Wake me up when you're done reading this

“Writers tend to work early in the morning, or late at night, when brains are naturally able to focus deeply on one thought. In the middle of the day, distractions are unavoidable. I wonder if anything worthwhile has ever been written in the afternoon.” -Scott Adams



Whether this was said by the Scott Adams that created Dilbert or another literary great that I am ignorant to, I blindly agreed wholeheartedly with this. And now I agree with this for good reason. I agreed before I knew what he meant simply because I noticed anything worthwhile that I've ever written was done either late or early and confused this as only being able to write under deadline. Not true.


I am prone to distractions during the day and it wasn't until tonight that I noticed - in the dark dead quiet of the witching hour - that from the stillness I could see and appreciate individual ripples of thought as they floated by one at a time instead of losing them all from too many things going on at once.

Maybe this is a lost ability. Before going away to school I used to be a raging insomniac. Waiting for sleep was waiting for a bus that never came (Not a fan of public transportation - sorry CUE bus, you must suffer this metaphor) and laying in bed for hours - what else do you do but walk circles in your head and stop occasionally to pick at thoughts that stick out? College took away that problem. A girlfriend that slept over every night took away that problem. Friends who enjoyed doing stupid shit til late took away that problem. Work took away that problem. Problem is, I kinda liked the late night insomnia for letting me sit in limbo to play with whatever insignificant thoughts I found.

Speaking of lost abilities - also inadvertently threw myself into a lucid dream. Sort of. Lucid dreaming = waking up within the dream, realizing it's a dream - and doing whatever the hell you want. Assuming you're not a guilt-ridden home-schooled religious zealot, this is a pretty crazy awesome experience because there really are no limits to what you can do besides whatever mental constraints you walk around with. Christopher Nolan worked on Inception for ten years. Chris Nolan is a punk, I've been playing with my dreams since I was 5. Or at least until I started getting older and waking up within my dreams happened less and less often and now the few times that it does, realization is usually followed by getting yanked into consciousness - where oddly, I'm not the baller of my domain.

Though there are ways to train yourself to be able to "wake up" and remain in control in your dream. Stay with me, people - I'm not trying to sell you Scientology or recruit you into Dream Club.

First rule of Dream Club, you must bring your own soap for the warm bath immediately preceding Dream Club

As Leonardo DiCaprio pointed out, "Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." I'm now telling you the same thing, except I don't have the luxury of dating Bar Rafaeli to lend myself any credibility.

This is all the proof I need, Leo. Continue

What I will tell you that Inception wasn't kind enough to go into more detail about is that all you really need is a marker. Not of the Crayola variety either - I mean something constant that you carry on your person all the time that has enough detail, and ideally, writing. This is for that pivotal moment where you wonder if something isn't quite right and think that it's slightly strange that it's clearly Monday, yet everyone at work is walking around with no pants on like it's casual Friday.

Example. For a solid 3 years or so until the band broke, I wore a generic watch I really liked. It was hip, it was classy, in short - it was me. No matter what sticky situation life threw me in, I would always be wearing this watch. I wouldn't even remember the brand it was except that it's the whole point of this paragraph: Lexington. What's important about this is, in dreams, your brain is constantly improvising and creating and filling space with whatever visual stimuli it pulls from your head parts.

The random things that get thrown in or disappear you won't really notice. Something permanent that you're used to always having on you being gone or different might set off a tiny alarm, but probably not enough to wake you up in the dream. Here's where the detailed/writing part comes in handy - because for whatever logical reason behind it, nine times out of ten, when you read something in your dreams, look away, and then look back, it will have changed. My watch read Lexington on the face just below 12. Look away. Look back - it says freakin' "Hamburglar." That sets off louder alarms because I know for a fact that my watch was not made by the godamned Hamburglar.

In retrospect, I should probably stop reading Kanye-West-interrupts memes before bed

Try as you might, you probably won't remember to check for your reality marker in your dream. Which is where the boring and tedious commitment to lucid dreaming comes into play, because it's a habit you have to train yourself into and who wants to do all that work? To question yourself at regular intervals throughout your day: "Is this a dream? Is this real?" to the point where you automatically wonder if you're living in The Matrix. Sort of. The point is that questioning the reality of the situation gets so ingrained into your routine that it seeps into your dreams, where you luckily have the reality marker I mentioned earlier to check to see if you should take a flying leap off the Washington Bridge or not.

There's other stuff too, but again with the commitment and dedication. Like paying a metric crap ton of money for a helmet you strap on that beeps periodically while you sleep loud enough to get your attention, but not wake you up except in the dream. Or keeping a dream journal so you "exercise" the part of your brain that manifests dreams and learn to recognize when you're dreaming. Or figuring out your REM cycle schedule and setting alarms to wake you up in the middle of them, hold onto a thought, and go back to sleep because apparently that's when you're most likely to dream.

The last of which is what I accidentally did tonight. For reasons I can't go into, I had my alarm set to go off every hour on the hour. The last time I awoke to this, my phone beeped just as I reached over to turn off the alarm, and technology & social media whore that I am, I checked it and groggily read off a text message and sunk back into sleep. Where I dreamt about the person that sent the message - completely random and strange dream, not really controlled, but nontheless inspired by explicitly having that person in my thoughts right before falling back asleep.

And waking up an hour later, on the hour. And saying damn it all to sleep, and just staying up until the sun comes up writing this nonsense.

Fun fact I heard the other day, though - even after you die, there's typically about 12 minutes of brain activity still going on. Given the translation of seconds/minutes in real life to hours in dreams, you could potentially live out one last adventure in your subconscious after the rest of your body has peaced out. Sweet dreams.

