Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"All the plots of all the terrorists in all the world have not the power to tear down the fundamental rights protected by the genius of the Constitution of the United States.

"It takes an act of Congress to do that."

-- from an editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune about proposed extension of the PATRIOT act, 2005-12-12

Argh. Bad and good. I'll do the bad first so I can end on an upbeat note -- the bad isn't interesting enough to make a really entertaining whine, so I'd better leave a positive taste behind ...

My body has been uncooperative. Uh, that's mostly it: the various other frustrations I've got to complain about mostly follow from that. I haven't been in severe pain, just the usual fibromyalgia background (okay, so that means part of the past few days it's felt like I have a sprained shoulder off and on with no actual injury to go with it, and my hands and knees ache; but that's how it is on all but my very best weeks, so it's not Special Dramatic Pain Levels or a migraine -- sucks, but I haven't had to reach for the codeine so it doesn't count) ... but fatigue and sleep problems are kicking my ass. I sleep for two to four hours at a time, and either wake feeling like I've only slept two hours and drag myself through to the next time I can fall asleep, or I wake feeling refreshed and perky and full of possibilities and it wears off 90-120 minutes later while I'm in the middle of something terribly urgent, and I become an inefficient zombie or (if I'm lucky) I fall asleep. So I haven't visited my mother or the in-laws, I haven't helped lonebear with the sysadmin stuff I said I'd help with, I haven't done paperwork, I didn't get to rehearsals, I only wrote one of the four major LJ entries I'd planned to write in the past week (little updates like this aren't what I'm talking about), and I haven't started transcribing the tunes I started composing.

I'm out of important groceries. Why? Well mostly because I expected to have been organized enough, and to have felt well enough for driving, to have gotten down to anniemal's house days ago, and figured it made sense to plan on buying food on the way back here rather than burn an afternoon's energy shopping just before heading out for a few days. Whoops. If I'd taken heed of a couple of telltales, maybe I would've realized I wasn't getting down there as soon as planned. (It kind of sneaks up on me. I need to get better at noticing little things early, instead of going, "Oh yeah, that's been this way for a few days now," late.) And now the weather's a mess, so I don't really want to make a food run now. Besides, I'm at the tail end of this afternoon's 'perky', and will need to go lie down soon. I'd hoped to beat the weather by hitting the road right after rush hour and going to Virginia. But then I couldn't sleep despite how tired I felt, until about the start of rush hour, and when I woke it was already slippery-looking out. I'll drive in pretty nasty conditions -- far nastier than this -- if I'm feeling alert, but when I'm already feeling a little off my game ...? (Which reminds me: for months now I've been meaning to write about my attitudes toward driving and safety, and observations on how I decide whether I'm feeling well enough.) Ah, but it's supposed to stop and then warm up, so maybe tonight or tomorrow morning I'll get out.

This is also why I missed a party I'd very badly wanted to go to this past weekend. *pout*

So, of course, I'm starting to feel a bit stressed about not being ready for Christmas. But at least that ties into one of the good things...

---

Yesterday I got my first Christmas card of the season. A few days ago I remembered to plug in the coloured Christmas lights hanging in the windows of the blue bedroom. And as long as I can pretend I didn't hear about the traffic accidents on the news, the weather is rather pretty. The cold came early this year, but other than temperature-related discomfort I really like winter -- and it's starting to look like winter and feel like Christmas. Stress or no stress, I've got a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings all wrapped up in the Christmas meme-complex. Feel-good memories, susceptibility to cultural "you're supposed to feel good" fictions that mimic memories, sensory triggers I enjoy, the background feeling of excitement and anticipation I pick up from my society (whether it's commercial, religious, gift-oriented, whatever -- I'm picking up the vibe, and the undercurrent of anticipation (and despite the screeching of the ohmyGodthere'sawaronChristmasandwe'rebeingoppressed crowd, cheer) is there), and the second most important holiday of my religion is approaching. (Yes, I'm very much aware of the reasons it's scheduled at this point in the calendar. Doesn't stop me from feeling it any more than understanding refraction prevents me from going "oooooooh!" at a rainbow.)

There's a huge potato baking in the oven (sliced in half, with an inside-out red chili pepper rolled into a little hollow I dug there, then reassembled and wrapped tightly in foil), and it's just starting to make those potato-means-FOOD smells. It should be ready just before I completely fall over.

I'm going to resist the impulse to go into "it would be even better if" territory, because right now that would sound (and, more importantly, feel, like whining, and this is the good-things half of this entry. (I could cheat and go add to the first paragraphs before I post this, but I'm not gonna. Y'all get this one stream-of-consciousness. Or at least as close to stream-of-consciousness as anything I write or say aloud ever is.) I have Christmas, I have a yummy-smelling potato, I have friends. And I have LJ to keep me entertained. My feeling "more 'alive' because it's winter" (actually that usually starts in autumn) is a little ironic considering my sleep issues, but any of it that I can feel is a positive thing and gets counted here.

And I've got tunes in my head that I need to write down before they get away.

( cut 'cause it's a personality quizmeme: mythical creatures )

In other news, the television weatherfolks are still saying eek-slippery-stay-home.

"If you had captured a terrorist, and you knew a bomb was going to go off in a few hours and he knew how to stop it, wouldn't you be right to torture him in order to save innocent lives?"

"What an unlikely scenario that is! That you would catch that person with so little time left in a plot that was probably years in setting up but could still be stopped at the last minute, AND you KNEW that you had the right guy and he could tell you how to stop it AND you were sure you could break him in time to stop the plot and he didn't think that he could hold out just long enough that you wouldn't have time to follow up after he gave you a bogus answer ... Outside of Hollywood does that come up often enough to be meaningful in a discussion of state sanctioned torture?"

And then it hit me. We've got a bunch of people who dodged military service trying to run a war without having to listen to the experts: what they know about war is mostly from movies, so of course they're thinking in terms of a Hollywood plot device and mistake it for reality!

(That's been percolating through my brain, waiting to form a big enough puddle to form into words, since reading theferrett's thoughts about the second season of 24 this morning.)