BuJo Initiate

It’s the Ex week again, and like for the past few years now, I’ve taken it as holiday time. It has also been the habit to use the time to do practical economical household craft projects each year during this time, as sort of an advanced preparation for making winter a bit cozier. This time around is no exception. Last year, it was some carpentry to reclaim storage space; other years, it has been canning preserves. This year, I’ve minimized and simplified things even more for a multi-day project.

Over the past couple years or so, one positive habit I have been cultivating for myself is carrying

One template format I'm exploring . . .

around a pocketbook and pen. Sure, a note taking app on the phone is quite handy, but when in a pressured dash or impulse to record, capture, and recover something more instantly and accurately while it is on the tip of my brain, the pen and notebook beats the cellphone. I have been finding my old-fashioned pocketbook to be as indispensable to me as carrying my keys, wallet, and my cellphone. It has helped save me a lot of time, money, and energy, especially in spots when the phone had little to no battery power left.

I like technical innovation a lot, but honestly, only up to a certain point. We think we are doing well for ourselves by organizing our lives with apps on our phones and computers, but this is illusory on some levels. It is ultimately making us comply to a complex system that suits tech companies in finding new ways to control us with ones and zeros, and for them to glean more of our money and personal data from us. In this sense, apps can tend to cheapen the quality of your life, or they at least make the data of it more valuable to everyone except yourself. There is a point where we lose sight of being able to create a very personalized, customized, and more organic system that allows us to stage things better for our own organizational needs, our unique learning modalities, our own personal goals; one that accommodates for recording through our more private and practical eccentricities. Those ones are not for sharing, the non-bloggables: thoughts and ideas best left on a page of paper, with the privacy assured.

One of the things I regret about my formal education, from childhood on through to my early university years, in the days before academic computer use, and before the internet was available, is that I never had any teacher at any time of my life who put any effort at all on teaching me how to do the very essential and elemental thing for excelling in true higher learning. That is, really teaching me on how to organize myself with the practical skill of efficient written planning/journaling, and effective note taking. It seems absurd, but it’s true. Sure, I of course learned literacy, but only mastering merely the taking in and absorbing of information part of it. I always had substandard teachers and mentors for helping me exploit my strongest learning modalities to transpose, and express, what was going on in my head in the way I sensed it, and frame it in the best organized and condensed manner on to a page that was most memorable and comprehensive to me. My willingness to write, or “show my work”, as was always demanded of me, just wasn’t there, and from that I think I suffered greatly in such a way that I was always reticent, reluctant, reserved, made to feel embarrassed, about expressing any form of creativity at all through the written word or graphics for the longest time. I was no dullard, there was lots of thinking going on; but I was always embarrassed with my poor organizational ability of trying to sort it out on paper. Capturing thoughts through note taking was like trying to catch wriggling live fish with soapy hands. I improved a lot over the years, but my journey to get better at it has been a very independent and solitary one, and I missed the most critical of years of when what I know now would have served me better at an earlier time. I’m trying to actively compensate for that even today.

This all brings me now to making a concerted effort at learning something that encompasses serving me as a means of approaching efficient minimalism, enhancing my productivity, and being a creative pastime. Currently, I’m immersing myself in the craft of bullet journaling (or BuJo* for short)¹. Like most of my hobbies and pastimes, it is nerdy thing that is a nice blend of aesthetics that pleases the senses, and orderly precision that gets mathematical, scientific, and data oriented. What I gain from doing it is a clearer snapshot of how my mind works while figuring out goal-oriented objectives. One thing I’m noticing is that there is a great and drastic schism in the quality in my handwriting between the floodlight mind (cursive, observing and fervent collecting a vast array of thoughts instantaneously) and my spotlight mind (block printed, mindfully focusing and methodically organizing them on paper, without the pressure of time and other stressful distractions). Comparing the two is seeing my brain operating and functioning in two different levels, or existing on two entirely different worlds, for each process. I wonder if there is name for the weird psychological anomaly to describe this huge difference between each modality. Examples provided.

My manic, brain-on-fire,
"conspitated looking" as one
of my friends once called it,

cursive writing vs.

My relaxed and focused self

block printing

My goal with this pastime is to get a journal formatted and formulated with templates for the

One template I designed that I may 

use for seasonal tasks. I couldn't

 find anything like this in a stationary 

store. Custom made is the way to go!

remainder of this year and the entire coming new year. What will I do with it all? Well, to automate some plans without the actual need for technical automation; to make cybernetic changes and adjustments without the cyberspace. I’m not trying to think like a machine, but I am trying to enhance my own recording and processing of stuff in much the same way that computers do: more effort to taking a small codified, point/mark, or bit of info to record and ramming it through a formatted program or function to filter out a result. Pixilating points (or customized bullets) to track data is a simple and effective way to record progress. The gist of this being investing in time to structure a perfect (for me) format now so that I can waste very little time and material for recording stuff later. Minimal effort through simple coding that can lead to big results. There is stuff to enter that is not as simple as purely numerical, or a yes/no, true/false, 0/1,

kinds of data. Some stuff, of course, is trackable and traceable only on a spectrum, or layers of spectra, or else needs a full out verbal explanation. The modular nature of this system allows for this too. I’m most interested see what kind of artistic infographics I’ll be able to create and incorporate as well. I want to see if I can progress from being crude to making the great leap ahead of being . . . slightly less crude with my graphical talents. Most of the detailed subjects that I will be recording, and tracking, are too personal to post here. However, I will disclose the broader general reasons for this new objective:

• Shifting from Day to Night Mode – Someday, I hope not too soon yet, I will be transitioning to doing night shifts. It will be a major upheaval for my body and mind to adapt to, with phases of insomnia assured to come; my working memory being the worse off casualty due to that. Hence, I’ll have to get into the habit of writing things down more often to not lose track of things. Also, having lists of things to work through eliminates the burdensome and torturous task of having to make decisions in such a state (or suffering consequences of making bad decisions in that way, read further below).
  
• Total Schedule Reorganization - There then must be a major reorganization of my schedule for my daily activity, have a productive rhythm to my day; to conserve my energy, and my social life and relationships outside of work. 
  
• Monitoring Health – Another offshoot of switching to nights is needing to actively check myself over for signs of physical deterioration due to the odd hours and unnatural rhythm of wakefulness. Knowing and marking the ideal time to exercise, and what and when to eat during this (mal)adjustment period is critical also, since “breakfast” kind of doesn’t work (doesn’t feel right) as a meal option in mid-afternoon. Alcohol consumption periods are things to be mindfully reckoning with too. What gets measured gets mastered.
  
