Doolies sent me to write. It’s a good thing she did otherwise this might have been a repeat of Tuesday night (actually, you would have seen the excuse-filled rant on Friday). I’m feeling crappy still. My ‘quil dosage has run out. I took a Dayquil at around noon and it’s now way past its 6-hour effective time. My next dosage is Nyquil and I can’t take that until I’m ready for sleep. You see my dilemma.

Tiger is tucked in and hopefully on her way to sleepy time. Dinosaur is next to me in the bouncer making noise. Not sure how long he’s going to last sitting there. Doolies is upstairs. He might be hungry or bored. Not sure which one. I’m not hungry or bored.

Today was another long day. I managed to drop off Tiger at day care with plenty of time to arrive at work before the start of my meetings. It was another long day of depressing meetings. Not that meetings are always depressing. Just today’s.

The dinosaur noises begin. He’s already kicked off his blanket and he’s staring at the pull toys. He plays with the bouncer toys more often than Tiger did. He likes to swing his arm and hit them and sometimes grab them. He has surprising good dexterity for a two-month old. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. He definitely has better dexterity than Tiger, but I’m not sure what is normal. I’ve only be around two 2-year olds, and the memories of the first one are at best hazy. He’s kicking again and looking unhappy. I’m coughing and looking unhappy. Clearly we’re related.

Chuck over at liminality.org has another fascinating entry, this time on boob jobs. Yeah, I know. It’s a real researched essay. Much better than the scribbles I write here. I’m not sure why I don’t ever write essays with organized thoughts and footnotes. At one time I could write those. Although I now wonder if I was ever able to write essays. I still write them at work (I think). Seeing as I probably will never write another personal essay, this may be one of those unanswerable questions.

Dinosaur is safely in his mother’s arms now. She took pity on him and rescued Dinosaur from his selfish daddy. I’m alone with my thoughts and the clock and all the goodness that can possible come from those two things.

Okay, teh internets distracted me but I’m back. I know, I know. I wasn’t supposed to be peeking but when I sat here staring at the screen, coughing my head off, I wondered what would be the harm of a glance. The harms are too many to mention.

I had a conversation with an extrovert yesterday. He’s the kind of guy who people want to be his friend. He also likes to draw attention to himself. He’ll say inappropriate things or screams across the hallway for no reason. People call that charming. I like him because he’s also wicked smart and not fearful. I asked him if his brain is always on, whether thoughts always zip through his brain. He admitted they do and it makes it difficult to sleep since he can’t quiet them down. I thought as much given how good he is at bringing crazy thoughts together and always having an opinion (usually outlandish but always there) on everything.

My brain doesn’t work like that. When I stare at a blank page my brain is usually blank. Thoughts flick through, more like shooting stars on a quiet evening. But they aren’t frequent and if I don’t look fast enough they’re gone. It’s why I find it difficult to push words and why I feel such a loss when ideas hit me and I don’t have any way to record them. My mind is not full of chatter. It’s relatively quiet, which makes sleep easy for me. To quiet my brain doesn’t take much (unless I have a headache, which is a different sort of noise). I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have those voices screaming in my brain. There are downsides to voices, I know. There are few doubting or worrying voices in my brain. Although, to be clear, this doesn’t mean I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time imagining terrible and horrifying fantasies of what may go wrong. I have plenty of that in the form of imaginings. But it’s different from the voices.

This ties in with another strange working of my brain: I don’t see things in my dreams. I had this discussion in one of my philosophy classes during college. We were on the topic of dreaming, and when someone talked about what they saw in their dream—or perhaps they were talking about whether they saw blank and white or color in their dream—I mentioned that I don’t see anything. It’s not like I’m blind in my dream. It’s more that I “see” my dreams as imaginings. I know what is happening and know where things are placed, but I don’t see pictures as in life or a movie. Instead I’ll know I’m walking on the planet Mars, and perhaps I’ll know who I’m with, and if I think about it, I’ll know what we’re wearing and perhaps what we see, and what we’re doing, but this knowing is different from seeing either through my eyes or from different perspectives. It’s difficult to describe except by replacing seeing with knowing.

My wrists are hurting from all this typing. It’s strange because I spent little time typing today, seeing as I was trapped in a meeting all day. Doolies and I both played Naginata hooky. I’m sick and Doolies is worried she’s coming down with something as well. She’s also been going to class three times a week for almost a month now. A break for her was probably the right call. I desperately needed the exercise, but given my sickness, my crazy coughs, and the pain in my head when I move it too quickly, I decided tonight was not the night to push myself. I’ll hopefully be ready to go on Saturday if everything goes right.

Even with my lapse I made it through the time. I feel good about it. Thanks, Doolies, for reminding me to write and get out from under the covers.