You were wrong when you said
I’ve not been sleeping well lately.
Either I'm spending far too many hours in the sack, staying there for far too few or just experiencing far too many interruptions. Regardless, I always seem to be awake at 5 a.m. and asleep at noon, neither of which is very healthy. I've been napping sporadically – picture a narcoleptic dachshund passing out in someone's front yard and you'll know how I feel pretty much every time I stretch out on the couch to watch a football game.
This inability to control when, where and how much I sleep usually leaves me sobbing into my pillow, due to the seeming impossibility of getting some decent shuteye or one of those other unrelated things I always manage to worry about when given enough time.
I have been, interestingly enough, dreaming up a storm. I rarely dreamt at all during my last few weeks at Lehigh and now I'm having extremely long, involved dreams every night and remembering them well past the time it takes me to get out of bed and shower.
The strangest of these dreams was centered around Hershey, my old and starting-to-show-wear-and-tear dog, being hit by a car. (Yes I know that was passive.) A racecar. (And that a fragment.) Someone, I have no idea who, informed me of this fact while I was walking around my [dream]house, which bore absolutely no resemblance to my house in St. Charles or the house in Bethlehem I'll be living in next year. The entire blasted thing was wood-paneled – floor to 10-foot ceiling! Anyway, I immediately saw picture-in-picture replay of Hershey loping down the racetrack, looking over his shoulder and dodging the cars that were also dodging him. And then one car spun out and into him and my poor dog rolled onto the grass. I used the overhead map of the track (you know, in the top left corner of my dream) to locate Hershey and was there pretty much immediately. He was fine, just a little shaken up, as you would expect from anyone just hit by a car traveling at 200 mph. We had to wait for the cars to go past before it was safe to run down the straightaway and into the kitchen. My grandmother's kitchen. Because the racetrack was inside my [dream]house, which apparently included my grandmother's kitchen. Once in safety, I tried to figure out how a racecar could fit in the hallway.
I also had a dream in which my dad, brother and I were driving around town, looking at Christmas lights on Christmas Eve eve. It was all good and fun until my brother and I claimed fatigue and my dad refused to go home. Ever. But the most notable part of this dream was the dancing underwear girl interlude, because the dancing underwear girl was a girl that I know but have seen neither in her underwear nor anything resembling it.
In addition, there was a bit of a Stephen King-esque dream in which I was brushing my teeth and a couple of my molars popped out. Except that by the time they had landed in the sink basin, they were much too large to be actual teeth and were thus sinister teeth, like in those anti-cavity cartoons the dentist used to show you. Only, come to think of it, those teeth were the good guys, so I suppose my teeth were more like the cavities. Or bizzaro-teeth. Yeah, that’s it – bizarro-teeth. Some more interesting stuff happened, and I attribute it all to my hatred of my genetically ugly (and caninally-damaged) teeth.
Because so little has happened recently, I’ve found myself online constantly. This is bad and absolutely not how one should spend one’s school-free, work-free, chore-free vacation. Also, I absolutely hate the laptop I've been using as a surrogate computer while I'm at home. It freezes up all the time and I have to restart it at least twice a day.
Regardless of my blinding hatred for the machine, I've tried to make it feel a little more like my own. One of the first things I did was create "stuff" and "things" folders on the desktop and then fill them with various files, including an ancient AIM chat log, pictures of Bling and a savings bond calculator. (I have $1500 in that safety deposit box, it seems.) I still haven't figured out what determines how the files are sorted into these neutrally-monikered folders, and I must assume this is somehow very closely related to some important aspect of my personality.
Aside from the laptop now monopolizing my desk and the TV I stole from the sewing room and put in the corner in preparation for late-night Mario Kart binges, my room hasn't changed much since I've lived in this house. The St. Louis Cardinals-themed wallpaper has been on the walls for the duration of my time in Missouri. Most of the plaques on the wall have a centered line that reads simply "1997" or "1999-2000." All of the furniture, save the six-month-old CD rack, has been living with me since 1986. The knickknacks and tchotchkes I own do appear to multiply when I’m on break, and I either shuffle them all about the room or banish them to the closet for an eternal purgatory with other forgotten belongings I can’t bear to part with. Speaking of which, I cleaned my closet for the first time ever this past August and it already looks like I'll have to pile a bunch of newer things on the recently cleared floor to get them out from underfoot. My room is a mess.
Even with the lack of non-room cleaning things to do, I've been putting off the few things that are on the oh-so-vital to-do list in my official reporter's notebook.
Namely, I haven't written at all. And this is so bad that it pains me. I obviously have not made much use of diary-x, and my offline journal has been behind by 10 days or so for about a month now. With regard to d-x, I’m just not motivated. This very entry has been days in the making because I tend to get bored after 300 words (at which point Notepad starts to hurt my eyes, so if it’s not one thing, it’s another). With the leather journal, I'll find some time and catch up a little, only to forget about it for a week.
I also had planned on writing some of my music columns, or at least getting a head start on them. When I was planning this while still at school last month, I figured I could crank out one a week and head back to Lehigh with five 1,000-word pieces at near-printable quality. So far, I've written zero words that could be used for The Brown & White. I’ve also come up with zero ideas too add to my column-idea list in that same reporter’s notebook.
Even with the ever-engrossing video games and the online, I have managed to do some things outside of the house, though most of these "things" involve either shopping with my mom or going to Wal*mart. And yes, Wal*mart is a fantastic place when you want to make a dancing Tigger hump an Elmo, but there's only so many times I can make that plunge into the horrid pool of human filthiness before I start to cry. I did take advantage of the 70-degree weather the other day and play a game of ultimate frisbee, but I haven’t run like I wanted to (not even on the new treadmill) and I think this constant junk food is putting the pounds on me.
Oh, and there was New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve was a disaster that left me wishing for last year's disaster instead. (This means they were different types of disasters.) Though you may think that nothing could possibly top whatever did or did not occur with Allison on the couch, put yourself in my shoes and try to enjoy a night where the extent of the fun is simply watching two people get drunk, one of whom should be hanging out with high school people only. Then break your car key off in the door and call me in the morning. I probably should've made my own plans, but I am lazy and Illinois was just too far away.
Since then, I've been playing lots of four-person video games at other people’s houses. That's really about it. I'm not good for much else.
Aside from the column-writing and the journal-writing (and the people-visiting, I guess, not that I'd put much stock in that (which is probably why I failed to mention it earlier (and also not do it at all))), my big plan for break was to perform some emotion-murdering. And, once again, I've chosen the route of throwing myself at people and hating myself for it:
The quasi-physical throwing around of my body equals the not-at-all-physical throwing out the window of my values equals the definitely-physical throwing down in shame of my head equals the metaphorically-physical throwing away of five weeks away equals exactly the opposite of what I wanted to accomplish.
Things just keep getting worse, and I'm helping them along.
So, at night, when I realize that sleep is not going to happen and crawl out of bed after a thirty-minute last-chance-for-slumber period, I head downstairs and pop in one of my "Coupling" DVDs and watch two episodes and laugh and am reminded of good times. Or I toss in a subtitled French movie, eat a bag of peanut butter M&M's and try to forget the bad ones.
I've not been sleeping well lately.
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