• Impulse Grounding – One of the things I have noticed after long bouts of insomnia is the poor ability to make sound decisions. The likelihood of acting on impulse rather than think things through rises significantly. For example, this is especially bad when I want to commit to a minimalist lifestyle, but then act on a reckless spending spree for impractical things after too little sleep. BuJo is a way to do a brain dump and check your thoughts outside yourself, with some frame of order, to analyze and weigh pros and cons. At the very least, the very act of doing this is a much cheaper alternative of using one’s time rather than falling into an impulsive habit of mindless consumption of whatever it is that one could possibly become addicted to.
  
• Cheap Hobby – It only needs: a writing instrument of your preference, and a good quality dot

  

  My entire Bullet Journaling kit.

  (or grid) paged journal for the basics. For refined line forming for edging and bordering and such, a cheap geometry set from a dollar store works. Additional lettering stencils and templates can be found cheap in an arts and craft shop, or even in a dollar store. Just engage the imagination, and that’s it. A minimalist’s dream come true! Very portable, and it doesn’t need a battery for power (except maybe just a good source of caffeine). It’s a big step upward from an adult colouring book anyway, and far more practical to use as well.
  
• Veering Away from Toxic Social/News Media – Simply substituting a bad use of time for a better, more constructive, one. I will have a genuinely more enriching time working on a means to sort my own life’s issues, and creating my own viable solutions for approaching problems and goals than thinking and believing, that during these turbulent politically charged times of the election season, that any government or other social institution, is going to be genuinely interested in doing that for me. It’s my time to opt out of indiscriminately spending too much time and attention on negative news and social media during these times of waiting for our nation’s federal election coming this October, and the bloody ridiculous circus of the still 454 remaining days of campaigning until the American election. Working on my own betterment through my journals will be a nice retreat away from all this.

The most satisfying and enriching thing about using BuJo as an analogue system of note taking and calligraphy²: purposely taking a plain word and page space and embellishing it such as to make it so strikingly elegant and distinctly vivid enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Imagine then how much more powerful it would look when it is applied to a whole written thought or idea. Goals are made to appear to have an esteemed meaning, as truly worthy goals should. It somehow makes your own ideas and listed tasks and duties appear more alive/animated. Even the duller things on a to do list can then look like they could be integral parts of some overall grand adventure.

A potential syllabus list

with flipped open pages

to record book titles

journaling is the chance and choice to be liberally creative and expressive with stylish lettering and artwork in one’s journal, thus further stimulating and empowering one to use the entire brain; not just the analytical and logical left hemisphere. I really believe there is some weight to this as a benefit, adding artful flourishes through doodles, and calligraphy.

I’m coming closer to understanding why monks in the medieval era were charged with the tasks of illuminating pages, making copies of calligraphic manuscripts, and other such scrivenery. Apart from being just merely literate, to do such a job well very much requires and demands a deeply focused, disciplined, and meditative mind. It can be very relaxing. However, I’m certainly not a monk. The best advice I could give as a novice for starting a page template is just to dive right into it. It is 100% guaranteed that it will be imperfect at the start, making lots of mistakes in your initial formatting, lettering, and page section alignment. So, once that is all done, set it aside for a long while, have a drink or two, then come back and review it, and then be totally relentless, ruthless, and absolutely merciless with editing it, and redo it until you get the right design and style that really satisfies you. You are allowed be your own harshest critic since you are going to be the only one interacting with this material; you have no one to please but yourself by taking such a measure.

The first mess . . .

. . . then the final product. Custom made and adapted for a coding 

matrix system unique and personal to me, and again, 

it can't be found in any regular stationers shop.

I have nothing more to include with this entry, except for this last thought from a quote by the author of my guidebook:

“Each Bullet Journal becomes another volume in the story of your life. Does it represent the life you want to live? If not, then leverage the lessons you've learned to change the narrative in the next volume.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future

*- I like Bujo because sounds more to me like some unique, Zen-based, Japanese term for some sort of work ethic discipline, like kaizen.

1. The initial resource I used was The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. I solidified the reason why I decided to undertake this; after that though, I’ve been finding a multitude of ideas for personalization on Pinterest.

2. I’m not ashamed to say, as a guy, that I love the artform of calligraphy. Before you scoff and think by default that it’s a sissy craft to do, consider this: the most instrumental class that Steve Jobs said he ever took (before he dropped out of college) which he said had been the most influential one for the inception of the Mac computer wasn’t a software programming class, wasn’t a computer science or engineering class; it was a calligraphy class. In a roundabout way, the practice of it forced him to see things differently through the elegance of design, and natural forms and ease of interface that made one want to engage with using a computer. Proper design is powerful stuff!

Winter Solstice/Yuletide 2018: The Inaugural Yule Bookfest

I’ve been writing this in a piecemeal fashion, starting around the winter solstice, Dec 21^st.

It has been a long while since I’ve posted an entry; for all good reasons. For the last while, with being in a new relationship, I’ve been more attuned into living intentionally and sharing my life privately with someone instead of being a passive commentator about life and sharing random observations about it with a general audience in written form. With the approach of our first yuletide season together, there also comes this excited eagerness and willingness in both of us to adopt some special thing to make as our own unique holiday tradition as a couple. So, we agreed to include a new observance for ourselves during this season. I feel like it is one worth sharing. Personally, I would hope it catches on with others as well if anyone so chooses to copy it.

The new custom we decided to observe isn’t really a specific local one, or even a Canadian one, but it serves our introverted selves very well. It’s one that we kind of appropriated from Icelandic tradition. By virtue of having relatives in Wynyard SK, a community that was largely founded by Icelandic settlers, I’ve already had some exposure to some traditional Icelandic Christmas (Jól) feast fare (like Rullapylse and Vinarterta) from my past holiday visits there. And now, strangely enough, we’re setting out to sample another custom similar to the one from that island, as a Canadianized form of it to suit us.

