mchua@bandersnatch:~$ man relaxation
No manual entry for relaxation

Tired and feeling oddly emptied-out. Dinner with Olin people stopped this temporarily, then writing an explanation of the design process, and then... now, tired and kinda emptied-out again.

Not a bad thing, necessarily. I need space and time to think and people to help me step through all of it a little slower, and I have not (as of late) shaped my environment to allow myself to get that, or to get into the state where I can take advantage of it. (Needed: more walks, more hitting things, more music, more conversations.) I mean, heck; I've found myself making phone calls to people, which is perhaps the extreme end of "boy, I feel like seeking people out today" for me. (I usually hate getting phone calls.)

In any case, this is a welcome contrast to the usual "Mel thinks of something? off! it goes... train of thought bounded? nobody knows!" state. Not because it's nice in and of itself, but because it's different, and I've been in several mildly destructive mental ruts lately (while still being happy, mind you - it's possible to be happy but still have suboptimal thought patterns, something like dancing really well despite/but wearing lousy shoes). And it's good to be kicked out of those into pretty much anything else; I readjust, learn things, do better, and the happiness remains. (Perhaps it always will. It seems to be one of the few really stable things about me.)

Not bad, not good. Just currently the way things are. My mind does not usually settle, especially on a fuzzy grey blank tiredness with mild overtones of anxiety (mostly because my brain's confused as to why it's not thinking of a zillion things at once today). This is typically an indication that I'm sick, but I think I got over most of that feeling by throwing up a couple times this morning (also, I'm pretty sure that was something I ate, and I feel reasonably decent now). In any case, a reasonable strategy seems to be to (1) let someone else do some of the talking for me - a.k.a. post a quote I came across today - and then (2) bed.

Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you cannot conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..
--Paul Bowles

I'm a little afraid of surrendering to the blankness; my mind's trying to burble and fill up with a thousand things again, but I should let this go and be okay with having emptiness in here, and go to sleep.

Away.