Here’s the deal: I’m a clutterbug. No matter where you go in my house, you’ll probably find a pile of something. It’s mostly piles of paper (drawings, notes, receipts, etc.), but you’ll also find cables, CDs, various pieces of musical equipment, batteries, pencils, pens, camera equipment, and books (yeah, there are a lot of book piles, too). But mostly it’s detritus that I just haven’t brought myself to throw out yet. I go through these sorts of Thoreauesque periods of wanting to trash everything, to simply my life and keep only the essentials; in other words, I just want to grab handfuls of junk and throw it all away. No, don’t even look at it, just throw it the fuck away! But I always end up asking myself, “What if there’s something important in there?” Well, the reasonable response to that would be to sort my crap into important vs. non-important items, which would probably eliminate fully three-quarters of the clutter in my house, but this task is so daunting (yeah, there’s that much crap) that I’m often paralyzed before I even begin.

But it occurs to me that it’s time to change my ways. I can’t take it anymore. And poor Alison, for as much time as she spends at my house she has been obscenely patient with my clutter. Her house is wonderfully clutter-free; in contrast my house is a sty. And I know it bugs her. Hell, it even bugs me! But I guess I’m just so used to living with it that I don’t see it anymore, I’ve been able to tune it out, so to speak. My room when I was a kid was always trashed. I hardly ever saw the carpet because there was always so much junk everywhere. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years but I still have a tendency to hang on to things, thinking, “I might need this someday.”

But I made an important first step in overcoming my clutter addiction today. I cleared out all evidence of oddfellow from chatterwaul.com. I was surprised by how many files there were with names like test.html, test2.html, test3.html, new.html, new.wait.html, this-might-be-important-someday.html, DONT-FUCKING-DELETE-THIS.html. It was, frankly, absurd. But I’m proud of myself: I let go of a lot of junk. Of course, there were some projects that I’ve held on to because, well, I put a lot of work into some of that stuff (like colectivo (which hasn’t been uploaded here yet but will be soon)). I’m happy to report that 15.8 MB of virtual clutter is gone forever. Be proud of me!

I guess the point of all this is that it was a lot easier than I thought it would be to throw stuff away. And although I can’t measure my progress eliminating physical clutter from my house in megabytes, I know that the difference will be noticeable. I’m hoping I can channel the same bravery I used in cleaning out my virtual space to cleaning out my physical space. Tonight, I’m starting with the storeroom. I plan to fill up my trash bin.

Wish me luck.

Sometimes, when I walk long distances — from my office to the cafeteria in the Capitol building, for example — I play this little game with myself. I pretend like the ground beneath my feet is a giant treadmill. I pretend that instead of me propelling myself through space I am, in fact, compelling the earth the move under me. Sometimes this doesn’t work, but other times I am actually able to convince myself that I am making the world turn. I don’t know whether this can be attributed to my degree of self-centeredness, which is often quite high, or if it’s simply a matter of being in the right (or wrong) frame of mind.

I played this game today, and it worked quite well. Starting in the stairwell, I imagined that with each step down the stairs I was actually allowing the earth to ascend a little. Then, all the way to the cafeteria, the earth turned beneath me with each step I took. Once I reached the cafeteria, I continued to imagine that I was causing the earth to turn and that, instead of me walking toward the lady at the register, I was actually causing her to move toward me. The world stopped turning as I stood at the register, pulled out my wallet, and paid for my food. I didn’t tell the lady that I was causing the earth to turn today. I think that would have been weird. She already thinks I’m weird, so why offer any confirmation? I left the cafeteria, making the world shift directions with each corner I turned. On my way up the stairs to my office, I was not climbing but rather pushing the earth down until my floor was in front of me.

Sitting at my desk now, I’m beginning to wonder if I should let go of the earth and let it start turning on its own again.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve occasionally had trouble getting to sleep. When I was a kid, I would lay in bed, wide awake, and listen to my dad snore while I watched the shadows on the wall from the trees outside my window. Back then, my patience for laying awake in bed was far greater than it is now. I used to be able to lay there for hours; nowadays, I get impatient if I’m awake for more than thirty minutes. One of the ways I used to help myself fall asleep was to lift my forearm (at the elbow) off the bed and then let it flop back down. There had to be a rhythm to it; it wouldn’t work if I lifted and dropped my arm at random. I would do this over and over again, concentrating on the timing so as to keep my mind focused on a single task. It was my version of counting sheep, I guess.

