Okay, confession time. I'm an insomniac, right? On multiple occasions, I've offered weak explanations of my tendency not to sleep. My circadean rhythms are messed up from living in a room without windows for four years, I drink too much caffeine, or even that my body is attuned to a 36-hour day. None of these are the case, which I think should come as no surprise to anyone, really.

Here's the deal. You know that period when you lay down to go to sleep, but it takes some time before you actually fall asleep? Where your mind (my mind at least) has a tendency to wander? I hate that time. When I have something occupying my mind - distracting me, I like to say - I'm really not all that neurotic. It's manageable, at least. However, when there's nothing else going on, I have a tendency to recall the kinds of things that I don't want to think about. It's that period of the evening that the neurotic within me really gets an oppurtunity to go to work... Last night, for example, the anxiety du jour was my major and class schedule for the next five semesters (it's been on my mind a lot lately). At about three-thirty in the morning, I couldn't take it anymore and got online and e-mailed the undergraduate advisors of three different departments. It's really not fun the way my mind works. So what I've learned to do is not go to bed until I'm tired enough so that the time from when I lay down to when I go to sleep is not long enough to build up a pensive mood that would be sufficient to drive me from the bed. I miss that window a lot. And so I stay up. It's become a very minor deal. I can handle not getting a good night's sleep for more than a week at a time, no problem. I bet if I tried, I could stay up for at least three and a half days, straight. It'll come back and catch up with me at some point, I'm sure, but not right now. I don't think that far ahead.

  posted by Matthew @ 9:03 PM

 
Hey, who else remembers a while back when the judge came under fire for keeping a statue of the ten commandments at his courthouse? Were you one of those people who thought, "What's the big deal?"

I'll tell you.

This is the big deal.

  posted by Matthew @ 10:39 PM