I had a dream that my friend and I were sitting on his couch on a little desert island, and the water was slowly rising around us. I watched it lap at the feet of the couch while he told a story about a cliff overhanging darkness.

I'm not sure whether it was day or night in the dream, because I seem to have two memories, one in which it was day and one in which it was night. But maybe it was just both at the same time. I also remember being on both sides of the couch, so I'm really not sure exactly how this was set up in my mind.

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Trevor challenged me to draw baby Krampus in GIMP...

I think this is the first thing I've really drawn in GIMP in quite awhile. Forgot how much it sucks to draw with a mouse. Trevor thought it was good, though. I wish I had the drive to draw as much as I used to.

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On IRC I was talking to a guy about a CBT thing I linked him to.

Him: Yeah. I think all it's going to tell me is that I show high signs of anxiety and depression and need to recognize my negative thoughts and think positive instead.
Me: Well, that's possible I guess.
Me: Though usually these things try to tell you how you can do that rather than just telling you to do it.
Him: Ha, that would be nice.
Me: It helps take it from abstract to concrete.
Him: Explain?
Me: Well, I think the issue with a lot of broad advice (e.g. "you just need to be aware of negative thoughts") is that it's too abstract to be useful.
Me: For instance, with environmental issues
Me: It's easy for us to say "we should clean up the ocean so it's not polluted anymore"
Me: But how the hell do we do that?
Me: So the little concrete steps are important
Me: Using dish soap to scrub sea birds and coming up with things to filter the water, stuff like that.

Talking about this made me think of other things that are too distant or abstract for people to take seriously. You can tell someone the same thing a hundred times and they might never get it, but if you offer specific concrete steps they can take, it makes a big difference... Or, well, it can. Sometimes it's hard to put things into concrete terms though, or even if you can, you might not want to... Maybe a good analogy would be trying to get someone to solve a math problem, and you don't want to tell them every step they need to take to do it, because then they won't learn how to do problems on their own... Better to just give them the basic tools they need and let them figure it out from there.

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On Sunday night I talked to my friend about the romantic... daydreams? Fantasies? that I have. They're pretty realistic, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want much. Just someone I can be alone with. I imagine quietly reading separate books in a room together and occasionally commenting on something to each other. Or sitting near the kitchen while the other person is somewhere else in the house, and when they walk over to open the fridge to see if anything appealing has magically appeared in it, mentioning some amusing little thing to them, and they smile a bit and then go back to whatever they were doing. My parents have this kind of relationship, and it seems nice to me. It's also nice to have long engaging conversations, but sometimes you just want something more relaxed.

Maybe my desire for this kind of relationship is just a compromise between a need for alone time and a need for companionship. I want a lot of contact with people, but not necessarily at an intensive level all the time... Like, I might spend hours IMing someone on my computer, but it's harder to spend the same amount of time with them in person. I mean, it's not like that with everyone every time I hang out with people, but sometimes I just want to like, take a nap or something, and I can't really do that without ending the hangout. Or being weird, I guess.

Man, I wonder if I'm anemic or something. I feel tired so much. Could also be a bad sleep schedule (most likely) or dying (less likely). If I start sleeping twenty hours a day and it's slowly increasing though, I'm probably dying. I had a hospice meeting tonight and the volunteer services manager told us that the patients we work with tend to sleep more and more as they get closer to death.

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I guess it's never really that far from my mind, though. It's just that the thoughts are a bit different when I'm feeling good. More "I'm glad I'm not dead!" type stuff.

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