somebody up there likes you

When I am not traditionally 9-5 M-F employed, my bedtime jumps from 11:00 pm to at least 3:00 a.m. in a matter of days. Tonight I tried to fight it and hit the hay early at 1:30 since I have my Paid Dog Groomer Trainee "interview tryout" tomorrow morning, but it was not to be and after an hour I fell prey to a cigarette and the remains of the $4.99 bottle of champagne I'd meant to bring to new friend G's New Year's Eve party (you know how I roll, G.) Whenever I'm lying in bed trying to sleep but I can't, I think "deep thoughts" that devolve into really realistic but slightly distorted dreamlike thoughts that turn into either real sleep or crying when the alarm clock goes off and I'm still awake.

Tonight I only made it to the "deep thoughts" stage, and the thoughts were influenced by my perusal of Wired Magazine in an attempt to bore myself to sleep. Not that Wired is particularly boring. In fact, it is quite a well orchestrated journalistic endeavor. It's just that my techonological interest and know-how pretty much ends with my two-year old iPod's shuffle feature. Anyway, the latest issue of Wired features picture-heavy stories (I'm all about pictures with my text) called "The Coolest Rooms on the Planet" and "The 50 Best Robots Ever" (of course, the teenybopper titles are an ironic contrast to the supernerd content of the articles.) While reading about dishwashers that can sense the dirtiness of the dishes within in order to adjust water pressure and temperature accordingly and hot-pink-dress-clad ballroom dancing androids that can predict their human partner's movements (from Japan, duh) I realized that, hey, humans have created some pretty unthinkably amazing things. And then I realized that my current aspirations include not breaking any corks when I serve wine to yupsters and learning the standard styling procedure of a Yorkie's ear hair.

Earlier this week Fat Asian Baby sent me a link to the New York Times obituary for her grandfather. It popped into my very awake brain tonight and I thought that having one of those long obituaries in the New York Times is not a bad life goal. If you've done things so significant that one of the most esteemed publications on Earth pays someone to tell the world about your departure from it, that's kinda neat. You had a sizable impact. Although in the grand scheme of the universe your impact is probably close to absolute zilch . . . but I wasn't in bed long enough to get into all of that. So for now I'm just going to shoot for "happy at least slightly more often than unhappy" and suggest that you pick up Kurt Vonnegut's breakout novel Sirens of Titan because it's really fucking good and will beautifully and weirdly tell you the meaning of life.