Temperature-wise, winters for that island nation seem relatively mild and less miserably frigid when compared to those here in Saskatoon, but given their proximity to the Arctic Circle, their winter nights are a lot longer during the approach to solstice*. The long cold darker nights around either side of winter solstice naturally stage an environment for which to retreat into coziness and stimulating one’s brain with a good story. Despite inhabiting one of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and being quite good at exercising frugality, folks in Iceland seem to spare no expense when it comes to buying and reading books. The result is that they have become one of the most culturally literate societies on Earth. Thus, books of all kinds are the most frequently gifted items around the Christmas season there: so much so that there is a word in their language defining this tradition of exchanging reading material as presents during the winter holidays. This annual tradition of buying and gifting books is called Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas time book flood” roughly translated into English. It sparked some appeal in both of us when we heard about this custom because we do both like to read and would find this exchange quite endearing. We thought it best to anglicize the name to Yule Bookfest*, (see further below as to why). She suggested having this exchange on the last Advent Sunday before Christmas Day, and I thought that plan was perfect: a day of rest, dedicated to fully relishing the blessing of being able to read in peace with a fresh new story. As much as we love our families and friends; and having a chance to gather with them for feasting, gaming, and drinking, for introverted people this extra onslaught of social activity during the holidays, even with it being awesomely joyful and fun, can be a bit overwhelming and draining at times for our mental lives. Yule Bookfest is thus a way to have a day to simmer down the nerves; to take a breather from excessive social overload from the holidays, and to gain a sort of calmer private celebration; balancing the yuletide joy with some peace.

Most people around here refer to the “Christmas season” as the general period covering the latter half of December; I think this term is too vague, and a little thoughtless and sloppy for my liking. I’m a little more demanding of accuracy. I grew up in a family that, at least for a while during my childhood, observed both the Gregorian and Julian Christmases (December 25^th and January 7^th, respectively), as some other kids did in mixed Anglo-Ukrainian families in the community where I was raised, where these holiday traditions mixed and merged. In my formative childhood years, I remember that I was sometimes insistent in having others specify which Christmas they were referring to when they were trying to talk to me about the holidays. When I refer to Christmas, I mean specifically Christmas day (Dec 25^th) or I get even more specific in defining it in mentioning Julian/Ukrainian/Orthodox Christmas on Jan 7^th, and don’t usually use it so vaguely to refer to any other time within the period of December and early January. For that, I‘ve been reverting to the word “yuletide”, for referring to the greater span of days of celebrating between and during Advent and mid-January. Yuletide may sound a little more pretentious and a bit archaic, but it is a word I’m noticing that I’m becoming fond of and favoring (at least in my writing) of its use instead of using “Christmas” all the time ubiquitously over the whole season. Partially because it is a better term that can extend to generally include all days from the first Advent Sunday to Orthodox New Year’s Day (Jan 14^th) and all days in between, and covering all holidays during that time from many other cultures, including newer bizarrely contrived ones (as perhaps ours is), with the celestial event of winter solstice roughly being the tethering post in the middle of it all. As for our new celebration, I’d like to start off doing this special day right, at the very least linguistically*. I see calling it “Yule Bookfest” instead of the original “Jólabókaflóð”, or “Christmas Bookflood”, as necessarily suitable because:

·         As I said, it leaves the word Yule to indicate an extended period of winter days; not just the singular day, of Christmas. After all, one usually needs more than just one day to completely finish and enjoy a book

·         Yule is a shorter word to type than Christmas. I get lazy at typing sometimes, and brevity is sweet and efficient for modernistic purposes. Plus, there are no accented characters, or funny letters (like eth -“Đ,ð”) to mess around with while typing, unlike the original Icelandic word.  This form does respect at least some part of the cognate** from which it was translated.

·         It better denotes that it’s not a serious religious observance; it’s open for anyone to enjoy, no matter what creed/faith, or lack thereof. One has only to appreciate the gift of a book, so we can just leave the term Christmas alone.

·         Rather than a flood, it’s just a single book to gift each other, for indulging in deeply. So, the word fest is best.

·         From the Wikipedia definition below,*** yule is a word originally derived from something rooted in a concept of playing, feasting, merrymaking, and joking around; not being seriously contemplative or solemnly meditative. There’s plenty of time left to do that latter stuff for the goddamned miserable other part, from January onward, of a Saskatchewan winter.

What else does this special day perhaps entail besides exchanging books? I think being costumed in ultra-comfortable loungewear (e.g. housecoat, sweatpants, and/or pyjamas), finger snacks (preferably drier ones to avoid smudging your pages: perhaps cheese, crackers and various other chacuterie), a warm(ing) beverage, perhaps by a crackling fireplace, and not moving too far beyond one’s armchair, or chesterfield. Snuggling and napping between chapters is permissible and encouraged.

My girlfriend picked out a perfect book for me: both in terms as theme material for this day, and the reflection of the kind of person I am, and the strange characters I’m interested in relating to. The book I was gifted for this inaugural celebration of pages was a piece of fiction written by Robin Sloan titled Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. A cool story that involves a bright, but somewhat hapless young fellow who falls into unfolding some strange secrets centered around this bookstore and its gentleman proprietor, Mr. Penumbra. It's kind of book that will inspire you to recommit to being a more avid reader, and to perhaps try to write in more than just some unidimensional prose. It has re-affirmed ambitions that I should follow up on in the coming new year.

This is a bit of a digression . . . but the nerdy part of me usually likes to reflect on the anthropological stuff as to how and why certain traditions have originated over the holidays. This year, it’s kind of nice to be an active force in it all. Speaking of new and modern Canadian yuletide traditions, it leads me to wonder what will be unveiled in this special inaugural year of the legalization of cannabis in this country. I’m going to guess (perhaps correctly) that several folks around the country are probably going to embellish the theme having a “green Christmas” to the max. Perhaps this is the year where there will be started some grand tradition of some kind of Yuletide Bongfest which will become adopted by the potheads of this country: exchanging weed and the means for which to smoke and consume it. I presume it could be on December 20^th (to correspond with the “20” in 4/20). Who knows.

If there was one thing I wish people would tune into more of as an addiction, I wish it was the substance of reading and literature. Long winters here in Canada would set us up for making a few more scholars if Yule Bookfest was taken seriously as a celebration.

*- Sunrise on Dec 21^st in Reykjavik, 11:21 am; sunset, 3:29 pm. In Saskatoon, Sunrise, 9:12 am; sunset 4:56 pm.

**- Given that this is a bilingual nation, I would suppose that we could possibly call this “Fête d’Hiver des Livres” for the Francophones, but I’ll leave that to be properly translated by someone with a better command of French than I have.

***- Yule (from Middle English yole, from Old English ġeōl, ġeōla (“Christmastide, midwinter”), either cognate from Old Norse jól (“midwinter season, yule”),^[2] from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą (“celebration, festivity; yule”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *yekə- (“joke, play”)) +‎ -tide (“period around a holiday”) (from Old English tīd (“period, season, time; feast-day, festal-tide”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dī-(“time”)).

