20140824.0914

I do sometimes sleep in. Sometimes, my doing so results in things like yesterday's comments, which are truncated because I do not do as well with a late start as I do with an early. And, indeed, I spent much of yesterday feeling somewhat...fogged. I was not hung over--I had not had anything that would make me so, and have not in some days, now--but I was muddled, as though I never fully woke. And that was despite the coffee and despite actually eating something for breakfast (which I do not always remember to do); it ought not to have been a problem.

Such things happen to me fairly frequently when I sleep in, and I ought to have learned the lesson and applied it to today. I did not, and while I do feel more mentally acute than I did yesterday, I also feel more than a bit sore from the experience. My neck, in particular, is quite sore, almost as it was when I was in training in judo and helped people work on their shime-waza. It is an appropriate price for me to pay for not having yet learned lessons I really ought to know; it is not as if I have not before realized the perils of too much sleep for me.

Among such perils is missing out on things. While current facilities for asynchrony mean there is less to be lost by not being awake and aware at the moment, something is lost in the mediation those facilities necessarily impose. Levels of bias and interpretation are enforced upon events as they are reported--however "neutral" or "objective" the reporter is. Science recognizes this in the observer effect, the notion that observing an event changes it--so it is not only my "touchy-feely" training in the academic humanities that leads me to make the assertion, even if it is a principle in that training. And language is notoriously imprecise; "blue" can mean this, this, this, and this, and other things, and which of them is "true" can only be guessed. These leave aside the possibilities of spin and outright lies...things that being on hand can help to reduce.

There are other things that accrue to missing out on things, and sleeping overmuch necessarily means some things are missed. I know that many people value their sleep and even enjoy it. I cannot say that I value the exchange so highly.