'm moving again, and I really need the money so I took on a ton of work to help pay for it.  It's going to be a crazy few months!  But good crazy, progress-crazy.  At the moment I don't even have a sleep-schedule, and "stimulants" are my new middle name, so I apologize to all the sleepers for whom I'm being a horrible example right now; I assure you it's temporary, and I'm very excited about finding out where I can fit polyphasic sleep in my new lifestyle, once I settle into it.  Thank you all for your support and comments and questions and attention, and I will post again when I can.  –I know I said weekends, but now I'm working the next three or four, so unfortunately now I'm no longer sure.  But I will absolutely try.  Thank you again!!)

*pant pant*

Okay, this week I almost wrote a Wednesday post.  I actually did write it — Wednesday night — and then it mysteriously got eaten alive, whole and chomping.  Gone.  And here it is Saturday, and I haven't been able to replace it.

See, here's the thing.  New job (YAY) is a mostly-from-home gig, which I'm quickly learning is harder than an at-the-office gig in a lot of ways (many of the same ways that doing college course-work online was surprisingly harder than going to school, actually).  It's only been a few months, and I have a weeeeird commuter schedule with a lot of new stuff to get used to, plus numerous big family-changes and stuff, so thank you all for being awesome and cutting me slack; I've needed it.

I think I'm going to switch to doing my weekly updates (as you know, there are Twitters and periodic small updates whenever, but the weekly ones are — or are supposed to be — the substantive ones) on the weekend, if that's okay.  I just spend too much time in front of the computer on a weekday as it is, and I just don't think I can work in any more.  Look at Ye Olde Schedule now:

• bet. 4-5a:  wake up, exercise, write fiction
• 6a, 2-3x a week:  kungfu class
• bet. 7-8a:  nap
• 8:30a:  start work
• about 1p:  nap
• theoretically 5p, but more often 7p:  done with work
• 5:30 or 7p, 2-3x a week:  more kungfu/taiji/stuff
• after work/class until 9p:  parent
• somewhere in the 7-8p range, if I can:  nap
• 11:30p:  bedtime if I didn't get an evening nap; I buy another 1-1.5 hours if I did.  I spend that time reading or watching TV and making chainmail, or exercising if I don't feel like I've had enough that day.

…So I'm on this rotating E3-E4.5 schedule where "it depends" on if I get all of my naps, or if work or the kiddo steals one, how much sleep I get at night.  Sometimes I even only get one nap, and then I sleep 6 hours.  Sometimes I overwork myself ridiculously at kungfu or working out (remember how I wasn't much of a straight-up-working-out freak?  That changed, heh) and need extra sleep to heal something.  (By the way, ice, some Ibuprofen and extra water before bed, and whatever herbal or topical healing-stuff you like, plus 3 hours extra sleep is the BEST cure for pulled muscles and stuff.  I've no idea if it works when you're monophasic, so don't ask.  ;) 

And one week every month, now, I travel, and spend that whole week working a LOT and sleeping in temporary places.  I've still only done it twice, so I haven't figured out how I can nap when I'm out of town, but I absolutely do plan to figure it out, if I can.  In fact, now that I'm mostly working from home, I absolutely plan to see if I can set up an Uberman-friendly schedule.  OH HELL YES.  If it's possible, I'm so on it.  But I'm still way in the early phases of figuring that out, unfortunately, so there's not much to write about yet.

And while I'm home, I'm spending 1-2 hours typing in the morning, and then 8+ hours during the day doing this rather astonishing combination of texting, talking on the phone, emailing, technie stuff, and chatting (IM is a big way my department communicates, so it's pretty much constant).  After that, I simply cannot look at any of the three computers I use every day (uh-huh) after 9pm; I can't.  So I've basically given up all video-games (except for my Wii, which I adore on the odd chance I get time to play it) and dropped largely off the face of the regularly-updating Internet Planet for a while. 

Like, 40 of you good readers got email replies from me this morning, some of which you'd been waiting on over a month.  Seriously. Oh, and I've pretty much been kicked out of my SF-critiquing group, for nonactivity.  D'oh!

