Late night. What to do?

Every so often I'm faced with a conundrum.

It's late night, and either I have something I need to finish before the sun rises, or I'm midst of some strange problem that just won't let me sleep, both mentally and physically. I would normally get some work done in situations like that, but for some reason I can't. There's something in my mind that just stops me from functioning normally, as if some pebble got caught between the cogwheel of my mind. I can feel the urge to do something building inside myself but I can't channel it to something more useful, the energy just disappearing like anything else that follows the course of slow, painful thermodynamic dissipation in this universe. (that makes me think. It would be so interesting to be able to come up with a model that describes human creativity as a function of the thermodynamical mechanism in the universe.)

When I'm faced with such difficult situations I usually try to do something that doesn't require much coherence yet still need some kind of input from myself. And over the years I've found writing (and sometimes drawing) to be the perfect solution for those late night blues... I also play a bit of violin (just picked up a new one a few weeks ago, in fact), but that's a difficult hobby to have in the city where the walls between the apartments are usually thin enough to be punched through (though it isn't nearly as bad as the situation in Japan). 

I've picked up a few useless skill over the past few months as well. Did I ever write here about how I never learned to touchtype and how my friends were always giving me weird eye (living around geeks and geekettes have that side effect)? Well I've learned to touchtype about a few weeks ago, roughly around the same time I got my new violin. It only took me about a day or two to memorize the layout of the keys, only to be expected I guess. Considering how I lived with a computer for half my life. The rate at which I got used to writing on the keyboard without using the hunt&peck approach surprised myself a bit however. Right now I'm writing this without looking at the screen. That''s right. I'm writing this while I'm looking out the window of my room, without looking at the screen or the keyboard. Who would have thought it? Learning to type completely blind in course of a week or two. 
I still need to get used to the keyboard though. I still make some odd typos and my wpm isn't all that high. Average at best. It's something I really need to work on considering the volume of writing I do on everyday basis, both for pleasure and for work. 

When I'm writing things like this, all alone in my room sitting on my couch, I always play some kind of music. In fact, I can barely remember the last time I went on without playing some kind of music around me. The ipod is plugged into my ear practically every single moment I'm outside, and whenever I'm home I play a music on the speakers on my laptop or when it's late at night I use wireless headphones that plug in to the speaker port of my computer (I only use bluetooth for syncing my cellphone with my computer for some reason). Of the terabytes of data I'm sitting on vast majority of the space is taken by music from all over the world, across all sorts of genre. I have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, all representing their own era. I have some rock, some of them the harder variety. I also have crazy collection of jpop compilations and singles, and I have many of them in form of original cd sitting in some storage space in the city, since it was way too impractical to bring them with me in my frequent moving binge. I regularly buy musics from promising bands and composers, like the OST/inspired album for Neotokyo. It makes me look like some sort of freak in this day and age where people my age doesn't quite seem to buy anything if it's available in digital format. 

Music must be one of the most fundamental invention of the humanity. Perhaps the invention of the music is the event we can clearly mark as the moment of divide between human the homosapiens and human the semi-ape. It's logical, yet impulsive. It's formless, yet the sytem that makes music come true can be observed all across the world, across the universe in weirded places, like the shape of galaxies, pulses of the stars, or patterns of moss in a forest. Music is very mathematical in that regard, and it is probably no surprise that expertise in one usually accompanies the other... There are some people who say arts are too different from the sciences for them to coexist together, but I tend to think it's only a method to cover for their own incompetence. All the greatest artists in the human history had been scientists in one form or the other, and this pathetic division that forces a child to choose between a path or arts or paths of sciences is a freakish accident of social nature that had nothing to do with the arts or the sciences themselves. I say this a lot these days, but really. One day, the future generation will look back at the state of arts and sciences today and laugh or be horrified at how crazy and irrational it all is...

Well I think I'm through venting for now. Gotta get back to work for the day ahead.