We went to a thing with Gamma. At the university, this university thing for kids. Yesterday evening. She wants to do this summer university program for kids, and they had this introductory thing yesterday evening. They took the kids on a tour of the building. Before that, they sat in this room and explained the scientfic method to the kids.

It was so boring, there was nearly a riot. Poor kids. A lady from the radio interviewed Gamma, it was broadcast today, the first 10 seconds of her 15 minutes of fame.

But the thing got me thinking about, about the scientific method, and how I’m testing a hypothesis for the next two weeks. The hypothesis is, getting enough sleep will improve the quality of my life.

Very simple. Instead of getting up early and meditating and writing, I sleep until 5.45 AM and rush to work. Then at lunch, I walk somewhere and tell myself I’m meditating while walking.

Writing, ehn. Can’t have everything.

I began research yesterday.

So far, after nearly sufficient sleep two days in a row (“sufficient” defined as 8 hours straight), I find myself more depressed than I have been in a long time. Otherwise, no great changes yet. One complication research has run into is my apparent inability to sleep past 4 AM. Two days in a row, I’ve woken up at 4 and tried to fall back to sleep until 5.45. This morning, I tried to meditate there in bed, figuring, either I meditate or I fall back to sleep, win-win. Then, after 20 minutes of that, I thought positive thoughts until it was time to get up and tinkered around in a great mood until I arrived at work, since which time see above.

I will continue testing this until the 2 weeks are up, and publish my results here.

Maybe even on a daily basis, if I can’t think of anything else to write about.

Who knows. But there’s always something to write about. I was looking at the newspaper with Gamma. She likes to read the paper. There was some article in the Sunday paper about male archetypes. They used various celebrities to illustrate the article, and I was quizzing her about which ones were cute. None of them were, not even Colin Farrel. But this one looks a little like you, she said, pointing at the picture of George Clooney, the

Dad, want to hear a joke? Gamma asked me.
Okay, I said.
A guy walks into a bar, she said.
(I love it when little girls tell me jokes that start that way).
He orders a beer, she said. After it comes, a big, mean guy appears and drinks it down in one go. The first guy starts crying.
What kind of sissy are you, the big tough guy says, crying over a beer?
It’s not just the beer, the first guy says. This morning, my wife left me and I decided to kill myself. I tried to hang myself, but the rope broke. I tried shooting myself, but the gun jammed. Now I just put poison in my beer, and you drank it.

She told me the joke about twice a day for a week. Luckily it’s a funny joke.

There’s nothing like a day off in the middle of the week to perk you up, I thought.

Sleeping in. Finally getting that workout I had been too busy for for so long.

No more feeling old for me. Spring had arrived, I thought, and I feel perky and youthful. Besides the only alternatives to getting older are dying or getting that weird Hollywood-actress-Madame-Tussaud-wax-person-with-a-concussion look.

Face it, James Dean never got to sit in the middle of an orchestra hugging a cello vibrating madly with a roomful of music, which is pretty cool, as I discovered Wednesday evening.

I remember reading Meike’s blog years ago when she was writing about playing in an orchestra, and I wondered if I would ever be good enough on the cello to experience that.

And, now, eh, I’m not exactly good enough, but there I am in the middle of it. That’s pretty cool. I just play the bass part when things get fiddly. I gather that’s legitimate.

Anyway, I went outside and smelled the air and looked at the flowers.

I played with the tortoise.

Well, not exactly played. I was upstairs in my office and heard some bumping noise and thought the cats wanted in (they knock) and checked but it wasn’t them. Then I saw the kitchen door was open, and couldn’t find the tortoise and thought maybe she had staged a daring escape. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I even looked in the cellar, in case she had gotten frisky and tumbled down the stairs.

I found a book Gamma had been looking for under the kitchen bench.

I found the tortoise in the living room. She was trying to burrow through the door, she had been knocking on it with her shell.

What the hell, I thought, I’ll make a day of it: I called my haircut person and made an appointment. Not with her, she had the afternoon off. But with the new woman.

We negotiated my haircut, including safe word. She did a good job. She didn’t talk as much as my regular person. So, not being a conversationalist myself, it was a pretty quiet haircut. Buzzing and snipping, mostly. She asked me if I wanted my sideburns trimmed. I had just had a nightmare about my sideburns, where this guy was obsessed with their length, so I told her to go ahead and do whatever she wanted to them. So now I have medium, normal sideburns.

Then she said, “should I trim your eyebrows while I’m at it?”

“…,” I said.

“Uh…” I said.

“Cause, you know, you got a few long ones in there.”

“Sure,” I said.

When I got home, I couldn’t find the tortoise again. The kitchen door was somehow open again, so I looked in all the usual places — reception hall, billiards room, ballroom, gallery 1, gallery 2, kitchen, dining room, dungeon, torture chamber.

I finally found her in the library/music room, snuggled in a corner behind my cello.

Ethan Winer has a lot of shirts!

…I read it on the Internet.

I won’t say I lack passion, but the only time I taste blood is when I floss.

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Gamma: “Gah. This movie is so long!”
Gamma’s father: “But just think: if you were going to be executed when it was over, it would seem too short.”