(friendswood) something new

my favorite time of day is the half hour before the half hour before sunrise. the time when the sky is still dark but you can feel that the dawn is coming. i like it whether i've been up all night and haven't gone to bed yet or if i'm getting up early for some reason. being awake at that time of day feels like you're in on a really great secret.

it always amazes me what a little bit of sleep can do to my outlook on life. two nights of nearly 8 hours of sleep, and i feel like i'm back on track. maybe finally giving myself the space yesterday to take a time out is exactly what has allowed me to feel like i don't need it anymore. so, even though my pool is still green and filled with leaves (which i view as a metaphor for my life), and my pool filter is ...well... lemme post a picture:



and even though my house is a mess and i still haven't unpacked from my australia trip last month and i still have weeks of work to finish for the australians and my cat still has fleas and i don't have anything to wear because i have gained too much weight and my laundry is undone and my car transmission seems to be going out and my house stinks and my papers are unorganized and my hair refuses to leave the 80s and my studio website is still undone and the 5 CDs i'm working on are still undone and i live in friendswood texas and i haven't published a single scientific paper on my phd work and about 15 different groups of people are waiting for things from me and my garage is still filled with boxes and i haven't started work on my solar system sonification project and i still haven't finished the technical report for the nasa oceanographic analog missions project that i did last year and a bunch of other stuff that i can't really talk about...

yeah so even though all of that...
i feel today (finally) like i can cope with it all and stop being all paralyzed and overwhelmed. all from just a couple days of adequate sleep.

i'm not a superstitious person at all, but another interesting thing happened this morning at dawn when i woke up. right in the middle of my right heel is a wart that has been there for as long as i can remember. i think i first noticed it when i was 7 and i stepped on a nail on the way to swim team practice. i probably got the wart at the pool, where i spent half my childhood. anyway, over the years i've tried getting rid of it. a couple extended campaigns of attack, including even participating in a wart study at stanford (in the non-placebo group). it has never gone away. not even close. someone once told me that he believed that it would go away when i really wanted it to go away. sometime in graduate school i started to believe that the wart was a physical manifestation of my biggest character flaws that needed attention, and that when i made sufficient progress on these character flaws, it would go away. i guess that's sort of a variation of my friends theory. for a few years i focused more on my character and less on direct attack of the wart. there seemed to be no change. then sometime in the last two years i noticed that the wart was spreading. there were two new ones up on the ball of my foot! so i decided to take a multipronged approach. i redoubled my efforts to improve my character. but i also went to see a laser surgeon. i've been going in for regular zaps every month or so now for the last year. this has cost me a lot of money, and since i've started, two new warts have appeared and grown bigger (!), while two have gone away. the original one seems as vibrant as ever, appearing to thrive on the attention. i have interpreted this to mean that my character flaws are deep-rooted, tough, and pertinacious. also that when i conquer one, more pop up. nevertheless, i am determined and hopefully more persistent than they are, and i have started hacking away at these warts myself in addition to the laser treatment.

this morning when i woke up my whole heel itched like something big was going on down there. what i'm thinking is that something new is afoot. i'm ready to conquer the big one, i think. i'm not certain which of my flaws is "the big one," but i'm pretty sure it's discipline. if not, i have a feeling i'm going to figure it out soon.

so i'm going to go back to work today. right after the pool guy leaves.