Deep thoughts.

From the deep thoughts factory at FredCo.

🧠 According to the Cleveland Clinic, your brain processes 70,000 thoughts per day. This means that by the time you turn 50, you've had approximately 1,278,340,000 thoughts. That seems like a lot, especially if, like me, the bulk of your thoughts are devoted to Is there anything to eat? and I'm tired. But if you had one thought for every dollar spent by the federal government's $1.9 trillion budget this year, you would be more than 74. And that's just the budget, which doesn't include mandatory spending, or entitlements, which was $4.6 trillion in 2020. Think THAT many thoughts and you'll be almost 180.

🐕 Buridan's Ass is the philosophic example of the donkey that starves to death, being unable to choose between two identical and equidistant bales of hay. It is tough to be caught in a dilemma like that, as with a smart or athletic student who can't decide between two great colleges that offer a full ride. Most of us are more familiar in real life with the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't type dilemma, where two or more choices all suck in roughly equal proportion. In real life, the donkey would probably just wander over to one bale and eat. If you tried it with a Golden Retriever, he would eat both meals and go running off to find something to play with or pee on. 

🐶 Speaking of dogs, one of the advantages of having them around is that they make you feel productive even when you aren't. Adult dogs sleep up to 14 hours a day. I only want to sleep that long. 

😴 Speaking of sleep, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the reason you don't usually punch and kick people while dreaming is that "Your arm and leg muscles become temporarily paralyzed, which prevents you from acting out your dreams." Isn't that helpful? Last night I dreamed I was with James Bond as one of a bunch of his sidekicks, planning to kidnap a foreign agent by getting him drunk. It devolved into a hunt for the hodag along a city street, all previous plot elements forgotten. If I'd been running and punching and leaping in bed as well as in sleep, someone could have gotten hurt. Or it might have made a video for the 'gram. 

💤🛌 Which brings us to what I was doing between bouts of sleep, which was taking out the dogs. Large dog Tralfaz got it in his head that he had to go out 700 times last night, and of course Izzy (a.k.a. Me2!Me2!) wanted to go as well. I tried to be patient because it could be chemo-related, but I am a tired puppy myself right now. The Harvard Health Letter reports that deep sleep may be when the brain clears toxic waste created in the normal course of cell life. And my brain feels pretty toxic this morning. So that's enough thoughts for now.