"Why do you lie awake in the dark at 4 am? You should choose to either go to bed and sleep or stay awake at your desk."

"I thought I was going to sleep. I actually fell asleep at my desk, and when I came back to consciousness, I realized that my eyes were burning and I had to remove my contacts so I could sleep without the consequence of having my eyes glued shut on waking. By the time I cleaned and stored my lenses, I was already too alert to drift off again. Now it seems that my body wants to hunt food or build shelter or whatever prehistoric activities it was originally designed for."

"'Originally designed for'? Your body wasn't designed; it evolved. It just happens to be the layout that kept your ancestors from getting killed Assigning it a purpose is the same mistake as thinking words confer meaning upon the world and not the other way around. Your body wants to get up and do things because the ability to have these circadian rhythms happened to be useful to many generations of humans. You're awake now as a result of some bad decisions in the recent past having to do with your work schedule."

"They weren't 'bad' decisions, as you pretty much just..."

"Right, that wasn't what I meant. They got the job done and were relatively minor drains on your social and financial resources. What I was trying to convey with the word 'bad' is that they were unconventional (for an average person) and contributed to your current wakefulness."

"As far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to hand out value judgements, they were good decisions. If the big price I pay for not having to ever set an alarm clock while being able to live in this manner is that I have to toss and turn and listen to 747s scorching through the clouds at 4 am, it's a bargain. I have to pee now."

"That would be done in the bathroom, which means ambulation and turning on the lights. You can pretty much forget about sleep at that point."

[pees]

"Sleeping is starting to sound really pointless right now. I'm not tired. No one else lives here. If I had a car, I'd drive to the airport and meet Kris when he gets off the plane from Hawaii"

"You don't have a car, yet, so maybe you could bake some cookies or neaten up your chaotic living room. Waffles! Bacon! Make breakfast!"

"Heh, bacon indeed. I don't think the bacon in the fridge is still good. In fact, I'm not sure if anything in there is edible, beyond what I bought two days ago. How long does it take for salad dressing to go bad? Why do I have salad dressing? When's the last time I made salad on purpose?"

"It was to go with hot wings. You do love the hot wings, and they sure are great for getting orange grease on everything including your hair and socks."

"That was a massively improbable coincidence."

"Ok. So anyway, it's conceivable that you've got email right now! Don't you want to go check?"

"Email? I'm sure I do. Let's see, 'VIAGRA ONLINE', 'UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS FAST LIKE NOW', and 'Re: information you requested' are sitting in the inbox right now, I bet."

"But you COULD have received something interesting? Something from someone you want to hear from?"

"Like who? A long lost friend? That WOULD be neat. But gee, friends get lost for a reason, you know?"

"The reasons range from "going off to college" to "you dumped me", they aren't always avoiding you. You're still paranoid about desertion, aren't you?"

"Fuck that, everyone else can go to hell at this point. I'm smarter than that, now."

"Too smart to like people, huh."

"Exactly! I mean, you get to REALLY REALLY like someone, you start wanting to get along with them really well. Since no match is perfect, you have to change, if only a little tiny bit. But you do it, just cause they're so keen. Then they (and it's gonna be "they" if they're so great you're doing the changing) decide they have to pursue some other goal and you're left this half-original person, with weird flanges and latches that are really meant for someone else. They don't work so well when you're by yourself."

"You ARE still paranoid about being deserted. Jesus, Andr00, it's been 16 years. "

"So? How long is long enough to forget an important lesson? Do I have to check fire periodically to see if it can still burn me? I think an important component of a healthy relationship is the capacity to not give a shit about the other person. ESPECIALLY when it is at odds with your own interests. Not all the time, of course, because then you're just two strangers. The ability is the important thing. Anyway, the basis for respect is the self; no one likes being around someone totally dependant. Except moms, I guess."

"Huh. I guess moderation is what we're trying to shoot for here. Moms don't necessarily respect their kids, as far as I could tell from the moms and kids I knew. But sometimes you do see a hint of it. Moms: tricky."

"Do you know when I first felt that my mom had any respect for me at all? It was when I moved out without warning. I felt like I was making my first decision, ever. She was insulted, but didn't argue with me. I hadn't ever seen that combination in her before, either."

"WHY did you move out without warning?"

"I thought she was going to try and stop me, somehow. By telling me I owed her such and such debt which just happened to clean out my deposit money, or that I had to stick around and finish some Herculean cleaning task before I was allowed to go. She was quite well known amongst us kids for doing that. "

""That"?"

"Hijacking your time when it became known that you had allocated it. In her head she kept this standing list of tasks she could assign to any one of us in the event that we made plans to do something."

"Paranoid nonsense. "

"No, I had plenty of time to think about this. Plenty of obsessed, angstful, neurosis-breeding time. I think I caught her with an empty list one day when I said I was going to band practice and she began calling out tasks for everyone. "Ian! Clean the louvers! Caroline! Pick up the living room! Andrew! ...fix... something..""

"Heh heh heh. Ok, so, because your parents got divorced when you were eight, you are a solitary-living, logic-loving, self-advancing machine today? "

"I think Neil Stephenson said it something like "mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead"."

"That was a good book. Girl protagonist."

"Sort of. Ok, you win, I'm going to check my mail. "

...

"Well? Human contact through the great grey grid?"

"I got: 2 x LOAN APPROVAL FAST and 1 x Lose 2-14 inches in an hour GUARANTEED!"

"Oh dear. "

"If I lost 14 inches (and I'm assuming they mean from the waist), I'd be a size two. That's like..."

[searching the web for what that's like]

"Oh dear god. Whiny bitches. I hate."

"Whoa whoa, maybe you shouldn't read the web right about now. Women aren't any worse than men."

"I was TALKING about men. Though I'm sure there are female whiny bitches out there too."

"I sense impending profanity."

"No, I'm calm. Reasonable. Cookies. I can make cookies."

"That's no way to lose 2-14 inches."

"That particular spam makes references to a 'body wrap', which sounds like a nice way of saying VICTORIAN DEATH CORSET."

"When you start reading your spam for entertainment, you've gone too long without human contact."

"I was curious! What can make you lose 2-14 inches in an hour?! A lathe? Life-threatening diarrhea?!"

"I thought you already knew the scam behind every spam."

"Well, for the most part, yeah. No new spam under the sun. It's like that Datacomm Warehouse catalog where they put out a new one every month but it's had that same blonde with the headset on the cover for fifteen years. Sure, there are subtle alterations in content, but the hook is the same: HEY GEEKS! A REAL LIVE GIRL WILL TALK TO YOU ABOUT HARDWARE!"

"I think you're officially awake now."

"In that case, I'm going to bake cookies and do exercises from this programming text."

"Holy Bible, Batman, how many pages is that thing?"

"Umm, 1479, if you start counting at 1."

"Yes, well, most of Earth likes to do it that way..."

"Not the guys who read books like this. Anyway, the first numbered page is 3, and there are like 20 pages of stuff before that. So yeah. Heavy."

"Well hey, like I said: It's the pages that confer meaning on the numbers and not the other way around."