• Sleeping for longer than 3-4 hours has cumulative negative consequences for my back & neck problems
• If I don't get at least one daytime nap, I run out of "nerves"; as in, somebody's getting on my last one by about 5pm
• Both the feeling of being tired, and the feeling of being groggy after waking from a 7+-hour sleep, are my least favorite feelings ever gods how I hate them
• Writing in the cracks of your worklife does not work when your work also happens on computers, and you don't have time to put hour-or-more breaks between the activities
• When almost all your time is in use doing "the basics" (work, sleep, errands), all the things you do for "play" (i.e. random learning/exploring/reading) go away…and life feels horribly adult and two-dimensional without them
• Summertime is WAY too short without the nights

…There, wasn't that enlightening?  Now, to round off your day, here's a picture I took of a Bad Movie DVD Cover where it says "Thou Shalt Not" while a guy shoots himself in the foot. 

I thought it was pretty good advice, myself.

;)

I don't nap with the kind of regularity I think would be best; I still get tired at my usual nap-times (unless I'm running too hard to notice), and if I'm going to snag a nap, it'll often be nearly where one of my naps would have been on Everyman 3.  I never get more than one a day lately, though; but on the 3rd or 4th day of sleeping 4-6 hours at night, that nap can really save my skin.  I don't wake up feeling perfectly rested like I'm used to, but it keeps me going.

Oh, and yes, I can still fall asleep really fast (in 2-3 minutes, max), and I still wake up fairly automatically after about 19 minutes.  I set an alarm, but more often than not I wake up ahead of it — I deliberately set it a little past when I would normally wake up though, to give myself the chance to wake up naturally, and that generally works great.  If I'm extra-tired, I may sleep through and the alarm will have to get me up. 

Hm, come to think of it, I had a late night last night (went to my first convention, hung out with a bunch of great people — arguably Southeast Michigan's best! — and went swimming, yay), and I'm still recovering from a crazy week past and preparing for a crazy week to come…and I have about 40 minutes before I need to jump in the car & run…so maybe it's time for another 20 minutes of wonderfulness right now. 

That's the thing with naps…especially once you learn to take them…you've got to get them when you can.  When they're this short, that's pretty easy, thank goodness.  And no, taking naps is not the same as being polyphasic; but it's better than being monophasic without them, if you ask me!

…

In other, somewhat more personal news, my husband stumbled across this great article (he's awesome for that, among other things ;), written by a drug-treatment counselor with 20 years experience, on what the real causes and effects of treatment programs for teens are.  As someone who was put through that exact thing when I was barely 14 — not over drugs, but general misbehavior – I could not more strongly urge parents, and future parents, to read this entire article and take what it says to heart.  Agree with the drug message or not, the truth is that more often than not, such problems have deeper origins involving the whole family, and the worst thing you can do about them is pack your kid off to an institution…that's something I would pay a lot of money to impress on people.  If you read the article because of this message, thank you!

In my own defense, I'm adjusting to a crazy hard job during an utterly crazy time at the company; I have a lot of responsibility and a lot to prove; and I have to move across the country in, like, a month.  So add moving and traveling 800 miles every couple weeks to apartment-hunt to 80-hour weeks with nights and weekends and, well, that's me. 

Seriously, I have neglected to email my mom more than once.  Don't feel shunned.  ;)

However, it's fascinating to me that I'm now living the exact pseudo-monophasic modern Western sleep schedule that I've railed about for years.  I stay up too late; I get 4-6 hours most nights; sometimes 7; some weekend day if I can I'll sleep 9 or 10 and feel groggy but oddly refreshed afterwards.  I'm exquisitely dependent on a good dose of daily caffeine; I'm starting to have to fight gravitating towards energy drinks.

I *am* that professional nerd.  And I am the worst sleeper ever; and for the moment, I really can't avoid it.  

