Raging fires caused by climate change wrecking havoc up and down the entire West Coast; a seemingly interminable pandemic that still is not under control; the very real possibility of election-related violence a few months from now: Americans have a lot on our plate at the moment and most of it really sucks. Like everybody, I’ve been coping in my own ways – trying to take care of myself, physically and mentally, while doing what I can to help my family and others close to me. I’ve been doing mostly okay. The fact that S and I are both gainfully employed is a huge boon, but finances are but a tiny sliver of the overall health-and-happiness pie.
There are things which aren’t going as well. A big one for me is sleep. I’ve mentioned before on this blog my love-hate relationship with sleep: I love doing it; I hate trying to do it. What I wouldn't give to be one of those people, like my wife and several of my friends, who are lights-out when their head hits the pillow. But I’m not. I’m not an insomniac, but I’m a fussy sleeper. I need everything to be just so to fall asleep. If I can set my own schedule, and sleep from, like, 2:30 am to 10:30 am then things would be much better, but obviously having kids and a “normal” office job makes that impossible. (I think this is a big reason I liked college so much. I could synch up my schedule with my inner clock.)
So, what typically happens now is I go to bed around 1:00 am, I wake up at 6:30 am, because S and the kids are up, and I sense my household is abuzz, then my youngest son gets into bed with me and rolls around annoyingly for a half-hour, and then he leaves and I doze lightly until 8:00 am, at which point my alarm goes off, and I hit snooze twice, and then I bolt up at 8:18 am and get the kids ready for virtual school at 9:00 am. One weird thing is that I always have amazing sleep for the two nine-minutes snooze sessions. It’s that amazing, deep dreamland, REM sleep. I really think those 18 minutes are the difference between me being zombie-like exhausted all day and being just normal very tired.
Sleep is something that makes no sense to me – or at least the fact that it can be so difficult makes no sense. If you have food it’s easy to eat; if you have water it’s easy to drink; if you have to poop or pee it’s easy poop or pee (for the most part). But sleep is in a different class: It’s a necessary physiologically act that, for whatever reason, is not very easy for a sizeable section of the population. It just makes no sense.
Here are a few other things in a similar vein.
Why do people, especially kids, love sugary, unhealthy foods instead of nutrient-rich healthy foods? I’ve heard it posited that this is how we evolved because our ancestors desired calorie-rich foods when calories were scarce. However, I don’t really buy this, because I don’t think it’s ever advantageous, from a survival perspective, to eat shit food. Like, if you could only have one meal, and your options were a bag of cotton candy or a bag of broccoli, you’d always be better off eating the broccoli, no? But every kid would take the cotton candy. It just makes no sense.
Why are miscarriages so common? One-fourth of pregnancies end in utero. That is an insanely high number, if you think about it, and one that causes much consternation and sadness in this world. It also, to me, is a pretty good argument against the religious, “pro life” classification of fetuses as people. So, by such people's logic, God – this magnificent, perfect, all-powerful entity – wipes out a quarter of humanity before it’s even born? It just makes no sense.
Why are we so isolated in the universe? Space: the final frontier. Except there’s nothing out there. Yeah, I know, there’s cool stuff like planets and asteroids and black holes and stuff. But where are the aliens? Where are the other inhabitable worlds? Where's the life? Why are we so alone? Imagine a universe like Star Trek, where we can move about from planet to planet, from star system to star system. It’s not sci-fiction. Well, it is, but only because of our place in the universe. We would’ve had people on Mars 30 years ago if it could sustain life. We could go to other solar systems, but for the fact the second closest star to us is four light-years away. (So, it would only take 150,000 years to get there, using slightly better technology than we have today.) The really deflating part: We can see and hear much, much further than we can travel, and we don’t see or hear anything out there. There’s no indication there is any life within contact range, and we're exploring using light, which is faster than we can possibly go no matter how good our technology. I mean, I suppose we could discover shortcuts through the fabric of space (wormholes), or learn how to harvest resources from space, or recycle so efficiently, that we could create a society that could float through space for hundreds of thousands of years, until we reach somewhere cool. But it seems more likely to me that humans will go extinct first. It's cosmically annoying. In theory, we could be partying with Martians and moon-hopping for the summer. Instead, we are stuck here, on this pale blue dot, no longer having even the capability to go to our lone moon, because there’s no reason to maintain our rockets, because there's no reason to go back to the moon. It just makes no sense.
Until next time…
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