The Ryndex

So it’s been two weeks of my sleep-deprivation experiment. It’s springtime, and verdant energy is busting out all over. I decided to try something new:

* I’m only sleeping six and a half hours every night.

* Those six and a half hours are as regular as possible — bed at midnight.

* When the alarm clock goes off, I’m up and out of bed. No snooze.

* Replacing sleep with some exercise (running and rollerblading thrice weekly to start).

* Keeping the same schedule (as much as possible) during the weekend.

So scientists say eight hours a night? Bollocks! “Scientists” will say anything to get you into bed. I say, forget it — I need proof. Maybe I need less than eight hours. Instead of cutting back slowly, however, I decided on this tactic; see what happens on six and a half hours and augment if necessary.

I sleep very well. I very have insomnia, I very rarely wake up at night, and sleep paralysis is even rarer. I could be a model sleeper. In bed, head hits pillow and bang: Deepest Dreamland. Getting up has always been a pain, but that might be an issue of will.

The results are:

* I’m tired at 6h30 in the morning. Getting out of bed on the first ring of the alarm, however, is amazingly refreshing in the long run. The morning goes much smoother.

* I’m tired at 23h00 in the evening. Given that I would normally already be asleep at this hour, this is probably natural. I wouldn’t schedule anything that requires heavy concentration for this last hour of the day, but it’s fine for light reading, surfing the Intarwebs, listening to music or watching TV.

* The rest of the day seems equivalent. I haven’t noticed any decrease in concentration or efficiency at work. I have noticed that I’m more motivated, but that could be unrelated.

* Yesterday was the first bad day in the past two weeks. I was yawning all day. Last night, however, I stayed up until 00h30 and I feel fine today.

I’m going to try out the rest of the month, and then maybe increase to seven hours.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

I’m doing a little experiment. For the last ten days, I’ve made a commitment to getting less sleep. Six and a half hours a night, in fact. I don’t play with the snooze button, and I go to bed at exactly the same time.

But I’ll give you the results later. I was looking up some sleep-related stuff and stumbled across a Sleep Paralysis questionnaire. I’ve had this freaky experience (and I take a perverse pride in having had my very own hallucinations without any outside influence). So I wrote down the absolute truth about this, and I’ve decided to share it here.

Sometimes when falling asleep or when waking from sleep, I experience a brief period during which I am unable to move, even though I am awake and conscious of my surroundings.

Frequency: Several times in life.

Intensity: 7/7.

Please describe your experiences in your own words:

Every few years or so, I have this experience. Always on waking, I’m paralyzed, but I can usually see perfectly — except occasionally with “added” hallucinations, either hazy clouds moving through the room or more concrete images (people or objects in the room that don’t exist). This happens in clusters, two or three times in the space of a few weeks and then stops.

The first time I remember this happening was before I was six years old. The second time, I was eighteen or nineteen.

On these occasions I have tried to speak or call out but was unable to do so.

Frequency: Occasionally

The second time it happened, I was in bed with my girlfriend. I thought something was terribly wrong, and I tried to wake her.

She was half-dozing, and woke up because I went completely stiff and gasping. She turned to see what was wrong, and her movement “woke” my body. My mind was awake during the whole thing.

When I learnt what sleep paralysis was, I stopped trying to call out, and just tried to go back to sleep.

During the experience I had the feeling of a presence in the room with me. (What is meant here is an awareness of something present, independently of actually seeing or hearing anything.)

Frequency: Occasionally.

Intensity: 6/7.

I’ve only felt a presence in the room if I was also hallucinating, which is infrequent.

During the experience I had a sensation of floating.

Frequency: Never

Intensity: Does not apply.

I normally feel trapped. I’ve never felt “out of body”.

During the experience I imagined that I saw a something: a shape, person or being of some kind.

Frequency: Occasionally

Intensity: 6/7

Please describe details, if any, about what you saw:

I usually don’t hallucinate during sleep paralysis, but when I do, it’s almost as vivid as real life.

