I dislike the pretentiousness of neck ties. I have a few patterns that put a sparkle in my eye, but you can't clean them, and if you aren't ultra-careful with them, they crinkle. They seem to be built with falling apart quickly in mind. Wear one a few times and the label starts decomposing visibly from the underside, protruding from your careful neck-hanging arrangement. Solitary threads holding ends and seams together come out like roaches on a warm night. I've never seen such an excuse for charging undeserved money. Given that you can't wash them, they should be indestructible: I have similar trousers that I've been washing, drying, and sporting carelessly since 1999. Finally, oh finally: you wrap one around your neck in a slipknot, as if in a totem to your employer's power of life and death over you. This is supposed to make people take you seriously as superior to the average human. The tomfoolery of the act of tie-hanging has never rested on shaky ground, even when I have found my ego buoyed by it, even when I have gone sunning in the glow of the "discipline" of presentation, displaying cooperativeness with the effort of maintaining all this. Just because the ruse of status works on other humans, and quite consistently, and even works sometimes to fool ourselves, we can't conclude that it's non-ludicrous. I'd happily burn all my ties and wear a tail to work instead.

When my brother and I did Tae Kwon Do, we wore colorful belts. Tying one on made you feel calm and proud because you'd won it in pain and performance. When the color was black, the instructor taught you a new way to tie your belt that was more elaborate and looked better, more symmetrical. The knot seemed to enfold meaning and flowed with the uniforms, flags, bows, calls-and-responses, moments of meditation, and warm-ups of putting on a role. You wore your belt for a reason that had applied in every lesson. You led more of the exercises. When belts wore in, they'd show sand-colored underlying fabric in a way that felt elegant, even a little intimidating. You knew because you had been intimidated yourselves, then flat out-sparred. They could be washed occasionally if carefully and otherwise accumulated sweat. They were sewn, it seemed, even stronger than your exertions.

Good aboutnoon, a dream!

Often I'll doze off earlier in the night but wake up and be awake until about dawn. It's important - to me - to be able to sleep until I wake up, when I'm depleted - say until noon - today by rare occasion it was 12:30. Others might consider that a luxury, but when you have unusual circadian rhythms it's just caring about yourself, treating your health with respect, and standing up for both.

I had an amazing dream before I woke up with several ideas I want to use. I miss rollerblading... That was one of them. Two or three others were creative ideas.

I like the idea of picking little ideas and being really persistent with them until others follow along. The idea might be as simple as a thing to do with friends.

Before I went to sleep I traced a note in the cloud about wanting something I'm excited to code, to help me past a block on something I need to code. The dream gave me an idea I'm excited to code. In the dream I was also thinking about crunch time - the way coders are abused with unreasonable time demands on many projects. I imagined being part of a better way.