answering the questions that needed no answer

I tend to view my body as hardworking and supportive of my goals, if sometimes out of its depth. For a couple of weeks at the beginning of the month, I was carrying around about three pounds of fluid weight (aka water weight), pretty clearly as a result of stress. (In this case, not overwork so much as disrupted sleep.) Sure enough, once I got some sleep and a day where I could sit and watch TV for a few hours, gone.

And it occurred to me today that what my body is actually doing is saying, "hey, you're stressed. You're pretty smart. You must figure we're about to walk into an ambush. I will helpfully give us some extra blood volume so that we can bleed some and still be able to fight or run away."

Thanks, body. You're the best.

Meanwhile, I have realized that my ideal career is "public intellectual," with the exception that I would like to be left alone. So really what I want to be is a private intellectual. If there are any think tanks looking to lucratively employ someone to write a lot of white papers on random self-selected subjects, you know where to find me (privately).