Last night I was the old abandoned Internet, off on the edge of town on e2 and IRC until about 3 AM, when I started writing a long and rambling email that I ended up not sending. I rolled into bed at about 3:45 AM and was surprised to find that I couldn't sleep. Time passed.
At about 4:30 AM I was thinking about a book I was reading last summer. How The Mind Works by Stephen Pinker. Suddenly, the early morning light, the sleeplessness, and memory clicked, and I felt a wave of recollection of last summer.
That was a strange time for me. After GCSEs I had an extended summer holiday of about 9 weeks, which is, I think, the longest time off school I have had since I entered the educational system. That's an odd thought, too. I took a kind of sabbatical in those months. I barely saw or spoke to my freinds.
The rest of my family were all at work at that point. As always in long holidays, without restrictions on when I had to go to sleep or get up, my sleep schedule slowly moved round until I was sleeping at 3-5AM and waking up at noon. That meant that by the time I woke up, my family had left for work.
I spent a lot of time alone that summer. I'm not sure why, but it was something I needed to do.
I also cut off my hair, which I had let grow to shoulder length, the longest it has ever been. In fact, I shaved my head. That was an odd experience, and a valuable one.
Earlier last night I was talking to a friend on MSN Instant Messenger:
Me: something or other
Them: something or other
Me: Ah, life.
Them: yea it sucks doesn't it?
Me: It has it's ups and downs.
Me: In fact, it is a constant ocssillation of ups and downs
Them: yeah
Me: And I can't spell.
Then this morning I was reading Blue Mars (yes, again) and a character used the phrase "large grained chaos". He was describing a sort of chaotic rocky terrain with large structures in it, but it struck me as such an apt phrase to describe LIFE that I laughed out loud.
It also inspired me to create a Paint/Photoshop mishmash of layered and distorted Gaussian noise, blurring and 4 colour posterization that is objectively hideous but reminds me of that moment of recognition* so that it makes me smile when I see it.
* Choosing this word was the hardest part of writing this daylog.