This afternoon's nap was definitely a mini-crash. I was at the so I told Tank to come find me in 15 minutes. I then passed out on the industrial-blue couches by the History department and proceeded to have trippy, trippy dreams for nearly 2 hours.

This is weird for several reasons:

  1. I was tired enough that I couldn't fight it.
  2. I slept. Almost immediately. No thrashing around like I usually do before I sleep. Just BOOM, and I'm down for the count.
  3. I dreamt. (I usually don't dream during short naps.)
  4. I dreamt about really strange things. Usually my dreams - and I've been in the habit of trying to remember them for several years - are relatively mundane. (Seriously. I dream about things like waking up and going downstairs to eat breakfast. Really exciting. When I have trippy dreams, they're usually tied into something from the waking world. This was not.)

After that nap (and being surprised by Andrew, Nikki, and April-Hope, who were waiting to ambush me around the corner in the hopes of waking me up with an adrenaline jolt) I was able to muster up enough energy to get me functionally through the rest of the day, drooping slightly but managing it well enough not to be in danger of crashing. I got a lot of code refactoring done and split things into a GUI layer, a logic layer, and a generic flashcard library (data storage & manipulation) layer. Coded in the van on the way back, too.

It is hard to plan around flexibility.

I wonder when people will stop being surprised at the abilities of others. The one that's been hitting us the most this summer is age. I wish I could go around without having an age, or a race or a gender, or anything like that - just be a Being who Does Stuff. Yay for preconceptions. I know exactly how I could use the typical ones attributed to me to my advantage, but I don't want to have those as an option for things I can manipulate. First of all, I refuse to become good at a game I don't want to play, and I'm afraid of what I'd become if I played it. Second, if you can do X "despite being [a] Y," you perpetuate the notion that "Y's can't do X". (You can, but you're just 'special'.)

I learn the most when I push closest to breaking but don't actually break. When you push too far and break, you have the potential learn even more but sometimes you don't realize it, and since I consider awareness to be much of learning, I get more goodness out of not breaking. Meaning I wouldn't break myself repeatedly if I were actually smart. Meaning I'm not actually smart most of the time. ;-) Also, learning something is more important than being right.

Wow, English... I'm not speaking it right now. I think I'm going to sleep very, very early tonight. I can't crash and burn during these last few weeks; we can't afford it, since everyone's running pretty close to their limits (I'm being as insistent as I know how to be about all the ILXO folks getting tons of rest). If I crash, I impose my brokenness on others, and that's an unfair load. Hence the self.take_care_of().