16 Facts about Sleeping/Dreaming

The Night I was a Hipster (sort of) (but not really)

Dinner was awkward. Like...awkward. Actually, that's not fair. The dinner itself was delicious - sorry dinner, I spoke too soon and too harshly. You were above reproach, my compliments to the fry cook & his mother, etc, etc. The conversation that took place with the person I had dinner with was awkward. It was a verbal ambush of the worst kind.

The kind of awkward that you don't see coming until the individual words are slipping out of the person's mouth and you try like mad to dodge the hail of awkward that's bulleting towards you and wish you'd packed kevlar in the form of a strong drink order rather than the pansyass sweet tea you chose instead so you could at least take shelter behind a sheepish smile and boyish shrug that a GM on the rocks can afford. The situation was sticky, is what I'm getting at.

But much like [actor you like] in [that movie you enjoyed], I was able to extract myself from said sticky situation by just nodding and waiting the damn thing out. My dinner partner and I parted ways - she went wherever awkward people go at night and already being around the corner from Mason and not being in the mood to go home or be around anyone*, I thought I'd go longboard the parking deck from roof to ground level . At this time of night, there are only so many cheap thrills that provide just the right amount of risk & exhilaration without requiring you to pay to see boobs.**

*Note - you can be in a great mood and at peace with self, nature, and all its inhabitants and still not want to see another soul
**Not that there's anything wrong with that. I know plenty of homeschooled kids that think this is a grand way to spend time and money

I got to the parking deck coincidentally at the exact same time that I realized I did not actually want to longboard down the parking deck. I did, however, have my gym stuff in the car and figured I might as well do something productive. A fleeting image passed through my head of me riding my longboard on a treadmill. This seemed all good and well until I realized I had a craving for commercial overpriced sweet delicious frappaccino goodness and there's a Starbucks on campus right across from the parking deck. My messenger/man bag and laptop within also happened to be in my car, so grabbed that too. It's important to note here that there's nothing more masculine that a man owning and operating a man bag.

Jack Bauer will vouch for me on this

Drink purchased, table acquired. Even with the internets at my full disposal to wipe away the awkward events of the night, I eventually started focusing more on the people walking in more than focusing less on the magic that are lolcats and Daily Show recaps. Chronic people watcher, guilty as charged. First thing I noticed were that Starbucks at Mason has turned into the pregame capital. This is promising - much like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, Mason's party girls are adapting and realizing that a double shot expresso grande blast mocha venti (is that a real thing? I'm just trying to throw something out there that sounds like it has a lot of caffeine) will get them through the night as a starting drink much better than a double shot of Burnettes. So they can dance, dammit.

This girl is ready. Ready to dance.

Next thing that grabbed my attention in a choke hold, slapped it across the face, and told it "Now you'll never forget me" - three Chinese girls walked in, ordered their drinks...and left. As in they left without their grand mocha frappaccinos. Just left. Left my brain to explode. Not immediately, of course. I had to assume/hope that they would be back for their drinks because to consider anything else would be madness. 5,8,10,20 minutes later there drinks were still on the bar. Small, identical, sad. Much like I'm not imagining those three girls to be at this moment. Or did they do it on purpose? Was it a protest of sorts? Was it meant to be ironic? Did motherfreakin' Zordon page them to report for duty? These are the things I will always wonder. Eventually the baristas threw them away and a part of me died then - because I would have thoroughly enjoyed three free mocha frappaccinos.

Only the good die young

That's the point where the night's events reached the tipping point and I remembered that I'm the neglectful parent of a blog. I had my laptop. I had the ricocheting thoughts of the past couple hours. The world had to know.

Going to have to side with Hitler on this one

Time and place, people. Time and place. Create a webcomic about Hitler reborn as a hipster in everyday "Hipster Hitler" activities and you are hilarious. There's a dozen reasons this is delightful - mainly that taking any horrible topic or person and finding a way to make it funny is probably the greatest catharsis there is.

Hipster Hitlah!

On the other hand, fall asleep taking up an entire couch - at the campus Starbucks or put your feet up on the little coffee table everyone uses to put their food & drinks on and you're a rude douchebag. Gross. Look at her scabby soles rubbing up against where you might put your sandwich down later.




Moral? Be hilarious. Don't be a rude douchebag.

back from hiatus

Big surprise! Made this thing almost two months ago and have nothing to show for it. Though to be fair, sheisse did hit the fan right after I created this pretty hard. Still, excuses are for for the excused and I am not one of them. I am now without job or woman, nothing to hold back the creative floodgates now.

Yep. Any minute now the dam bill burst and out will spill forth righteous insightful babble to crash against your brain parts...any...minute now....ah who am I kidding, I can't force this stuff out. For now all I have to offer is the only other creative thing about me that I've been up to recently. As always, whole gallery viewable at http://bu2fuloblivion.deviantart.com . And you can't really write a decent blog without throwing in random pictures, graphs, charts & links - can you? Interactive content is the free t-shirts of the blogosphere in terms of drawing and keeping attention. I think. From what I've gathered in my 2 months and 2 posts as a *grimace* "blogger." FML

Intro

Dunning–Kruger effect

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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.^[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."^[1]

This blog will be an ongoing project part of a greater effort to diagnose which side of the Dunning-Kruger coin I fall on - while I have been assured time and time again that my wildly interesting persona is only dwarfed by my devilish good looks, I must do my best to either confirm or deny these baseless accusations. Herein I will document all that I find amusing and thought provoking on the Internets and my daily life.