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May. 25th, 2014 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaipurI've been trying the sleep-restriction approach to insomnia again for the past week or so. That means that instead of turning in at 10 pm and sleeping 'til 3 am, I stay up 'til 11 or better 11:30, aiming to sleep until 6 am.
I actually kind of like it--I drop off without a second thought--I still wake up fussing about work and deadlines and what not, but when I look at the clock it's usually after 5:30, instead of 3 am. Plus I get more time in the evening with the hubby, so it's a win-win. I'm doing a solid 6 hours a night, which is a nice break from the 4 or 5 hours I'd been doing recently.
Eight hours' sleep a night would be lovely, but those days are apparently gone. Being 18 again would be nice too, and it's about as likely to happen. ;)
But as a result of being up at 5:30 yesterday and this morning and not having to get up to go to work, I had the TV's music channels on while I was reading. I usually flip between the 70s, 80s, and pop channels, but this morning I ended up on the Teen channel. I know some of the songs, recognize some of the bands, and the rest are the latest thing for teenyboppers, I guess. But what the hell--these will be the songs playing in the grocery store in 20 years, and I might as well not lose touch completely. ;)
But it led to a weird experience--they put up a picture of a One Direction member during one of their songs, and it was such an odd shot that I found myself staring at it. The guy had a full head of hair, fluffy and windblown and so prominent that I found myself comparing it to what happens when men age, and wondering if it'd still be that fluffy when he aged. It was a young boy's hair, but then he had the scruffy beard of early adulthood, and his lashes were so thick it looked like he had eye-liner on. All told it was an attractive picture, but all I could see in it was the hints of how he would age, like I was looking at the tube of his life through time. It was a picture that captured a transition phase and highlighted the passage of time, if that makes sense.
And that got me musing about time, and how these bands age, how a group is hot and has its hit songs and time on the radio, and then the bloom fades and there's always another band in the wings. (At least since the 50's, and moving forward.) Then during an Edward Sheeran song the blurb on the screen said he'd been so proud when he could introduce his Beatles-fan father to Paul McCartney, and I got temporally dizzy. Sheeran's in his young 20s, his father is probably my age or a smidge older, and Paul McCartney was a hit before I was born. McCartney had his time and has moved on, but his impact continues--he isn't just what he is now, an old man, but what he also was. He's a vector, not a scalar (maybe a tensor?). We all are--not just the cross-section of the current moment that keeps moving forward, but the whole longitudinal tube, if you will.
It's almost like you can sense the dimensions of time, when you get into it. I can't describe it, but it's a sensation that shows up occasionally when I think too much about aging and time. (Unfortunately it doesn't DO anything, doesn't lead to anything productive, but it's a weird sensation.) A sense of how it's all connected backward by the interactions of molecules, back through history. Forward is a different story--it will be all connected backward, but not yet. I'm sure other people have these sensations; the hubby's said things about other people under the influence of various drugs seeing sequential moments of time as pearls on a string, and there's that sense of linear shape and connection to it.
I actually kind of like it--I drop off without a second thought--I still wake up fussing about work and deadlines and what not, but when I look at the clock it's usually after 5:30, instead of 3 am. Plus I get more time in the evening with the hubby, so it's a win-win. I'm doing a solid 6 hours a night, which is a nice break from the 4 or 5 hours I'd been doing recently.
Eight hours' sleep a night would be lovely, but those days are apparently gone. Being 18 again would be nice too, and it's about as likely to happen. ;)
But as a result of being up at 5:30 yesterday and this morning and not having to get up to go to work, I had the TV's music channels on while I was reading. I usually flip between the 70s, 80s, and pop channels, but this morning I ended up on the Teen channel. I know some of the songs, recognize some of the bands, and the rest are the latest thing for teenyboppers, I guess. But what the hell--these will be the songs playing in the grocery store in 20 years, and I might as well not lose touch completely. ;)
But it led to a weird experience--they put up a picture of a One Direction member during one of their songs, and it was such an odd shot that I found myself staring at it. The guy had a full head of hair, fluffy and windblown and so prominent that I found myself comparing it to what happens when men age, and wondering if it'd still be that fluffy when he aged. It was a young boy's hair, but then he had the scruffy beard of early adulthood, and his lashes were so thick it looked like he had eye-liner on. All told it was an attractive picture, but all I could see in it was the hints of how he would age, like I was looking at the tube of his life through time. It was a picture that captured a transition phase and highlighted the passage of time, if that makes sense.
And that got me musing about time, and how these bands age, how a group is hot and has its hit songs and time on the radio, and then the bloom fades and there's always another band in the wings. (At least since the 50's, and moving forward.) Then during an Edward Sheeran song the blurb on the screen said he'd been so proud when he could introduce his Beatles-fan father to Paul McCartney, and I got temporally dizzy. Sheeran's in his young 20s, his father is probably my age or a smidge older, and Paul McCartney was a hit before I was born. McCartney had his time and has moved on, but his impact continues--he isn't just what he is now, an old man, but what he also was. He's a vector, not a scalar (maybe a tensor?). We all are--not just the cross-section of the current moment that keeps moving forward, but the whole longitudinal tube, if you will.
It's almost like you can sense the dimensions of time, when you get into it. I can't describe it, but it's a sensation that shows up occasionally when I think too much about aging and time. (Unfortunately it doesn't DO anything, doesn't lead to anything productive, but it's a weird sensation.) A sense of how it's all connected backward by the interactions of molecules, back through history. Forward is a different story--it will be all connected backward, but not yet. I'm sure other people have these sensations; the hubby's said things about other people under the influence of various drugs seeing sequential moments of time as pearls on a string, and there's that sense of linear shape and connection to it.
