slept off and on from 2-5, awake for a little and then back to sleep. Finally woke up at 7am.

when to sleep around 10 last night with the beginnings of a migraine that started with a headache from therapy. I had been awake since 10pm the night before. when to sleep at 5am before that.

woke at midnight feeling fine and awake. was able to go back to sleep. woke around 10am and lay in bed thinking until 11:30am.

So I am sitting at 12 hours sleep. I have something to go to in the city at 7:30am tomorrow. Don’t know if I will sleep beforehand or not. *le sigh*

With all the canned and processed food I have eaten over the last week, I have felt desperate for food with cell walls. I was even craving celery.

I went shopping and got sugar snap peas, apples, cob salad, tomatoes, watermelon, and corn on the cob. Even pickles count.

I just went through an odd web surfing journey:

I was reading one of Cracked.com’s funny lists and I ended up with copies of published papers on work I did as a staff scientist 15 years ago. Cracked -> linked article->book article uses as reference->my old workplace->my old boss->published papers. What an odd journey from silly to serious.

The Cracked.com funny list is 6 ways your office is literally killing you

http://www.cracked.com/article_18654_6-ways-your-office-literally-killing-you_p2.html

Because my old profession was lighting, the bit about how fluorescents and over-lighting causing problems peaked my interest and hit my research button. Almost everywhere I have worked, I end up reducing the overall lighting. No one had done it before and generally people found they really liked it to the point it would end up too dark and lighting would need to be added back in.

(Lighting story and geekiness)
At one job where I worked for five years, I would unscrew the lights above me. I would be moved to a different desk since corporate reshuffling happens a lot and the person getting my old desk would find they like the light level as is and wouldn’t want the lights screwed back in again. I would unscrew the ones above my then current desk and things repeated each shuffle. Eventually the entire floor became too dark because no one wants theirs to be the lights turned back on to provide lights for everyone. A lot of people coming to see us would remark on how dark our space was. We started calling ourselves Mushrooms. The dark was our choice, the BS was typical corporate type BS.

The Cracked.com thing was posted today (July 26, 2010) and the article they use as reference was written in 2008. The book the article uses as reference has a 2nd edition available via Amazon.com published in the 80′s. All of them claim how bad fluorescent lighting is for you. Which is our of date. It is interesting to see how something continues on and is completely supported by references and is still wrong. Their claim may or may not be valid but because of some major changes that are not taken into consideration, the claim doesn’t have a base.

In the 90′s legislation went through outlawing the types of fluorescent light bulbs that the 80′s book talks about. This happened for energy efficiency reasons but has the benefit of higher quality lights. Fluorescent flickering went from 60 cycles a second to 3,600 cycles a second. The compound in the tubes that give off the light was changed from one spectrum of light to a more complex mix of minerals which gives lighting better suited for our eyes than before. The ones that are comparable to full daylighting are more expensive but the regular ones are so much better than when many assumptions about fluorescent lighting were carved into stone.

I have a lot to say about overlighting but am not going to go into it now. A lot of it boils down to the idea that more is better than not enough. From some of the other stuff the article said, it may have been found that the opposite is true, more is much worse than not enough.

(End Lighting geekiness)

From the book referenced the Lighting Group at LBNL which is where I worked in 1996. I found links to published papers of projects I worked on. Since I was there for 7 months and worked on the end of one project, the experimental phase of another project, the beginning of another project, and was not part of any project from beginning to end, my name is not included on any of the papers. The project where I was the one that collected the bulk of the data wasn’t a government project and there was no government paper released on it.