5Q5A: Winterlude

Again, this is mostly for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. 

I’m not trying to react too negatively about it, but It’s back, and being that I should be better prepared for its coming is neither here nor there. Of course, I’m talking about winter: and no matter how well prepared I am for the physical and logistical rigours of the season, like any savvy Canadian should be, ultimately, I am never prepared for it psychologically, despite having lived here all my life. Things like the extra darkness, the featureless snowscape, the extra work shoveling and blowing away accumulations, the treacherous driving from idiots who aren’t adapting to slick road conditions, and the augmented stretches of isolation and being penned indoors are already getting to me, and we are only four days into the season since the snow came. Knowing that there is 32 times that of a duration yet to endure until spring isn’t making me any more cheerful. I don’t feel anymore thankful or blessed in knowing that Halloween was snow free, and it could have come much sooner by one or two weeks, which is not uncommon in these parts to expect. It’s just here, and I have no will to deal with it. It’s going to be hard to find pleasure in this one. The title above is more of a note of sarcasm than anything.   

Q1. How is this going to be an even more challenging winter?

A1. What’s even more foreboding about it is that now that I’m a member of the Condo board, I’ve been bestowed some responsibility of assuring snow removal around the building on days like these; dealing with the gray areas of how responsibly the owners and the people contracted to remove it for us are going to interact. To do one home is enough, to be responsible an entire building complex is another thing. Plus, along with dealing with some residents and board members, some of whom are bickering with each other, and being caught between their petty conflicts, doesn’t make me enthused to pursue this endeavor. It makes me a little regretful that I’ve yupped myself into this.
As usual, the missing of like-minded intimate female companionship is at its worst when enduring this phase of the year*.

Q2. What do you tolerate best about winter?

A2. Strangely enough, the cold really doesn’t bother me much physically. Genetically, I suppose I just turned out to be a very warm-blooded person. It’s just an element that one dresses right for. I don’t give it a second thought or complaint about those instances, like this morning, where I’ll march out in -30 C wind chill to help relieve the dog. The whining and complaining everyone else does about it, and its resulting negativity, is more what gets to me when it’s overplayed. I get grumbly when I have to remove snow, or be forced to travel by foot or vehicle over ice, but cold temperature itself isn’t the bothersome factor to me directly, just what results in its influence in other things beyond me. I get pissed off at the failures and foibles of some mechanical and technical things like cars, cell phones, and other devices that aren’t as resilient as I am when the temperature plummets, but not with the cold itself. Personally, I find brisk, cold air cleansing and purifying. I’m one of those weirdos who favours an extremely cold day over an extremely hot one. I can dress better for a really cold day; I can’t undress further for an extremely hot one. If I ever find it too cold for my personal liking, it’s just a good excuse to have a hot bath, or use the sauna, or enjoy some tea or soup.

Q3. What are your personal betterment projects going to be for the season?

A3. I’ve sorted things out to the following.

1.       Language project – Learning (some) Russian. What more appropriate language is there to learn in the harshest and most bitter of seasons such as this? I’ll expound more on the reasons why and my progress in future entry.

2.       Cooking – Becoming a better saucier. To take ordinary cuts of meat and vegetables and elevate them to another level of amazing with a simple formulation of a sauce seems to be worthwhile doing. I’m reckoning on learning about 20 – 30 different sauces, dips, and glazes during the season.

3.       Studying – I have a big, stupid hoop to jump through with some required courses. It’s actually a form of hell and punishment to me, and a reminder of collective ineptitudes which, unfairly, other parties aren’t being held accountable for. But, I’m challenging myself in creating some weird and wild mnemonic systems to help me remember this stuff, which I can hopefully transfer and apply to other things more meaningful and valuable to me.

4.       Writing better  – I’m considering workshops for it.

5.       Continued involvement with my Union

Q4. What fitness and leisure are you going to try to pursue more of?

A4. Things like:

1.      X Country Skiing – If there is an ideal weekend for it. I might travel up to Elk Point to experience the trails there. Otherwise, I’ll try to keep regenerating my lung tissues with the circuits here locally. Running on icy streets and sidewalks is too much of a risk given that I need non-sprained ankles and unbroken legs for work.

2.      More sauna time – and with that, to pass the time better while sweating out toxicity in there without boredom, it seems fitting to read . . .

3.      More Scandinavian crime fiction – I built up a rather large extensive syllabus of books by Nordic writers. After reading a few, I totally get why people have commented that I think more like a Northern European than a Canadian.

4.      Shooting Nazis – Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, a video game, has been released. I really don’t want to offend my German friends after saying this. Please remember that I’m shooting at Nazis, not the good Germans. The first-person shooter gameplay for this series is awesome, and I’m sure I’ll need some form of quasi-destructive cathartic release of anger towards something representing oppressive evil sometime throughout this season. I wish I knew more people who like to play board games and cards; I would welcome that too. As for now, the dog is lousy at dealing cards, and doesn’t really have a grasp on how to play chess or backgammon.

5.      Designing and building furniture – mostly shelving and table options (solutions).

6.      Cocktail Bar Development – gradually accumulating the essential ingredients for a fuller and varied personal mixology lab experience. If I can’t have quantity, I at least want quality on the minimal level.

Q5. Let’s end with being positive, what are the better or favourite sensations of winter that you enjoy?

A5. Sensations, as in what appeals to the five senses, could be summarized thusly:

1.      Sounds – or rather the absence of it when the first snow comes. Walking outside in the darkness on the morning of the first snowfall of winter, where the light snow absorbs all acoustical aberrations. On the opposite side is listening to blizzard blowing outside whilst being with a warm beside warm, crackling from the fireplace. It’s the winter equivalent of listening to thunderstorm for me, which I also find pacifying. The only time I really appreciate classical music is during winter. Ella snoring by my feet after a long cold walk, either her effort to warm up, or to warm me up.

2.      Textures – the mass of a super heavy quilt draped over me. This is only appreciated on the super cold days of course.

3.      Smells – Birch firewood burning, conifer trees (the only non-dormant plants during the season; a good whiff of pine sap is intoxicating), fresh bread baking and soup cooking, any incense that masks months’ worth of smells of kitchen grease, other malodorous stenches and other volatile organic compounds (from not just my suite, but others’) that get trapped inside because you can’t really open the goddamned windows for fresh air for the risk of freezing the pipes.

4.      Sights – Hoarfrost, like everything outside gets encrusted with diamonds after a good freezing fog. Christmas lights, or any extra light that brightens the evenings before and after solstice.

5.      Tastes – For some weird reason, I tolerate red wine better during winter than at all other times of the year. As forms of alcohol go, ordinarily red wine seems like it is to me like what Kryptonite is to Superman. Anything fat and sugary is more pleasurable on an exponential degree during winter. If the only feast I had for Christmas was Butter Tarts, I’d be happy with that. I drink more coffee and tea during winter as well, perhaps to trick my brain into making the cycle of daylight longer than it really is.

*- I’m not going to be prideful, or be feeling ashamed, or hiding anymore about the fact that at times I get terrible spells of feeling weaker and vulnerable about being very lonely. Winter here is the worst for experiencing that, but some how I endure.

Old Dead Drunken Authors and on Writing while (somewhat) Impaired

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools. -- For Whom the Bell Tolls  

What the hell do adults do alone in Saskatoon after 10:00 PM on a showery May evening: something that's somewhat stimulating outside of the regular home life, yet not too abnormal? If one isn't into the NHL playoffs and generally dissatisfied with all other television programming, plus no appetite to speak of, with the bookshops being closed (not that I'm really in the mood to read anyway); when one doesn't care to waste coin visiting bars, or a cacophonous casino; when the cinemas have nothing special to show, and when it seems too late and unsettling to abuse caffeine and sugar at donut and dessert shops, there really isn't much else to do by oneself at this hour enduring sleeplessness*. So, one tours around cyberspace, while at the same time retreating inside one's own head; it's doing me no favours. It seems to be too busy in there as it is. I only have more insomnia to contend with later it seems: if I don't do something about it. It's times like these when I reflect and speculate on what notable people did in the past: those who didn't have such options for entertainment and yet were creating it for others, and who have suffered relatively more than I have. The topic is also spurred by a strange fact in a posting thread I read earlier, and stunning myself with noticing strange connections.**

I couldn't think of much else to do for now but to remain at home; propping myself in front of my computer keyboard, with a tumbler glass full of whiskey, starting this entry, and perhaps pretending for a while that I can pull off a Hemingway, i.e. having something profound exit my mind and onto a page whilst I'm half lit, that is if I am not made sleepy first by my libation. Whatever gets crafted as a result afterward, for better or worse, I'll credit to the liquid inspiration. As much as I choose to avoid drunken outlandish storytellers in bars, I am however intrigued by some of them when they end up committing their words to paper

Ernest Hemingway could at least verbally draw something fantastically vivid out of a scene that others would ordinarily find trivial. The copious amounts of alcohol he used for fuelling his process was his gimmick modus operandi. The question about whether he was a writer with a drinking issue, or a drunkard with a writing issue, still remains debatable amongst his critics. One can't fault Hemingway much for becoming a drunk though. After all, he did witness the worst of the resulting suffering from the savagery along the frontlines during the first World War as an ambulance driver, until he was wounded himself. Booze was probably the most convenient tool around for dealing with what was called "shell shock" at the time. I suppose he made the best with it as he could.

Edgar Allen Poe is another example who comes to mind, who has my respect as being another writer, who was a hopeless sot, yet who was still able slap together sentences well enough to make them stir one's senses with eloquent, yet macabre, diction relating to things intriguingly mysterious. He was a sickly and melancholy fellow for most of his forty odd years of an odd life. Drinking lots surely didn't help him, except only to be probably more disinhibited to find the right words for him to express with ink and pen. To write literature well, I suppose some sorts need to reach a certain degree of pathos. There's no shortage of that stirred up from excess imbibing of liquor. There's a fine line as to when it turns from a help to a hindrance.

It's interesting, and yet kind of sad, to know just how many of the best critically acclaimed literary works out there are products of someone's neurons being basted in ethanol, or other narcotics and psychedelics. Perhaps, when it comes to writing on a level that's appealing and impactful to all sectors of society, it's just proof that if you are intelligent and keen enough to use grammar effectively, one has to contort the mind such chemically to observe how weird, warped, and surreal the rest of society is as to give it a fair and accurate commentary as well. Probably that's what Hemingway was alluding to in the quote above. He also said that he drank for the sake of making other people look better. That definitely doesn't work for me. It's not the kind of writer I'd want to be. Again, using the examples of Poe and Hemingway: Poe ultimately died alone and penniless, wearing someone else's clothing under mysterious circumstances, and Papa Hemingway sank to such a low that he cancelled himself off with shotgun blast to the head. There's no glamour there I must say.

My whiskey is finished . . . enough about that. I'm not so seasoned as either a hardcore boozer or a writer, so I'll choose to stick with just this one glass. After reviewing what I just wrote, I still seem to be rather lucid.

This reminds me that the Top of the Hops season approaches, and I'm debating if I should go this year. For now, I see no reason to this time.

*- My only other feasible entertainment options for the evening were non-adult things: like videogames. We laugh at our house pets and think how kooky it is when we pull out a laser pointer and make them chase a projected dot, but isn't that what we ourselves are essentially doing when we try to chase and maneuver around sets of pixels on a screen with some control interface? In that perspective, playing videogames isn't exactly very creative or intellectual either. Contraband things could then be listed after this I'm sure.

**- An article about E.A. Poe, and about how he sort of predicted a shipwreck with the name of one of his characters in one of his stories (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) being identical to one of the victims who suffered the same fate under the same circumstances in real life (cannibalized on a lifeboat) occurring several years later. The name of the character was Richard Parker. It struck me then that it was also the same name given to the tiger on the lifeboat in Yann Martel's book Life of Pi. This wasn't coincidental. I found out that Yann Martel purposely chose that name for the tiger in his story based on these uncannily identical, yet temporally separate literary/actual events. It's like Poe time travelled.

