A week ago:

Nearly a week of not drinking and going to sleep before midnight means I’m dreaming every night again. I’m really not sure which is worse for my sense of reality.

The hardest part of getting enough sleep isn’t being groggy in the morning, it’s slicing the memories made during dreams off before they settle permanently into my sense of reality like barnacles on a boat.

J kept mentioning how happy I looked at the AA fundraiser, yesterday another friend said:

I’ve been seeing the stream of constantly happy tweets and kind of enjoying it by osmosis because it’s clearly causing positive vibes for you

I try to imagine what graduating from college and entering the “real world” would be like. This is difficult, because professional and educational lines were always blurred for me, I think my first part-time internship was in 7th grade. By the time I dropped out of high school I had graduated from computer repair to systems administrator; a title I still usually hold today although working with quite different technology. It has to be more epic than changing jobs, perhaps like moving to a new city and changing careers at the same time. Once again, my experience is broad and smoothly fades from hat to the next. I sometimes talk of “former lives,” usually when I’m referring to my time doing electronics salvage and driving a truck around the east coast.

I once drove a leased truck for a month and had to keep track of mileage. I drove over 10,000 miles that month, and yet, I was only driving part of the time. The rest, I was leading two salvage crews and handling most of the local logistics. Once a year or so I end up driving a few miles for work to pick up an air conditioning unit or take furniture to the transfer station and I’m reminded of those times. It’s nice to think that everything was so much simpler then, and perhaps it was through the lens of driving. While I was doing quite a bit of work and had significant responsibility, it doesn’t compare to now. I think the most significant factor was the manual labor that left me exhausted every evening such that for weeks at a time life was mostly sleeping and working. That’s okay though, I’ve always enjoyed working.