From there I looked up my old boss and found he stopped publishing in 2000 and left in 2004 to go to UC Davis and form a Lighting Group up there. It was odd finding him on Linkedin. I can find no record of my co-worker after our boss left. I can’t find him out working on his own. I admired my boss and liked him. Towards the end of my time there (funding for my position was cut) he did something that really stepped on my toes. I find now that I think I still admire him and have fun stories to tell about him to others but with the possibility of reaching out and reconnecting with him I find that I really don’t like him and view him as a snake in the grass that will strike with a poison bite without thinking and maybe even without noticing he has done so. He is using the same pictures that I saw of him 15 years ago. I can remember seeing those pictures and smiling and thinking how cool, unique, and quirky he is. Now I see the exact same picture and he looks sinister and not trustworthy. He isn’t a bad person, I just feel he is harmful for me to deal with.

This started as a light hearted post and got a lot deeper. Not getting a chance to talk to people for days means it gets stored up, I guess.

Many science fiction stories and studies show that humans have a hard time with schedules that are not based on a 24 hour day. I am using this as evidence that I am not human (OK not really but it is a fun idea to explain my “natrual” default schedule).

I slept off and on through Sat. I woke at 2am on Sunday morning and was awake until around 5am Monday morning. I woke around 9:30am and felt good. I got my shake and nuzzled down in bed because it felt good, not because I was drowsy. At 1pm, a phone call woke me. I had been dead asleep. I drank my shake and watched some tv.

After watching both parts of the final Dollhouse episodes I ended up crying hard and wore myself out. I guess it could have been around 4pm. Exhausted, I fell asleep again. Woke and am finally moving again at 8pm Monday evening.

It appears that it is relatively easy for me to adapt to a longer than 24 hour day even with the light dark cycles at 24 hours. A wild guess would put me as adapted to a planetary day of 36 hours.

The thing is that it appears that my dad has the same inertia issues I do. He loathes to go to bed when he is awake and loathes to get up when he is asleep. This issue is what has made my schedule what it is. I don’t have an external schedule placed on me. He has always had someone around that is on a 24 hour schedule to keep him there.

I am sure some of it is my depression or whatever. But I wanted to record my observations (and what fun I can have with them) somewhere to find again later. (when my real origins are found, I can then claim I always suspected it).

Figured it would be a good idea to make note that something I have accomplished over the last few days is meeting with two agencies to get me up and running with them. They were uninterested before but called me this time.

I have done some updating on my samples and have not heard if I did enough or not. I find this annoying.

I now have a Facebook page and a twitter account for my “real” self on the web so that those can be found if people google me. I am working on forming the idea that they will be a limited version of me rather than me pretending to be plastic like I have learned doesn’t work for me in the past.

The model I am using for my real name facebook page it to be much more open to casual contacts instead of people I actually know and are active in my life. The “real” version will be limited to socially acceptable and work related interests whereas my real version is about any part of me that comes to the surface. This here is my real LJ and it gets all the dark and light stuff. Weeee.

I doubt that I will be creating a public LJ. I just don’t have much to say that I want people who will be judging me to see without context. Before I could trust that people who would look for me would actually want to know what I have to say and who I am. Now the internet is used to find info on people to judge who they are before even meeting them. This I am not to pleased about but see how it can be useful. Ergo, I am creating a personal brand. I am not selling myself this way but am limiting my output to the parts that are publicly appreciated. I thank yndy for the example of how to do this without pretending to be something I am not.

Maybe this is where I am getting my ideas about going back to limiting myself and my connections to only surface levels.

drowsy and dropped off until 2am. After 3am, I put food into me. I took my meds which I had missed for two days.

I feeling more like I normally do lately but still wondering about the usefulness of cutting off connection to become functional again.

I feel so drugged. I have slept hard. I went to sleep around 5am to be woken up at 10am by the fix-it-guy to fix my sink. Around 11 or noon, I was dropping off again. I finally woke up around 7pm and just want to go back to sleep again.

My sleep has been off for days. I think I have been getting by with 2-4-8 hours a sleep at odd intervals. I know that I have gone 36 hours without sleep and it felt just fine. I have been wondering why I feel drowsy at 6pm and wide awake at 10pm when I keep a normal schedule.