Crash Habits

I realized that it has been some while since I wrote here. Nothing eventful has happened between now and my last entry that is really notable except for the fact that I've decided to take a sabbatical from the long-distance running to let my bones and joints heal up properly. I'm substituting in more cycling for fitness. I opted out of the Saskatchewan Marathon this year, as well as the Bridge City Boogie that is scheduled for today. I'm stuck in the midst of the second day of trying to resolve computer problems, and today I took the radical step of doing a total overhaul of my operating system.
My Sunday so far has gone as follows:
Stage 1: Start reinstalling Windows 8.0 operation system, since all my free time yesterday was used in vain and wasted effort desperately using whatever help advice and fixes I tried to deploy.
0% installed . . .
Showering, hygiene and grooming . . .
10% installed . . .
Prepared and had breakfast (scrambled eggs with onions and jalapeños and salsa, hashbrowns and coffee; loaded and turned on dishwasher
25% installed . . .
Go for another walk with dog to kill time between software loading, get rained on, return home quickly. I'm kind of thankful for the rain to make me feel less regretful and having an excuse for being cooped up inside to attend to the configuring . . .
33% installed . . .
Cleaned kitchen and sweep floors . . .
54% installed . . .
Folding laundry, changed bedding, and cleaned/dusted/vacuumed bedroom, groom the pooch . . .
67% installed . . .
Made more coffee, chatted with my Mom for a bit on the phone . . .
89% installed  . . .
Start praying to Jesus, Buddha, and whatever other patron saints and deities there are for restoring system crashes who'd care to listen to my plight. Twelve minutes later, a successful installation occurs. On to Stage 2 of this soul-crushing operation. Ella pokes me with her paw to get my attention, and then jumps up on my lap to try to comfort me from my noticeable unrest from this irritating fiasco.
Stage 2: Begin downloading and installing the layer of Windows 8.0 updates necessary before I can ever tack on the latest Windows 8.1 upgrade (92 needed).
Start a new blog entry on desktop (this one) . . .
0 of 92 downloaded . . .
I unload my dishwasher and started preparing stuff for lunch. I then begin reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by the late Douglas Adams, feeling about as useless, surreal, and absurd as the Electric Monk introduced in chapter 2 of the book through the flow of this process. A half hour has passed by, then I see . . .
0 of 92 downloaded!!! . . . <a myriad of expletives at this point> . . . oh wait, holy crap it finally took some action to install updates. Loading and configuration seems like trying to escape a Black Hole at this point knowing that I'm not even half way finished of what I need to do to correct all this.
I think the point of how aggravating I find post-crash massive scale installations has been made, and this is probably the main reason why I would hate having an IT career as a tech support worker. I couldn't handle dealing with the levels of livid pent-up frustration while talking myself through a task, I'm sure my impatience would only get worse when dealing with someone else. If I were tied to a desk incapable of hastening the process, and couldn't make the busywork, or anything else constructive or productive for things like what I just described to curb this aggravation, I'd be totally at my wits end.
It's my own damn fault that this has happened. A complete refreshing install once a year is what I would recommend for anyone who uses their system at my degree of usage, but I follow my own advice rather poorly. I haven't performed any maintenance like this since I purchased my laptop a few years ago.
Being that we are now so interlinked with technology, this all leads me to wonder if there could be an entirely new psychological profile inventory made solely based on a person's ability to organize, attend, adapt, and using time-passing habits through the tedious process of recovering from a computer system crash and other monotonous first world problems: much like the formal stages of dealing with the news of hearing that one is approaching their mortality in a short given time (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It's being affronted by the irony of taking so much lagging time is used to set up things that are supposed to process all the other things in our lives in nanoseconds.
I forgot how long and agonizing this process is, and if I were more prudent I should be given myself more substantial things to multitask at while this was happening, like planning a manned mission to Pluto or something . . .

. . .It's now 3 days later, with one night shift, one migraine, two excruciatingly sore eyeballs, and cruddy weather within that time. I have my system up and running again. I plugged in the old apps I had (actually used), leaving the rest in the digital oblivion to prevent them from cluttering up my hard drive; one of them was probably responsible for this trouble to begin with. I also took advantage of rigging this baby up with the newest version of MS Office: to crawl out of the primordial ooze of what was Office 2007, and start crawling on solid ground with more cloud-capable features provided with Office 365. It's a hell of a jump, and I'm ashamed I waited this long to come to this point to do this enhancement, and I'm thinking more that my crash that forced me in this direction was a blessing in disguise.

I'm so far impressed with the new features. I'm testing Word's capability of uploading my entry directly to my blog, right now. Office 2007 had the same feature, but it calved on me for some reason ages ago, and I just didn't bother coming back to it. I like the fact that I have more formatting options and better correction utilities at my disposal now. Maybe someday I'll manage to actually get creative with them.

Vacation Day X: Brooding, Brewing, & Planning for a Better Escape Next Summer

I quit counting the days off that I've used since this past Tuesday. There has been nothing eventful since then, except for sobering issues that I had to address on Wednesday evening, all of which were work related. Other less than favourable circumstances have me restricted to being a homebody. So, I settled with converting the kitchen into a laboratory, to start brewing some beer, and then I continued to monkey around with other wildly experimental ways of cooking and food prep that just run shy of me using liquid nitrogen and explosives.

The brewing project is going well so far. The yeast culture is alive, activated, and doing what it loves to do best: making alcohol. I love hearing the initial rhythmic released bursts of CO₂  escaping from the fermenter's airlock, as it matches the same cadence and frequency of a person's heartbeat at rest . . . a tell-tale sign that this life form is being well-nurtured and content. Yeah sure, I suppose that sounds a little flaky . . . but I'd rather share this little blurb with an embellishment of romanticism than describing it all with the more accurate scientific explanation of what is really going on through this process: the synchronous expulsion of gas that is an expended metabolic by-product of digestion from micro-organisms. In other words . . . a pulsating release of the collected billions of tiny yeast farts.

I had to force myself to settle down, and let my ankles and knees recover from the shock of using my toe shoes (Hobbit boots) for running again. These things are a delight to run in, but they play havoc to the leg muscles when doing any extended period of walking in them. I became so seduced by how wonderfully I was performing with them on my run that I overshot my training range by a hell of a long way, and I'm paying for it now.

My review of last entry led me to search through travel sites for getting ideas for cheap packages for next summer. I figured that I'd extend my running to hitting a race or two out of province, or even out of country. I'd be doing neither races further south of here, nor any around the great lakes region in summer*: I don't handle heat and humidity very well as it is now. I figured that I could do a marathon in Quebec, or the Maritimes, or someplace in Northern Europe which would be suit me better: maybe somewhere between the latitudes of Reykjavik and Zurich. I have more research, and whittling down of options, to do.

*- Maybe in mid or late autumn.   

Amusements in Logic

Starting Monday, I have about 11 hours left of short shifts to do this week before I do some holiday time. In a way that's good. I do three or four hours within three days, and I'll hopefully have enough energy and momentum to clear stuff away at home for the remainder of those days before I dive into time that's to be devoted to mostly leisure. Perhaps weaning myself away from work gradually like this is the way to go, rather than having a more radical transition. 

