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Typical daily agenda for the past month:

4-5 a.m.
Wake up early for no reason. Wait patiently until my alarm goes off at 7:06 a.m.
Finally get sleepy.
Hit snooze two or three times.

7:24-7:33 a.m.
Get out of bed.
Drag ass through cereal/shower/dressed/drive-to-work procedures.

8:30 a.m. – 7-8ish p.m.
Work at work, at the work where and at which I work at.
Hopefully eat lunch or just subsist on candy/snacks in my desk.
Stay late because things aren’t done because being interrupted is my primary responsibility and I take that seriously.
Take stuff home to work on.

8-11 p.m.
Work at home on more stuff — freelance, stuff for other people.
Work on stuff I brought home from regular job to work on.
Most likely, finish nothing before I hit wall of diminishing returns on effort/quality ratios.
Probably eat a Pop Tart.

11 p.m. – 2 a.m.
Lie in the dark trying to go to sleep.
Worry about things.

2-4 a.m.
Sleep.
Dream about losing teeth, abandoned supermarkets, food I don’t have time to eat.
Wake up with nosebleed and furious at my humidifier.

So, in aesthetics there’s a concept called “The Uncanny Valley.” You can read about it on the internet in a lot of places. It basically says that if you chart the relationship of “realness” to likability of something, instead of it just steadily going up there’s a drop when something is very-real-but-not-real. In robotics, specifically, there’s a huge dip in the likability of very realistic artificial things. For example, artificial limbs that move on their own are really creepy. “Toy Story” is great, but “Polar Express” gives you the willies. Instead of being better, they’re so good they’re worse.

Anyway, I think there’s a similar thing for the relationship of cuteness and reality. Case in point: do a Google image search for “morkie.” A morkie is a dog that’s half-Maltese half-Yorkie, and it’s so cute it looks artificial, and therefore isn’t cute at all, it’s just terrifying. See also: Ryan Gosling. So good looking it’s actually unbelievable. Blows my mind. I just don’t trust those people/things.

B-plot of this blog post: Wednesday someone asked me if I was engaged. I wear a ring I got for my 25th birthday on my right-hand ring finger that does kind of look like an engagement ring. (I like to think of it as a ring with which I could do serious damage if I punched somebody). Because of my total ineptitude with, you know, talking to other humans, I said no, and then when she asked me “Don’t you want to get married someday?” I said no because I don’t really like people.

More B-plot: My mom tried to guilt me into going to a baby shower yesterday by telling me that if I didn’t go, then nobody will come to my baby shower. I cackled laughing. What do I care if nobody comes to my baby shower? What does it matter? What would I do with a diaper cake? (Note: Diaper cakes are a real thing. It’s a sculpture of a cake made of diapers. This is something people want to get at baby showers.) In this imaginary future where I’m pregnant who says what I’ll care about or not care about? What kind of threat is that? Nobody will come to your baby shower. Ha. It’s like saying nobody will come to my funeral — what do I care? I’ll be dead.

Barely functional metaphor: I’m OK with all of this because it is all so far out of my realm of reality I can’t even begin to comprehend. A dolphin isn’t stupid because it can’t drive a car — it’s just not a problem a dolphin faces ever.

C-plot: Today I went to a lighting store. If you’ve never been to one (which, for thirty years, I hadn’t), it’s incredible. Completely overwhelming. First of all, it’s packed, wall-to-wall with lamps, sconces, mirrors and hanging light fixtures of ever imaginable shape, size and material. Indoor and outdoor, stuff made of metal, wood, plastic, mirror, crystal, painted-metal tulips, wicker, straw, glass bubbles … just, everything. And some of them are gigantic — like they belong in a humongous ridiculous castle house. Like I wrote, it was completely overwhelming, and I was completely overwhelmed. I just sort of doped around, wide-eyed and confused. I couldn’t remember the difference between anything I saw. I could only remember the lamp or dangling fixture I’d last seen. After about 40 minutes, I had to leave.

I started to have serious doubts about myself. I’m a 30-year-old woman. This should be the kind of thing that makes me all, I don’t know, happy or excited or something. It doesn’t. Do I have the wrong priorities with my life? I don’t care about lamps, just like I don’t care about babies or being pretty because I just want to be good at my job and work hard and get older and die proud of what I did. Why do I need a lamp for that? Why do I need to care about a lamp for that?

Would I be happier with my life/myself/the world if I was more interested in lamps? Are my lamp-shunning priorities ruining my existence?

Act three, where it all comes together: Fuck it. Lamps. And if they can’t handle it, let them riot. I’m not going to be pressured into caring about you. LAMPS. And if I don’t have to care about lamps, do I really have to care about all that other crap? All these things I’m doing “wrong” with my life. No. Not really. I don’t have to choose to waste valuable molecules of caring on stuff that doesn’t matter to me.

Resolution/takeaway message: Don’t threaten me with your beautiful-people-baby-lamp club problems, they don’t mean anything to me.

There are, at the least, about a quarter-million distinct English words. If you count distinct senses, inflection, words not yet added to the dictionary, obsolete words, derivative words, plus words from technical and regional vocabularies there are about three-quarters of a million. (For example, this second count would include every unique way one could use “like.”)

When people ask me if I’m paid by the word for writing, I wish I could say yes. I write you X number of words, I get Y dollars, we go on our magical separate ways. Too bad nobody is paying for just words. They’re paying for a specific selection and combination of words. They’re paying for my skill of selecting and ordering them. It’s a finite set of options, and there are finite ways of combining the selection, plus a ton of rules that govern how they may be combined and ordered, which, somehow, I feel should make it easier.

Comparatively, for example, there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, 206 bones in an average adult human and 118 named elements on the periodic table. If you just looked at it by the numbers, an astronomer would need to know a lot more than an osteologist, who knows slightly more than a chemist, so it should be easier to be a chemist than an astronomer or a writer or an osteopath. Of course, this is wrong, but something I’d like to tell my doctor sometimes.

I will never discover a galaxy. I will not synthesize a cure for cancer or treat someone’s degenerative bone disease and improve the quality of his/her life. (I mean, I guess I could do these things accidentally, or on purpose if I decided to go back to school and pursue advanced degrees in hard sciences or medicine, or whatever — it’s not relevant to my argument here.) The best I can hope to do is choose a handful of words from a scant quarter-to-three-quarters-million and put them together in some order that captivates attention for as long as I’ve requested. A lot of the time, that’s hard work enough.

“Have you got any soul?” a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.

-Nick Hornby, High Fidelity