glowingfish

 I meant to update this, apparently a week and a half since my last entry.

I was trying to remember what I had even done this weekend, but really couldn't. There has been a lot of things going on with the house sale, on Monday I sat down and signed papers for a mobile notary. Sat down on my calf and was limping afterwards.

I've had ear problems, too. And weird tingling and a feeling of poor circulation in my hands, I almost feel like I have Covid-19, but I know that even if I went to the trouble of being tested, it would probably say no. 

Oh, also that explains the confusion and lack of focus. 

And, autumn is starting...do I have the energy to do everything I need to do in the next 3 months? Or really, six weeks, because six weeks from now it is going to start to get cold and dark. 

 Yesterday, it was a misty day, and I came home around 8 PM. I was cold enough from walking around in the wind all day that I turned on my electric heater! This is the Pacific Northwest, so its just an electrical unit, built into the wall.

But still, it is August and already getting chilly...I can feel my summer ending. 

 That is 72 hours that I've been home, and about how long it takes to clear my mind. 

So for three full days last week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), I was clearing out my father's house. It is now cleared out to the point where there is nothing (as far as I know) personal or valuable left in the house. 

I was doing this on days when the temperature was over 90F, and when the air quality was in the "unhealthy" to maybe "hazardous" range. Carrying big old boxes of stuff to be mailed away, riding the bus, and then dealing with emotions and also dealing with financial things that don't make much sense. I was very very tired. 

This has been going on since April. It has become what the year has been about for me (along with, you know, a wasteful and terrible war). I am in a way, waiting to wake up from it, and remembering what my own life is about. 

 In my life, there have been at least two separate cases where I helped women figure out what to do with a billion dollars. Or, rather, how to manage billion-dollar (and in one case, many billions) budgets. 

All of which I can do just by sitting in a room and asking random questions and sometimes talking about nonsense.

I wonder why I can't use these skills in other social situations. 

 This is something that I have been considering for a while, and it isn't really covered in the many many discussions about AI:

There are just so many jobs that AI can't replace. Last week, I had to move a lot of furniture out of my house. I spent $300 so two men could load a couch, a chair, and a large table, along with other things, into the back of a truck, and then take it to the dump. This took some time, the table had to be dismantled, etc. 

This is a job that, as far as I know, AI can't do! 

There are a lot of jobs that require manual labor, but also involve a lot of decision making. In fact, that is what most jobs involve! Whether it is drawing blood, serving coffee, trimming a tree, moving boxes, mopping a floor, shelving books, fixing a roof, surveying a field or judging the value of collectibles, there are so many tasks that AI is almost totally irrelevant for. Sometimes it could provide some automation, but human judgment is still necessary. Or, you know, human hands. 

The reason I don't think this occurs to many people in business who are fueling the AI bubble is that most of them have only had office jobs for a long time. When you work in an office, sorting through information and then restating it all day, that seems like what "Real Work" is, and so you think that AI is this gigantic breakthrough, because you can scan an email and then send a summary of that email to someone else, who will then automatically repost that information in another report, that someone else will then refine and email...and that is "Real Work". And all of these people honestly think that any job that requires interacting with the real world is stupid and frivolous. 

 So yesterday I started a game of Civilization II. If you aren't familiar, the Civilization games involve micromanaging the entire globe, and can last a week of real time. (Or in some cases, a dozen years, as one person played a single game for a decade). Civilization II is also 30 years old. 

And sometimes, every couple of years, I will sit down and play it obsessively because it helps me turn off the world around me. This could be either escapism or maybe a good time letting my mind lay fallow. 

Anyway, so that is what I did with my day. 

 I sometimes wake up earlier than I want to, and have trouble getting back to sleep.

And like a lot of people, that was compounded by feeling anxious and worrying if I would get enough sleep.

And so one thing I realized is that I don't need to worry about falling back to sleep. What I do in those situations is tell myself that I will lie in bed for 20 minutes. If I need to go back to sleep, I will. If after 20 minutes I still feel too awake, that means I can get up and start doing things. But the idea is that I don't worry about sleeping and whether I will have enough energy for the whole day, I just worry about the next 20 minutes. 

I did that this morning before starting a trip...

 ...down, 

But I also don't know what that means. 

This year has been terrible, and along with the chaos, there is just boredom. Enshittification has made the internet boring and stupid, and I keep on thinking "lets break out of all of this and be creative!", but what exactly does that mean? Because for something to be creative, it also has to be meaningful. Like, I can go and noodle around with image or video editing, but that isn't a revolutionary cry, is it now?

I know some day this stultifying boredom has to break...but I can't just force it to happen.