Good morning.  How’s that for optimism?  It’s 4-11 today, so perhaps I should try to give you some information.  You all remember the old information line, don’t you?  Four, one, one (in the US, anyway).  I think the toll-free/long distance version used to be 800-555-1212 or something like that.

I don’t know if those lines are active and maintained anymore.  I know I haven’t used either one for probably more than 2 decades‒by which I mean it’s been more than 2 decades since I used them.  I don’t mean to deny having used the line for a stretch as long as 2 decades.  I hope it goes without saying that I have never just stayed on the 411 line for decades at a time without stop.  That would be weird.

Speaking of weird, I want to apologize if yesterday’s post was too weird for anyone.  I don’t plan these in advance, as you may know, so they become a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Not that I didn’t find the stuff I wrote interesting; obviously I did at some level, because it’s certainly there in my head.

Of course, I do edit each post (three times) before posting, and yesterday I even did some relatively elaborate figuring (though the math was really just basic arithmetic, and I messed that up when working out the surface area of the Earth because when I squared the radius, I didn’t square the pi in the denominator of my expression for the radius).

To try to cut myself some slack, it was early in the morning after all, and I was going more speedily than was probably advisable, since I only have a limited amount of time to do and post these things in the AM.  I suppose we all have a limited time every morning; if anyone out there has unlimited time in the morning, please let us know.  That would be a staggering phenomenon.

Of course, if time is continuous and infinitely divisible (our best understanding of the universe seems to say it is not, but that’s not absolutely certain) then one could, in a sense, have unlimited time, but only if one could speed up without limit, and we know you can’t do that.

Anyway…

I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot org this week‒at least one little set a day‒so that’s an accomplishment of sorts.  I’m in the midst of several courses, but lately I’ve mostly been doing the vectors course‒it’s really just a basic review for me so far, but reviewing is good, because I want to get on to linear algebra and tensors and matrices because there is a question in Special/General Relativity that I would like to solve for myself if I am ever able.  That’s probably a pipe dream, because my attention meanders to too many other things too often.

That’s why my former routine to write my fiction during my commute worked‒it wasn’t a debatable thing, it was just what I did every morning.  That worked pretty well, or, well, at least it was productive.  I don’t know if my stories are actually good to anyone else but me, and honestly, neither does anyone else, in general.  It’s possible (however unlikely) that my books and stories are the greatest works of literature ever produced on Earth, but since next to no one has ever read any of them, almost no one will ever know.

Of course, now I have this routine, which I guess one could continue to call productive.  It’s certainly productive of relatively frequent blog posts.  That plus about ten bucks’ll get you a descamisado coffee* at Starbucks®.  It’s not as though anyone is ever going to while away an afternoon reading my old blog posts, but it’s just conceivable that someone might read one of my novels or short stories some day when they are bored.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  I’m very tired and sapped of motivation to do much of anything.  I wish I could even imagine a positive future for me, but honestly, I don’t really imagine the future at all.  You might think that’s just good “mindfulness” or, well, a “living in the present moment” thing.  But I think it’s just the current set-point of that function in my brain, to no credit of my will.

Anyway, I’m tired, and not just of work or the blog.  I want to go to sleep, but that’s one of the most difficult things for me to do.

I hope all of you, at least, have a peaceful and good rest of your weekend, and a good rest of your life while you’re at it.  As long as I’m hoping, I might as well hope big, right?

*I’m pretty sure that’s not actually one of their drink names or sizes, but they do use such pretentious and absurd names for the sizes of their beverages that they should be ridiculed mercilessly until they go back to “small”, “medium”, and “large”.  Do coffee shops (or the equivalent) in other countries use slightly twisted versions of the English “small”, “medium”, and “large” to describe the sizes of their beverages?  Probably some of them do.  People are so stupid.