July 23, 2003

I’ve rewritten the library, and begun updating it again. You’ll find a mini-review of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing by Philip Greenspun, among other things.

My vision for the library is to turn it into a celebration of the beauty and wonder and weirdness of books. I want it to celebrate my bibliophiliac nature.

1:00 p.m.

The Photo of the Week. A good opportunity for me to broaden my mind.

Okay, this week I’m catching up on all the journal entries I meant to post last week but didn’t, then meant to post earlier this week but couldn’t after my hand slipped while rewiring the site.

Sometimes I wish we lived in a Star Trek world, where you could fix a matter transporter by pressing a blue salt shaker into a tube. Then I could rearrange the interface to this site by spending half an hour dictating the new interface to the computer, as it responded in a cranky monotone.

Ah well. The web world has progressed by a heck of a lot over time. Never forget that at one time simply changing the color scheme of a site like this was a Herculean effort. Never mind adding navigation buttons to every page. Yikes.

Anyway, on to last week’s entry:

Remember what you felt like the day after pulling an all-nighter? Remember feeling noticeably off? Definitely awake, but the edge is gone. You’re not fully there.

That’s how I feel as I write this (on Wednesday the 16th). This is probably due to the fact that I got four hours of sleep last night. Intentionally.

I did this because I talked to a co-worker about my recent problems going to sleep. She said something ridiculously sensible: If your body doesn’t want to go to sleep, maybe that’s because your body doesn’t want to go to sleep. Maybe I’m forcing myself to get eight hours of sleep when I only need six. Or fewer.

So, last night, I stopped by a coffee shop and bought some groceries and talked to Saalon for an hour and went for a run around the neighborhood and showered and wrote some more of Seeing Things Invisible and watched Robotech, and went to bed only when I got exhausted, and that was a bit after 3:00 a.m.

…And I had no trouble waking up. I trotted weirdly down to the bathroom, got ready, left for work on time, and arrived a bit early of all things. It worked.

The only dark cloud on my skyline is this off feeling. The thing is, I don’t know if this feeling is a residue from my recent screwy sleep, or if it’s caused by my four hours of sleep last night.

>Writing Thoughts

Ahhhhh. I finished a short story last night.

Well, more accurately, I wrote the last page of a short story last night. It still needs a lot of editing.

But…ahhhhh. I finished a short story.

I’m proud of it, too. It’s an emotional story about a woman who’s returning to the small town she grew up in, to retrieve an earring she left behind, so that she can take it to her stroke-impaired mother to see if it will make her remember her past. It’s sad, but it’s very hopeful.