I can never get home from being out all day and go straight to bed.

So I usually end up, surfing the web, watching television, or an unholy combination of both.

If it's late enough, I'll do neither particularly well, but it'll take at least a couple hours of senseless activity to wind me down enough to sleep. Even if I'm dead tired from a long day.

I'll scan the web, misreading weblinks titles like, "Rapid Heroin Detox Under Anesthesia Doesn't Work, Can Kill Airborne drones, mimicking gulls," or, "Robot Bat With Echolocation Building Secure Computers?" It took me a while once to realize "How to Quit Smoking Roundup" was not refering to the weedkiller.

Clicking around, looking for anything interesting, I'll settle on hitting the usual suspects of websites I frequent, especially gadget listing websites, and eventually run out of interesting things to misread.

Usually after, or at the same time, I'll search the upperbands of the TV spectrum, watching foreign TV channels. Asian variety shows and soap operas are a favorite. I can't understand a word their saying, and in the instances of variety shows sometimes don't even know what at all is going on, but there's something beguiling about seeing something from a different culture, even if you don't get it at all. Soaps are easier, because it's the same stories worldwide, but it's nice to look at different cities shot rather plainly and quickly.

Once enough hours have passed and my brain is sufficiently descrambled (or maybe just scrambled in a different way by dissonant website and TV viewing), I can finally get to bed and manage to eek out some sleep.

I hear the TV calling....