The only reason this isn't upsetting in the extreme is that I've determined, for sure, that my job will be cool about letting me get a nap in.  There's still the commute and other details to iron out, but that's promising enough that I'm willing to use it as an excuse to not panic.  I may just be too busy, and too out-and-about-with-no-car, to pull off Uberman; I've accepted that.  But Everyman 3 — one of the great loves of my life — looks very darn likely again in the near future.  

THANK.  GOODNESS.  I hate sleeping and I hate being tired, and I've been doing more of both the last few months than I ever did while I was polyphasic.  Ew ew ew.  …Still, it is a heck of an experiential opportunity, to try the typical, horrible (I-M-increasingly-justified-O) sleep schedule that the typical overworked slob in my socioeconomic arena keeps…I suspect I'll be glad to have learned this, later on.

Before I go, I want to say thank you to everyone who's been emailing me — there have been quite a lot lately! — I do enjoy your stories, questions and comments, even when I can't get back to you promptly.  Thanks so much for taking the time to fill me in.

PD 

I could explain it for days, but to be brief, that line I got as a kid about how The Church wasn't really a bad thing because Mrs. NicePerson down the street goes there, and she isn't so bad, is she?…is total hogwash.  If Mrs. NicePerson put on ghost-robes and burned a cross, we wouldn't think of that as vindication of the KKK; and the fact that she can ignore intolerance and sexism is a strike against her, not a point for the intolerant. 

Also, the fact that some of the trappings of religion include potlucks and community choirs is exactly as vindicating for religion as the fact that some of the trappings of dictatorship include awesome parties and palaces.  Throwing nice parties for your chosen few does not exempt you from the consequences of, you know, mass murder and shit.

Anyway, along those lines, I found this highly intriguing:

Adam Lee has come up with the Bechdel Test for Religion: (via Friendly Atheist)

… I think it’s worth creating a similar test for religion, to help believers notice sexism in their churches they might not have noticed. My suggestion is as follows. For a religion to pass this test, it has to have:

(1) at least one woman in a position of authority;
(2) who plays a formal, recognized role in shaping doctrine or practice;
(3) that is binding on male members of that religion.

…

If a religion categorically excludes women from all positions of authority, it fails. If it gives women positions of authority, but only so that they can teach and pass on doctrine created by men, it fails. If it permits women to create doctrine, but doctrine that’s only applicable to other women, it fails.

…

As with the Bechdel test, the mere fact that a religion passes this test doesn’t mean that it’s a feminist or egalitarian religion. It could still be appallingly sexist. It could still have rules that treat women as inferior to men. And it could still be harmful in any number of other ways. But I would argue that this test is the bare minimum — the first necessary, but not sufficient, step for any religion to genuinely treat women as equals.

 

I think this is a fantastic idea.  I'm really curious now as to whether the Shaolin Order would pass…I'll have to figure that out.  My "home temple" would pass with flying colors, but one of my points about religion not being harmless is also that it's not harmless to identify with a religion and then claim to only be "into the good parts".  (If you claim to be non-sexist but you give money or support to the Catholics, your claim has as much validity as mine if I claim to not be racist but I go to KKK meetings.)  So if the Order is sexist in its implementation, then the Temple is by association, and that's not much better.  (Then again, I'm moving to where I can't attend the Temple regularly anymore; however I still plan to make regular donations & go back when I can, so it still matters.)

What about other religions?  And while the Bechdel test is awesome, what about other tests, or tests for other things that are commonly wrong with religions, like intolerance of people of other faiths, or disrespect for the poor?

Good stuff to think about!  Enjoy your brains, everyone.  ;)

Without waiting until it writes new rules to carry out the Supreme Court’s controversial January ruling lifting campaign finance curbs,  the Federla Election Commission on Thursday approved formation of two new groups that will raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to try to directly influence congressional elections this year. One of the new groups is an offshoot of a Republican-leaning organization that has raised and spent millions in federal elections in recent years; the other is an entirely new group formed by individuals long associated with Democratic campaigns.  There was a lone dissent as the five other FEC members approved both.