My first memory of sleep paralysis was a clear image of a robot entering my door (as clear as I can recall, this was before I was six years old and a lot less silly at the time). My parents explained that this was a nightmare, and I thought it was just a particularly vivid nightmare until it happened again in University.

Once, there was an indistinct shadow of a person (an old woman) in the room, even though the rest of the room was perfectly clear and realistic.

A few times, the room has been filled with a hazy cloud — again, the room was clear through the cloud.

I remember once that everything in the room was in a different spot than normal, and much less clear and real.

During the experience I felt pressure on my chest or other part(s) of my body.

Frequency: Occasionally

Intensity: 2/7

Especially when panicking (before I knew what to expect), I felt like I couldn’t control my breathing, especially to breath in sufficiently to yell.

According to my girlfriend at the time, I never actually stopped breathing.

Blah blah blah

At this point, the survey asked questions about things that had never happened to me, such as floating, leaving my body, etc. The answers were either no or too dull to include here.

Have you ever felt: Fear

Frequency: Occasionally.

Intensity: 6/7

Before I knew what was happening, it was very frightening — more frightening than I would have expected.

Ever since, I’m still anxious when it happens, but I remind myself that it’s just sleep paralysis and try to close my eyes and go back to sleep.

Have you ever felt: blah blah blah

Lots of other stuff that I’ve never felt, including sadness, anger, cold, erotic feelings, trembling.

Blah blah blah

Body position, general alertness, when this normally happens, triggers, and demographic information.

That’s the whole story. Yes, I had a robot hallucination before the age of six years old. It’s one of those things that I remember so vividly that I have to wonder if it actually happened.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

Summaries of hypothetical crimes were given to judges, who were asked to choose the appropriate and fair legal sentences. One set of judges received no physical descriptions of the guilty party; the other received the same summary except the criminal was described as ‘attractive’ or ‘handsome’.

This slight change resulted in more lenient sentences across the board for the attractive criminals. The judges didn’t even need to see the man or woman.

I like this study because it proves something we all suspect: pretty people (generally meaning other people) have easier lives.

Beautiful isn’t necessarily good, and good isn’t necessarily beautiful — but if you’re going to spend five minutes trapped in an elevator with a stranger, which would you prefer?

The good news is that five minutes is all the advantage that the pretty people get. Well, maybe fifteen. Possibly even longer if viewed from far, but once you start interacting, talking and walking, it soon becomes irrelevant.

I don’t think I’m particularly profound — in fact, I’m downright shallow. Regardless, I’m not going to spend longer than fifteen minutes absorbed in the beauty of any timeless objet d’art, much less another human. I don’t have the concentration. I think I’m about average in this respect.

No, the most aggressively attractive person has at most fifteen minutes to physically dazzle in human interaction, then it’s down to personality and charm, intelligence and wit. And that’s how they’ll be judged for the rest of the time you’ll know them. Maybe you’ll have flashes when you suddenly remark how pretty they are, but it’s more of a pleasant surprise.

Granted, fifteen minutes of privileged treatment is a lot — there’s always someone new to dazzle. I can imagine it would be useful in bars, pretty much any service situation, job interviews, and apparently criminal sentencing. But as useful as being pretty might be, for the vast expanses of life between court hearings, one’s prettiness is irrelevant compared to one’s capabilities. That’s very reassuring.

I don’t consider myself pretty, and sometimes I can be hard on myself. That’s normal, especially among the beautiful (and during criminal sentencing). I don’t have the extreme form of deep-seated conviction of my own unattractiveness — that’s called body dismorphia. If you’re convinced that you’re always uglier than the people around you, you likely have a distorted view of yourself. This is something to talk to someone about — it’s not a nice way to live. Do something about it.

In conclusion, I exfoliated today using a packet of sugar (as recommended on the excellent What Not to Wear). It’s been five years since my last exfoliation, and I was surprised how much dead skin I actually took off. I could have made a second face with it!

