chaos and noise

Today at Morsla Research Laboratories, I harnessed a new source of power - combining insomnia with structured procrastination (also written about here) to temporarily become a rampaging juggernaught of Getting Things Done.

I woke up around 3am, and finally gave up pretending that I could get back to sleep at 5am. This has been happening a lot lately, and usually I'm stubborn enough to try getting back to sleep right up until the alarm goes off. This time I got up and started painting... sort of. I only managed a few brushstrokes on the figure I first picked up, but then I found myself reaching for one of the older revenants - covered by dust, forgotten by the world.

My desk is covered in half-finished projects. By 'covered' I mean that it is no longer possible to tell where the desk starts under the pile of models. These accumulate like some kind of sediment for months or years, until geological forces in the household reach breaking point. Today is one of those days.

There's something refreshing about finding a few spare hours between sleep and 7am. It's a quiet, grey null-time, when the rest of the world doesn't exist yet. Freed from any sense of time, those niggling little jobs suddenly become less of an imposition. A job that takes an hour might be a chore at 3pm, but in null-time those minutes are essentially free... after all, I wasn't going to use them for anything important.

So I oscillated back and forth between discarded and forgotten projects, clearing out some of the backlog that has been building since the last great productaclysm. Models were finished, sections of desktop saw (artificial) sunlight for the first time in months. After the last jobs were done I still had time to eat breakfast (a rare occasion) before leaving for Tai Chi.

I may never be much of a morning person, but I can certainly appreciate my mornings when they let me get this much done before sunrise...