After lying in bed blinking around the room in search of the alarm clock that woke me, because it's not his for once, I realize that even though I need this sleep, it's just not going to happen. So I get up. At this point it strikes me why I stopped drinking soda right before bed. So I head off to the bathroom. On my way out and back to my room, I pass the guy from a few rooms down leading a giggling girl in her pajamas to the showers. Even though I don't know her, I add both of them to the "Taze Me" list.

Back in my room I up the blinds even though the sun makes me squint whenever I do that. I like looking at the city on mornings when the weather is like this. After standing long enough to be pretty certain that the dynamic duo aren't still hiding in the shower stalls, I head off to take my own, solo, shower. To pass the time while the water does its stuff, I start thinking about a combination of my calculus and logic courses, and I come to the following realization:

Since life exists on earth, life exists. Physics tells us that the universe is infinite. In an infinite universe, there are infinite chances for life to exist in an infinite number of places. Call the number of beings who care personally for you N. Call the universal population X. The ratio of beings who care for you to the universal population is expressed N/X. N may fluctuate over time due to births/deaths/meetings/etc. X grows exponentially to infinity thanks to positive birth rate (which must exist for life to sustain). As X approaches infinity (as it can be shown to do thanks to the infinite universe and the positive rat of change) and N remains fairly constant, the following statement represents the situation: The limit of (N/X) as X approaches infinity = the number of beings who care personally for one. Since N is constant, this is a limit of constant/infinity, and therefore = 0.

I leave my shower sufficiently debased. I decid that it was just about time for some more caffeine, so I get dressed, toss on a coat, and begin the long walk to the student store for comestibles. I get to the Howe Center, but detour to check my mail. I get a Valentine's Day card from my cat. I love my cat. I stow the card in a pocket and detour further to the ATM to get money for tomorrow. On my way out I remember I came for soda, and I turn in to the store. It's closed, so I rummage for change and in a small mercy find enough in my pockets for a soda from a machine. I crack the bottle, sip, and start back slowly.

On the way back I'm ruminating about how the air is almost good. It's the temperature and smell that belongs more in the past-midnight part of a spring night walk. I consider for a second making excuses to be outside, but since it's about noon on the ass end of winter, I decide that to deal with it further would be disorienting and resume my trudge back to my room. When I get to the door of my building I pause long enough to blink at the door a couple times. Then I realize why I stopped and remedy the situation by tearing the announcement flyers off of it and scattering them to the wind. The door looked unhappy.

I take the stairs, two at a time as per usual, up to the fourth floor and walk three doors down to my stained white board. Another tired sip of my soda precedes unlocking my room and reentering. My door looks unhappy though, but there isn't much I can do for it. Once back inside I doff my coat, and hang it in its usual place on my closet door. The shirt goes next. It's crisp outside but hotter than hell in here. I put my laptop back up onto my bed and flip the switch. I need music. The too-friendly and somehow foreboding loading screen for Windows 2000 pops up and I think to myself that I need to configure my Linux partition for network access someday. Music on, I get out the broom I stole and start sweeping up the bags, and the M&M's, and the food wrappers, and the plastic utensils into little piles for disposal. I even sweep the rug 'cause I don't feel like begging a vaccuum cleaner from somebody. I write my roommate's name on the "Taze Me" list a couple dozen more times.

I use the bag I got from the bookstore when I bought books to bundle all the shit on my floor into because it started out carrying trash, it might as well end that way. Before I carry it down the hall I skim through a few songs 'til I find one that doesn't grate on my nerves. I sit in the folding chair with my head in my hands and a bag of trash at my feet listening to it. When it ends, I realize that the alarm clock that woke me is my neighbor's. And it's still going off. For more minutes than I should, I think about what I could do through a closed door and a stack of cinder blocks that would show him just how much I hate him. Instead, I add him to the "Taze Me" list and take my trash to the big cans at the end of the hall. I wash my hands and think, as I usually do when I do so, whether I might be just a little obsessive-compulsive. When I rinse I look in the mirror and see that my eye is bleeding again.

when I get back I realize just how much bigger the room looks without all that junk on the floor. I climb up onto bed skim through another couple songs until I find one with lyrics that don't amount to screaming. I rearrange the slipping sheets and realize that I should probably remake the bed. I've been turning in my sleep more often lately and the mattress is bare in a few places. Later, maybe. I sit looking around the room, still wondering how the apparent size of a room can fluctuate so much. Maybe I should straighten my desk up. Eh. Later.

I spend a few songs with my eyes closed, rocking slowly back and forth, sometimes in time with the music, sometimes in spite of it.

I load the code for Rainman. I should do that list instead. Or I should do that tokenizer. Instead of doing either, I reassure myself that I don't even know which one I'm supposed to do, and until I email God I won't. I make a note to email him. For now I'll skim Rainman, making pointless tweaks until maybe I'll be up to doing something real about it. Failure. My music stops. HoMM3 gets loaded.

Quite a bit later, it's dark out and I've beaten my campaign. My eyes are pulling themselves shut. It might be time to stop looking at the computer for a while. That works, because it's about time for dinner, and I can go take a walk to get food. A quick minute to turn the computer off and go wash my hands for dinner and I'm out the door. I walk four blocks in solitude, sneak across main street between oncoming cars, and get my dinner. I pass a large group of girls coming up the street as I walk home, and my only thoughts are of avoidance.

While I eat dinner I decide to kill a little more of my brain and for the first time in... more than a week, it has to be... I turn on the television. Junior Jeopardy is on. I sit there watching Alex forgive the mistakes and verbal slips of the little girl in the center but not those of the boys to either side of her. I watch all three of them miss stupid questions. The girl thought "It's a bird... It's a plane..." was followed by, "It's Peter Pan!" She won anyway.

Disheartened by the untimely loss of common knowledge, I decide to turn the tv off and curl into a ball. I do so. While I'm there I realize why I've been having to concentrate on walking straight moreso than usual. It's because I've started seeing the spots again. That's John's fault. When I don't get sleep, I start seeing things that aren't there. Most often it's just amorphous floating spots on the sides of my field of vision. Sometimes it's not. I also realize, laying on my side with my knees at my chest, why the doors look unhappy. When I look outside and see a spectacularly tall and spectacularly lithe woman with no face standing on the Hudson River handing each of a throng of just as lithe but unusually short humanoids something, then hugging it close and sending it away, I decide it's time to distract myself.

I check to see if my visitor is available for talk. If I don't get to talk to my visitor before tomorrow, I can't consider her a visitor anymore. She's there. For a while. Dammit I missed again. I send her email that it's imperative that she let me know when she's arriving. While I wait I strip and remake my bed. It looks a lot better afterwards. Sometime while I was cleaning up my visitor responded. Looks like she won't be up to travelling. Oh well. It was kinda late to be making plans anyway, I guess. So we reschedule.

I open RainMan again, tweak around a little bit more without really accomplishing anything. It doesn't surprise me. When my eyes start to hurt again, I save, shut everything down, kill the lights, and try sleeping. I'm not counting on it though.