Dreamer Easy

As you may have guessed, during my attempted Year Off Politics, I've been trying to sort of quarantine Srs Bizness over here in kateorman, along with my obsessive tallying of my reading, while preserving dreamer_easy for more relaxed everyday chit-chat. I am trying to avoid Issues and things, really I am, but I started reading the newspaper again during the recent election, which was a mistake, and of course I just keep stumbling across things. A trickle of race-and-racism stuff is still popping up seeingred, plus I've just fired up suck_it_and_see. I'm not quite sure whether this filing system is working or whether I'm making a dog's breakfast of it. Never mind, it all looks the same in your flist!

Anywho, a couple of links. At least one politician thinks we should Ban how-to-vote leaflets at polling places. I entirely agree. The current situation means no candidate can afford not to be waving bits of paper in your face on the day, which is irksome for voters and hard tew for the volunteers. Ban them and we can all go home and relax.

The Daily Show punctures the non-Ground Zero non-mosque hoo hah, with a little help from a highlighter pen and Charlton Heston. (Hmmm. Actually, I'm not sure I agree re Columbine, because I'm not sure that the NRA's culpability is non-zero. Here I don't mean "not sure" as in "well obviously it isn't I am being sarcastic", I mean "not sure" as in "I don't know". But then, I am biased.)

In conclusion could I just state that if you take Valium but still have insomnia, you can't go to sleep, but neither can you get out of bed.

Sleep's all messed up. No surprise there - I slept all day after the hospital, then all night, then long naps in the morning and afternoon, so ping, there I was at 3 am, on the sofa with a book light and The World's Greatest Stories For Boys And Girls, being stared at for hours by an eerily immobile demon-eyed cat who wanted his breakfast.

Anyway. I am of course a wreck today, so am on the sofa, watching the 1997 Cracker episode One Day A Lemming Will Fly on my mum's recommendation. You were right, mum - Eccles is pretty amazing in it. There's a misogynist* streak to Jimmy McGovern's writing which raises my hackles, but it's really something when he puts masculinity under the microscope, as here - the best scene, IMHO, is just three men sitting in a room, banging their horns together. And oh my gods, that ending! Bastard!!!

(btw, the IMDB cast for the episode is messed up - this is more useful.)

ETA: lol, mum emailed to say the episode of Eccleston excellence she had in mind was actually the following one, To Be A Somebody. Into the rental queue!

*In the original sense of the word, "woman-hating", not the fannish sense of "arguably slightly sexist".

Just called for pizza. They asked for our home phone number. I read out the number on the front of their menu.

I've been awake and fairly functional all day, but in the last two hours I've just got more and more woozy, vague, and limp. I can only hope this means I'll sleep through tonight. Off to see the gastroenterologist tomorrow re my dodgy vitamin and mineral levels. What could be more fun?!

Have rewritten short story The Sign and hammered out a rough scene for Burning Room. Lessee, what's next in the queue? Write the other nine-tenths of She Sells Sky and then get onto Eating and Explosions. Gosh, I'm so busy! Be nice if I could bleeping SLEEP.

Essay on Doctor Who + race now up to 2100 words. I've just ripped out the wimpy, flavourless original opening paragraphs and replaced them with something far more robust. Two bad nights' sleep in a row mean I'm a wreck right now, but I'm really pleased with that.

I've buggered up my wrist, so I can't get much housework done today, so you're about to be spammed with all my backed up links. Plus I'm in a rubbish mood. Duck and cover.

Recent postings suggest that lj Doctor Who fandom may be beginning to reclaim itself from the shipwarriors and other obsessives. Huzzah.

Australia's gag rule will soon be lifted. "[Foreign Minister Stephen Smith] Mr Smith said the focus of Australia's foreign aid would remain on avoiding abortions by providing better family planning education, as he pledged to boost funds for preventing maternal deaths by $15 million over four years."

Saith Gordon Brown: UK, US 'aiming for nuclear-free world', with Britain making some reductions to its nuclear arsenal and offering to go further if the US and Russia will.

Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad? "Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems."

Guantanamo guards "take their last revenge"

Carbon dioxide is good, so more carbon dioxide is better! Unless you're a foram and can't make a shell because dissolved CO₂ has acidified the ocean. Oops.

Having reassembled the CPAP mask and adjusted its straps, I've caught up on my sleep - lots of energy today for a change, although I still slept in and took a while to get started. This afternoon was spent out, drinking buckets of coffee and working on multiple writing projects - part of which work was re-reading bits of The Duel by Giacomo Casanova:

[Of kings] "... even their slightest gesture is carefully examined by the Argus-eyed onlookers; and their words, however little they are susceptible of such treatment, are subject to a hundred different interpretations."

The other book I'm re-reading is Black Beauty, which I read as a small child, and which introduced me to the idea that fashion is a bad thing. I distinctly remembered the story of the accident caused by horses made to wear blinkers because they were "stylish".

WHY CAN'T I *)%*_&%*(^+^ SLEEP?!!!!!

Fuck a doodle doo. I had today all planned out in my head. Breakfast out, run a dozen errands, bit of shopping. Instead I have woken up in pieces. The CPAP machine is helping my sleep, but the fact remains that I am still unpredictably KNACKERED.

Fireworks burst, heavenly trumpets played, rose petals fell from the clouds, and all my Christmases came at once at approx. 12 noon today when I dragged my shattered remains out of bed, called my boss to let him know I would be dragging my sorry carcass into work, and got his answering machine message: I'd forgotten this is his week off. Oh the resulting writing and housework and lack of being wracked by guilt and exhaustion. Huzzah etc