I'm doing some more advanced programming exercises now. Messing around with the process of trial and error in correcting some missing details and other silly mistakes, is making me think that there was a time in the past when I would have been so much better able to retain the knowledge, hone my skills, and have a peak performance at doing such tasks.* Right now though, I feel as though my brain has to have a lot of rust, dust, and cobwebs brushed and knocked out of it before I can deal with anything that's purely logical. 

There was a time in my life, when I had less busy days and was better able to focus, when I was becoming a real enthusiast for doing the rather esoteric hobby of solving logic puzzles. The British ones were (still are) the best. It was a way to sort of play detective. I was correctly completing ones ranked five stars in difficulty; even the ones without a logic grid, on a regular basis. I became so interested in them that I wondered if I could even create any of my own that would ever be acceptable enough for publication in any one of the puzzle magazines one finds them in. I did start a small portfolio of some that I drafted up, working at composing and editing them piecemeal. I don't remember when it started happening, but I'd guess that it was something I did as an effort to endure the coldest, darkest, loneliest days of winters past.
 

I doubt if dreaming up and writing these things is something one could ever get rich at, or allow me to just quit my day job. Logic puzzles, at least non-digital ones, are a dying amusement these days, like most of the other pencil and paper puzzles; thus their creation is becoming a dying art as well. The jest and appeal of it for me though is that I’d be creating something that like-minded people want to approach for a bit of diversion and positive mental stimulation. Also, the thought of making even a little money from watching an idea grow and come to fruition, even if it's just a small and trivial one, is now becoming a hell of a lot more thrilling to me than that of earning comparatively more money from doing stuff that wears you down with boring routine, and constantly muddling through and dealing with others' ignorance and stupidity in the act (guise) of service.

Back when I taught English for my brief time overseas; being sent frequently without a prepared lesson plan, into a classroom full of kids often too incorrigible or indifferent to learning anything, making and presenting a logic problem was often my salvation. If the kids were disinterested in learning language directly, they were more often than not more willing to be involved with a game or puzzle based on a formula, which they had to force themselves to express in English. I wasn't any good at enforcing classroom management with structure and discipline, but I did alright with at least capturing the attention of those few students who enjoyed the challenge of doing more critical thinking.

The one thing I miss most is getting to be engaged with more people who regularly deploy logic and common sense; so that's the kind of company I should be seeking out during my holiday time. I suppose then that one of my ambitions during this vacation time will be to start probing through and editing these past works of mine, and find publishers to submit them to. If they get rejected, I'll post them here to share with other interested parties. Perhaps my followers who are logic puzzle enthusiasts, especially those from the UK** who read my blog, could help me with this project.

 *- I'm referring to a time when the computer languages and technology I'm messing around with now did not yet exist.

**- The stats from my reader numbers by nation indicate that readers from the UK are only 7th in the standings. As it is currently, the rankings of my numbers of followers before that placement, by nation, rank as such: 1. Canada, 2. Russia, 3. Latvia, 4. United States of America, 5. Germany, 6. Ukraine.

Viva La Home

I did this very deliberately and purposely. I am using one of those cushioned laptop desks, which is propped up on top of my legs, that are raised and perched on an ottoman, while I'm seated in the bunny chair*, which I'm realizing I rarely ever use. I only have one ass, and it regularly prefers the chesterfield for comfort, but my habitual way of slopping my body into it isn't doing much good for a supportive healing posture right now, nor is it doing a lot to settle down my soreness and aching. This new spot is sort of a therapy: with this position, and the computer on my legs; it's a method of effectively pinning myself down so to force to me to stop walking/squirming around, and to just sit still, for at least an hour at a time. The chair is really on the smaller side as far as armchairs go, and it doesn't recline much, so it keeps me seated reasonably upright and in a more relatively confined, restrictive position without sacrificing too much comfort and support. Otherwise, I've either been too restless, or too distracted by pain, to simply use the moments to just meditate. Who in the hell can, or wants to, focus on the here and now if all that's there is real bodily discomfort? Thus, I'm not being very Zen. My mind is straying into realms of what I would, should, must, ought to, want to, need to, or have to, be doing instead of accepting the present moment. A time like this has been a harsh glimpse into how I'd be (un)able to cope if, God forbid, I ever had to go on long-term disability that impairs senses or mobility, or I had to manage through a similar such retirement.

I wrote an entry a while ago about having simple comforts and entertainment at home, titled The Four Square Meter Kingdom, I just reviewed it. Comparing my attitude back then with my sense of suffering and inconvenience now, is like touring two different worlds. Sure, having a chance to seek solace at home during a most brutal winter season was a welcome thought**, but it's "warmer" now, and it is so counter-intuitive for me to just sit around. The thing I'm realizing, sitting in a chair that I haven't actually used in months, is just how alienated I have become in trying to rest and relax within my own walls, and I'm questioning now about exactly how much time I actually do use to consciously live in my own home. Most of my workdays are 10-11 hours long, and then there's the time used commuting, shopping, running/fitness, walking the dog, and attending other appointments (mostly medical now): all outside of home. Days off, or free weekends, are just catch up time for other projects. My remaining waking hours used in here are used mostly being busy in the utility spaces: my kitchen and office, trying to research/plan/economize on things, then there is the time used for cleaning and maintenance, not relaxing or interesting stuff. The actual typical leisure time I have left is two to three hours for generally reading/writing, Internet, or TV between work and sleep. So, I now wonder, is this really living? Is this really as thrilling and adventurous as I've been allowing life to get? It's totally weird to be finding myself off on a stretch of days like this with more empty hours. As time goes on, I'm feeling more and more estranged from anything that involves engaging in social recreation***. I reflect and realize now about whenever I do have actual "vacation" time: just how poorly I use it. I know I'm not alone in feeling and thinking this way.

I brought home a stack of magazines and books from the library after my last appointment, more so to keep the passing of this time on the cheap side, to budget for more impending chiropractic and massage treatment bills. Amongst them is one fittingly called At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson. Initially, I never gave much thought about the prospective content of the book; I just really like Bryson as a non-fiction writer, and I haven't read this particular book of his that he wrote yet. He can take the most ordinary of things that most people take for granted, and he'll explain them as amazing topics embellished with detail, with a profound and interesting commentary on their placement and effect in our social history. He definitely is not a textbook writer. Dull things look extraordinarily meaningful, which I thought would be a welcome type of diversion to practice for around here right now. This book, wonderfully, adds a new and fresh  perspective about the development of housing throughout the course history, and the forces and cultural events that determined our very social evolution of lodging ourselves and way we design, assign, and utilize the space inside what we designate as our home. It should be required reading for architects, cultural anthropologists, interior designers, sociologists, psychologists, history teachers, engineers, economists, or people who just want to market home and furniture supplies, like with RONA, IKEA, or Home Depot.