–The official Supreme Court of the US blog

…In better and completely related news, Futurama is back on. Yay for the exceptions that prove the rule (that television sucks)!

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.)

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!!)

Here was my response:

The reason caring matters, even when it's only one person's state of mind, is that it changes everyone's (who learns about it) perception of how the world and the people in it work.

We all act differently when we perceive the world to be at least somewhat populated with people who do care — who, maybe they can't help us now, but if they knew we needed help and they could give it, they would.  Knowing that those people exist, and especially that they aren't even that rare, makes each of us more willing to reach out and help others than we would be otherwise.  It makes us less likely to give up, less likely to victimize or use others for our own ends, and less likely to treat others like potential aggressors or criminals.  Think of how you'd live in a small town filled with people you know (just to use an easy example), versus how you'd live in a dangerous dog-eat-dog city.  It's not impossible, or even hard, to show empirically how those perceptions affect not only individual happiness and long-term security, but the structure of society as a whole.

So yes, people who care should speak up.  Those who can hear you, even if they have nothing to gain directly by your caring, are better off psychologically, and freer to be the people they want to be, because they know you're out there. 

The kind of skepticism that says "caring doesn't matter unless I can get something from it", is already coming from a place of assuming that most people don't care; that humans are not fundamentally connected and that what happens to one of us doesn't matter to another except where it matters materially.  That some people go through life thinking this way is itself proof of why good people need to be a louder portion of our societies.  Someone who'd seen the effects of genuinely caring people being available to help in surprise situations would already know that they're a valuable resource simply by virtue of their existence.  You don't love them for what they do for you; you love them because if you, or someone you love, needed a helping hand, the fact that people like [the man who spoke up] exist means there's a much greater chance that you or they would get it, freely given.  And that means you live in a different world than if people like that didn't exist, or didn't care.  And the world you perceive yourself to live in is very often the one your actions reinforce and create.

Fast forward through a whole bunch of taiji, a serious dose of shorin ryu and a good sprinkling of kungfu, plus some basic mandatory pushups-and-situps stuff.  Now I'm even slightly more lean, quite a bit stronger (especially in the core-muscle area), and if I really work at it, I can show you actual muscles, like, with lines and stuff.

Naturally this situation has been a tinderbox all along.  Wanting to be stronger can only be a distant glow for so long; eventually the fuse catches and before you know it you're shopping for weights and getting angry that you don't have room for a squat-cage.  Oh yes!  The geek-fire hath spread again.  ;)

I'm up to almost 50 pushups and 130 crunches (still doing the 100 pushups / 200 situps challenge from before; it works! –Or it's working so far, anyway!); and yeah that's nice, but come on, it's beginner stuff.  Time to get some barbells and really have fun!

Only…getting them is not fun.  Getting them, so far, has meant being asked to "talk to my husband about it" twice, and directed to the Pink Hand-Weights section whenever I'm stupid enough to look in a store.  And did you know that weightlifting equipment — even professional Olympic-grade stuff — has a crippled female version?  Seriously, the bars are 2" shorter and often lighter.  WHY??  I bet they don't suggest the "women's bar" for short men, either, because it's pretty obviously not about size — I have yet to see a single "for people under 5'5"" or something on any of it–not that that would make much sense either, since, you know, it's a BAR and you can just slide the weights in farther if it's really an issue — no, it's divided by GENDER, and to the point where women competing professionally in weightlifting are forced to use the crippled equipment, while men never are.  So a six-foot woman should be using wussier equipment than a five-foot guy.  BECAUSE OF THE WHY?  Do we have to go in the back door and use a separate drinking-fountain too?!  (Oh wait..sometimes, yes we do).

