Day 105

It was a bad combination of pharmaceuticals that left me awake at 2:00 a.m., unable to go back to sleep. I got up and went about my morning routine as if it were some reasonable hour of the morning. I opened my email to find a message from Kat. There was an attachment - an essay written for a class on the relationship between mathematics, literature and writing. I started reading and it was like fireworks in my brain, a shot of adrenaline to the cerebellum, calisthenics for my mind. The essay outlined the intersections where numbers and words converge, parallel systems of thought and action. These concepts quite simply blew my mind. For hours, I kept returning to the ideas I read before dawn. It was like playing with a top. I enjoyed watching it spin. When it would die down I would give it another whirl. I have always enjoyed playing with ideas. I sometimes think that it is nothing more than mental masturbation: intoxicating and seductive, but pointless. But other times, like today, I think that the mind is a muscle that must be stretched every so often, otherwise it will atrophy. Our brains become so rigidly programmed, a dose of the novel is just what we need to wake ourselves up.