That doesn’t work anymore, but I have a TV in my room that serves a similar purpose. The voices of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are surprisingly lulling. While I still have trouble getting to sleep occasionally (sometimes I’m awake until one or two in the morning), eventually I do fall asleep. And it doesn’t matter whether I’m feeling good or insecure, or whether I’m happy or sad. I can lose sleep over just about anything, really. Hell, I once lost sleep the night before a camping trip because I was so excited!

The first time I can recall having been awake for several consecutive nights was a couple months before Julien was born. I’m absolutely sure it was anxiety over becoming a father. How the hell could I possibly be a dad? Here I was, this guy with a ton of flaws; I can’t be a dad! I’m only going to screw this kid up! That concern kept me awake for five straight nights. I think I managed to get an hour or two of sleep during that time, but of course that wasn’t enough. I spent those five days scrambling through a series of emotions; panic, fear, excitement. There were more I’m sure, but those are the three I remember the most. I had seen my doctor at one point and he had given me valium. It didn’t help me get any sleep, but it relaxed me enough that I didn’t care. Later, I got a prescription for Ambien, which knocked me right the fuck out. I won’t ever take that again. It was a controlled sleep; so controlled, in fact, that I remember waking up one morning and being unable to open my eyes, move my body, or speak. Basically, I was wide awake inside my head but had absolutely no control over my body. The first time that happened, I thought it was an anomaly and didn’t suspect any connection to Ambien. So I took it again the following night. The same thing happened the next morning and so I swore off the stuff. Fortunately, I didn’t need to take it anyway; the cycle of insomnia was already broken.

Another time I can remember being awake all night was right after entering graduate school. I had come to Austin to study library preservation at UT. Within the first few weeks of classes, I decided that preservation was not for me and so I made the decision to change my concentration. This made the director of the preservation department very upset. She reacted in a way I had not expected, basically suggesting that I had made an absolutely ridiculous decision. I was mortified that someone I barely knew would have the nerve to tell me that I was wrong to do something I wanted to do. I lost sleep over that, but it was only a couple nights instead of five.

Last Tuesday night, it happened again. I made the very ill-advised decision to go for a swim at eleven p.m. (I should back up and tell you that I bought an above-ground swimming pool for me and the boys last weekend. It’s only ten feet in diameter, but that’s plenty big enough for the three of us.) The day I filled it, the water was icy cold, but being out in the sun for a couple of days had warmed it up a little. I thought it would be relaxing to get in the pool that night. As it turns out, when the sun isn’t shining, it doesn’t matter if the water is only slightly cool. I was only in the pool for about five minutes but the damage was already done; I was wide awake.

At two a.m., it occurred to me that, holy shit, I was still wide awake! And so I fretted over that for a while until, when four o’clock finally rolled around, I realized there was no hope of getting any sleep at all. So I got up and puttered around the house; did some dishes, played some guitar, watched an episode of Dream On. At five, I made some coffee, and at five-thirty, when the sky was starting to brighten, I went outside, sat on the front porch, and watched the sunrise through the trees across the street. I was pretty tired by that point, and although I probably could have fallen asleep then, it would have been useless to try because I needed to be up an hour later to take the kids to the bus. So I began my day without having ended the one before.

The day was mostly okay. I got tired again that afternoon, and my drive home from work was mildly hallucinogenic. Colors were really vivid and the cars on the road seemed to be spongy somehow, like if I bumped into one I would just bounce right off and both cars would return to their normal shapes. By six o’clock, I was exhausted. I was scheduled to begin drum lessons that night but cancelled them earlier that afternoon. I’m glad I did because I was in no condition to learn anything that evening. I talked to Alison on the phone for a little while after the boys went to bed. I told her how I hadn’t slept at all and she advised me to go to bed as soon as I hung up, which I did. Within minutes, I was asleep. I woke up with my alarm at six-thirty the following morning. It was a normal night.

I know that won’t be the last time I’ll ever lose sleep. It is, after all, something I’ve dealt with since I was little. And frankly, unless I somehow learn to handle stimuli (both internal and external) with Machiavellian efficiency, I don’t think I should ever expect to be completely free of it. But on the bright side, it does seem to be getting better. After all, instead of losing five nights (or even two), I’m down to one.

