(no subject)

Favor to ask: the next time you happen to hear me make noises about pulling an all-nighter just so I can make an early-morning appointment, please suggest that I go to bed as usual anyway, even if it would result in my getting only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. Reminding me of this post will be sufficient.

I am now maybe fifty dollars richer from this morning's freelance camera gig, but an entire day poorer. My whole Friday afternoon sunk into a bleary fog that finally overcame me when I slept straight through a social engagement that I was looking forward to (dozing deeply enough that my cell didn't wake me, twice). And now it's after midnight and I am rested and refreshed and guaranteed not to see another person I know for another 12 hours or so, and when I do it will mean that it's time to go back to work. I'm not so much lonely as teeth-grindingly angry at myself. What the hell am I supposed to do now? I guess I can find some work to do, but I really don't want to, since I haven't had a chance to play first. Oh so bitter.

Every damn day it seems I manage to lie to myself about sleep. I set my alarm for 10am, knowing it won't work and that I'll sleep until 1pm or whenever eight hours after bedtime is (unless something non-routine is happening in the morning, as novelty is very effective at getting me out of bed early). But I set it anyway, thinking "Ah, it's five hours, that'll be enough." Maybe if I was someone else, for whom alarm clocks consistently worked, that thinking would apply, but after so many years you'd think I'd be able to face the truth.

Another lie I tell myself is that staying up all night will give me a chance to reset my sleep cycle. No, you fool, it doesn't work like that. It just fucks up the entire next day, and then I'll be back where I was, or worse. Hate hate hate.

(no subject)

Has anyone commented on the irony of the Danish cartoon brouhaha reaching global proportions at the same time as the American release of a movie called "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World"? Probably there'd be a stronger link perceived if the movie were better...

As for my own take on the issue... well, my feelings are very complicated, based on what I think is a fairly good handle on everything involved. I see a lot of people on both sides oversimplifying or misinterpreting things. Rather than offer a summary of my feelings, I will say: I generally do support the exposure of significant social disagreements sooner rather than later, even if they lead to conflict. The rise of the Intelligent Design school, for example, does not fill me with despair but hope and courage: here the Enemy, sensing a threat, has chosen to manifest itself. This is a threat in itself, but it also gives the forces of Good a face to punch in.

This one's weird, though, since it seems a bit trite to speak of "social disagreements" when we're arguably talking about a disagreement at the civilization level, perhaps even at the hemispherical one. Demanding U.N. sanctions on a country because one of its newspapers made fun of your god religion shows a basic lack of... well, it shows a different worldview, certainly, hmm, yes.

Even though I think that only one side here is objectively sane and correct, I think that the Danish paper did with the cartoons' original publication was tactless provocation. I understand the point they wanted to make, and it's a valid one, based on the story of a writer who could not find an illustrator for a picture book about the life of Mohammed because none were willing to risk reprisal from militant Muslims. But the paper seemed to go out of its way to make their point as acerbic as possible.

What's done is done, though, and now we have this thing. It's interesting.