svnsettia

I've been using my earbuds because my headphones died a couple of days ago. As of yesterday, the earbuds are also dead. Great timing. So that's another thing I need to buy. I think the headphones and the earbuds lasted longer than usual because I used them for separate activities, so I'm going to keep doing that.

The blackout curtains worked as expected but I did indeed have trouble getting up and feeling fully awake, even after I turned on the sunlamp. The sunlamp ain't got nothin on the actual sun. Finally I had to just mentally snap myself out of it and force myself up out of the blankets and things.

I had a very colorful dream this morning about people modeling clothing. The men's clothing style was fairly standard, but the women's clothing was stuff I'd never seen before. I don't follow fashion and I like rather conservative men's fashion, like jeans, button-down shirts and slacks, so I don't know where the content of this dream came from.

I feel worse about my limitations now that I want to date again because I think about what I can offer to another person, and someone who struggles just to keep an apartment clean is not something I want to offer. Oh but I've been in pain lately because I've been undersleeping, so I'm not as bad off as I was thinking today as I looked at the food caked onto my stovetop.

I had no glycine but I'm still tired. Coffee hasn't been working lately, which is extra strange because I had time off from it.

Eighty pages into the Asimov novel, there's still not much more happening than a bunch of talking, and it looks like political intrigue is brewing. What really made me put the book down today (and possibly forever), however, is a description of the main character's space ship as changing mass. MASS. Not because bits are falling off of it, not because it's approaching the speed of light. JUST BECAUSE IT'S LANDING. No, dammit.

Sci-fi novels that don't even obey the laws of physics are things I will not abide. If sci-fi authors don't want their fictional universe to work like our universe, they need to create and describe the alternative universe in which their alternate physics exists. Well, Asimov hasn't done that and the previous eighty pages suggests that he won't. I was already annoyed by an earlier, unexplained description of the ship as "gravitic," operating somehow without regard to gravity. This disappearing mass is going too far.

I'm a bit exasperated that this is the second sci-fi novel I've recently tried, thinking I'd found something worthwhile in the trashbin of English-language fiction, that turns out to be more trash. I had a vague idea that Asimov had some actual scientific qualifications, probably because I read science books of his when I was a kid, and these fictional details are disappointing coming from a scientist, if he actually was one.

I think some people don't understand that science fiction needs to actually be science-based to qualify as science fiction. There are limits to how foreign, how technologically advanced things can be before the story veers into the realm of fantasy.

Today I finally started reading the philosophy of quantum mechanics text I bought months ago. The writing is not as clear as I'd like but I feel some relief at beginning to finally get some clarity about quantum mechanics.

I actually took a quantum mechanics course in college, and I've always felt that I know next to nothing about the subject. The textbook made a lot of vague assertions, then we the students did a lot of weird math that was somehow connected to these assertions. Chiefly I remember that the book would always refer to particles without specifying which particles were under discussion. I don't know whether the stuff pertained only to subatomic particles (and which ones?) or included atoms and/or molecules. I could tell that something was off with either the teaching or the theory itself at a very fundamental level, but, to my exasperation, I couldn't put my finger on what.

My new text confirmed my suspicions. The author says that quantum mechanics, as it's typically taught at least, is not a physical theory. That means that it's not a theory that clearly stakes out a particular type or set of physical object(s) and describes the behavior of that/those object(s). So it's no wonder that the authors of my college textbook never specified which particles they were going on about.

So my problem as a student was that I subconsciously expected all the physics curriculum to pertain to physical theories. Quantum mechanics is apparently a wildcard, and nobody told me so, and I didn't know enough to get to the bottom of that myself. I kind of feel like I'd been gaslit in a way.

After I'd transferred to a second university, I spent a lot of time in the science section of the school library trying to find discussion of quantum mechanics that would...actually explain quantum mechanics. Or just shed some light on what it's fundamentally about. But even the history of science books just repeated the vague statements I'd been fed in my degree program. The fact that tracing this discipline to it's very origins turned up no answers was rather bewildering. Book after book that seemed to say nothing. It was like being trapped in some kind of a nightmare. Not the scary kind, the kind that are weird to the point of driving the dreamer insane.

I'd been afraid of starting this book because I suspected I might have to face the harsh reality of being so sick and tired that I couldn't even understand it. The pain and the chronic insomnia have left me duller than I used to be. But I was motivated to open it up because I'd put down Asimov's book after reading less than one page and because I think I'm back to my usual five hours of sleep per night (and the associated level of cognitive function). And now I'm motivated to keep going.

I feel nauseous now and occasionally and I don't even know why.

I think that my blood glucose sensor reader may not be functioning properly. It shows that my blood sugar hasn't dropped in days. I don't see why I'd suddenly be so stable. Plus I saw an error message on the thing earlier today. I closed the message and haven't heard or seen anything unusual since. Maybe I knocked the sensor loose. I was scratching the skin around it a lot the first few days after I installed it.

I want to keep adding more and more shit to my blog posts. It's not healthy. I'm avoiding my offline life. But now that I think of it, I also have problems switching tasks and focusing when I'm hungry or have even mild pain. My life is rather boring, though. Composing posts is more interesting. Ok I'm going. Potatoes, rice, and soy chorizo for dinner tonight. I feel weak with hunger but apparently I'm not actually undereating because I don't seem to be losing anymore weight. I'm hoping that I'm just losing super slowly.

It's kinda sad. I need to get more stuff going in my life. Studying Mandarin takes forever though.