Quick notes
Lessee. I attended two birthday parties over the weekend: Susan's on Saturday, where I finally met Jen in person (having previously encountered her in email), and a little miniature quasi-surprise party on Sunday evening, where I hung out with a bunch of Pomonans. Which gave me a brief flashback to the first couple years I was back in the Bay Area, when Sarah's Pomona friends and then, later, Kam's Mudd friends constituted most of my social group. There seems to be a loose network of social ties and synchronicity that connects like-minded folks from various small (mostly liberal-arts) colleges: Swarthmore, Pomona, Mudd, Carleton, Oberlin, to some extent Reed (though less so), maybe a couple of others.
Sunday night, I finished some edits I needed to make, and was briefly kind of smug about finally finishing a long-delayed task, but then got stressed about various things. It was 1 a.m., and I was barely-keep-my-eyes-open exhausted, but I went to listen to a particularly soothing song I like before going to sleep, and discovered that it was on one of the CDs that disappeared after the Utah trip. Ended up spending another hour online buying CDs even though I really need to cut back on spending for a while. Went to bed around 2:15, read for ten minutes, turned off the light, and started fretting. And couldn't sleep. Eventually got up and made a list of all the other long-delayed tasks that I'd completely forgotten about earlier, and after that managed to get some sleep.
Yesterday, after a lousy morning, was nicely productive. At work, got little done until late afternoon, but then zipped through a bunch of stuff I needed to do. After coming home, I read something like nine or ten stories I needed to read, did a little administrative stuff, wrote a little email. (And really, a day with three notes from Cat can't be all bad. (Hi, Cat!)) I originally said "three emails," but then that sounded wrong somehow. : )
Slept okay, though not really enough. I should note that for the past couple weeks, I've been getting a lot of sleep (for me); often 7 or 8 hours a night, sometimes more. It just doesn't occur to me to talk about it except when I don't get enough, and recently the nights I've had only 5 hours are more debilitating than usual. I wonder if my body's finally going on strike to protest the lack of sleep. Unfortunately, it has only itself to blame; it's not my idea to wake up after 5 hours.
Oddly, it sounds like a lot of people have been having trouble sleeping lately. I keep seeing journal entries from various and sundry folks saying that they woke up in the middle of the night, or couldn't fall asleep, or slept badly. Probably just my usual patternmaking; probably not unusual, just noticing those who say it so it sounds like a pattern.
This morning, did some more editing. Now I need to go to work.