I'm caught in a tangle as to whether to act on impulses to rant about everything that's happened lately. But I won't. Maybe quite obliquely, I suppose. I can't think of more than one or two times in my life where I've been driven so fiercely towards a combination of self-control, self-study, and at the same time surrender of both of those things - I'd tried to consciously devote myself to self-growth and study in the past, but I haven't in a long, long time felt such a need. Here's one thing I've become more aware of internally - an oscillation, for lack of a better word. At first I thought it was just a result of crisis and stress that I would be so conscious of my mood or being or whatever swinging up and down, but as I explore it I begin to get glimmers of how there isn't just one little sine wave of my mood, nor is it as simple as a sine pattern, but that there are multiple patterns of differing scale in my life. Definitely bearing further thought. In related and unrelated line of thought, these articles have been helpful in that regard, if they might be of any use to anyone else.

      Just to keep my mind going, I thought of a couple other things absolutely randomly. One, in having three different sort of data analysis projects dumped on me by higher-up people all at once, I was staring at a lot of numbers that had little to no meaning to me, and yet having to recognize things and mark them down and understand, etc etc. Anyway, where I'm going with this is that I started to get an idea about what they sometimes say in fantasy stories, where the character reads some eldritch tome, or looks at evil glyphs, and then remarks that it hurts their head to try to comprehend what they're looking at. Yep, not very profound, I know.
      I also remember this random game from back in the day called Earthsiege. I only remark upon it because I loved the idea that (the player taking the side of the hardscrabble geurillas) one was almost completely reliant upon salvage from the field. So what, one asks. Well, it directed the player towards finesse, where if you could take out the baddies with a maximum of skill and minimum of stupidity (ie, be really precise and blow off their mech's foot and let them slide down a hill so they couldn't get back up), you were rewarded with beaucoup salvage; if you just rampaged around with a blase attitude, the game of course wouldn't give any salvage, and it would be hard to even progress. Like Soul Caliber, a game that rewards finesse = automatically awesome.