Snow days
Yesterday, the outdoors was Winter Wonderland. The snow is still out there now, but yesterday was filled with the glorious golden northwestern sunlight, so the snow on the branches glittered and the last autumn leaves glowed red and gold. And almost no one is at work, so I've mostly been at home for the past couple of days, since I don't know how to drive on ice and I certainly don't have the tires for it on my tiny rental car. Maybe I'm a wuss... but at least I'm not getting dents, and I have been doing a bit of work remotely, so it's not a complete loss.
Living far north is really unnatural for me. Nobody (even the locals) seem to like the short days in winter, but I didn't even like the really long days in summer. Whatever time the sun goes down, I want to sleep a few hours later. The fast change throws me off as bad as jetlag, and it's hard to get enough sleep. In summer it was just a complete lack of situation for sleeping until at least 1:00 or 2:00. Now, with it getting dark at 4:00pm, I get really tired around 7:00 or 8:00, and I don't really want to go to sleep then. But if I stay up past that, I'm wide awake until after midnight (usually 1 or 2), even if I did get up early and/or didn't get enough sleep. I think my body is hard-wired for sunset around 6:00, going to bed around 10:00, and presumably getting up around 6:00, which is what I did back in the Golden Days Before Stress. Yes, believe it or not, I had a few years as a good honest morning person, getting up around sunrise with no alarms. Then, those pesky teenage hormones that cause one not to produce melatonin til late at night must have kicked in (yes, there is a biological basis), and through whatever combination of habit and actual continued biological basis, I still have the sleep pattern of a 17-year-old... and the skin of a 13-year-old (plus a few lines), and the palate of a 5-year-old.
I spend a lot of time just thinking. It's like setting up house inside your head. I spend a lot of time there, so I want it to be comfy and orderly and nice. I like to feel like I'm making progress at it, and sometimes I even get outside evidence that I am. The other day it occurred to me that the mind is like a landscape, and the consciousness is a little person walking over it. Sometimes you get to hills where you can see off into the distance, into a whole bunch of new territory, but you can't see any of it in much detail. So you go and walk over there and look at it up close, and it takes a while to do all that walking.
Living far north is really unnatural for me. Nobody (even the locals) seem to like the short days in winter, but I didn't even like the really long days in summer. Whatever time the sun goes down, I want to sleep a few hours later. The fast change throws me off as bad as jetlag, and it's hard to get enough sleep. In summer it was just a complete lack of situation for sleeping until at least 1:00 or 2:00. Now, with it getting dark at 4:00pm, I get really tired around 7:00 or 8:00, and I don't really want to go to sleep then. But if I stay up past that, I'm wide awake until after midnight (usually 1 or 2), even if I did get up early and/or didn't get enough sleep. I think my body is hard-wired for sunset around 6:00, going to bed around 10:00, and presumably getting up around 6:00, which is what I did back in the Golden Days Before Stress. Yes, believe it or not, I had a few years as a good honest morning person, getting up around sunrise with no alarms. Then, those pesky teenage hormones that cause one not to produce melatonin til late at night must have kicked in (yes, there is a biological basis), and through whatever combination of habit and actual continued biological basis, I still have the sleep pattern of a 17-year-old... and the skin of a 13-year-old (plus a few lines), and the palate of a 5-year-old.
I spend a lot of time just thinking. It's like setting up house inside your head. I spend a lot of time there, so I want it to be comfy and orderly and nice. I like to feel like I'm making progress at it, and sometimes I even get outside evidence that I am. The other day it occurred to me that the mind is like a landscape, and the consciousness is a little person walking over it. Sometimes you get to hills where you can see off into the distance, into a whole bunch of new territory, but you can't see any of it in much detail. So you go and walk over there and look at it up close, and it takes a while to do all that walking.
Labels: random thoughts, Stuff I do
posted by Amy at 6:11 PM
1 Comments:
I like the conciousness analogy. :-) And it continues to snow on the west side! Totally bizarre... I like Penny Arcade's comments about it:
"...when snow falls over on this side of the state people don't see it as weather, it's seen as a portent - evidence of an angry pantheon. A single snowflake will fall on their windshield, and they will immediately swerve their SUV into a truck hauling fuel."
Hahahah! But it's seriously dangerous out there, stay in for as long as you need, I say!
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