1001 winning chess sacrifices and combinations

I've accomplished more before 10 AM this morning than I did my entire Sunday. For that I can thank insomnia. The cause was probably a combination of sleeping until about one in the afternoon and not leaving the house or getting any kind of physical activity at all yesterday. Also an erratic sleep schedule. Also because that's just the way the world works. You've done your daily reality tests*, you've recited the pre-sleep mnemonic, you even went lucid for a few seconds the night before (prompting you to sleep in so late attempting to replicate it), and as you're lying in bed, calming yourself, waiting for the thoughts and the images that accompany the beginning of sleep to arrive, it slowly dawns on you that you are not tired, that it is an effort to close your eyes, and that in fact your entire body is twitching, coursing with unspent energy. And so you get up, pee, stretch, remake your bed because the bottom sheet was bundled up by your face instead of over your body, and try again. Nothing. I must have slept a little bit. It was frustrating. I could convey the tedium and the frustration mimetically, through some kind of prose poem of frustration and tedium, but I'll spare the internet. Usually I'm able to kind of nudge myself dreamwards by giving myself over to nonsensical, stream of conscious prattle that calms me and distracts me until random scenes and images start to come into my head, at which point I know I'm near sleep. That didn't come. I guess I did sleep a while, because next time I looked at my phone it was six, but I'll be damned if I'm going to call that sleep!

At 7:30 I got out of bed to work.

Possibly because my brain state, I noticed myself early this morning transitioning from thoughts of being pissed off that I hadn't slept, to previous injustices, slights, going over all the things in recent memory that made me angry or upset or disappointed. To make meaning of this, so it's not just a sleepless night, I'll interpret it as some kind of subconscious-punishment for being such a goalless, weak-willed slug yesterday. I probably played about three hours of chess. My lone "accomplishment" was finishing an essay for my Chilean Fiction course that beecame increasingly crappy as my will to write it decreased. I told Andy the other day that I was having trouble concentrating on homework for more than 20 or so minutes at a stretch and he said "That's pathetic!" which I guess it sort of is. This morning though, I have done about two hours straight of reading (15 or so pages, no joke), and still have no desire to play chess or otherwise distract myself. I am translating the story I just read for a meeting with my teacher this afternoon.

Translating is interesting business. My first limitation is my incredibly paltry vocabulary. Looking up the word works for getting a sense of the text, but it does not suffice for a good translation. Here is what I have so far. I don't think it's very elegant at all.

Now, I remember that it seemed quite natural to us, despite how little we knew each other, the invitation from Veronica to the countryside. After, we knew that my mother had arranged everything. My mother trusted Veronica's family, since their good times; moreover, she was an expert in arranging matters such as these. In those days my father was quite unwell; pallid, (out of joint?), and always forgetting things. Shortly before we left a fatigue came to him, at midnight. He slept badly, and passed the nights walking through the house. He said that the best rest, for him, was summering in Santiago, but we divined, through a conversation that my mother had with Jose Ventura, that there had been some bad business, and that he couldn't afford to rent a house in Viña. My mother said that José Ventura had behaved very well; the only one of the family who had acted well. And you told me, aside, in a tone unusually serious, that I didn't have to insist in a holiday in Viña. I nodded my head and looked you in the eyes, in silence, showing that I understood the situation was grave. "Perhaps it's pretty there," you added, conciliatory. "Perhaps," I said; "I'm sure." I remember that I woke that night and my father was in the bedroom. He had turned on the light and was examining the table of books. "You don't have the phone book here by any chance do you?" "What a thought! I've never kept the phone book in my room." "It's that I was looking for an address," he said. With his hands in the pockets of his pajamas, gaze erratic, hair disheleved, pants half down, he went into the hallway, where he left the light on. I had to get up, turn off my bedroom light, and close the door. I heard his voice through the wall, asking the same question.

It's from a story called "The Order of Families" and it might be one of my favorite stories we've read so far. It by far resembles most the kind of fiction I'm accustomed to reading. Two of the other stories we read were in a style called "Criollismo" which is stories from the country, or stories from the frontier--cowboy stories basically. Another two were, I don't know, I guess "women's" literature--stories about how two women dealt with the unfairness of their position relative to men in society. Maybe it's my phallus speaking, but those stories didn't really do it for me. The latest story, I can dig it. Though I feel like there are some important details that I'm confused about. Essentially the story is about a relationship between a guy and girl, and the girl ends up going for this rich jerk. For some reason this is encouraged by the narrator's mother, and the girl and the guy seem to live together even after she gets with the other guy. Important details, yes, but I followed the story for the most part.

I haven't updated my blog for a while and there's too much that I could say that I won't bother with any kind of comprehensive update. I took a break because I started hating the way my writing sounded, but then Trevor told me he liked the blog so I'm back on it. I had two social engagements this weekend. I ate Chinese food with a girl who I met in New York this summer (we went to a burlesque show together) and her friend. I learned that this girl was in Chile through Facebook and I offered the hand of friendship. We are possibly getting Thai food this week. Also, I met up with a friend of a Chilean girl that Dan knows. We met up in Bellas Artes, which is a strong candidate for my favorite neighborhood in Santiago. Lots of hip looking kids, coffee shops, a park, museums, an arts theatre. We had actually tried to meet up once before, but we didn't encounter each other. (I think she was downstairs and I was at the top of the stairs.) While I waited I walked in lots of circles and made periodic eye contact with this very strange looking guy who was hanging around the stairs. One week later, we tried again, and succeeded. Some cool things about this girl: she has seen every David Lynch movie; she is doing a research project on irony; she can eat her own weight in hamburger. One of those isn't true. We went to a cafe and she ordered tea and I ordered a disappointing milk shake. We made a lot of eye contact and spoke about 3/2 more English than Spanish. Her English is way better than my Spanish, which is good, because she wants to be an English teacher. She had planned some things for us to do, so after the cafe we went to a museum that was about to close, and then another that was closed. Then we went for a long walk, and it seemed as though we were going to a bar, but then eventually we ended up in the subway, and when we got to the stairs she helpfully pointed out that my train was on the other side, so I guess we were parting. But it seemed like we got along pretty well and she kept mentioning things that we should do in the future like: see movies at the arts theatre, celebrate her birthday party, enjoy her mother's cooking. Her name is Ingrid.

In other news the nearly all expenses trip to Buenos Aires will likely be cancelled because of swine flu and because of Dengue fever. I like saying Dengue fever, but definitely not as much as I like not having Dengue fever. I just got distracted reading about some girl who wanted to be a a vj on mtv, then the gas man came, then I had to finish reading about how she didn't get to be a vj, and was much happier in park slope, with her cowboy boots and her free-lance writer friends. I want free-lance writer friends. I myself want to be a free-lance writer. I can lance as freely as anyone, I know it.

Enough.

*All this reality stuff test will be explained in further posts or you can just visit the lucidity institute website. And yes, for the past few weeks I've been one hell of a determined oneironaut (which kind of sounds like onanist, and the two have more in common than is tasteful to describe).