Thanks to the inestimable Mark Couvillion, my IE CSS woes are over. I have no idea what he did to make it work, but I’m okay with that; I’m just glad it works now. Thank you, Mark!

So at lunch today, Julien began to wax philosophical about life, sort of thinking out loud about the life spans among different species. “Chickens don’t live very long,” he said. “But turtles, they can live to be a hundred years old.” And at that point, I figured it would be appropriate to say something profound and dad-like. I began, “Yeah, well, even within species, the circle of life is …” I struggled; I needed something profound! Quick! But Julien beat me to it: “The circle of life is kinda square.”

It was a good lunch.

I tend to regard quotes the way I regard bumper stickers: sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they make sense, but most of the time they’re lame, and when you have to resort to appropriating someone else’s opinions to express your own (and especially when you feel it’s necessary to plaster those opinions all over your car), something’s wrong. That said, I came across a really good quote from Dr. Seuss this morning: “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

I hate Internet Explorer more than Hillary Clinton hates losing to Barack Obama (and that’s a lot of hate). My menu/Flickr sidebar at left works perfectly fine in Firefox, but of course it doesn’t work in Exploder. Why do I ever expect anything to work in Exploder? Does anyone know how to fix it? (If you’re using IE to view this page, the sidebar is supposed to be flush with the top of the most recent entry, just like it is in Firefox.)

I received this email about forty-five minutes ago:

Hello all,
I have been informed … that the demo crew has accidentally busted one of our main water supply pipes. The entire building’s water supply will be shut off to the building at 5 pm today, June 4th, for a couple of hours in order to fix the problem. Every restroom has been affected by the water problem. No restroom will flush at this time. Please reframe from using the toilets.
Thanks.

I sure am glad I don’t have to go.

On my way home from work today, I got stuck behind a guy who was going 20 in a 35 MPH zone. And I said outloud, “What. The. Flippin’. Fuck?” I chose the word “flippin” because sometimes I think I cuss too much.

The Lorenzo de Zavala State Library and Archives building is currently undergoing a massive renovation. They’ve started in the basement, ripping out walls, abating asbestos, and generally doing things us employees are not privy to. There are signs everywhere warning us to stay out of the basement. There is no statement of penalty should we happen to break this rule and trespass, but frankly I don’t care to find out what the penalty is so I’ve avoided the basement like the plague since about January of this year.

They’re at a phase of construction that involves a tremendous amount of demolition. Every time I walk past the loading dock on my way to my car, there is a fresh mountain of rubble piled up outside the dock gate and a small bucket loader is there scooping it all up and depositing it into the large receptacle that sits across three of the lot’s four parking spaces.

Today, I can hear the demolition in my office, which is on the third floor. Just outside my office, in the acquisitions/purchasing department, the light fixtures are vibrating. There is an old wooden door with a large window in the middle of it leading into the hallway (this door reminds me of one you might see leading into a detective’s office in an old movie, and sometimes I want to paint names on the glass: Mike Hammer, Private Eye, for instance). Today, when the door is closed, it rattles obnoxiously in its jamb. I’ve come and gone quite a few times so far today, and each time I’ve forgotten and closed the door (because, you know, I wasn’t raised in a fucking barn, so I’m used to closing doors behind me). And each time, I take a few steps either into the hallway on my way out or into acquisitions on my way toward my office. I get a few steps and I hear the rattling. And so I stop and turn around and open the door just a little bit, just to keep it from making that awful noise.

Sitting at my desk right now, I can feel a vibration in my chair and on my desk. When I went home for lunch this afternoon, The China Syndrome was on AMC. Eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I watched the part when the reactor shows its first signs of meltdown. Jack Lemmon’s character sets his coffee cup down on a desk, looks over a printout, and then reaches for the cup again. He stops just short of grabbing it and watches it: The vibrations from the impending catastrophe shake the mug and cause a series of concentric circles to form on the surface of the coffee. Cut to his reaction; he is alarmed.

I’m sure we’re not headed toward meltdown here. I’m sure the engineers know what they’re doing. I’m sure this building is going to withstand all the surgery being performed three flights below me. But in the off chance that a worker accidentally rips out a load-bearing wall and all four floors of metal and concrete come crashing to the ground and I am buried in it (and hopefully die, because who really wants to survive something like that?), please give all my valuables to my kids and anything else to a charity of your choice. I mean, I’m sure it won’t come to that, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.