Falling in love with sleep: looking back at August, 2016
These past few days, I have been a little short on sleep. Some of this sleep deprivation comes from the kitten, who continues to bite my toes and dance on my belly while I rest, and some of it can be attributed to a small cold I have been fighting for a few days, but much of it, I admit, is directly due to my poor sleeping habits.
I don’t “prepare” for sleep, like so many experts recommend, but instead crawl into bed at a certain time — whether I am tired or not — and stare at my phone until I doze off. This, I know, is not healthy. I am slowly working on making my pre-bedtime routine more conscious, more conducive to rest, but this, as all habits do, will take time.
Perhaps we all need to learn to fall in love with sleep, again. Sure, we relish slumber after a long day, but our culture is fascinated with being awake:
Great philosophers have taught that most of us mistake the limits of our own perception for the limits of the universe. Nowhere is this conundrum more relevant than in our contemporary take on sleep. We are mired in a pre-Copernican-like, wake-centric era regarding consciousness. We presume waking to be the centre of the universe of consciousness, and we relegate sleeping and dreaming to secondary, subservient positions.
Looking at sleep solely through waking-world eyes is like looking at a glorious night sky through dark sunglasses. We are caught in wakism, a subtle but pernicious addiction to ordinary waking consciousness that limits our understanding and experience of sleep.
Falling in love with sleep again. Sounds good to me.
I have spent more days in August in Toronto than I have in our small hometown — for work and weddings and more — and I’ve begun to wonder why I have been so easy to embrace our move to a smaller town when I am so enthralled by the magic of big urban centers.
The answer is easy: I love the place where we live because I live here with those I love. I miss the buzz of the city, and my many friends there, but I am comforted by the quiet of our new hometown, and by the fact that I come home every day to my wife and my cat. Life is good; this life, wherever it is, feels like home.
I didn’t do much writing this month, and most of my reading focused on reports and articles for work. I did, however, read and review one book, write a short tribute to the World Bank InfoShop, and submit my most recent mixtape for The Mixtape Concern.
Here’s a list of my favorite diversions — a selection of essays, articles, blog posts, and miscellaneous links that inspired me this month:
“Practicing waiting is a lifelong practice since, as it turns out, impatience has a particular gravitational pull. But after all that waiting, finding or opening or having that once-future thing feels very much present. And that is worth waiting for.”
BoJack Horseman is one of my favorite television shows in recent years. The way it deals with depression, anxiety, sense of loss, sense of purpose, and aging is impressive — especially considering it is an animated show starring an anthropomorphic horse. This NYTimes profile on its creation and creators is a great read once you’ve finished the third season.
If you think anthropomorphic animals are adorable, you’ll be interested in this look at what makes things “cute”, and the pervasiveness of “cuteness” in Japan. Apparently, a whole new academic field of cute studies has begun.
How to get rid of books: “You’ll always have more books than space for them. You’ll never achieve bookshelf equilibrium.”
The creator of the Super Soaker water gun was a Black engineer who worked for NASA and was constantly discounted because of the color of his skin. Gives a whole new perspective to all those years I spent at picnics chasing after friends with my triple-barreled Super Soaker, and getting soaked myself.
“A good chunk of science is being at the right place at the right time to see something briefly.”
I have no clue how to describe this essay on drinking alcohol and on being a woman, but I can say that you definitely should read it.
Not something I’ve thought of before, but now I can’t stop thinking about it as I stare up at the night sky: the constellations are sexist.
“This is the problem with public proposals. They are, at heart, an act of intense coercion and humiliation, made by men apparently too insecure to ask their loved one to spend the rest of their life with them without a baying mob complicit in the weird slushy sting operation.”
America (and many parts of Canada, too) is enveloped in a culture of fear around Islam, leading to patients declining treatment from Muslim doctors. It’s heartbreaking to be a Muslim anywhere in the world these days.
Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION was one of my favorite albums of 2015, much to the ridicule of many. This reflection, one year since the album release, is an excellent articulation of what makes the album so great.
The Tragically Hip weren’t in my consciousness growing up, and I didn’t know any of their music. Still, two weeks ago, I watched their last concert, and tears streamed down my face. These articles by Stephen Marché and Eric Koreen do a good job of encapsulating why this band means so much to Canadians. Conversely, this discussion on not being a fan of The Tragically Hip while still being unabashedly Canadian is also quite poignant.
We all depend on Wikipedia for quickly looking up facts, but the underbelly of the online encyclopedia is marked with mental illness and suicide that the community is working hard to manage.
More and more people are using online communities and tools to find solace when our current mental health system fails them. How can the system use these online communities more effectively?
“Nearly every city has tried to build its way out of traffic congestion, but the approach hasn’t yet worked.” Building more roads to deal with traffic congestion doesn’t work. We need to think of other ways to move people around our cities.
I had a delicious lobster roll for dinner last week, so it’s only fitting that I thoroughly enjoyed this oral history of the lobster roll and its origins in Maine.
Important reading for our current political climate: how technology disrupted the truth.
In the project Ornitographies, photographer Xavi Bou captures the motion and stillness of flying birds, all at once.
Why has Korean food become so popular recently, like Peruvian food just before it, and so many other international food trends over the years? Turns out gastronomic diplomacy is quite an extensive industry, and shapes what we eat every day.
Internationally-renown chef David Chang has a unified theory of deliciousness, which came from years of studying and examining what works and what doesn’t in his kitchen and others.
Photographer Oliver Curtis visits famous landmarks and takes photos faced the wrong direction, capturing essentially what these landmarks see all day.
The best kind of writing on the internet is happening in places we often ignore:”These little platform-incongruent Easter eggs give us blips of pleasure; they are like the marginalia of the internet, except they’re more than just notes — they’re little standalone works of art.” I love the idea of the “marginalia of the internet.”
My out-of-office reply always gets nice comments, and occasionally responses, because I always make each one conversational, personal, and fun. What happens when your out-of-office reply becomes news?
My Uber, My Friend: “Ride-sharing drivers have become the unofficial new bartenders, or arm-chair therapists.”
Do you know much about Will Smith’s early music? Turns out his lyrics weren’t as sweet and uncontroversial as we may think: Will Smith started as a gangsta rapper.
A defense of something I’ve believed for a very long time: Janet Jackson made better music than her brother Michael. (Now, time to go listen to Rhythm Nation 1814.)
“Everyone wants to believe that they are a good person. Americans want to believe it more, perhaps, than the rest of us, because their nation has done and continues to do some very bad things both in the world and to its own people in the name of a dream that is still a nightmare for millions.”
There’s no shortage of good election writing these days. Here are a few pieces that stood out over the past couple of weeks:
- How Hillary Clinton came back from the brink
- The new political divide
- Last Trump for the suit? (Fashion and politics together. Excellent.)
Almost every collection of my favorite links over the past few months has included a link to a blog post by James Shelley; this one is no different. His most recent musings on careerism and being micro-ambitious in the present are poignant and resonant: “Is the whole point of running this race simply so that one day I will not need to race anymore? Do I work solely for the cause of not working in the future? How does this make sense? Never mind. Around I must go again.”
