I've spent today utterly exhausted - not just in a sleepy sense, but unable to muster the effort to do my post-wake-up exercises, or bother to step outside (let alone take a walk), or even stand up for ten minutes in the kitchen to make a meal. I spent some of my monthly splurge money on ordering in a pizza. If you're familiar with Spoon Theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory ), I just didn't have any spoons today.
It may be another day or two before I'm up to thinking up any of the responses I should have written by today. (... And longer than that before I can get back to my novel.)
This particular bout of depression has some meta-depression attached, since my non-24-hour cycle has come close to syncing up with everyone else's circadian rhythm, which is usually when it's easiest for me to do anything at all. (Oddly enough, the best intro to non-24-hour stuff I've been able to find is the sidebar at https://www.reddit.com/r/N24/ .) I've been keeping track of my wake-up times at https://twitter.com/DPR_exercise , and just recently have checked the numbers to see that, on average, my daily cycle is around 25.5 hours. But the variance is high - some of my pseudo-days ("sols") are shorter, some longer. I really should be asleep already, and am pretty sure that this journal has become the equivalent of sleepy babbling.
So, yeah, non-24 is a thing. And it's a thing I've been dealing with for many years. Trying to acquire just about any form of hourly employment is pretty infeasible, as is any form of education that involves, you know, actual classrooms or teachers or interacting with other students. Irregular bouts of depression have made it hard to even do something on my own hours, like finish that novel I'm more than half done writing. If I want to look for an up-side, I have so few social connections that I feel sufficiently few attachments to any given cultural groups that I might have at least a slight edge in avoiding certain cognitive biases involving group-identity. Oh, and there's a reasonable chance that I've found the theory that explains the natures of gravity, intertia, and the phenomena usually classified under 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'; no, I'm not the inventor of said theory, but I've tied my banner to enough interesting-seeming "this solves everything!" ideas in the past to be able to recognize the differences between pseudo-science and proto-science, and if I actually had any cash to spare, I'd be willing to make some bets on this particular theory's predictions. Of course, it could still be bunk - but it'd be a form of bunk that meets a variety of relevant criteria about whether it was worth testing. And I'm reasonably sure that 99.9+% of the mainstream geeky/nerdy/fannish/furry population who are interested in 'dark matter' and related concepts haven't even heard of the theory, let alone have any idea about how to evaluate it. If I'm very lucky, then if I spend some more time thinking about the implications and toying with the math, I just might be one of the first persons in history to understand a certain aspect of how the universe works, such as "how black holes really work" or "is there a way to create negentropy in apparent violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy". If I'm not quite so lucky... then I'll at least have a perfect source of technobabble for any science-fiction stories I do ever manage to write.
... Yeah, I think that last paragraph got away from me a bit. Ima crash now for the night.
