Lydia Schoch

Photo credit: Unukorno.

Once upon a time there lived a young couple who had a dilemma: their baby wouldn’t go to sleep. Both parents paced the living room floor with her for hours, bouncing her little body up and down with the hope of soothing her colic.

It worked as long as they didn’t stop walking or bouncing.

When the baby was a little older, she fought sleep when they placed her in her crib. The father eventually learned an interesting trick. If he could keep all of her limbs still for a few minutes, she’d fall asleep in moments. He began gently touching her arms and legs every time she lifted them up. She must have liked it. She fell asleep every time he played the keep your body still game with her.

As you probably already guessed, I was that baby. My internal clock can be fussy at the best of times.

Case in point: the last week or two. Falling asleep wasn’t an issue. Neither was staying asleep.

Come 5 a.m., though, my body was wide awake every day.

It didn’t matter that I’d stayed up until 11 the night before or that I hadn’t had any caffeine in ages. I wasn’t anxious, sick, or in pain. My body just would not let me sleep once it detected the slightest whiff of daybreak.

Frustrating? Yes. I’m definitely a morning person, but usually that means I’m wide awake an hour or two later in the day.

Finally I decided to work with it instead of against it. Last night I went to bed much earlier than I have been lately. My body still woke me up at a little after 5, but this time I was well-rested.

Problem solved.

Tell me about your internal clocks. Can they be reset? Have you ever had an issue with yours not working the way you hoped it would?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Penis Interruptus via hiyacynthia. This is one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time.  Sometimes people do truly bizarre things online that I will never understand.

Apparently I’m Too Happy To Blog. My friend Jenna has an odd writing problem. Can anyone go help her out?

Facing Ancestors’ Past & Not Liking What We See via LauraLHedgecock. I’ve recommended other posts from this blogger here in the past. What I enjoyed most about this one was how open-ended it left everything in the last few sentences. It gave me a lot of stuff to think about, none of which I can mention here without giving you spoilers for what Laura is talking about. Go read it for yourself!

Food, Sex and the American Obsession with Purity. This isn’t quite as common in Canada, but I’ve still seen people get really weird about food up here. There’s a big difference between eating a balanced diet (or having a healthy sex life) and obsessing over it. It will be interesting to see if North America becomes even more puritanical about food over the next few decades. I’d love to hear my reader’s thoughts on this.

What Would You Do? via TerryBookAddict. How would you have responded to this?

From There’s No Morality in Exercise:

People who were always hardbodies love that competitive style of team-sports activity, they come up with timers and fitness contests and personal bests. But for the vast majority of people, competition in exercise is not fun. It’s no fun to compete if you know you can never win. It’s no fun to be on a team if you know you’re bound to let everyone else down with your performance. The rhetoric of ‘more, better, harder, feel the burn’ doesn’t work for who those of us just want to use our bodies and enjoy being in them.

This is great:

What have you been reading?

Referring to your local social circle, be it at school, at work or at your gym as “IRL” (in real life) may seem logical at first, but – to me – it’s actually rather bad taste, and in some situations downright offensive.
The fact that it’s often used carelessly makes it even worse in my opinion.

 Today’s post is a response to I Find the Term IRL Offensive. It was written by my friend OlliCrusoe.

I remember a time when people thought of their regular and online lives as two separate entities. When I was a teenager, we were routinely warned against sharing too many details of who we were in the “real” world. The last thing you wanted someone to do was to figure out where you lived, worked, or went to school. They could find you that way!

Our world has changed a lot since then.

The two spheres are melting into one. When I meet someone new, I google them as soon as I get home to see if anything interesting turns up. It’s actually disappointing to not find any social media accounts, blogs, or websites about them.

The friendships I’ve developed online are equally important to me as the ones I’ve made offline. I even met my spouse on a now-defunct message board back in the day. We moved seamlessly between typing words on a screen and talking face-to-face. Sometimes we still have entire conversations online if one of us has a sore throat or other life circumstances make it easier to type than to talk.

There’s no competition between the two. You can appreciate both ways of keeping in touch with others.

It’s all real life.

This is the tale of a stone who silently witnesses millions of years of change on the earth.

It’s another one of those short films that doesn’t have any dialogue. I’m really getting obsessed with this genre. There are so many creative things happening in it!

The final scene was my favourite one, but I can’t tell you anything about it without giving away spoilers.

There’s some kind of construction going on in my corner of the city today.

I’ve been hearing the buzz of an electric drill, the uneven taps of what sounds like a hammer, and the occasional, jarring thud of stuff being dropped.

So much for a peaceful day of writing.

