So... another sleepless night, followed by... what else... another rotten day. Well, except for the fact that the day wasn't rotten, it was much better than I expected. I like surprises like that, I really do. The sleepless night was caused by the first real bout of sinusitis that I've had since I quit smoking. Very uncomfortable, of course, but it will pass. All things will pass, and in the end, nothing, nothing, will matter. I have talked of depression here many times. And the treatment thereof, and my conquest of depression through medication. There is an intellectual component of depression, however, and the conquest of that continues to elude me. If it were not for the temporal beauty of life, I would forfeit it willingly. No, this is not a thing lightly said, but a statement of heartfelt and unequivocal passion. Yeah, and maybe a statement of fatigue. And foolishness. The beauty of life is only revealed to those of us who take our leisure to study life, with the time to see the ephemeral wispishness of it, with the vision to feel the pain of the living and the imagination to know the loss of the dead. There is not a shred of evidence that life is serious, after all. Maybe I'm completely alone in this, but occasionally, from out of the blue, I wonder, "Why am I doing this?" and it doesn't really matter what I'm doing at the time, the question is the same: WHY? And I realize that the why doesn't matter, and the what doesn't matter, but what matters is that I continue to be amused by life. Yes, I know that I am one of the privileged few. I have the time to think about shit like this. I really have the feeling that I will continue to be amused by life as long as I have the breath to sustain myself.... But if I don't, that's OK too. But you know, if life gets boring, I'm outta here. On a more serious note... I got a portable MP3 player, part of my effort to keep life amusing. It's a D-link, and seems to be all it's advertised to be.