Anyway, this is your formal assurance that there are Plans.  To start with, regular updates will be returning, albeit on weekends.  Progress on the 2nd Edition of Ubersleep, which I left at about 2/3 done, will resume.  Somehow.  And I'll keep everyone posted on the details of my situation that are relevant to casing out a possible future Uberman opportunity, which, if I did it, I would do it right, including videos and daily notes and the whole shebang.  I'm busy as shit, but I remain hopeful — which, really, ought to be my motto.  I need a T-Shirt…

PD

::breathes deeply::

Aaahhh, four a.m.  I've missed this time of day — it's so peaceful, and there's time to watch a whole movie (or whatever) before the sun even comes up.

Today is Thursday; yesterday there was no chance I was getting my weekly post done (nor was there on Tuesday, when I usually actually write them).  This is great because I have a job again — YAY! I still won't know I get to keep it for a few months, but for now YAY AND YAY AND YAY — but awful, because said job is eating a good 10 hours out of the middle of a day that had already filled up with several hefty non-job tasks…none of which have gone away now that there is a job.  Waugh.

In short, after working (for the moment, I work from home) on Monday, I looked at my husband and said, "I don't think I can do all this, without my Everyman schedule back!"

He agreed that, even on paper and using a calculator, I actually have more work to do than I can be awake for, even if I work continuously (and eff that), sleeping monophasically. And let's not forget that I'm not actually getting enough sleep on a monophasic schedule anyway, and that 6/1 as a substitute was okay, but not great, and I was missing the nap far too often and just ending up sleeping 6 hours.  Yikes!

So I checked in with my BFF and she agreed.  Now, I have managed in the course of my life to attain a very high-quality best friend and husband, and when they both agree on something, I almost never buck it.  Together they are more powerful than you can imagine, like one of those click-together giant robots.  ;)

…I had quit polyphasic sleep, remember, because my schedule got way sloppy when I lost my job, and it was difficult almost every single day to carve out time for my naps.  Now, what's happened is that my schedule got that full, and I have no choice but to force myself (and others) to make time for the naps, because I *can't* make enough time to do without them!  But I almost don't care what the reason is; I'm polyphasic again, hurrah hurroo!  ;)

So, two days ago (Tuesday) I took all my naps.  My husband took a look at me at ten o'clock that night and said NO.  "Sleep debt accumulates," he told me, "And you still haven't managed to catch up any of the sleep you missed [going out of town recently].  I demand you get one night of more than enough sleep before you start this."

We all know that sleep-debt is part of what makes the brain/body switch over to a polyphasic schedule, but we also don't know whether starting the adaptation process while already sleep-deprived is a good idea or not; so I had mixed feelings about his advice.  But in this case, he was very right; for the last seven days straight I'd been operating in a thick fog, and I didn't even realize it until I slept 9 hours (like the dead) on Tuesday night.  WOW did I feel better on Wednesday.  So I took all my naps again yesterday (couldn't sleep for one, but I laid down anyway), and then I stayed up last night — I was tired, but not horribly so.

Getting up at 4a.m. … yes, well, there are more fun things than that, especially the first couple times.  But I'm here and I'm quite functional, barely a yawn, and in less than 4 hours it'll be naptime again.  (On Everyman 3, I get up at 4 and take my first nap at 8; then my next at 1-2pm, then another at 7-8pm.  That's the schedule I held, with very little modification, for a few years there.  And it's back!  I'm so geeked. WOOT!)

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes me to "switch back".  I was on this schedule — Everyman3, which is one three-hour core nap and three 20-minute naps — for over three years before I quit it, and it's been, um, about 3 months since I started having such trouble getting my naps and "gave up".  But good lord, that "giving up" cost me almost four hours a day, plus a lot of soreness and grogginess and quite a bit of stress and feeling rushed, all of which could have been so easily solved…by a little 4am-time.

Good morning!! 

PD

Gorgeous creative-commons photo by Martin Pettitt — thank you!