After a decade in the city, I’ve learned to tune out the faraway sounds of traffic.  If this racket kept going for a few weeks, I’d probably get used to it. Right now my ears perk up every time they hear it, though.

I’d love to see what they’re working on. It sounds like quite a big project.

How do you tune out background noise when you’re working on something? Or do you like hearing certain things when you’re concentrating? What sounds have your ears adjusted to that other people might find distracting?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Girl Who Would Live Forever. This article has been haunting me all week. What would you do in this situation?

Black Sheep via RealSarahC. I don’t normally like to tell my readers what to expect when they click on these links, but this time I thought I should. This post is about living in a dysfunctional family as well as what happens to people who try to become healthier adults. It was excellent.

Yes, You Can Catch Insanity. It will be fascinating to see if this turns out to be true.

10 Words You Should Never Use via AndieDelicacy. Scroll down to these specific numbers if you want to know which words on this list make me cringe: 9, 7 and 2. The rest don’t bother me at all, although there are other words in the English language that do annoy me.

From The Worst Parents Ever:

This was the son of a well-off family escaping consequences by saying he’d always avoided consequences. It was proof of separate justice systems in this country, one for the rich and another for the poor, and Ethan became the face of wealth and privilege.

From I Know My Value via Whiteliphant:

I got my first anon-hate last week through ask.fm. Yay, I guess. I mean, I’m not necessarily happy that somebody I probably know hated-commented on something that I work very hard to keep alive, but as a best friend said (in quoting someone else): “You know you’re doing something right when you are pissing someone off”.

What have you been reading?

So, guess who forgot to write a blog post for today? D’oh.

I realized it a few minutes ago.

Luckily, I had just finished a fascinating TED talk by Nick Bostrom about what could happen when our computers become smarter than we are. It’s about 16 minutes long. I listened to it while doing other things. It’s not the sort of thing that requires you to watch the video as well if you really don’t want to.

Nick makes some good points, but the science fiction writer in me kept zooming back to the worst case scenario for all of the things he thinks will change when AI becomes superintelligent. He acknowledged the importance of giving the computers extremely specific goals. It still sounds like something that could terribly wrong in a heartbeat, though.

I know there are some science buffs who follow this blog. What do you think of his ideas?

This is a short film about a tall, clumsy puppet who doesn’t know his own strength yet.

I love the creative of these short films I’ve been finding lately. It’s amazing how much character and plot development can happen without any use of dialogue.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Your World Is How You View It via digbydigz. There’s definitely something to be said for looking at the world this way. I’ve never met this blogger, but something tells me I’d like her if I did.

Trash Food. This is really fascinating.

Adventures in Hydrocephalus via Apo_Papafrangou. Talk about an eye-catching title!

Nina Nestor Obituary. No, I didn’t know Nina or any of her loved ones. To the best of my knowledge, none of my readers knew them either. Why am I telling you to read her obituary, then? Because it’s hilarious. If any of you ever ask me to write a summary of your lives, I’ll try to be half as witty as Nina’s daughter. She did a fantastic job here, and I am truly sorry for her loss of what sounds like was an amazing mother.

The Devil Marries Three Sisters via prnancarrow. Who else remembers the fairy tale called “Bluebeard”? I noticed a lot of similarities between that one and this one. I wonder which one came first?

From The Glorification of Busy:

Some days mum is only out of bed for an hour, but gosh it’s snuggly to jump in there with her and put a movie on.  My children are happy…I did that.   And that is ENOUGH.

I AM ENOUGH.

And the thing is, you, who is reading this YOU are enough too.  I was always enough, and so were you.  Why do we think we need to do it all, to be enough?

What have you been reading?

Picture credit: Filosofias filosoficas,

I’ve been staring at a blank page on my monitor for the last 10 minutes.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas. I do.

There have actually been many of them rolling around in my head recently. After a long time spent scraping the bottom of my barrel of creativity, this is a welcomed surprise.

Here’s the thing about writing: the words don’t always listen to you, and the characters are even more incorrigible.

The expressions on people’s faces when you tell them that is priceless.

Wait, what? How? Can’t you make your characters and plots do exactly what it is that you want them to do, nothing more and nothing less? 

No.

Well, sometimes you can. I’ve written stories that slid out of my keyboard as smoothly as if I were transcribing someone else’s memories of something that really happened a long time ago in a faraway place.

You can’t count on that, though. Every empty page is unique.

I wonder if singers feel the same way about the notes they’re about to sing, or if painters sit and think about all of the possibilities before dipping their brushes into a brand new jar of paint.

Here’s hoping they do.