So anyway — not fun, that and the general amount of static even the subject of pursuing strength as a goal generates in the population at large…apparently everyone and their mother (as well as my mother) feels they have not just the right, but the obligation, to inform me that I'd better be careful or I'll be ugly (because strong men are attractive and strong women are icky) / have no breasts (as opposed to what? Have you looked at mine, lol) / scare people (is bad why? Scary men are envied, and they arguably can't even make as good a use of it as a woman can, defense being a particular issue of ours) / go blind or piss off Jesus or whatever. 

Oh, also, once I get some (more? visibler?) muscles I am apparently going to bleach my hair and prance around in bikinis all the time and suddenly become incapable of marital fidelity.  Geez, who knew that being strong also turned one into a "stupid slut"!  (Or a lesbian, which in popular parlance seems to be a frigid subspecies thereof.) 

I can't imagine how that narrative got started.  ::facepalm::

For various reasons, this is looking like a Lost Year for me, coming up; a year of biding and slowly plodding towards goals I had hoped to reach this summer, but which "the triumph of inferior influences", as the I Ching puts it, has stalled for a while.  Which doesn't make it seem like a bad year to focus on self-improvement, specifically strength of various sorts, which will hopefully make me readier for the challenges when they do hit, after sitting around building up energy for a year. 

WHAM!  Yup. 

Oh, and I seem to have found an awesome full-contact Wing Chun school right by my house.  Think I'll go ahead and put the cream on that there cookie, and learn to brawl too, if I can eek out the time!

So that's my "new and exciting", or a chunk of it anyway.  Feel free to share yours!  Just don't tell me how I'm going to lose some measure of my "femininity" or something by working out, or I will come over there and put this Olympic Men's Size barbell right up your…ego.  ;)

So yes.  I ran myself almost into a coma most of the week, but I had an intense Thursday night and a lovely Saturday, and got to hang with some of my favorite humans period, so I'm calling that a win.

Anyway, the list!  I offer it in gratitude for all that it implies.  ;)

• 200' of 550 paracord, red & black
• awesome BDU/utility pants (though I was pretty offended that I wore an 'extra small' in them.  I'm not extra small, dammit.)
• 2 p38's
• a tai chi sword to replace mine with the wobbly grip.  I had to get it, because it looks just like mine (which is kind of an odd style), except that instead of being black it's red, and it's both garish and wonderful and I love it.  Also, the army surplus guys had no idea what it was (and were visibly awed by my overpowering female nerdosity — the combination of my deadpool t-shirt and FMA purse almost gave the cashier tremors, ha), so they sold it to me for about half the minimum price they should have.  \o/
• Books:  "Please Kill Me" (a punk-rock history for my boy), "Homework for Grown-Ups", the Opus (Bloom County) full-color compendium, some pr0n, and an awesome book on Oriental Battle Tactics, Weapons and Strategies 1200-1800.  All on sale.  *score*
• The Coolest Pink Frilly Umbrella Ever, for a certain goddess among gradeschoolers
• Little rubber-bandy shapey things that are all popular now, for same
• Assortment of real, brightly-colored, sticky-note tabs for placement on important documents, with big bold arrows and variations on "F*CK THIS" and "DON'T F*CK THIS UP"
• Black aluminum 12-LED ultrabright flashlight for my tactical (yup, milspec–I'm totally one of those nerds now) office laptop bag
• Red aluminum pen-size precision screwdriver multitool for same
• Awesome accessory bag for the MOLLE straps on said tactical office bag (a gift)
• 2 locking d-rings for same (I can hook so much to that bag now, heh)
• Wacom tablet for my boy (also a gift)
• RFID-blocking two-color duct-tape wallet, made just for me right in front of me.  *aw yay*

So yeah.  I had a great and crazy week; and I'm sorry it didn't leave me with much to write about here, but still…great and crazy!  That's worth something! 

May you all get one too!  ;)

P.S. I don't have a camera right now – I realize that could have made this post a lot more fun – but I should soon, and then, I promise, fun of some kind will ensue.  *wink*