Meh. I’m tired and sore today, and i don’t know why. Maybe i’m not getting enough sleep. Actually, i’m pretty sure of that, since despite spending 12 hours at work staring at one of several flickering screens, i come home and instinctively log in so quickly that my tossed jacket has yet to land on the sofa and my kicked-off shoes haven’t even hit the floor. With a feverish intensity doubtlessly experienced by divers doing breath-holding exercises who finally return to the surface, taunting the cold grip of the sea, i jack back in after the seemingly endless haitus from technology that is my 20 minute commute. Why do i do this to myself? No one has emailed me in the time it takes to bounce my way 15 miles down I-5, no one has replied to one of my forum posts while i was unplugged and behind the wheel of the Pathy. Besides, if they had… it would page my wireless phone anyway, so i’d *know* there was an email waiting. Why do i need to check? Of course, nothing exciting awaits, and i fall back into the workday habit of checking more and more places, expanding the circle of subscriptions, until i find something that offers a new tidbit to click on that wasn’t there 1200 seconds ago. Eek. I am addicted. I am the crack whore of the new millenium.

Anyway, where was i? Oh, yeah… i need to sleep better. Cause i stay up too late, doing all that stuff i was just tangentially blathering about. And cause alarm clocks are evil. Let’s get to the root of that. Have you ever been pleasantly awakened by your alarm clock? NO. My furnace is timed to warm the place up just before the alarm goes off, to make it a little easier to stick that first toe out from under the covers. On days when i don’t need to get up at 5:15, the heater thing does it’s trick anyway; i wake up feeling well-rested and ready for life at about 5.30am. Days like today, when that alarm comes shrieking through the night, my blissful slumber is interrupted in a most jarring manner.

Enter technology’s answer: the Sleeptrack watch. It tracks your sleep (shocker!) by using your blood pressure or brain stem activity or drool rate perhaps, and then tries to wake you up as close to your target alarm time as possible in a window that coincides with your natural fluctuations of deep and light sleep. The idea being it’s better to wake up at 5.04 or 5:24 feeling great than at 5:15 feeling like your head is filled with oatmeal and your limbs are carved from solid blocks of concrete. I’m not sure what the threshold is for “near” your target time, but if you don’t have a happy-zone anywhere close it just wakes you up regular. Anyway, sounds interesting. If it wasn’t $150 i’d give it a try. If the nice people at sleeptracker want to send me one i’d be happy to give them my first-hand impressions. ;)

Monitoring yourself with a watch is neat and all, but what if it doesn’t match what you’re wearing? That’s what medical monitoring contacts are for. How handy would it be for all you diabetics out there if your eyes turned green when sugars were too high? A simple glance in the mirror or an observant friend might save you an unpleasant reaction. They also have potential for measuring other things, like potassium levels, cholesterol, etc. No more blood test, kids! How exciting is that?

Okay, that’s about all the excitement i can take for today. I’m going to resume watching Die Hard 2 and reading really old issues of dieselsweeties until it’s time to go home and check my email.

Working out to Ryan Adams, Dido, & Big Head Todd. Sometimes slow intense music is just as motivational is fast, upbeat stuff.

My Z passed its checkup today with flying colors – and the guys at the shop liked the rims – and the sun is out. What a beautiful day!

420 miles so far. Listening to Real Life Trauma, headed south to help Matt with his 240. Engine still sounds amazing

It’s been 3 hours since lunch – a “delicious”, “indulgent” lean cuisine pizza roughly the size of an english muffin that conquered two plastic knives, a powerade bottle full of water, and eight generic ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet humanely stocked in the kitchen – and the pounding on the brain is still contemptuously persistent.

Standing at the urinal, all finished but still there, foreahead against the cool white tile walls. Finally mustering the strength to step away, and then cringing at how loud a zipper is!

Draped loosely into a stubborn, unforgiving office chair, a bargain model from office depot designed for light home use or ambulatory workers made rigid, unconforming, jaded … and squeaky by years of 24/7 occupation, neck wrenched forward to accomodate the ice pack that mercifully numbs a six inch radius around the upper 3 vertebrae.

Stumbling from one side of the room to the other, down the hall, to the bathroom, to the sink, back to the chair… tripping over invisible obstacles, extra-dense pockets of air, the patterned rises in the low-pile carpet.

Taking aim loosely, clumsily with the faucet, water spilling onto forearms as the flowing water’s whine deafens and disables functional thought.

A feeble reach to the ringing telephone, eardrums torn apart by the evil, shrieking banshee who has made her home inside the doldrum plastic casing and has cast a spell on the device to shift it further away with each renewed effort to extend three fingers toward the handset and thereby interrupt her dreadful siren.

Abandoned by a natural instinct for over-punctuation, communications become confusing, verbose, circling and full of the errors that come from typing with closed eyes. But oh, how good it feels to close them!

Conversations with people – such unnecessarily loud people – that are less an exercise in understanding or common ideas and more a battle of wits between one person who desperately wants the conversation to end, to drop the handset lifelessly to the floor, to cast the vociferous device out a nearby window – only there are none nearby, and even the distant ones do not open – and another person who has know idea such a battle has been waged and chats along merrily in a teatime manner.

The white noise – persistent, pervading, inescapable… the movement of air; the imperceptible-until-amalgamated sound of electrons moving through paths and gates and switches; the high-pitched hum of a television tube – even tho it has no tube, and is turned off; the droning of the building powerplant, its reverberations carried by the very walls that should isolate and protect from the noise outside and below; the quiet hiss of speakers through which no signal travels and so which recursively amplify only the sound of their own amplifiers… the sum of them all, relentless and exigent, crushing in from every side, pressurizing one’s head like the deep ocean on a diver’s skull, with no hiding place, no reprieve, and no sensible recourse but a pair of hands clamped tightly over ears and a doddering mental effort to cling tightly to a dangling thread of sanity.

Man, my head hurts.