Insomnia

Those who know me more than in passing know that I regularly fail at sleep. I don't know enough about D20 to say something witty about my sleep-skills but quite clearly, my stats suck.

I have a creepy suspicion that I've just forgotten how to go to sleep. Like somewhere along the road I just forgot how to turn my brain off. It shouldn't take hours to fall asleep, but it does, every single fucking night. The nights I do get to sleep that is.

That is not to say that It haven't gotten better. It's been worse, far worse, but I seem to have reached an impasse as far as my improvement is regarded. I've been considering taking up meditation, re-learn to shut my mind up if you will, but I've yet to mobilise the motivation to actually learn, or the economic means for that matter.

One morbidly interesting aspect is when I catch myself re-enacting negative patterns which further keeps me from sleep. For example, looking up insomnia in it's various forms on the net and getting all anxious and depressed about it, which does not help me calming down enough to sleep, a theme which has endless variations of course.


Interesting anti-achivements of insomnia so far:

• Turning my sleeping-hours around so badly that I went to bed at 6 AM and had to stay up 36 hours straight in order to turn my sleeping hours right.
• More than once.
• three times.
• While having a cold to deal with.

Being awake for 36-hours is less-than-fun. There are several studies that co-relate insomnia with depression, something which does not surprise me in the least. The things that so drasticly impairs your capability of rational thought, sound assessment of self and rapidly escalate your general angst-levels the way insomnia does are few and far in between.

After a conversation with a friend of mine who currently works with studying sleep, I'm planning on visting my doctor to determine wether I'm suffering from insomnia in a clinical fashion the day after tomorrow. And now I've written it down so I'm officially comitted to the idea so there, I hope I get around to it. I miss sleeping well on weekdays.

If I were Shakespeare...

...I'd be so much better at writing than I actually am.

Having hung around a Creative Writing forum for a couple of years now, I haven't been able to keep myself from making a few observations. Mostly pertaining to defensive pubescent teens, but still, some observations. One of these observations is on a defensive technique that has reoccurred with such regularity as to have become a pair of common logical fallacies of writing I've decided to call:

The Fame Fallacy, and The Cummingsdun'it! Fallacy

Writers guilty of this fallacy tend to make statements such as:

"If Shakespeare wrote this you would've loved it." Or,

"Cummings wrote like this"

What they fail to realize is that cummings did not "get away" with oddly structured work because he was famous, he was famous because his poetry was groundbreaking and not in any way random in its structure. To put it succinctly, Cummings and Shakespeare had skill, and if Shakespeare had written what they themselves had written, he would have written it differently. And not just because Shakespeare was a playwright and a poet rather than a High-Fantasy-Space-Opera-Soap Novelist.

The real issue of the Fame Fallacy is that the writer who fall back on it expects to be given the benefit of the doubt. S/he wrongly assumes that famous writers are given this benefit because of their fame, rather than the skill and talent that brought them their fame.

A common side-track of The Fame Fallacy is The Cummingsdun'it! Fallacy

The problem in this instance is that the writer wrongly assume that if Cummings did it, so can they. The problem, apart from failing to understand or see the system behind unorthodox structure in poetry, or the point behind writing prose in a certain manner, or the fact that some things just require plain skill to pull of, is that they don't understand the historical or social context behind that particular piece of writing.

Writing does not exist in a vacuum, as most crafts, it has developed over time. While certain true masters of the craft (like, you guessed it, Shakespeare) have managed to write things that truly and genuinely still move and engage us centuries after the fact, it does not remove the historical aspect of their work. Shakespeare is not only enjoyable because of his great skill, he is enjoyable as high water-mark of classical sonnets and overall 16th century writing. Trying to duplicate his archaic syntax just because you like your poetry to be flowery is completely missing the point of why it works for him and not for you, just like most fantasy writers who want to be Tolkien manages to miss that the The Lord of The Rings is a by-product of a life-time spent creating an alternate-world Europe, which is what carries the books through in the end.

While there are a few choice exceptions in these Fallacies, such as writing a 16th century styled Sonnet, archaic syntax to boot to better understand such sonnets overall, or to increase your mastery of language, budding writers would do best to let these fallacies go, along with their pride.

Now let's just hope no one wrote this down in better words long before I even thought of it.

I see dumb people

They don't know they're dumb. Quite honestly, I am absolutely certain that they're unaware of their own moronitude, otherwise they wouldn't be acting this way.

To fill you in on some background info:

I had a really shitty day at work.

For those of you not in the know, my job consists of convincing people on the streets to donate money to Greenpeace on a regular basis. In other words, I work in sales. I sell you a good conscience. Or I would, if you people would fucking stop and talk to me.

This rant is however, not about those people.

It amazes me to no end how absolutely idiotic people will act when you are in a foul mood. Let it be well-known that I do not share my bad mood with people I hardly know unless someone specificly enquires for my state of well-being. Let it also be known that I tend to answer such questions honestly.

I don't consider myself a whiny person, or someone who gives up easily, but there comes a point when you've forced yourself to jump back on the wagon so many times that it's time to face the fact and cut your losses. Some days are not worth any investement. It boggles me to no end that people will see fit to inform me of the most mind-numbingly obvious facts of life such as:

• Tomorrow is a new day
• Don't take it personally
• All jobs suck sometimes
• Everyone has bad days every now and then

If we momentarily put aside how incredibly condescending and demeaning it is to assume that anyone who has even half their wits about them haven't realised these things, these people have the audacity to tell you this in a cheery, perky voice. As if the very fact that other people suffer shitty days right now, all over the world, in this very instance is supposed to make you feel better. Either that, or you're an ungrateful spoiled brat for daring to feel that your day was shitty because ohmyfuck the children in Africa are fucking starving to death.

What the hell happened to granting a person some space and integrity to bounce back in?

Honestly, if your comfort at the end of a shitty day does not involve a pipe, a whiskey and a hug I don't want to fucking see you.