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the merry merry month of may

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Adult life has boiled down to two things: sleep vs distraction. If I get enough sleep, I am not as distractable. Bed by 10 up by 6 and everything falls right into place. Work goes smoothly, little tasks get done, and in general I am more pleasant. But then I can clearly see the larger issues in my life; I get concerned and I want to be distracted.

Let us speak truthfully, distraction is the true American product and pastime. Just like high fructose corn syrup, distraction is package in a mind-numbing variety of eye-catching ways, all of which are bad for you. I go for the engrossing distractions: games that never end, 1000 page books. Bullshit so deep that it has time for meta-bullshit and self-referential bullshit. The distraction that lets you say, "Just one more " followed by "page", "chapter","message", "level", "city", "fortress".

When I lose myself there, sleep goes by the boards. What was once 10pm becomes 1am, or worse. Everything suffers, until I reset the clock and hope that I have a bit more traction against the issues that drive me to distraction.

There are three key things to come out of this:
#1 The cycle is getting shorter, but deeper.
#2 The people I know who have succeeded have married their money to their distraction.
#3 This is a difficult lesson to actually learn and respect.



--Evil B.
(37 comments)
2005.05.01
It's May Day once again! April actually seemed to last a good long while this year.

People who have been to my apartment might've seen my storage closety thing, a narrow room that's as long as my bathroom, but barely wider than the door, and the mountains of modular storage I have there (the same stuff I made a closet rack out of last year)...with great hubris, I had jokingly been refering to myself as "The King of Modular Storage" but yesterday my kingdom came raining down around me in a very "I Love Lucy" kind of way...I had been aware that a few of the "joints" had been loose and had been fixing them as I found them, but then, wouldn't you know, eventually a critical mass is reached, and the stuff collapses like dominoes.

Ah well, nothing hurt but my pride, though the ongoing effort to put it back together has set back my apartment straightening regimine quite a bit.

Essay Excerpt of the Moment
The idea that there can be prudential compromises on issues like the right to die, or same-sex marriage, or stem-cell research is a difficult one for fundamentalists. Since there is no higher authority than God, and, since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind.
Wow. I must have Star Wars on the brain, because now I think of "New Republic" as "What Happens After 'Return of the Jedi'"