new pool table!

I'm surprised at how useful and fun this is. The balls feel like regular resin, just half-size, so they've got weight and they make the satisfying click. It's 4' x 2', the same proportions as any full-size table. The table play is good enough that I can realistically practice a lot of things (like shooting straight at a distance), and it means I don't have to go to a bar when I get the itch, unless I want to. Which is good, since I don't actually like bars.

$25 well spent, I think.

crabbypants

Most of us have been sleep-deprived at some point: children, college, work. By coincidence, I caught some of tonight's City Arts & Lectures, which starred UC Berkeley sleep researcher Matt Walker. He describes our understanding of sleep as "embarrassing" next to our understanding of our other basic drives (hunger, thirst, procreation). One thing we do know is that sleep deprivation causes the emotion-generating part of our brain, the amygdala, to over-activate, so the logic-spewing prefrontal cortex can't do its usual mediation of emotion. In other words, stronger emotional reactions, and less capacity to manage them. Think "irritable."

Now imagine that you're sleep-deprived, and so you sleep! Eight full, glorious hours. You dream. You wake up.

And you feel like you haven't slept at all. Day after day, night after night, morning after morning.

People talk to me, and I know they said something and I may even respond, but I often forget what it was a moment later, and my memory of the conversation is just that the two of us made some meaningless buzzing noises. During the good stretches, I can read light fiction. Doing anything technical is out of the question: last week was a complete loss at work, and seeing things on the downswing, I pre-emptively took this week off.

I lack the mental energy to follow superficial social scripts, so unfortunately most people who ask me how I am are now getting an honest answer, which is "Terrible."

Friday I started the insurance paperwork for a CPAP machine, so hopefully I get it this week, and hopefully it works, and hopefully it works quickly. Otherwise...it will be up to some very confused doctors.

asymptotic house progress

It's never over until the closing papers are signed, but we have mostly run out of things to go wrong. Our loan has been approved, and the sellers have agreed to lower the price a bit, so now it should just be a matter of filling out the paperwork.

And then. IT BEGINS. The madness. This is the list of things to do before move-in:

• Kitchen remodel.
• Refinish/repair wood floors.
• Garage door.
• Washer/dryer.
• Dishwasher.

Doom. DOOOOOOOOOOOM.

(Though, if you've ever remodeled a kitchen or refinished your floors, you'll know that it's far better to do it when you're not living there.)

literary reference.

"How are you feeling?", the sleep doctor asks.

"You know that story Flowers For Algernon, where the developmentally disabled guy gets really smart, then watches himself losing his intelligence?"

"Yeah," he says. "Are you feeling more intelligent?"

"No," I say. "No, I'm not."

right here in River City.

As mentioned earlier, I've been enjoying the idea of putting a pool table in the garage of our potential future house. A new slate-top table is at least a couple thousand dollars, easily stretching to $4000 and up for one of the marquee brands (Brunswick, Olhausen). However, if you look on Craigslist, it turns out that pool tables are like pianos:

• Hard to move.
• You probably won't take care of it.
• Probably not as useful as you thought.
• Almost guaranteed not to fit in your next apartment.

At the risk of having the same problems as the seller, you can pick up a reasonable-quality table for a fraction of a new table's price, even once you add in moving and re-conditioning costs. (Moving a quality slate table yourself appears to be a bad idea: watch How It's Made for indications why.)

My current sleep regimen requires that I stay up at night a couple hours past when I would like to go to bed, and it occurred to me earlier this week that there are places in the area where I can go pay money to play pool, and that might be a fine way to wind down in the evening before bed, to say nothing of using up my prodigious supply of quarters accumulated over the decades. I went about 15 minutes north to a nice well-lit bar I know, and had a lovely hour or so of shooting pool, both alone and with the other guy who was practicing. (I won, both games.)

I also discovered that basic quality pool cues are not expensive, so I went to the local shop and bought a cue and case. (I grew up using 1-piece bar cues, designed more to withstand being handled by drunks than to shoot well. Dad eventually bought us a regular 2-piece cue for some reason, and the difference was night and day.)

One or two nights later, I thought I would find a place a little closer to home, so I stopped in every bar in my town that I knew had tables. In various places, I found:

• A dive bar with a nice vibe, but the pool table was blocked by the darts league.
• Many early-20s street bros and their girlfriends, mostly playing at the dozen beer pong tables. (I did not know beer pong tables existed.)
• A scary drunk barfly lady who seemed to be in the middle of a game, but when I asked, she just mumbled and continued dialing her phone. She also eyed my cue case skeptically. Then there were the women at the bar ranting about men not being "real" about their romantic relationships. I swear that place was less cranky last time I was there.

There's one other place to check, but as white yuppie scum, there's a good chance I won't be welcome. So, 15 minutes north it is.

house progress

We had the inspection on Saturday, which was educational. We're navigating some back-and-forth with the sellers, but I think everyone is properly incentivized to have the sale go through and we'll come out happy. It turns out there's more up-front work than we originally thought, but hey, we'll be starting out with a new kitchen and refinished hardwood floors.

(The kitchen, as a space, is one of the best parts of the house; big chunks of it just need to be torn out, disinfected, and replaced.)

Between the house and the garage, we almost certainly have enough space for a pool table, so I've been doing some research about prices and quality and such. I grew up with a pool table in the basement, an old pay table from the 50s that somehow migrated its way from some small-town bar in western New York, into my grandfather's house, then to our house when my grandmother moved away. The bumpers were erratic, giving us a home-court advantage against our friends, but I grew up enjoying the game and even today I'm still a far better player than most. Anna likes it, too, and it seems like something J might enjoy: you can have a lot of fun playing even without finicky fine motor coordination.


Of course, you can drop $15,000 on a restored antique pool table if you want; I recognize that I'm probably putting the thing in the garage, so I'll be wanting something of decent quality, but utilitarian and not delicate.

Now that we've got a better sense of the quantity and source of money to be thrown at all the problems, I'm kind of excited.

today's music puzzle

Watch this first video, or as much as you can stand. Then, watch the second, which will make sense of the first. Humans are awesome.