Has anyone heard of the sentencing study and provide me a link? I hate vague writing with “a study exists…” or “experts say…” or “statistics prove that…”

Also, did you note my carefully chosen pronouns? This was inspired by a very attractive (and interesting and charming) person — but it goes back a few years and you don’t know who it is, even if you think you might.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

So I got fired.

Well, terminated. The auld mother company untied the apron strings and pushed me out of the nest. I got my last paycheck, but I skipped the exit interview (being thousands of kilometres away). I didn’t say good-bye to my manager, because I never actually met him.

Technically, I’ve been out of the nest for three years. We’ve decided to make it permanent, and at the beginning of March, I signed my new contract in France. Same job, same position, less money, more vacation.

I’ve always felt kind of like a rat fleeing a sinking ship, because I know that a lot of my close friends and work colleagues had this sprung on them. Well, all of my work colleagues in fact — I was one of the guilty survivors of the Vancouver massacre, having cleverly arranged to have a contract when They decided to trim the fat. Now I spend my time sipping coffee on a terrace in France, eating cheese and mixing cocktails and metaphors.

Nope. No more Canadian paychecks. No more CPP, RRSP, EI. Now it’s all carte de sejour, carte vitale, and carte d’orange — and enough passport photos to fill a horse. I’m working for the French now.

And being terminated was a sweet deal. Not as sweet as severance, but being paid out for banked vacation days was a pleasant surprise.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

Yesterday, as I’m sure all of you are aware, was International Women’s Day. This is a day to reflect on women and their issues in today’s society.

I wrote about it yesterday, but everything I said sounded slightly off and patronizing. International Women’s Day isn’t exactly like Mother’s Day. You can’t buy a card for all the women you appreciate that says “Hey, thanks for being you and doing the things you do!”.

The charter of the UN has the equal rights of men and women as one of the highest priorities in the preamble (just after “let’s avoid war”). In an ideal world, I wouldn’t be thanking any women because their roles and the things they do wouldn’t be any different than for non-women.

In a poetic turn, it was Ladies Night at the Canadian Bar in Paris last night, so she got twice as many drinks as the rest of us.

Regardless of whether the holiday is for reflection or appreciation, I’d like to conclude by thanking you (women) for being you and doing the things you do.

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

Well, hello there, and welcome!

You may be wondering why my blog regularity has dropped so dramatically recently. I have plenty of things to talk about, but unfortunately little time to discuss.

1. I have shuffled off the Canadian coil. I was terminated (fired!) from the Canadian side of the telecom company that I work for. Fortunately, this is because I was hired on the French side. Hooray! Now I’m officially in France indefinitely (i.e. two and a half more years). Unfortunately, I get a slight pay cut. Fortunately, I get way more vacation than ever before in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t have the right to take it until 2006.

I could play the unfortunately/fortunately game for hours, covering aspects such as losing my right to the severance pay, reimbursement of public transport (a significant expense), extreme complications for my retirement, yearly bonus. In the long run, however, I believe I made the right decision.

2. It snowed here. Thursday, I left my house at 7h20, and returned at 10h10 — the buses stopped running and I was stuck out at the end of the inter-urban train. I left my house again at 13h00 and got to work at 16h00. There was an episode where I finally got a bus, but they decided to change the route so that it didn’t pass anywhere near my work.

All this for about 15cm of snow. Given the histrionic hissy fits the French drivers were having, you’d think I was in Vancouver.

3. I left the house this morning, and when I was in the elevator, I started panicking because I might have left the kettle plugged in and turned on. It has an automatic shut-off, unless the lid is slightly ajar, which it might be. I frequently have these obsessive moments, and if I give into them, I’ll end up going back to my apartment an infinite number of times before leaving. This is why I have a thorough checklist before going on vacation.

But this time, something was really bothering me, so I had to use my extraordinary powers of apathy to suppress the urge to go check on my apartment.

When I got to the street, I realized I was wearing two different shoes.

4. I got a haircut. It’s highly illogical.

Before

After

Tin Foiled BlahBlahBlah

The beast awakens.

It’s been so long. What am I supposed to do with Internet at home?

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