You'd think after cruising through the whole day on two hours' sleep, I'd be able to lapse into unconsciousness before midnight. No such luck.
Picked up a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff in a secondhand store. I love Tom Wolfe's writing, how he delivers his subjects' thoughts as though he were some gossipy midwife, with just an undertone of bitchy satire. And I like the subject matter of Stuff, that being the early days of the U.S. space program. (If you want to get a cross section of Tom Wolfe's work, pick up a copy of his collection The Purple Decades -- it has excerpts from a number of his books, as well as several articles and vignettes.)
Also finished plowing through a paper in the Journal of Memetics called "Darwinian Processes and Memes in Architecture: A Memetic Theory of Modernism". A long read, but worth it.
Another read on memetics that I got through recently was "Hacking Memes", which basically posits that you can spin the whole notion of passive thought contagion on its head by getting into guerrilla media, culture jamming, and devising anti-memes.
I have Jazz FM 91.1 playing on my stereo as I type this, which is a welcome respite from my steady MP3 feed of late. I keep thinking I should listen to more jazz -- it's seems so much better for your brain than electronica, which increasingly strikes me as being the Jolt Cola or triple espresso of my musical diet. It's great the way electronica pumps you up but, like caffeine, too much of it leaves you all twitchy and distracted. Jazz, however, requires energy to listen to, but if you've got a bit of cerebral juice to spare, you can get your head in gear and the jazz will keep it humming along nicely.
Which reminds me that I also snared a copy of Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (gawd, I hope I spelled that right) yesterday, but the damn thing hasn't left my backpack until now.
Been actually taking one of my notebooks out with me over the last few days and scribbling in it. Haven't done that in far too long. Not that I've committed anything worth reading to paper lately, however.
Now if only I could get to more excavation work on my apartment and finally tackle that mountain of laundry rising from my floor...