My Insanities
Plus, it's difficult to spell restaurant.
Yep. I own an insanity or two score, and it took decades to uncover 'em because I live on the inside of 'em.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?"
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
...
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
Derek Sivers paraphrased it this way:
Fish don’t know they’re in water. If you tried to explain it, they’d say, “Water? What’s water?”
They’re so surrounded by it that it’s impossible to see. They can’t see it until they get outside of it.
Derek Sivers
Continuums
When talking evolution one time, Richard Dawkins, offhanded, explained a continuum which clicked with me.
Paraphrasing, he said, You don't now remember the specificity of being age 6 years 1 month and 14 days old yet you were, however if I asked you then, you would know exactly what it was like.
This shows, to me, how a continuum and a point on a continuum functions.
Infinity and specificity all rolled up.
Insanities and Continuums
Insanities live on continuums or spectrums in the parlance of our times.
An example of one of my insanities: I compulsively want to joke. The worse the situation, the more I want to crack a joke.
This is the insanity: comedy.
This is the continuum: context of appropriateness <--> inappropriateness.
Give me a funeral and I see 3 hours of improv standup.
To this day I neither believe my sister asked me to perform her wedding ceremony nor I did nothing to get arrested or excommunicated from the family.
A common insanity which jumps around on a continuum: crankiness and hunger. So sayeth Snickers.
Multidimensionality
Insanities do not live on single continuums.
Mood, for me and as an example, lives on a nexus of continuums: sleep, blood sugar, and productivity to name a tiny few.
[A]wareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
David Foster Wallace
My insanities require management.
Management requires self awareness.
Self awareness requires an outside perspective because "this is water".
So, naturally, I built a tool to keep an eye on myself by myself from the outside.