Addendum: Today it officially is six months of winter for this region: snow coverage since Oct 22, 2012. If we still have snow around here by May, I think we'll be seeing a few people around here going postal.

*- It's called the bunny chair, not because it looks like a kiddie chair with pictures of bunnies on it, but because its former owner claimed that it was mostly used by their family pet: a rabbit. I found through local online buy and sell ads, and got it for free. An effort to reduce, reuse, recycle. There are marks around the base of the chair of evidence where the rabbit gnawed and scratched at it. Ella was sniffing at it suspiciously for a few weeks before she felt comfortable enough to use it. She, of course, is the most frequent user of this piece of furniture, it's the perfect size for her to curl up on.

**- Despite the weather and having moments of opportunity to do so, I rarely ever used them to just to dwell in those 4 square meters for any prolonged amount of time, like I have now.

***- Mostly due to the fact that my hours of work are skewed into the zone of when everyone else has their evening/weekend social entertainment hours.

First Night Shift of 2013: Post Game Beer

"A day without sunshine is like. . . well, you know, night." - The words of wisdom found on the underside of a bottle cap from a bottle of Hoptical Illusion Almost Pale Ale*
 

I'm utterly amazed and shocked right now that my brain still has the capacity to string/wire/connect together enough neurons in a series, to allow me to write this entry. I've only had two hours, within a period of thirty-four, of sleep so far. I'm trying to find the right words for all the anger and frustration, but it's hopeless. My effort to make it home in time before sunrise was all in vain. I'll only add that in the future, it would probably be in my best interest use every valid and legal measure available to get out of this bi-fortnightly fiasco. I might even have to go so far as to start watching out for this particular moon phase, or run into some bunker somewhere whenever this kind of Monday night comes along again. The shift itself went reasonably well. What I'm more pissed off about is the wretched chain of events prior and after the shift. I won't go into any great detail; I'll just say that within that time the matters involved: -42 C below wind chill, my car stalling, a sadistic dental hygienist**, 15 extra kilometres worth of walking, an idiotic CAA customer service rep, my neighbour's stupid car alarm, and a subsequent migraine, and the entanglement of all these events that are so bothersome that I'm resorting to something from a source with such a bizarre appellation as "Flying Monkeys" to pacify and sedate myself. I also have this to use (11 Tricks for Perfect Sleep)from my author-buddy, Tim Ferriss, who describes my particular form of insomnia to a tee.

Anyway, this particular beer I'm sampling seems to be extra endowed and bittered with some intense notes of dry finishing hops. Hops have the compound Humulone (alpha-lupunic acid), which has anti-viral properties, serves as a nerve and gastric tonic, and has sedative/hypnotic properties.

"He who drinks beer sleeps well. He who sleeps well cannot sin. He who does not sin goes to heaven. Amen." - Monk, Name unknown 

Ross Murray, writer for the Montreal Gazette once said: "Listening to someone who brews their own beer is like listening to a religious fanatic talk about the day he saw the light." He is, to a degree, quite right; it's only the state of exhaustion I'm in right now that keeps me from expounding more about it, or else I'd be in total beer snob mode right now. I'll simply end off with sharing my favourite beer-related limerick:

On the chest of a barmaid in Sale
Were tattooed the prices of ale,
And on her behind
For the sake of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.
-Anonymous  

* - Enjoy the free advertising plug there Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery (Where Normal is Weird). . . You're welcome!
**- I actually now believe that it's quite possible to get lobotomized through the probing around the nerves of one's molars and gingiva with a pointy sharp metal instrument.

One Quarter Left: of the Year ... and of Me

October began yesterday, so now we're into the beginning of the final quarter of the year. It opened with me making a platelet donation at Canadian Blood Services, and then going through the futile process of trying to rest before doing my stupid night shift.

I gave up in frustration with trying to rest through the day to prepare for it by trying to bore myself to sleep with studying. I ended up starting and processing a bunch of other household stuff. I hoped that the later sunrise would allow me more wind down time, but it wasn't so. I have three more of them to do before year's end. I do my best to push myself through when I do work them, but I've resolved to not put myself through any future hell of doing anymore of them. I have enough vacation hours and banked stat time to allow me to do so. It's better for both me and the people I serve if I avoid them. I don't want to go to any job, or do any task, or sign up for anything else where I'm reduced to being only 25% (or less), of the kind of person that I want to be; when it becomes such that it reflects both mentally and physically in my performance, which is what is effectively happening when I commit to doing these shifts.

So, I've been awake for more than 36 hours now. Here are a few more peculiarities that I'm noting and learning about me while I'm stricken with this degree of insomnia, with my senses working overtime, and depleted of a few less discretionary mental faculties:

• I try to chill out with music, giving eighties alternative/indy artists a good play over (The Cure, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Bowie, The Jesus & Mary Chain, XTC, Joy Division, old school R.E.M., et al.).
• Anything I tried studying the previous day is just not in memory, thus wasted time and a total write off. I have to redo the last unit from my programming manual.
• I get strange and ridiculous surges of hunger that interrupt sleep, and for very carb-loaded foods too. This time I did something out of character and made pancakes ... for myself , after I came home, a true sign that I'm having some sort of a mental breakdown from exhaustion.
• I purposely isolate myself at home to prevent myself from making impulsive purchases while having less than adequate decision-making ability.  
• I get really geared to do something to fix myself better, despite the fatigue, with problem solving strategies by exploring productivity improvement sites, like Mind Tools™ (only after when my eyes aren't hurting too much to read).
• Gobbling up any pain-relieve pill that will sooth the headaches and muscle/eye-soreness, (I usually avoid anything in pill form if I can).
• I try to vent my general edginess and frustration through blogging, hoping that sleep will strike me down soon afterward.

If I'm still not able to sleep after this, my next manoeuvre is to review my stack of scans, sketches, and scribblings to see what of these non-ongoing things are most likely achievable within the next three months. Part of my problem with the lack of headway in some things is the degree of interest diversity I have, and trying to do eight or nine things at a time, rather than just narrowing the focus down to one or two items. My To-Do list really needs to be abbreviated.