The dream this time involved me working with a danish guy (tall, thin, named something like John or Joseph, reminds me a lot of an old dear friend of mine that opted out of my life) on some spy type mission where we posed as a married couple in Denmark.

The part that is sticcking with me is my energy running down after a day spent exploring the town we lived in and shopping. I didn’t have any local currency and they didn’t take credit cards(the totals were given in powers of 2. Some very simple things I was buying ended up cominig to 2^30 which is beyond unreasonable. We were waiting for my brother (who was visiting) toget out of the bathroom and I woke up finding myself alseep on a store display and both of them gone. It was late and I had needed to eat when we were waiting before.

I went the few blocks to the car and found it was stil there. As I managed to get out of the parking lot and try to get out of the center of town, I spied him in the window of a restaurant. I stopped and confronted him. He said that he and my brother didn’t want to disurb me because it looked like I needed the rest and that they were going to walk home so that they could leave me the car so I could take care of myself and not need a parent. The parent thing got me. It was the idea that when I run out of energy, I need someone to step in like a parent and take care of me and that is sort of the way it really is. Life is so so so much easier when I have someone that can and will do that for me.

I thought that this guy would and I realized that he didn’t really know enough about me to be able to do that. He really thought this was a good solution and didn’t have an idea how bad it was to leave me in a foreign country with no usable currency, no way to contact him, and no idea where he went other than to eat.I had no backups and after I got back to the car, I realized i didn’t know the way back home either. I felt like I was not able to ask him for anything like money, directions or help. I felt like I was on my own and that I would eventually be ok but it was going to cost me.

I didn’t feel betrayed or hurt or anything. I felt mild disappointment like an entire branch of options just got erased and they had looked like really useful options and it was a shame they didn’t really exist. I was disappointed that I had depended on those options enough that I didn’t have other options worked out and I needed to do that while at my lowest point.

It felt very natural that I didn’t have any back up other than the most superficial (like what a store clerk would offer), nowhere to go for help and had to do everything by myself.

I don’t know if this is an attitude that is a goal I should be trying to get to or something I am trying to work to get away from.

“So I don’t need someone to parent me.”

Now that I am at the end of typing this out. I don’t feel drugged anymore and like all I can do is drop back to sleep again. I am getting the idea that the place where I ended in the dream was my logic only self with no emotional connections and not caring for any emotional connections. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I have not seen anyone for days and will not be seeing anyone for days unless I work hard to contact people to set things up. The thought of going into that mode again feels exhausting to me. Right now it feels like the only person that want to connect with me is my mom and I have to fight to keep her from not overwhelming me. Other than that, I am on my own. I feel right now that I want to just accept that fact and start working out what options I need to just take care of myself without having any space open to allow anyone else in. To prepare for only the most surface level of connections. To plan on anything more than that is to set myself up for only the type of things that happened in the dream.

I know one of my major life goals is to have real connection to people. I have put a lot of work and suffered a lot to have this. From where I am right now, I can’t see this working or have any purpose. I “know” better but the filter is thick right now. It is very much an abstract knowing.

I feel that I can get myself out of my hole that I have created if I stick to this attitude. I don’t know if this is true. It feels like a position of power. I believe that this is where I have lived most of my life and what I swore to not go back to because that spark that makes life worth living can exist in this mode. But that spark doesn’t show up much or doesn’t have a lasting effect if it has managed to show up living it the other way either.

I didn’t realize how deep this went until I started working it out via writing it out. I am very tired and want to either go back to being strong or get some of the reward of being weak. Because I know how important my Work has been to me, I want to just turn myself off, go back to sleep and see how things are later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/memory/

From the BBC science site: Memory test:

results

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml

The BBC science site has an interesting test to find out what sex you brain is. I ended up with exactly 0 between Men and Women. Balance, yeah that’s me. Some of the areas were strongly one gender or the other and they averaged out to even. Other areas where in the middle of the gender lines.

Here is the breakdown: