Deep thinking... and a volcano.

After my last post, I managed to stay awake for a few more hours and then left for the airport. I then flew from Maryland back to Austin and got home around noon. This was Sunday afternoon. At that point my recent sleep schedule was as follows:

Saturday night: 0.0 hours of sleep
Friday night: 6.5 hours of sleep
Thursday night: 3.5 hours of sleep

So... yeah. In the previous three nights I had gotten a total of 10 hours of sleep. Guess what? I was tired. No, that is an understatement. I was perhaps more tired than ever before. I felt drunk. I felt more than drunk. At one point Sunday afternoon I was convinced there was a rainbow on my wall. I did laundry and spent about five minutes trying to figure out why the machine wouldn't turn on (it tends to work better if you close the lid). I was so tired, so exhausted, that I was just completely stupid.

But something very odd happened. I started to do a lot of deep thinking. And I mean really deep, contemplative, soul-searching, no-holds-barred thinking. It was about life and everything that comes with it. I was so tired I couldn't even go to sleep, so instead I thought. And thought. And thought. I thought about anything and everything, but mostly I thought about my own life and the last couple of years.

I don't know why, but I ended up spending a lot of time analyzing my life over the past few years. What has happened in that time? I graduated from Rochester, took a summer off from work, moved to Austin, started graduate school, found a profession and a field within that profession that I love working in. I've traveled to Hawaii three times. I spent a month in Europe. I've traveled to quite a few places within the country. I've made contacts in cities all over the country, and to a lesser extent, the world. I've discovered a great deal about myself, about my interests, my likes and dislikes, and about what makes me tick.

And yet have I been happy? Not really. Why not? That was what I spent so long thinking about while staring at the imaginary rainbow and trying to make the washing machine with the lid up work. I have some ideas about why not, and some ideas about what I need to do to improve myself in the future. I'd share them with you, but just as I was on the edge of a major breakthrough in all this deep thinking...

I fell asleep.

And I slept for 16 hours.

And I only woke up because I had set an alarm just in case I fell asleep and slept for a long time.

So maybe I'll stay awake for a few days again to see what happens. I was so close to finding the answer to everything. So close!

I've decided to end every blog entry with a picture. It's the only way I'll ever post all the pictures I've taken and want to show. Today's picture is of lava entering the ocean at Hawaii Volcano National Park. I took it about an hour after sunset. Most amazing place I've ever been, without a doubt. There is something incredibly awe-inspring about knowing that you are standing on land that didn't even exist two years earlier, and only now exists because lava spewed forth from the ground and entered the ocean and cooled, building new land. Very cool.



Ignore the little red dot in the upper half of the picture. My camera has a bad pixel and I am far too lazy to photoshop it out. Just deal with it.