A Modest Proposal for Preventing a Surfeit or Deficiency of Sleep From Being a Burden, and for Making It Beneficial To Me

Abstract

For the most part, I sleep fairly well at night, insofar as that I don't often wake up, and I can usually get to sleep quickly as well. However, as far as I can remember, I have never ever been happy to get up.  Whether I'm forced to get up after 5 hours, or reluctantly drag myself into the world after accidentally sleeping 11 hours, I always feel rather terrible; this feeling is what leads me to sleeping for too long, which only makes things worse.  I'm only ever driven out of bed by the alarm, or by shame, and it takes shame a lot longer to penetrate the fog on my consciousness.  It's possible that, for whatever reason, this is just my lot in life; however, I think I can throw some science at this problem over the next semester and find the exact right amount of sleep for me.

Book Review: Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is utterly present in Doorways in the Sand.

Now, I've given Zelazny a small amount of shit in the past, at least in the limited context of this blog, but only in the interest of being an honest reviewer.  I now feel obligated to give the old boy some love, publicly and on the Internet, at the cost of my nil critiquing cred, but fortunately that won't be necessary; I actually read Doorways, and enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any other book ever.

Several Thoughts

A couple of things have occurred to me, none of which is large enough to make a full post out of.  I guess this is what Twitter's for, but I can only manage so many Web-2.0 life outlets at once.

The Good

The extent to which the alignment system of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons influenced my philosophy of the world is very nearly embarrassing, although the writings of Michael Moorcock helped too.  Good and Evil is a fine spectrum for some stories and some religions, but Law and Chaos are so much more interesting.

The Story of Brother Giles

It seems that there was a Gaelic monk named Giles who was a brother of the priory at Lindisfarne.  Giles took his final vows in the year 745, and soon afterward, in a fit of holy inspiration, took up residence in a small wooden box.  An ascetic among ascetics, Giles spent his days in silent, cramped meditation, leaving his box only for the Palm Sunday precession.

Brother Giles continued his life as an enclosed anchorite until June 8, 793, the day of the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne.  When the Northern raiders found Brother Giles in his box, they demanded that he come out of his box to be killed.  When he refused, two of the stoutest warriors carried the box to the top of the bell tower and cast it to the green.  The Vikings descended to inspect the ruins of the box, but Brother Giles' body was nowhere to be found.

Because of his controversial lifestyle, Brother Giles was never canonized, but the sad story of the miraculous monk soon spread through the flock of the faithful.  An idiom grew among the merchants of Europe: boxes containing precious cargo were to be treated "as it were Brother Giles' own box".  As greater literacy arose in the 15th century, traders began marking such cargo with the now-shortened form of the idiom, simply "Brother Giles", or in Latin: "Fra Gile".

Semster-end Work Spike: Update

Just released an amount of tension via my second presentation of the week.  Some of the work for this was going on ten minutes before class, so very high stress.  I need to try really hard not to relax though -- there's plenty of more work ahead.  My portfolio will definitely get beefed up by the end of the month.

After taking 5 classes this semester and promising myself, "Never Again", my very favorite professor ever ever announced an independent-study class involving work on the gigantic Sakai Project.  I have never been so excited about anything.  Also, this is the first class I've ever had to apply for.  News on that will be forthcoming.