It's 11:30pm and I'm trying to sit here thinking clearly about the work I should be doing. I feel like I've got a lot of good stuff wadded up inside my brain from the past few months of deep-diving (well, as deep as one can dive in largely one-week chunks) into a variety of education-related contexts, but it hasn't found a satisfying way to spool out yet. Talking with Karsten in Santa Cruz got enough of it out to make for a good OSCON talk, and that felt great; I need to get more of it out. C'mon, thoughts. Form into words. You're in there, wordlessly floating in my brain... now all you need to do is reify into something externally shareable and usable.

It probably doesn't help that I'm simultaneously trying to get my brain to think in another language again. Mandarin re-acquisition isn't going very well; I still don't like staring dully at books that don't type back at me. I memorize words quickly, then forget them just as quickly. Videos make my eyes glaze over. The #fedora-zh channel is largely empty and silent. I'll pick a dictionary and a book to take with me to Shanghai - once I'm there, I'll probably reabsorb the language like a maniac, but I won't have long enough, nor enough time, to settle into being better at the language before I fly back to the US again.

Wish I could live there for a while. I don't know how else I'd become fluent in the language, and... I would like that. I feel like such an ABC (okay, I am an ABC) and I'd like to be able to talk with the people I look like, and look like the people I talk to, at some point in my life. And it's such an amazingly untapped part of the world for large swaths of the FOSS community, and... I would like to be able to help make that bridge. And I want to learn how to live in other places. Having more or less figured out how to live on my own, and then how to hop my long-term base every 3-12 months, and being reasonably happy with the progress I've made in learning how to travel constantly (still a long way to go, but I think I've identified most of the major bugs I have in that process by now), I want to go farther.

One of my problems is that I have to reach a certain point of exhaustion (it's typically called "collapse") before I can really rest. It's a known flaw. It used to basically ensure that I'd be sick at the start of every single major school vacation because my immune system would cave in as soon as the adrenaline died down. I know, I know, I know. Sigh. Trying to work on this - the problem is that the sort of work and effort I'm used to involves more effort, not less (and putting in less effort involves more effort, which circumvents the point). I still can't sleep for more than a few hours at a time - I just wake up. The way I know to sleep for longer than 6 hours or so involves not sleeping for multiple nights in a row and then then crashing hard. Or being sick. That works too.

What do I want to do tonight? The only deliverable I have to push out are my OSCON talk slides - as far as I can go with both sets of slides, and then publish them out so my co-presenters can complete their portion of the text information and we can release. Tomorrow I need to write an OSDC/edu article. And I'd like to clean my inbox before I start driving to Raleigh.

All right. I'm going to finish a little reading, upload all the notes I have for both sets of talk slides and blog about them and let my co-presenters know, and sleep for a few hours. I'm trying to go light on my to-do list and rest as much as I can force myself to rest; I'm bad at sitting still, but even if I can't sleep, I can still lie down.