Successfully woke up early, do not feel SCREECH or HORRIBLE EMOTIONAL VORTEX

Time to get some fucking work done, finally

Today was somewhat like yesterday, in that the plan was: WORK

The actuality was: HORRIBLE EMOTIONAL VORTEX

And once again the plan is: take sleeping pills, wake up really early tomorrow, WORK

I already had to postpone a meeting to tomorrow morning because of yesterday's HORRIBLE EMOTIONAL VORTEX so I hope I can pull off the trick this time and come into tomorrow’s meeting in a convincing “Functional Human Being” suit

Maybe the solution to my woes is to develop and promote a worldview based around the idea that “no one really knows much of anything”

Not like “philosophical skepticism,” not the thing where you don’t even know if your hands are real or whatever

But just like, most people don’t know most of the things they think they know

I feel like I know next to nothing but if I could demonstrate that everyone else knows next to nothing too, it might not make me feel so bad

There would be no self-consistency problems because statements like “we don’t know X” would be some of the few things we did know

(This is not a serious proposal … probably)

Pretty full of SCREECH and similar things right now and can’t do much but mope so I’m glad I realized early I wasn’t going to work

Trying to figure out what variety of moping to do between now and going to bed

I did the theory stuff for today successfully but I’m trying to do the code stuff and my mind is complaining so I’ll just leave it until tomorrow morning right before I have to present it

Immediate time pressure can override bad moods: why “bad work habits” can be good work habits

I feel “bad” about the posts I made last night, apart from any positive or negative reactions they got, because they were me giving into the “any disagreements can and must be resolved and then we can all be friends” feeling

Which is one I’ve learned over the years to not act on very much, because I’ve learned that people generally don’t like it

If you hate people who tactlessly want to argue about everything all the time and think that any ideological disagreement is just one Rational Dialogue away from vanishing, well, meet 19-year-old me

Mood’s not working, but math’s working, so that’s good; mood will be better later

In the last two years (?) or so I’ve taken to using the phrase “everything flows” to remind myself that all of my capabilities – of doing things, of experiencing various kinds of happiness, etc. – turn on and off again semi-regularly, and it’s never the end of the world when I lose one of them temporarily

I really like the style of … well, “absurd humor” is too specific, but the kind of writing that is odd and comedic in a way that involves a lot of statements that seem like they have weight or meaning in the depicted social context, but in which the viewer can’t directly see that meaning and can only partially manage to infer what it is

Much more clearly: stock phrases from weird internet videos are fun and useful to me because they provide ways to push my thinking in one direction or another using an amusing, counterfactual, intriguingly mysterious social norm rather than some real social norm I might not want to think about

Last night I was thinking about something I didn’t want to think about, and then I just thought “no.  we’re not gonna do that” in the voice of Charlie Rose from this video, and that was a great way to get myself to change gears, because all the lines in that video feel like they take place in a social context where they’re deeply significant, yet I didn’t need to invoke the kind of statement that would have deep social power in the real world, which might create its own unwanted train of thought

Using the norms of an implied, unreal, and entertainingly strange world can sometimes do the same work as using the norms of this one, without forcing you to think about the norms of this world

(“There’s my Chippy” from Tim and Eric is another one – it’s often something I say to myself when I find something I’m looking for, and is a great way to express satisfaction without thinking about “the search for satisfaction” as an actual thing in the world and the flaws it might have.  Whatever that search is here, the guy who searches for Chippy seems invested in the search and purely happy to succeed, and the fact that I don't understand that fully is both the source of the the humor and of its utility as a mental trope)

Today all I want to do is stay in my quiet apartment and take twice as much clonazepam as usual and be in a perfectly still world containing no animate entities that make potentially unpredictable motions, and thankfully I can do that, and it’s OK

Maybe eventually I will get up the gumption to read a book; books make statements that are unpredictable but it’s a bounded unpredictability (I don’t think Wendy Doniger is going to start telling me about anything except the history of Hinduism)

Also Scott’s experience being on SSRIs as a kid sounds a lot like my experience being on various medications (Risperidone and GHB*) as a kid, e.g. “they seem to have permanently messed up my sex drive” and “social life was very confusing for a few years when I stopped using them”

I wonder if there’s some cluster of traits here that is more common than one might imagine (b/c people aren’t likely to talk about the sex thing freely)

*yes, really, for insomnia (it is a very awkward insomnia drug because it is a stimulant in low concentrations so it wakes you up in the middle of the night and you have to take a second dose, also it’s probably neurotoxic and stuff, especially in children/adolescents?  Great thing to give to a teenager who takes a long time to get to sleep and has literally never tried taking Nyquil or something [the doctor who did this lost his license later for something unrelated involving human growth hormone])